The Vulcan might be a nuclear bomber but it had a big conventional bombing role, and this was seen in action during the Falklands war.

Black Buck in the Falklands Bombing Ranges Radar Bomb Score Units, RBSU Diagram of RBSU plot

Photo J Dillon.  Taken with very wide angle lens at RAF Museum Hendon. Full load of 21 x 1000lb bombs laid out underneath. Also the WW1 aircraft almost fits under the wing.

Black Buck

The photo on the right is off the RAF web site (http://www.raf.mod.uk/falklands/bb1.html) where they have an excellent section on the Black Buck sorties against Stanley Airport in 1982. The photo shows the armourers loading a full carrier of 7 x 1000lb bombs on the centre bomb beam.  A first set of seven has already been loaded on the bomb beam at the front of the bomb bay.

The photo on the left is from the April 2007 edition of Aeroplane. It shows the last of the three bomb-racks about to be loaded, making a full load of 21x1000lb bombs. This was not a Black Buck sortie, just an illustration of the bomb load.

The photo on the left is from the same site and shows where the full ‘stick’ of 21 x 1000lb bombs have been released from 10,000ft on Port Stanley airfield. When attacking a target like this it is taken at an angle of about 30^o to increase the number of likely impacts. To release along the runway would only require a small heading or drift error to cause all bombs to miss. To attack at right angles would risk the runway falling between two bombs in the stick, so getting no impacts. In this case one has hit the runway centre line, one the edge and the rst have gone across the dispersals.

Bombing Ranges.

Around the coast of Britain, and also overseas, there were a number of ranges where live bombing was permitted. I recall using 25lb practice bombs on the Wash range and Akrotiri in Cyprus as well as 1,000lb bombs near the Lake District (West Freugh) and a small island off the coast of Australia, not far from Darwin. The targets were normally a small wooden raft with a radar reflector to give a paint on the radar. Attacks were normally done on a radar release rather than visually, scoring was normally done by the range staff who would do a visual triangulation on the 'splash'. Safety was obviously paramount so the range crew would need to give the approaching aircraft clearance onto the range and onto the target after ensuring that the range was clear of people or other hazards.  With some ranges there was always the chance of small fishing boats or sports fishermen.  On the run-in to the target it was important for the Nav Radar and the pilots to keep a sharp eye that the aircraft was in fact heading towards the correct target and that there were no boats or other safety hazards that they might be attacking! 

The photo on the right is crown copyright from the Andy Leitch site.  It shows a full complement of 21 1,000lb bombs being released.  The release sequence from the three bomb carriers can be seen.  They are ‘rippled’ to help limit the effect on aircraft weight distribution during release.

Radar Bomb Plots

Both in the UK and especially in the US, Radar Bomb Plots (or Radar Bomb Scoring Units, RBSU) were a way of scoring simulated bomb runs.  It should be remembered that in the '60's and '70's war targets could have been things like an underground missile silo that may well have given no radar return and may also have been difficult to see either visually or with a downward facing camera, such as the F95. Bombing on radar would have been by use of 'offsets' rather than on a target return.  Radar Bomb Plots also gave a result within seconds rather than waiting for a return to base, having a film processed and then passed to someone for analysis and scoring.  The advantage of a quick result while in the air was that the Nav Radar could see if he needed to do something different on any subsequent attack on that same target, or it could give him an indication of a system problem he needed to be aware of for subsequent attacks on other targets in the sortie. So how did it work?

The RBSU used a narrow beam radar to track the aircraft, and to feed the track to a plotting table on which the track of the aircraft could be traced by a pen driven by the radar and a ‘computer’. The ability of the RBSU to track the aircraft relied on the crew flying to the IP accurately and calling the RBSU when they were at ‘IP’, the bomb plot could then begin to track them.

The diagram below shows the sort of trace that would have been produced at the RBSU.

On the latter stages of a bomb run, say 5 or 6 miles before bomb release (not before target as the forward throw of a bomb at high level was about 6 miles) the Radar would switch on a 'tone'. This was a single pitch note that would be transmitted from the aircraft as it approached bomb release.  On the RBSU plot above it is the ‘event marker’ shown by the blue triangle. Prior to the IP the crew would have passed to the RBSU the height, heading and speed they would expect to fly to the target.  From IP onwards the RBSU would maintain a plot of the aircraft track towards the target. Another essential piece of information passed to the RBSU at IPwould have been the bombing profile they would be flying (2J or 2F at low-level, type 2 at high level) and the bomb type being simulated. This could be a 1,000lb retarded bomb or a nuclear weapon. With this information the bomb-plot would know what weapon trajectory they needed to calculate when they received the release data from the crew.

When dropping on the radar the 'tone' which was being transmitted would be turned off automatically by the bombing system when the system generated the release pulse, (see ‘Release Point’ in diag. above) this would occur when the system had calculated that the aircraft had reached the point where the forward throw of the bomb would allow it to hit the target. The stopping of the tone would cause a pulse on the RBSU trace, the forward edge of which would be the exact point at which the weapon had been released.  At the time of release the crew would have noted certain essential data elements; heading (the bomb plot know the track), speed and height.  This information would be passed to the bomb-plot just after release. Using this data, the true track of the aircraft and the weapon type, the bomb-plot staff could calculate the forward throw of the weapon and where it would have struck the ground in relation to the target.  Having calculated this impact point it would be passed to the crew, in code, as a range and bearing from the target, this could then be decoded by the crew to see how accurate they had been. The best news was if it decoded to DH; Delta Hotel or direct hit.

For more info on attack profiles.