A ‘Lone Ranger’, as I knew them in RAF Bomber Command (which became Strike Command on 30 April 1968 with the merger of Bomber Command and Fighter Command) in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s, was what aircrew used to call "a jolly" - a sort of do-it-yourselves holiday away from home with all costs paid for by the RAF. At its simplest, a Lone Ranger involved a straightforward flight to an overseas airfield, not necessarily an RAF airfield, and a return to base a day or two later – often having stocked up with legal duty-free goodies. Other rangers were far more complicated.
Lone Rangers took a crew away from the restrictions of home base and allowed quite junior officers to make unilateral and often far-reaching decisions. A standard 5-man V Bomber crew, consisting 1st Pilot/Captain, Co-pilot, Air Electronics Officer (AEO), Navigator Plotter, and Navigator Radar, would be accompanied by a Crew Chief. The crew chief was usually a Senior NCO. He was there to assist the aircrew with turn-round servicings, hand round the in-flight rations and, because of his age and experience, be a fount of all knowledge.
Of course, in those days communications between UK and overseas bases were primitive by today's standards. Air-to-ground communications were conducted on HF (high frequency aka short waves) by Morse and only later by voice. HF, using the primitive STR18 aircraft equipment which had gradually replaced the WW2 TR1954/55, was, at its best, frustrating to use and often unreliable. Ground-to-ground communication between UK and overseas bases was mainly by means of teleprinter signal messages and it often took over 24 hours to get a reply to routine enquiries. (I was employed on that system in the late 1950s when I was a wireless fitter in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) - see here.)
I went on three Lone Rangers when I was an AEO on 18 Squadron at RAF Finningley – long before my pilot days. (RAF Finningley is now Robin Hood Airport) In September 1961 I was adopted by a Hastings crew from nearby RAF Lindholme (now a civilian prison) for what was intended to be an overnight trip to Gibraltar. The Boss of the Bomber Command Bombing School needed an air signaller and they didn’t have any of their own so my Squadron Commander offered me. The story of that very eventful Lone Ranger is on my website starting here. Two Lone Rangers on 18 Squadron Valiants were: an unremarkable one night stop in El Adem, a desert base at the eastern end of Libya; and a trip to the HQ of USAF Strategic Air Command and Montreal in July 1962 – that story is also on my website here.
My next Lone Ranger, a 10-day trip to Singapore and back, was not until 1972 by which time I was a Captain on 214 Squadron at RAF Marham. My fellow crew members for the Lone Ranger were: Al Skelton (co-pilot), Paul Chessal (navigator Plotter), Ken Hulse (Navigator Radar), Neil Flowerdew (AEO) and Pete Hogg (Crew Chief). Quite why we were selected for the Lone Ranger to Singapore is as much a mystery to me now in 2012 as it was 40 years ago but we were the envy of the rest of the Victor crews.
The aircraft allocated to our crew, Victor B1A K2P XH667, was the most disliked aircraft on the inventory of 214 Squadron. There was nothing really wrong with it – as a matter of fact I always enjoyed flying it. It was a very early interim tanker conversion from a B1A bomber. It had only two in-flight refuelling hoses (the K2P part of its designation) whilst the more modern tankers had three, so XH667 was less useful for tanking operations and that was why it was often used for pilot training when air-to-air refuelling was not required. Because of its non-standard fuel and electrical systems crews tended to get out of practice with its particular idiosyncrasies.
Our route, which was dictated mainly by geo-political considerations, would take us from RAF Marham in Norfolk to Akrotiri in Cyprus on the first day, then on to Masirah (but Dubai on the return to UK), Gan and Singapore on successive days, roughly five hours flying on the first, second and fourth days, but only about 4 hours on the third day from Masirah to Gan. In the 1960s, and until the UK’s withdrawal from its bases east of Suez in the early 1970s, Masirah had been one of several RAF staging posts between the Middle and Far East.
