Sleeping over Nice - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

This anecdote was written in October 2009. It tells of about an incident when I was flying on Victor Tankers in the 1970s.  I have not edited my original article except to delete precise dates and times that would identify my crew members. They know who they were! However, as Captain of the aircraft I was entirely responsible for what happened. The image below is not connected with this particular incident but it is just rather pretty!

where they would protect British interests in one of those largely forgotten international emergencies that tended to crop up during the 70s.

After bidding farewell to the fighters, we turned about and headed towards Nice where we had flight-planned to join the normal civilian airways system for the return to UK. I handed control to my co-pilot in the right hand seat and I took charge of the fuel system from him, scavenging our remaining fuel from the many wing and fuselage tanks into the single bomb bay tank. This was standard procedure and it would give me a short break before I took over to make the landing at base. I calculated that fuel would be a bit tight but we had done similar sorties twice before in the previous 18 hours, so no sweat. The flight had become very mundane and we were all exhausted. The aircraft cabin was very dark apart from the lights on the flight instrument panel and a couple of small anglepoise lights in the rear cabin needed so the navigator and AEO could see what they were doing. I fell asleep, in the left hand pilot’s seat, still clutching the fuel log.

I woke, with a guilty start, as we approached the south coast of France to find that the auto-pilot was in charge and my co-pilot, the Crew Chief and the rest of my crew were all fast asleep. I estimated that we could all have been asleep for about 8 to 10 minutes because the south coast of France was now very close, looking spectacular from 41,000 feet on a gin clear night. With a start, I remembered that a mandatory flight level change was needed as we approached the major airways complex at Nice! The insistent voice of the French Air Traffic Controller was asking for a radio check - that must have been what had woken me up. I gave him the radio check and requested our flight-planned climb to 43,000 feet. By this time the other five members of the crew, including my Crew Chief, were all wide awake – but silent.

One thing led to another, as so often happens. Radiation fog suddenly closed both Marham and our planned alternate, Manston in Kent. Surely the possibility of fog had not been mentioned at the pre-flight briefing? The wretched Met Man must have got it wrong again! Then I remembered that I had not had an updated weather forecast before leaving Marham for this third sortie of the night – there had been a quick turn round, barely an hour on the ground, between the second and third sorties and, after all, they were operational sorties!

Now, with insufficient fuel remaining to make a stab at Marham, we were given a Grade 1 mandatory diversion to RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire – quite a bit further on. One of the Victor’s inboard engines shut itself down on final approach to Waddington, about 15 miles from touchdown (fuel pump drive failure, we discovered later, but for a few seconds I wondered if we were out of fuel) and we made an uneventful three-engined landing on minimum fuel just as dawn broke. A couple of hours later, after a short refuel and a welcome breakfast, we were ordered by our Headquarters to return to Marham, “as soon as possible, on three engines"! The aircraft was required for further operational sorties.

Naturally, I did not report to anyone that the entire crew had been asleep at a crucial phase of the flight – what good would that do, I asked myself. As far as I am aware, the rest of my crew never realised that we had all been asleep at the same time. We certainly never discussed the matter! In those days there was no such thing as a confidential occurrence report and confessing to my crew’s lapse of concentration would undoubtedly have resulted in comments on another sort of confidential report.

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