OT The Vulcan Bomber

[Huge]

Nonsense.

[charles]

Sounds to me as though the pilots have never heard of tactics. All aircaft out on patrol and what is left for close defence. Did the two carriers have identical aircrat on board? I though there were RAF Harriers as well as FAA ones. They had different roles, Did the Navy have suitable bombs to deal with the runway at Stanley? and could they have got past theair defences (missiles). The last one was to keep the carriers out of Exocet range. I imagine an Exocet would make a nasty mess of a carrier.

[Adrian]

I'm no military expert, far from it, but it strikes me that the vast majority of military action that this country's been involved in over the last century or so has been primarily land-based, with naval and air support. Which, to me, seems to suggest that the most important service is the Army, with the Navy and RAF as essential backups.

[Adrian]

I remember standing in a Heathrow hotel carpark in the early '90s, as an Aeroflot plane took off. That set all the car alarms off, too, with a stink of unburned fuel in it's wake.

But I think that was sheer sheddiness rather than sheer power.

[Adrian]

I was in Melbourne for Australia Day about ten years ago - with military jets coming down the river at full welly and somewhere around bollock-all altitude.

[bert]

In message , charles writes

They got pretty close - but missed and hit the Atlantic Conveyor instead.

[dennis]

They are building some proper aircraft carriers ATM, not the tidily helicopter carriers we have just scrapped.

[bert]

In message , DerbyBorn writes

Early ICBMs used valves.

[Adrian]

Exactly. And once the Harriers were retired, there was nothing but helicopters could use the carriers.

[charles]

They were small, but they were equipped with Sea Harriers.

[charles]

which had a significant number of Chinooks as its main cargo.

[Tim Streater]

Not followed the Battle of the Atlantic, then. We barely won that, and it needed a lot of help from Ultra. As it was they sank 5000 merchant ships in WW1 and 5000 ships in WW2. In WW2, we sank 1100 U-boats.

Also not followed the Pacific war either, I'd guess. That would have been a non-starter for the Yanks without a Navy.

Without the Navy, Adolf could have invaded quite easily, and his surface ships and subs would have strangled our imports. We'd have lost in pretty short order.

As you may be aware, Jellicoe at Jutland was the only commander of any sort of either side who could have lost the war in an afternoon.

Navy ships take quite a while to build, although the Yanks got the business of building merchant ships during WW2 down to production line rates. Fighters of the WW2 type are much quicker to build, and grunts with rifles can be turned out by the bushel in quick time.

[Jethro_uk]

By all accounts they weren't very good though ....

[John Rumm]

One of the most impressive (and in some ways scary) things I ever saw was a harrier at one of the Southend air shows about 20 years ago. If did a couple of fly pasts, and then did a third one slower and slower until finally coming to a "stop" in front of the main crowd. It was flying at about 50' and hence was below most of the audience standing on the Westcliff "cliffs". It then did its normal side to side, nodding, and backwards flying displays. Before finally starting to ascended with the planes attitude level to start, but slowing rotating toward the nose up vertical - all the time gaining vertical speed until it is on full afterburner, flying straight up, until it vanished through the cloud base. Awesome display of power and control.

The scary bit (aside from the incredible body shaking noise) was it did its display over the water - the tide was in. There was a couple of dozy muppets in a rowing boat that thought it might be a good idea to get under the plane and so rowed out into its jet thrust which you could see whipping up the surface of the water. Obviously they then suddenly realised it was really not a very good idea at all, and were trying like mad to get out of the way, but by this time the side to side and forward / backward part of the demo was taking place. The thrust was basicically playing a game of tiddlywinks with them - skitting the boat first one way then the other - I was amazed it did not sink or get capsized under the shear force being excreted on it.

[tony sayer]

In article , Tim Streater scribeth thus

Quite;!....

[fred]

In article , tony sayer writes

I think that's mainly a puff of chaff, aircraft don't need to be particularly rad hard as they get blown over and wiped by blast long before the electronics pop.

Pretty much the same applies in flight.

[Jethro_uk]

And we used/use them in our radar ...

[Adrian]

You notice where it says "...vast majority of...", rather than saying "...absolutely every single last piece of..."?

[Jabba]

Tim Streater scribbled...

It didn't help that the Royal Navy codes had been broken by the Germans and it took some time for the RN to work that out.

"It takes three years to build a ship, but 300 years to build a tradition," Admiral Cunningham.

[Part Timer]

Do a google image search for Vulcan XA903 Olympus. I remember seeing it in a book about the Vulcan a few years ago in our local library.

has info about the development of the Olympus.