Spock and span

The Vulcan bomber played a crucial role during the Cold War, and the last one to take to the skies is keeping the story alive for future generations.

Chris Bond reports. Pictures by James Hardisty.

all heard about electric cars, well there are also electric aircraft now and there’s a lot to say about the research that’s going on.”

The hope is that this piece of British aviation history could pique the curiosity of youngsters. “Our mission is not only to talk about the history of the Vulcan and what it did and what it represented at the time, but also to inspire youngsters to get into engineering and technology,” Dr Pleming added.

The story of the Vulcan is entwined with British post-war history. It was designed – along with the Vickers Valiant and the Handley Page Victor

– to carry nuclear weapons and act as a deterrent against the Soviet Union, and it was the Vulcan that proved to be the mainstay of the RAF’s bomber fleet during the Sixties.

Its maiden flight came in 1952. Over 300 of these aircraft were made and they were based at 10 stations dotted along the eastern side of England, with RAF Finningley, now Doncaster Sheffield Airport, one of them.

“The first flight of the Vulcan was only 11 years after the first flight of the Lancaster, which is an incredible pace of development, and these aircraft carried the British contribution to the Nato nuclear deterrent from 1955 until the Polaris submarine fleet took over the role in 1969,” said Dr Pleming.

We know that XH558 was involved in some key moments – it was used to collect atmospheric samples after China detonated its first atomic bomb in the Pacific in 1964, an event that sparked widespread alarm in the West.

By the end of the decade several Vulcans, like the one at Doncaster, were converted into maritime radar reconnaissance aircraft. XH558 was subsequently converted into a tanker aircraft before returning to her original role as a bomber, and then retiring from RAF service in 1993.

However, that wasn’t the end of the story. In 1997, Dr Pleming and a small team started to investigate the possibility of returning it to flight.

Ten years and £7m later, in a triumph of British engineering, the aircraft made its first postrestoration test flight in October 2007. XH558 went on to fly for eight more display seasons, to an estimated 20 million people across the UK.

The Vulcan is certainly an awesome sight both on the ground and in the air. “She’s a beautiful shape and incredibly strong because the wings are very thick,” says Dr Pleming. “She’s also very nimble, so she flies like a fighter plane despite her size. She could fly up to 60,000 feet just under the speed of sound, and what many people also remember is the sheer noise powered by these four Olympus turbo jet engines.

“Our aircraft was the first Vulcan B Mk2 model to go into RAF service and she’s not only the last Vulcan to fly, she’s also the oldest complete Vulcan in existence.”

www.vulcantothesky.org