Vulcan XA897 hit the ground and bounced back into the air a few hundred yards short of the runway. Only the pilot and co-pilot got ejection seats despite the Vulcan having a typical crew of five (two pilots, two navigators, and an air electronics operator)
The Royal Air Force (RAF) acquired Vulcan XA897, the first Vulcan B 1, in September 1956. This aircraft promptly engaged on a fly-the-flag mission to New Zealand. On October 1, as XA897 approached Heathrow to finish the trip, it crashed short of the runway due to bad weather. The two pilots were able to eject safely, but the rear crew perished.
Squadron Leader “Podge” Howard was the pilot, and Air Marshal Sir Harry Broadhurst was the co-pilot.
Only the pilot and co-pilot were given ejection seats despite the Vulcan having a typical crew of five (two pilots, two navigators, and an AEO (Air Electronics Operator)). This aspect of the Vulcan has drawn a lot of criticism, as Jack Hamill relates in Robert Pike’s book Phantom Boys. There have been multiple cases of the pilot and co-pilot ejecting in an emergency and the “rear crew” dying because there was not enough time for them to bail out.
Hamill recalls: “I had been a pilot on the Avro Vulcan, the iconic delta wing strategic bomber which became the backbone of the United Kingdom’s airborne nuclear deterrent for much of the Cold War period. During my time on the Vulcan force, the policy of relying on a high-speed, high-altitude flight to avoid interception was changed to one of low-level tactics, a move which, from the pilots’ point of view, made life a little more interesting. The two pilots sat on Martin-Baker ejection seats, unlike the rear crew members who, in an emergency, had to abandon the aircraft through the entrance door.
“This highly controversial policy was maintained despite a practical scheme to fit ejection seats for the rear crew and despite, too, a tragic case in October 1956 during a ground-controlled approach to London’s Heathrow Airport. Vulcan XA897, the first Vulcan B1 to be delivered to the Royal Air Force, had been on a flag-waving round-the-world tour and had returned to Heathrow in foggy conditions.
“Instead of diverting to another airfield, the Vulcan continued to Heathrow where a reception party waited. A few hundred yards short of the runway, the Vulcan hit the ground before bouncing back into the air. The two pilots, Squadron Leader D R Howard and his co-pilot Air Marshal Sir Harry Broadhurst the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, now had just seconds in which to decide whether to stay with the badly damaged aircraft and attempt an emergency landing, or whether to eject thus saving themselves but committing the rest of the crew to certain death.
“The pilots chose to eject. Perhaps, as the four rear crew members on that flight heard the firing mechanism of the pilots’ ejection seats, if the men perceived, then, a sudden and terrible instant of doom, maybe as they sat in their non-ejection seats ready to be thrust helplessly, pathetically, inevitably towards the abyss, perhaps, if time twisted to turn seconds into eternity and, even with eyes tightly shut, colors of red, white, blue, green and black flashed, flashed, flashed across the screens of those closed eyes, their final thoughts were less of mounting panic in the midst of reckless endangerment, more, one can only hope, of an ultimate, mysterious sense of concord beyond, in the imminence of death, the realms of normal conscious comprehension.”
The video that follows shows news footage of what happened after one of the first Vulcan bombers, XA897, crashed at Heathrow Airport.
Photo by Royal Air Force / Pinterest