100% full US air defence.
It was the US’s own test of their defences the main thing they were “shooting down” were the US’s own fleet of bombers. it was meant as a full scale test and the RAF was invited kinda for the fun of it. They got through without much effort the first time. Second time, they had to use different tactics, use 3 vulcans to bait the air defences but the 4th got through.
Read up on Operation Sky Shield.
He’s referring to Operation SkyShield. More specifically Operation SkyShield II.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/this-is-only-a-test-3119878/
but it sucked
Full scale tests to simulate how the US could defend itself from the russians. the sky shield exercises were huge in the late 50s and early 60s
not the lazily read a wikipedia article guy lol
Eh. Its compressed :D
all vulcan had going for it was jamming. thats literally it.
and what about B-58 sucked?
Vulcans didn’t participate in The first Operation SkyShield
You 100% sure? Fairly certain 8x Vulcan took part
That is operation skyshield II
in skyshield 2
Fair enough, my bad. Thought they participated in 1 and 2
If it’s nearly 6am over here, why on earth are you brits awake still lol??
Jamming good enough to defeat the entirety of the US air defences and good enough (with some upgrades) to protect it during the blackbuck raids during the Falklands war.
Also had very good climb rate and good handling.
first time can be chalked up to testing such a big system on such a large scale. ofc stuff will go wrong.
2nd one, didnt they need 3 vulcans to jam? and it was not going against full US air defence. only F-102 and ground radars. and if it was the real deal, im sure even with the jamming they could still locate where it was with enough accuracy for a couple AIR-2’s to wipe out the whole formation.
Or maybe the Avro Vulcan was just better and the US had no decent defence against it?
AIR-2 is a pretty damn good defence if you ask me. ofc they arent going to set them off for an excercise
NORAD. It was a test to see how NORAD’s radar network and defense would fair against a full scale Russian bombing assault. After B-47 flew low and first dropping chaff followed by mid altitude B-52s flying in only 1 of the vulcans was detected and considered a kill.
and the Avro was an insanely good strategic bomber. With one of the best defensive loadouts of the 1960s
its did 2 things good, it was manueverable for a bomber, and it could jam stuff (chaff still a thing btw, and B-52 has jammers too).
speed was lacking, payload was lacking, range was lacking (even the B-58 outranges it)
and it had nearly 5000 chaff on-board