November Dinner Meeting
Hong Kong Historical Aircraft Association
Presentation by Mr. John Bent and Mr. Tony Semark
Hong Kong Aviation Club
23 November 2004
Jonathan Sharp reports
V-Bomber Reflections
In an enthralling and often moving double-act dinner presentation at the Hong Kong Aviation Club, John Bent and Tony Semark recounted just what it felt like to fly Britain’s fabulous V-bombers - Valiant, Vulcan and Victor - in the 1960s when the Cold War was in daily danger of becoming terminally hot. They described the awesome responsibility of how, as men barely out of their teens and joining the RAF right after the Cuban missile crisis, they had to be prepared, as John put it, to do something that was absolutely horrific as members of Britain’s designated deliverers of nuclear weapons. It was a time, Tony said, when "the world survived on a balance of terror."
It was sobering stuff ?made all the more chilling by John and Tony’s admirably understated delivery of their presentation, which was also marvellously enhanced by a magnificent video and display materials assembled by HKHAA Chairman Cliff Dunnaway showing the bombers strutting their stuff and technical details.
As John and Tony noted at the outset of their address ?which skilfully mixed humour with visions of Armageddon - they were initially depressed about the prospect of flying bombers because they were hoping like mad to fly fighters. Tony: "If John and I thought we were going to be posted to the V-force, we wouldn’t have joined the air force because we all wanted to be fighter pilots. We are flattered that now, 45 years later, we are speaking to an audience interested in the very aircraft we didn’t want to fly."
But they made abundantly clear they would not have missed the experience of flying V- bombers - Tony in Vulcan and John in Valiant and Victor - for the world. This was despite the fact they had to endure the nerve-racking experience of being on Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) and waiting for the dreaded klaxon to sound that could send them to almost certain death. Their RAF bosses strove to maintain morale by assuring that Soviet defences could not even see low-flying bombers, but as Tony said: "The fact of the matter was that if we had gone to war and released the weapon . . . probably half of the squadron would have got there, and of the half that dropped their weapons, probably none would have got back." Added John: "They would probably have had nothing to come back to anyway."
On a lighter note, there were descriptions of how the fiendish device issued to crew to enable them to answer a call of nature could go embarrassingly wrong, and Tony recounted how, at quiet times, he and fellow crew members would drive their service-issue Standard Vanguard cars to their aircraft - in reverse gear.
They also spoke of the sometimes difficult relationship between V-bomber pilots, who in an emergency could eject, and their justifiably bitter crew members sitting behind them for whom a satisfactory method of leaving the aircraft in a hurry was never installed.
Concluding on a human note, John said he and Tony were totally privileged to have had the experience of flying during a supreme period of British aviation technology. That technology had its apotheosis in the TSR2, which John said would have been one of the most remarkable fighting aircraft. It was of course cancelled by a Labour government - "which," added Tony dryly, "is why I’ll never vote Labour."
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