Close Encounter - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

The Victor Mk 1/1A in its various tanker configurations was a pleasant and unforgiving aircraft to fly but it was desperately short of power. In my first few months on 214 Squadron I had the opportunity to find that out for myself when I necessarily explored both the maximum and the minimum speeds possible.

My crew’s very first all-solo operational tanking sortie was on 16 April 1971. Only two days earlier we had successfully passed our final handling sortie with the Squadron QFI, Paul Gausden.

(Correction dated 5 November 2011. My AEO, Neil Flowerdew, has just emailed me to point out that: "The only thing I have ever seen mildly incorrect in your diaries relates to the fact that I had been at Marham since July 1966. When you turned up I was loaned to the OCU to fly through your course and your name first appears as Captain on Feb 16 1971. I already had more than 1000 hrs on Victors and brashly considered old hand - I was on the 214 Sqn when I was 19 years old so was 24 by then.")

Our 16 April 1971 flight was a standard refuelling sortie on Towline 6, the southernmost of six towlines, or dedicated refuelling areas, over the North Sea from Scotland to Suffolk. We had been briefed to expect a series of Lightnings coming up in pairs from 29 and 111 Squadrons at Wattisham. Normally such sorties were conducted under radar control from Eastern Radar but on this occasion we were operating with No 1 Air Control Centre, call sign 'Romeo', a mobile tactical facility operating from a farmer’s field somewhere in deepest East Anglia.

The weather was perfect with unlimited visibility; from the pilots' vantage point at 35,000 feet we could see all of East Anglia and, to the south, London and beyond. The first part of the sortie was uneventful and we quickly off-loaded 18,000 lbs of fuel to the ever-thirsty F3 Lightnings. As was the normal procedure when fighters were in contact, the auto-pilot was engaged but my hands were resting lightly on the control column. As we were turning left at the southernmost end of the towline, with two Lightnings in contact taking on fuel, I suddenly heard a very urgent radio call from one of two other Lightnings that were holding a couple of hundred yards astern awaiting their turn to refuel.

“Tanker, emergency break, emergency break, up and left now!!”

Knowing that my refuelling operator, Ken Hulse, would have immediately switched on the red lights at the rear of the refuelling pods, thereby instructing the Lightnings in contact to make an emergency disconnect, I slammed all four throttles fully open, and pulled the aircraft into a steep climbing left hand turn – at the same time the auto-pilot instinctive cut-out switch under my thumb automatically disconnected the auto-pilot.

A heavy Victor Mk 1 at 35,000 feet did not respond well to such a manoeuvre! It would roll quite quickly but the extra thrust from the engines, which had been running at about 90% of the maximum permitted anyway, was barely noticeable. A second urgent radio call came. “Tanker, pull harder, keep turning.”

By this time the Victor was performing something akin to an aerobatic manoeuvre known as a wing-over. The airspeed was dropping rapidly – the last figure I saw was 130 kts and still reducing. I could not pull back any further because the aircraft would have stalled. Indeed, I had to unload the wings by applying more roll and pushing forward on the control column thereby reducing the ‘g’ force to less than plus 1. The two refuelling hoses were probably flailing about quite dangerously but we could not even contemplate jettisoning them without knowing who was behind us. Suddenly, as the bank increased to almost 90 degrees, there was a roar in the cockpit as four jet pipes passed close overhead and then filled my forward windscreen before disappearing off to my right.

The Victor was now in a dive and the speed was increasing rapidly to a much more sensible figure. I levelled the wings and gently pulled out to straight and level flight. I had to be gentle: the maximum permitted loading at our all up weight was 2.3g which did not give much scope for aerobatics.

“Was that a VC-10!” I called on the radio to no-one in particular. All I had seen were the four tail-mounted jet pipes.

“No, it was an Aeroflot IL-62,” replied the Lightning pilot who had given me the warning.

Throughout those frantic few seconds no word was heard from Romeo and they did not answer radio calls. My AEO, Neil Flowerdew, changed frequency and filed an immediate air miss report over the radio with Eastern Radar. Apart from that my crew were uncharacteristically silent. I decided to jettison excess fuel and return to base immediately – partly because I thought the aircraft might have been over-stressed but mainly because my crew were rather shocked by the incident. After landing I called the Lightning pilots at Wattisham to thank them and to get their version of the story. It turned out that although the accelerometer in the pilots’ cockpit read 2.5g, according to the readings on the sensitive fatigue meters in the bowels of the Victor the aircraft had not been overstressed – but it had come close.

It seems that the controllers at Romeo had seen and heard nothing because they had decided to have a shift change while we were turning northbound at the southern end of the Towline, but they had not bothered to tell us that! So much for radar control. The Lightnings taking on fuel from me saw nothing of the incipient disaster because they were, quite properly, concentrating all their attention on keeping station on the refuelling hoses.

One of the Lightning pilots waiting his turn to refuel had saved the situation by keeping a good all-round look out to protect his Leader and his tanker. He had seen the IL-62 in a climb coming towards the formation and he realised that there was imminent danger of collision and had ordered the emergency break. Two other Lightnings about 20 miles away climbing out of Wattisham under the control of Eastern Radar, but on a different radio frequency, had seen the whole incident but were unable to do anything other than warn the Eastern Radar controller whose only contact with Romeo was by landline telephone. One of those pilots told me that the IL-62 had appeared to fly right through the middle of the formation from behind and he could not believe that there had not been a mid-air collision. He said my wing-over had looked most impressive and he had watched in amazement as the four Lightnings closest to me had scattered in all directions.

It took nearly three months for the Air Miss final report to reach me. The Aeroflot captain, having just departed from Heathrow on a scheduled service to Moscow with a full load of passengers, was many miles off his flight planned route. This had, apparently, gone unnoticed by the civil air traffic controller but that individual was struggling a bit because his assistant at Heathrow had, according to the official report, passed him incorrect flight plan details for the Aeroflot anyway. The Aeroflot captain gave evidence that he saw neither any Lightnings nor the Victor so he had not submitted an air miss report. Remarkable really because the entire action took place directly in front of him and had he bothered to look out of the front of his cockpit it would have been impossible not to see us! Perhaps he was having a late breakfast – or perhaps he was deliberately off course so that he, or someone else on board, could monitor the refuelling operation? The Soviets were sneaky like that!

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