Operation Black Buck One, the night of 30 April to 1 May 1982, was at the time the longest-range bombing raid in aviation history.
This British Bastion documentary tells the engineering story of how the Royal Air Force flew an obsolete Cold War bomber 8,000 miles to the bottom of the world.
It took eleven Victor K2 tankers in a cascading mid-air refuelling relay.
It took a single Avro Vulcan B.2 lifted from the brink of retirement, with refuelling probes restored from gate guardians and museum exhibits.
It took Flight Lieutenant Martin Withers and the crew of XM607, on a flight of fifteen hours and forty five minutes, to put one 1000-pound bomb on the runway at Port Stanley.
This is the planning, the improvisation, the flight, and the strategic message that landed in Buenos Aires the next morning.
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TOPICS COVERED IN THIS DOCUMENTARY
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→ The Avro Vulcan B.2 and the Cold War V-force
→ Why Argentina assumed the Falklands sat beyond British air power
→ The thirteen-day improvisation at RAF Waddington
→ The Victor K2 tanker relay and the cascading refuelling plan
→ The crew of XM607: Withers, Taylor, Wright, Graham, Prior and Russell
→ Squadron Leader Bob Tuxford and the broken probe over the South Atlantic
→ The angled bombing run on Port Stanley airfield
→ The Argentine reaction and the Mirage III redeployment debate
→ Wideawake airfield on Ascension and the busiest runway in the world
→ The follow-up Black Buck raids and the final RAF heavy bomber mission
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MAJOR RESEARCH SOURCES
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→ Rowland White, Vulcan 607, Bantam Press, 2006
→ Lawrence Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, Routledge, 2005
→ Admiral Sandy Woodward, One Hundred Days, HarperCollins, 1992
→ Commander Sharkey Ward, Sea Harrier Over the Falklands, Pen and Sword, 1992
→ Martin Middlebrook, The Fight for the Malvinas, Viking, 1989
→ Bob Tuxford, Contact! A Victor Tanker Captain's Experiences, Grub Street, 2016
→ RAF Museum oral history archive
→ RAF Air Power Review, Volume 18, 2015
→ Imperial War Museum collections, London and Duxford
→ Fuerza Aérea Argentina, Aeroespacio institutional magazine
→ The National Archives UK, Falklands declassified files
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FURTHER READING AND ARCHIVES
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→ Vulcan to the Sky Trust at vulcantothesky.org
→ RAF Museum at rafmuseum.org.uk
→ Imperial War Museum at iwm.org.uk
→ The National Archives at nationalarchives.gov.uk
→ Fuerza Aérea Argentina at argentina.gob.ar
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ABOUT BRITISH BASTION
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British Bastion documents the engineering, intelligence and doctrine that shaped British military history.
The Battle of Britain. Bletchley Park. The Dambusters. The SAS. The V-force. The Falklands.
The men, the machines, and the institutional memory that made the British way of war.
If your father, grandfather or uncle served in the Royal Air Force, the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines or in any allied unit, please share their name and their unit in the comments.
These stories are how the memory survives.
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Historical documentary for educational purposes. Archival material is presented in its historical context.
#OperationBlackBuck #FalklandsWar #AvroVulcan 
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