Avro Shackleton

RAF aircrew slang for the airframe's apparent inability to keep itself in one piece at full power. The four Rolls-Royce Griffons running contra-rotating six-blade propellers produced a vibration signature and a noise level that left aircrew with measurable hearing loss after a single tour. The cabin shook hard enough that crews tied gear down and propped instruments with foam. Operating at 1,000 ft over the North Atlantic for fourteen hours at a stretch in those conditions was punishing work, and the nickname captured both the affection and the resentment crews felt for the aircraft. Modern maritime patrol — the Boeing P-8 Poseidon at 30,000 ft on autopilot — is a different working environment.

Hunt Soviet submarines in the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. The principal threat through the 1950s and 1960s was the Soviet Northern Fleet's diesel-electric and later nuclear submarines transiting the gap on their way to the Atlantic. Shackleton crews flew long low-level sorties dropping passive sonobuoys, listening on the ASV radar for snorkel masts, and (very rarely) running attack passes with depth charges or homing torpedoes. The actual Soviet boats they detected and tracked are still partly classified, but a handful of confirmed contacts and trail-and-report missions are documented. Secondary roles: maritime search-and-rescue (Shackletons coordinated several major mid-Atlantic ditching rescues), Cyprus Emergency operations, the 1956 Suez Crisis, and the 1976 Cod War with Iceland. The AEW.2 from 1972 onward did airborne radar surveillance over the North Sea and patrolled the South Atlantic from Ascension during the 1982 Falklands War.

A 1972 stop-gap that became a twenty-year programme. The RAF had ordered the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod AEW.3 to replace the Fairey Gannet AEW.3 carrier-based airborne early warning aircraft, but the Nimrod programme ran into severe radar and mission-system development problems and was cancelled in 1986 with no aircraft delivered. With no successor in sight, twelve Shackleton MR.2s were converted by removing their MR mission gear and fitting the AN/APS-20 surveillance radar that had been salvaged from the retiring Fairey Gannet AEW.3s — a 1950s set, with 1950s computer support, integrated into a 1950s airframe in 1972, and flown until 1991. The AEW.2 was widely criticised during its service for poor radar performance against modern threats, but it gave 8 Squadron a real RAF AEW capability for nineteen years. Final retirement came when the Boeing E-3D Sentry arrived from May 1991.

The E-3D Sentry was finally ready. The RAF had ordered seven E-3D Sentry AEW.1 aircraft in 1987 from Boeing as the long-delayed Nimrod AEW.3 replacement, and the first arrived at RAF Waddington in March 1991. With a modern airborne early warning aircraft on the strength, 8 Squadron stood down its Shackleton AEW.2 fleet on 1 July 1991, ending forty years of Avro Shackleton operations in the RAF. The Shackleton MR variants had already gone, replaced by the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod MR.1 (1969) and MR.2 (1979). The AEW.2 was the last in service.

The best preserved airframe is RAF Museum Cosford's WR960, an AEW.2 displayed in 8 Squadron markings. Imperial War Museum Duxford has WR963 — kept in taxiing condition until 2018 and run up periodically for engine demonstrations. The South African Air Force Museum at Swartkop has two MR.3s. Pima Air & Space Museum (Tucson, Arizona) has WR985. The Belgian Aviation Preservation Association at Beauvechain has WR974. About 8 originals survive worldwide. Several Shackleton crew associations run reunion events and there is a sustained body of memoirs and oral history from the long-serving fleet.