The V-Bombers: The UK's Strategic Nuclear Strike Force 

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Anyone who's ever seen a Vulcan will never forget it. The thing is bloody huge, beautiful and has an amazing sound.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Operation Thunderball in 1965. Where British MI6 agents were tasked with recovering a hijacked Avero Vulcan and the two atomic warheads it carried. Thankfully the downed Vulcan was found in the waters of the Bahamas and the missing atomic weapons were recovered. Great video as always Simon! 👍

The Valiant was delivered on time because it didn't suffer scope creep as many other projects do. It had a spec to hit and the spec didn't change, so it hit it. The problem with other projects is they see how well it does X then they want it to also do Y and Z, which wasn't in the original design spec, so it's tacked on and takes longer to find a way to make it work with what they have without having to start over.

How could you do a video on the Vulcan, and not have a clip of the Vulcan Howl?! It's an incredible sound to hear!!!

I have so many great memories of taking my daughter to airshows when she was younger than *10yrs* to see the XH558 prior to it's retirement. The noise at Waddington will stay with me forever.

Simon. I would love to see a video on the Soviet's version of Cheyenne Mountain . I realise there might not be much open source material but maybe do one of all soviet command and control facilities to expand it. Just curious

I used to work in Farnborough and every other year when the international air show was taking place, we saw some amazing planes. Including a Vulcan bomber. Words cannot describe just how amazing it is to see one in the air, to listen to the screeching of its engines and knowing this was one thing that saved my own country (Germany) from nuclear annihilation. Thank you, United Kingdom, for being a vital part of european security.

51 min to timecode ? OOOOOw 1:55 - Chapter 1 - Background 6:05 - Chapter 2 - Vickers valiant 17:35 - Mid roll ads 18:55 - Chapter 3 - Avro vulcan 33:35 - Chapter 4 - Handley page victor 44:50 - Chapter 5 - Decline of the V bombers 49:35 - Chapter 6 - Further reading

Having seen XH558 both in her hangar at Doncaster, and years prior in flight, three things stuck with me. Firstly, the howl of the engines. Second, the dart like shape, as a silouhette is genuinely intimidating, and thirdly, the Vulcans are a lot bigger than you’d think.

Our family farm was under one of the low flight paths used by Vulcans during the 1970s. They were both loud and aerodynamically "messy" - when the plane could be seen disappearing over the horizon around 20 miles away you could still hear the rustling of the air as the wing-tip vortices trailed many miles behind it. As it was a hill farm occasionally we'd look across and down "into" the cockpit - they were a little loose with the minimum height regulations back then. Only ever had one Victor fly over.

I remember as a kid growing up in Yorkshire in the 1970's seeing Vulcans flying overhead fairly regularly. Always a beautiful sight watching them bank and climb from wherever they were based nearby (I assume, too long ago, cant remember exactly) but they are a gorgeous aircraft.

I once witnessed in the summer of 1979 an RAF Vulcan bomber do a fly-by in front of Chicago's lakefront (practicing for an upcoming airshow). Not only did it have a sinister look to it, but a sinister sound as well!

Yay a video that's nearly an hour long! I am that freak on here that genuinely loves long-form videos. Means i can put something on and not worry about having to find a new video for long enough that i can actually get stuff done instead of scrolling through videos i have little interest in since youtube likes to keep the videos from channels im subbed to off the main screen.

36:25 "A suitably steel testicled crew" The most beautiful compliment I have ever heard 😂👌

I was asleep in the garden and a Vulcan bomber flew pretty low over my house which was one hell of a surprise i can tell you lol, thought i was in a earthquake for a second till i saw it fly over head i remember my two cats were freaking right out like the world was coming to an end, truly epic sound with that awesome howl too.

I have a Blue Steel separation switch from a Vulcan and bomb release Wander Button taht was used on all three on my desk! It is kind of cool having the button you press to release a nuclear missile.

Thank you for doing justice to the V story. I remember being an RAF trainee in 1990 at RAF Locking, a Vulcan did a very low flypast and then went nearly vertical just above us. I swear I felt the exhust heat! And still feel the ground shaking 30 years later!!!!!

This was great, really good you took the time to explain the history of each aircraft in detail rather than rushing a quick overview I grew up next to RAF Waddington and my late fathers old Royal Engineer unit shared a hanger with the Vulcan display flight. I got to sit in XH558 a fair few times, I didn't appreciate it as much as I should have, and saw her flying very regularly. She's a very special aircraft

I watched a Vulcan Bomber flight demo at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana in 1976. I was twelve, and it was the most awe-inspiring thing I have ever experienced before, or since. The sound was earth shattering. The rolls and hammerhead turns jaw-dropping. I met the Brit pilots and they graciously answered my questions. It was a good day.

I once watched a Vulcan perform in an air show at Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, USA in 1975. It was amazing. I was sitting on a berm near one end of the runway. The Vulcan took off and made a couple of stately passes the length of the runway. Then the Vulcan climbed to around 20,000 ft (6,000 meters) then dived down to under 500 ft (150 meters) and went screaming (literally) over the runway at over 400 knots. As it reached the end of the runway it went into a vertical climb and proceeded to perform an Immelmann turn. I later asked a B-52 pilot I knew what would have happened if he tried something loke that in a BUFF. He advised me that the wingtips would have touched like the hands of someone doing.side straddle hops just before departing the aircraft. The USAF Thunderbirds performed that day but the real star was the Vulcan. Amazing aircraft!

MORE LONG VIDEOS PLEASE! Keep up the great work! The team and Simon do a truly awesome job!

*mentions hawker Hurrican, Shows Hawker Hunter.

That was one of the best videos you have ever done. It felt like a proper documentary.

Through my subscription to the 1950s Eagle magazine, I had cutaway illustrations depicting all three of these aircraft types. I thumb tacked these to my bedroom wall at home. Now, all these many years latter, a wonderful surprise popped up on my notifications feed, that Britain's V Bombers were going to be featured on a program cheerfully narrated by the one and only, Simon Whistler who's commentary reveals all truths about Britain's heavy duty bomber force. While I was watching the show, I idly wondered if these military aircraft types would have been suitable in another role with a commercial application as a passenger airliner, and carrying freight for freight forwarding companies like say, UPS.

My great uncle Alan (who is sadly no longer with us) was an engineer on the Vulcan bombers. It's an absolutely amazing aircraft that deserves the legendary reputation it has.

A Vulcan flew low over my house when I was a kid ( we lived in Lossiemouth ) . I could read the warnings on the fuel door , but all I can remember is the ear splitting, gut liquifying howl of the engines. It was terrifying!

I saw a Vulcan at Offutt AFB in Nebraska in 1974. It struck me as so futuristic looking and beautiful! I'd never seen one before and I thought it was some new top secret aircraft, lol.

They're all so Buck Rogers looking. I think they're awesome and I hope they're preserved in perpetuity for future generations to admire.

Epic video thank you. One of my favourite things to consider about this subject, look at the Lancaster, look at the Vulcan and look at the short number of years between them, yet they were designed by the same man, genius.

I'm sooo happy that you did the v-bombers

I absolutely love the looks of all the V-Bombers, everytime I look at them, they look like something weird coming from a different timeline than ours.

It's amazing to me that all those technologic marvels as the V-bombers, U2, SR-71 and the A12, the experimental XB-70 Valkyrie, Concord, and even the F-117 have all had their "wings clipped" and are relegated to museum and gate guard duty unlike the BUFF (aka B-52), C-130, and UH-1 and AH-1 are all still operational and are slated to be for the next 20-40 years.

I recall rather impressive plastic Vulcan bomber toys being found in Shredded Wheat packets. Fired by catapult: they did an excellent loop, before hitting the ground and breaking the nose off so you couldn't launch them again! :)

Can we have a series of big project that delivered on time and on budget? That would be cool and wholesome at the same time!

I feel privileged that I managed to see the Vulcan at Cosford back in 2013. It was amazing. As was the Typhoon that went vertical above our car and the Apache. What a great day that was even though the road management was appalling.

I remember seeing the vulcan at Duxford when I was a kid, was in awe of the sheer size and power of this monster, got my into collecting the world aircraft files, for whatever I reason I fell in love with the F14 tomcat

Honestly the Valiant B.2 is a huge missed opportunity. Not long after the prototype was scrapped, low level intruder aircraft became a huge concern (think F-111, A6, B1B, etc)

I remember watching the Vulcan and Victor taking off from RAF Tengah in Singapore in the early 60's. A Beautiful site and also the Javelin was based there too as my father was a pilot on the Javelin, yet another delta wing design!

I really enjoy when usually-short-form channels do longer videos. The research is so detailed and the the presentation is so informative.

02:08 that is not a Hawker Hurricane, that is a Hawker Hunter. And did you mean the Hawker Typhoon, a fighter/ground attack aircraft, was the "bane of the panzer corps"?

A lot of that low level training that the Vulcan crews did occurred at my home town of Goose Bay. I have many childhood memories of seeing and hearing the mighty Vulcan taking off from the military base there... the RAF even donated one to my hometown and it currently sits on display just outside the local airport...

So good to hear someone covering the valiant in such detail. Thank you Simon

Wing wear out is very common- it happened to the Bristol Britannia, B-57’s, B-47’s, B-52’s, and C-124’s. It’s not just limited to British designs.

I'm a model builder and display finished projects online with modelers in the UK. They outnumber US plastic modelers by a wide margin, per capita. They are also extremely proud of RAF V-bombers. In a discussion one day, several of them bluntly asked how we managed to keep B-52s flying for decades after the V-bombers were retired. I explained how, approximately every 7 years or so, B-52s are sent to Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City, OK. There, each B-52 goes through a complete rebuild, coming out a practically brand new airplane. Every airplane in the USAF inventory goes through the same process. There once were 5 Air Force bases dedicated to the Air Logistics of the Air Force that were built to service military aircraft built by the thousands during WWII. In the 1990s, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission closed the Kelly AFB and McClellan AFB, leaving Tinker, Hill AFB in Ogden Utah and Robins AFB, which I retired from in 2020. The history of the USAF Air Logistics Centers might make a great Mega Projects video in the future.

Having grown up near the Farnborough air show as a kid. The noise of the Vulkan made our windows rumble, you truly f'd up to be on the receiving end of that noise.

Nice job on this particular vid. Other than a couple of very minor errors, it was very accurate and informative as well as entertaining. Keep up the good work. You and your staff are getting better with each program you make.

Excellent as always, I'd love to see similar for the Buccaneer, an awesome UK jet with a decent history.

My personal favorite of the V Bombers is the Vulcan, which I personally think is the most elegant looking bomber ever made 🇬🇧

Someone really needs to let Simon know that “pound-feet” (lb-ft, or more properly foot-pounds, ft-lb) is a measure of TORQUE and NOT thrust. Thrust is a FORCE, measured in pounds (lb). It’s unfortunate that some use “lbf” for “pounds of force” to distinguish with pounds of weight, but it’s all force.

The unearthly howl of the Vulcan is truly something that needs to be experienced in person to be truly understood how terrifying that sound is.

A great video, liking the longer length a lot. To this day it never ceases to amaze me that the first flight of the Avro Vulcan was just 11 years after the first flight of the Avro Lancaster!

Absolutely great video. Had to watch it in two pieces, first "half" while drinking my morning coffee, second now after work. Loved it.

I would like to point out that an Avro Vulcan exists outside of the UK, in Goose Bay, NL, Canada. The RAF used to practice at the airbase and when the Vulcans were retired, one was deemed to be requiring more effort to return to the UK, so they donated it to the town.

LOVE that you did an extended vid on this topic!! 😉👍✌️

Thank you for making this video, I had requested this subject many times when you first started the channel. Great work

The V bombers were beautiful machines. I'm especially fond of the Vulcan, I saw one fly at Farnborough in 2014 and the sound and sight of it was something else, truly intimidating yet beautiful.

Excellent video! Loved the longer documentary! Great work!

These videos is the thing we need

A good book I read was called V Bombers by Tim Laming which gives the background on all three and goes into a bit more detail about the development of the aircraft around the Blue Danube missile. And the reasoning behind having three designs simultaneously. A good read.

I've always loved these planes. I had little die cast models of all 3 of the "V bombers" as a little kid. The Vulcan has always been my favorite.

The Vulcan was always a favourite at the Canadian National Exhibition Airshow in Toronto back in the old days. I saw it many times.

The content of the video aside, I just watched this on a big screen, and the camera resolution is amazing. Clearer than most amazon movies. Good job.

A wonderful video; an historical document; an excellent and professional piece of narration. 5* out of 5.

Living near Lincoln in the late 70’s and early 80’s it was a regular sight having Vulcans flying low over your home doing circuits and bumps.

I've gotten to see the Vulcan in flight at very low altitudes at the Clacton air show a couple of times now and it is a beautiful sight. For such a large aircraft it spends a surprisingly small amount of time with throttles engaged, but when the throttle is pushed up you certainly know it.

Great! I particularly liked the recommended reading refs at the end, a new and welcome addition. More like this please!

Bombers Of The West by Bill Gunston is another fine book that covers V-bomber development and careers up to the early 1970s.

Love that your oration and rhythm are so clear and precise that I can easily enjoy even more at 1.5 speed.

I don't think the Victor is the most aesthetically beautiful aircraft, but it is ... elegant. Much like the B-52, it's kinda function over form, and that in itself is a sort of beauty, innit? And it looks good in antiflash white.

Once got to sit in the cockpit of a Vulcan at an airshow once, not a lot of space in the crew compartment despite the size of the plane. Amazing looking machine though, incredibly elegant, and despite its decades of age, it somehow still looked futuristic.

Great video. I really enjoyed this longer format video. Some subjects need a little bit more time to explain in detail. Great work.

I recall the Vulcan at Dawlish Air show some years ago. She hadn't long been brought back into service, and there was a real sense of gung-ho, let's show these folks what she can do. She flew out a distance off shore and pointed near vertically upwards. For an impossible second it seemed as if her incredible mass was hanging motionless in the air. And then the pilot pulled the throttles out on four Royle-Royce Olympus engines. My God. Awesome is a horribly over-used word but in this case it is entirely appropriate. The Howl, they called it. I'm not surprised because there was something animalistic to that sound.

The British did have a way of naming things. The engines Merlin, Olympus, Sabre, and my favorite the Saphire U.S. had R1830 and GE F110. It seems the early jets were just beyond the capability of engineering metal fatigue had never been a problem before.

Brings back great memories of seeing the Vulcan fly directly over my house on its way to Southport Air Show the year before its retirement. 250ft up and then going into a full power, almost vertical climb with its engines howling. 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰. The one day I didnt go to the show (and it was only a few miles away) but if I had gone, I would have missed one of the most breathtaking sights and sounds of my life.

I remember in 1977 as a kid see 2 vulcans parked at the airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica while I was in an airplane getting ready to takeoff. They were beautiful aircrafts.

Excellent video. I certainly remember seeing Victors and Vulcans in the air when I was a kid

I spent most of my life living in Farnborough (grew up there) the airshow was always a treat especially when Vulcan came over that and the harrier!

When I was a kid I always thought the V-Bomber fleet looked like they were from the future. Staggering to think that they were built just a few decades after powered flight was invented. Also, was it British policy to build one workhorse, one sexy and one out there plane? They did it with fighters and bombers in WW2 and then the V-fleet...

We had a Vulcan visit Minot AFB back in the very early 80s, truly a beautiful aircraft.

I had the pleasure of seeing a Canadian Vulcan back around 1980 at Offut air force base. It was an impressive sight to see as it came over the field quiet as a mouse then hit afterburners and was gone.

Arguably some of the most beautiful aeroplanes ever built.

Very insightful! Thank you.

Jet engines do not have thrust specified in pound-feet; just pounds. Pound-feet is a unit of either torque or work, depending on context.

My personal favorite is the Vulcan. Absolutely the most beautiful militairy aircraft ever built.

7:30 CC on: "Nucleus Jiu-Jitsu Bomber" Now that's definitely something.

What a fantastic long form video. I’d love to see more long videos like that, I like listening to you while I work at my computer. Can you do a deep dive into how the bomarc missile won out over the avro arrow? It’s a massive sore spot for us Canadians. - all the best from the great white north

Pulling an all nighter, wrapping Xmas pressies and binging MegaProjects 👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼 On point as always! Thank you for your content guys!

Great in depth video Simon. A wealth of info.

Terrific! I loved every second of your video. I lived and loved those planes. It will soon be time for me to go also! Thanks for the memories!! ☺️👍✌️🇬🇧

Saw the Vulcan few years back on its last Airshow tour at Southport before it was retired. Incredible aircraft!!

Thank you for the intelligent articulate work you and your staff. Do I personally appreciate it?!!!

Literally one of your best videos... I so appreciate your knowledge. Now maybe some understand. I think you get it.!

Me and my grandad went to see the Vulcan flying in its last year airborne. It was a fantastic day and the noise is something I will never forget. Duxford is somewhere I can wholeheartedly recommend for anyone who wants either a nice family day out or an educational enthusiasts outing. They’ve got tanks, artillery guns, planes and it’s basically a history nerds wet dream.

Awesome production. Thanks.

I’m surprised that y’all didn’t comment about the Vulcan being a movie star as well, for it’s appearance in James Bond Thunderball. Watching that with my dad as a child was my first time seeing one and I have always loved the howl they make with the intakes.

When you say Hurricane you show a Hunter 🤕

I'd love to see more long videos like this

Well I just watched three of your podcasts I loved it it was great very enjoyable and extremely informative thank you four thumbs up👍👍👍👍🏝⛵

I'm glad I can go see an Avro Vulcan at Castle AFB here in California.