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Vickers-Armstrongs Valiant

The Vickers-Armstrongs Valiant was a British four-jet bomber, once part of the Royal Air Force's V bomber force. The Valiant was originally developed for use as high-level strategic bomber. When the other V-bombers came into use it was also used as a tanker. However, when the RAF moved to low level attacks, low level flying in the Valiant caused premature fatiguing. Rather than repair or rebuild the fleet, it was grounded and the Handley Page Victor took over the tanker role. The Valiant was the first of the V-bombers to see combat, during the Anglo-French-Israeli Suez intervention in October and November 1956. During Operation Musketeer, Valiants operating from the airfield at Luqa on Malta dropped conventional HE bombs on Egyptian targets. It was the last time the V-bombers flew a war mission until Avro Vulcans bombed Port Stanley airfield in the Falkland Islands during the Falklands War in 1982. Although the Egyptians did not oppose the attacks and there were no Valiant combat losses, the results of the raids were disappointing. Their primary targets were seven Egyptian airfields. Although the Valiants dropped a total of 856 tonnes (842 long tons) of bombs, only three of the seven airfields were seriously damaged. Note that the Valiants had not yet been fitted with their operational Navigational and Bombing System (NBS) and were dropping largely using World War II techniques. When NBS was fitted and crews well-practised, bombing accuracies became typical of other aircraft of the time and from high level (say, 40,000ft) a 100 yard error was not uncommon. Peacetime practice involved the dropping of small practice bombs on instrumented bombing ranges, also a system of predicted bombing using radio tones to mark the position of bomb drop over non-range targets, the bomb error being calculated by a ground radar unit and passed either to the crew during flight or to a headquarters for analysis. On May 15, 1957 a 49 Squadron Valiant B(K).1 (captained by Wing Commander K.G. Hubbard OBE DFC AFC) dropped the first British hydrogen bomb, the "Short Granite" (AKA "Green Granite Small"), over the Pacific as part of Operation Grapple. The blast was impressive, but the test was largely a failure, as the measured yield was less than a third of the maximum expected and while achieving the desired thermonuclear explosion the device had failed to operate as intended. The first British hydrogen bomb that detonated as planned (or actually with a higher yield than planned), "Grapple X Round A" (AKA "Round C1"), was dropped on November 8, 1957.