The Full Avro Story Lancaster, Vulcan, Nimrod & Joe Raimondo Interview

Video from the channel David Lawton about Avro Vulcan, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 39:39. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary on the history of Avro, from its founding to the end of its lineage with the Nimrod, with a central section devoted to the Vulcan. It includes an interview recorded in May 2026 for the Avro Heritage museum with Joe Raimondo, a former RAF engineering officer who served in the Vulcan's operational conversion unit (OCU) at Scampton.

Alliott Verdon Roe founded A.V. Roe and Company in Manchester in 1910. After the D and E types, the company mass-produced aircraft for the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF during the First World War, and in the postwar years the Avro 504 became a training aircraft. The 1926 general strike and the 1929 crisis hit the company hard until the rearmament of the 1930s. From the twin-engined Manchester, weighed down by its engines, the four-engined Lancaster was born in 1941, a mainstay of Bomber Command, with more than 7,000 built between Woodford and Chadderton. It was followed by the York and, in the jet age, the delta-winged Vulcan, which entered service in the mid-1950s as part of the V force alongside the Victor and the Valiant.

The documentary covers the anti-flash white paint scheme, quick reaction alert (QRA), the Blue Steel missile, powered by hydrogen peroxide and retired in 1970, and the switch to low-level penetration with camouflage once deterrence passed to the Polaris. Raimondo, born in Malta and enlisted in the RAF in 1967, arrived at Scampton in 1979 and witnessed the OCU's closure in 1981. He explains that only the two pilots had ejection seats and that the three rear crew members had to exit through the lower hatch. He recalls the crash of XM645 at Żabbar (Malta) in 1975: the pilots ejected, the five rear occupants died, along with a civilian on the ground. The account continues with the 1982 Black Buck missions from Ascension Island against Stanley airfield, and with the Nimrod, derived from the Comet at Woodford: the MR2 and R1 versions, the cancelled AEW, the loss of XV230 over Afghanistan in 2006 and the cancellation of the MRA4 in 2010, whose gap was filled by the P-8 Poseidon.