Library Reference Number: 135
Low Level At Night - Buccaneering
It was the winter of 1971 and I was a young navigator on Buccaneers with 12(B) Squadron based at Honington. We were scheduled to night fly
and my pilot and I were detailed to fly a low level sortie ending up with a toss bomb First Run Attack at Tain range. The weather throughout
the UK was pretty dismal and low flying at night was going to be a challenge anywhere. These were the days well before Terrain Following Radar
and inertial navigation. It was all down to a stopwatch, a doppler driven twin gyro platform and the Blue Parrot radar - designed to find a
Russian Sverdlov Class Cruiser at 200 miles but certainly not ideal for low level night navigation over land. In 1971, the rules governing low
flying at night were quite demanding and had been driven largely by No 1 Group for the Vulcan - an aircraft with many navigational aids. You
flew at 600 feet above the highest obstacle within 6 miles of planned track. If you were visual with the ground it was a bonus but again it
was at night. I had planned initially to fly at high level, to the north east over the sea, turn about, squirt my radar at the coast, mark my
coast in point with the doppler driven markers, switch the radar to standby and descend in an under the radar lobe profile. The planned coast
in point was about 5 miles north of Peterhead and the route would take me through much of north east Scotland to coast out into the firth of Forth
somewhere between Kirkcaldy and Burntisland. The planned speed was 420 knots.
The high level transit was uneventful in clear air. Scottish Mil was fairly quiet - not many out on a night like this. I turned for Scotland and switched on the radar. I could make out a vague coast about 160 miles and I marked what I thought was Peterhead, and offset this to my coast in point - too easy really - and switched the radar to standby. My heading was about 15 degrees left of planned track and not quite what I expected but I had a good mark and felt confident. I obtained the regional pressure setting and we started to descend into some thin Strato Cu. The next layer of cloud was thicker and the air quite bumpy. At 5,000 the radio altimeter kicked in and we continued to descend slowly to 300 feet above mean sea level; the visibility was poor with no horizon but we were over the sea and there were very few oil rigs to worry about in these days. The odd ship passed close by with lights blazing against a black and rough sea. We reset the pressure altimeter to the radio altimeter height and there was quite a difference with the regional setting - strange but I thought little more about it. At 25 miles from the coast and about radar horizon, I switched on the Parrot and searched for my chosen coast in point. The markers had drifted about 10 miles but there the Rattray coast and Peterhead. About three miles from the coast and now totally IMC we climbed to the first leg height of 1200ft on the reset pressure setting and coasted in. As we started on the first leg the radar altimeter did not tie in with what I was expecting and the radar picture was at best confusing. Never mind this was what these poor Vulcan chaps did for a living and we were only a poor man's TSR2. We continued en-route, totally IMC, flying at my planned heights over some very bumpy ground with neither the radio altimeter nor the radar giving much correlation. The odd village would go underneath us - some were in the right place some were not. Some seemed much closer than the 600 feet clearance and the Radio Altimeter on occasions would kick down showing a ground clearance of just a few hundred feet. After about 20 minutes of high workload I said with confidence, "Expect to see the lights of Kirkcaldy off to our left as we approach the coast" Nothing appeared, we were still over land with no sign of the coast. We couldn't climb because we were approaching Edinburgh civil control area. Still IMC, 420 knots, very bumpy conditions, 600 feet above the land mass with no coast on the radar. Check compass with E2B - looks okay, switch on Leuchars DME - no lock. It was a full 5 minutes later that the sky started to light up - gee whiz Kirkcaldy is burning well tonight I thought. As the sky continued to illuminate I came to the conclusion that this was no Kirkcaldy. We pulled up from low level to about 2000 feet. We were over the middle of Middlesbrough!
It took some time to sink in. We had coasted in, not at Peterhead but at Dunbar and flown the complete route at low level through the north east of England. I thought - if we had done it the other way round we would have hit the ground as the planned heights would not have given us any terrain clearance. That 15 degree difference in inbound heading, the difference between the regional pressure setting and the radio altimeter height, the drifting doppler mark, a radar misident between the Peterhead coast and the Dunbar coast now all started to tie in. The clues were all there. We didn't have enough fuel to go to Tain Range and in any case we would not have made our slot time - We relayed a call to Tain, "Sorry can't make our FRA tonight - weather problems" and slunk off home to Suffolk. There was not much to say at the debrief but the lessons learned that night were to stay with me for the rest of my flying career.