There is an excellent book about XM607/ Operation black buck written by Rowland White. It’s not just about the actual mission it’s also about retiring the Vulcan then bringing them back and all the other bit that led up to the mission.
- each horizontal/diagonal line is a refueling operation
So, planes take of from Ascension Island at the bottom, only one reaches the Falkland Islands.
Ignoring the gray vertical lines (they are for ‘insurance’, in case other planes would have hit a problem), we have:
- 6 Victors taking of
- 3 of them refueling the other 3 after a short while (presumably because taking of and getting to flight height uses more fuel than steady flight), immediately returning to base afterwards.
- the bomber taking off
- a seventh Victor taking off, refueling the bomber twice, and then returning to base
- one of the 3 Victors of the first wave refuels the bomber twice, then refuels another of the three before returning to base
- that second one refuels the third one and returns to base
Of all the aicraft that took off, only one actually flew over the target. It had to be refueled seven times on outbound journey, and the last tanker itself had to be refueled three times to fly that far.
Yeah, OK, wow. That's ... complicated. And I think they didn't manage to get a very good return for all this effort, from a diagonal reading of the article.
Er. Sorry, I'm being thick, but your hint about the link to the relevant maths etc went way over my head. I might be missing a cultural reference? :0
Didn't the British do something similar in the Desert Campaign during WW2, burying supplies to be recovered later. The Long Range Desert Group perhaps?
