weapon. Other examples include the Lion Book of Speed in 1962, and more recently a 2005 issue of
war comic Commando.
In the 1965 Cold War novel The Penetrators by Hank Searls (writing as Anthony Gray), an RAF officer
leads nine Vulcans in a maverick mock attack against the USA in order to prove that the manned
bomber is a more flexible deterrent option than ballistic missiles. Published in 2006 the best-selling
Vulcan 607 by Rowland White tells the dramatic story of the first Black Buck mission, and Vulcans are
the central feature of the novel Hullo Russia, Goodbye England (2009) by Derek Robinson, where a
WWII Lancaster pilot rejoins the RAF at the height of the Cold War.
The Thunderball mock-up
under constuction in the
Bahamas, and the scale model
at Bruntingthorpe in 2009
as the crew celebrate the
successful conclusion of a
fundraising campaign.
Below: Commando from 2005
illustrated by Ian Kennedy, and a
1980 copy of The Penetrators,
cover by Brian Knight.
TV and Film
In 1953 the Shell Film Unit produced a short film on the Vulcan, directed by Peter De Normanville,
and the little-known 1958 Italian sci-fi film ‘La Morte Viene Dallo Spazio’ (The Day The Sky Exploded)
uses a clip of a white flash Vulcan at low level, but the aircraft’s most notable role came in the James
Bond movie Thunderball (1965). Agents of SPECTRE hijack a Vulcan B.1a bomber to use its two
NATO nuclear bombs for a ransom plot. In Ian Fleming’s original novel the bomber is known as the
(fictional) Villiers Vindicator. Two aircraft from the Waddington Wing were used in filming, XA913 for
ground sequences and XH506 for in flight shots. A large scale model used in the film used to reside
with XH558 at Bruntingthorpe. For underwater location shooting in the Bahamas a full-size mock-up
was constructed of the forward section and underside, including landing gear, and the remains are still
a popular diving attraction. In Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien parts from scrapped Vulcans were used to
make the set of the spaceship Nostromo.
Appearances in tv shows include ’The Master Minds’ episode of The Avengers (1965) in which all three
V-bombers feature, and a Blue Steel equipped Vulcan can be seen in The Champions series (‘The Silent
Enemy’, 1969). In the 1995 series Bugs, a car crashes into XL426 in the episode ‘All Under Control’
(actually hitting a lorry trailer in front of the aircraft, thankfully!).
Opposite page, left to right: Avro advert,
Meccano Magazine cover for March 1953,
Ladybird’s The Story of Flight (1960) and
Look and Learn (1961), depicting the
engine failure suffered by XM610 in 1971,
by artist Wilf Hardy. Note the three trailing
static lines indicating the rear crew have
parachuted out.
Right: A dramatic scene from the Mach1
strip in 2000AD, illustrated by Ian Kennedy.
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