Miniature RAF / NATO Avro Vulcan B2 – Thunderball (1965)

SPECTRE hatches an insidious plan to hijack one of NATO’s nuclear-armed Vulcan B2 bombers. Flown off course during a test mission and down to the Bahamas, SPECTRE’s pilot crash lands the Vulcan into the ocean and sinks it to the seabed. Emilio Largo and his henchmen-divers then remove the missiles and camouflage the plane.

A converted Vickers Valiant was used for the major Vulcan flying scenes, while a full-scale partial Vulcan cockpit was sunk in the Bahamas. Some of the aerial scenes, the water-landing and the underwater sequences where the Vulcan sinks employed scale models. A larger model can be seen sinking into the water with landing gear engaged. A smaller model was likely used for the water landing. The Vulcan owned by the IFF is almost certainly the model engaged for the water-landing shots.

Special Effects wizard John Stears supervised the water-landing sequence. He would fly out from London to the Bahamas over the weekends during shooting to supervise the building of the towers that would support the overhead rig. Stears recalled in 1995 that one tower rose approximately sixty feet out of the water, attached by cables to a second fifteen-foot tower over a quarter of a mile away. Three wires suspended the model from the rolling rig that would travel between the towers.

One weekend Stears became alarmed when he found no progress. It turned out the riggers feared the shark infested waters. Stears insisted that the water was too shallow for sharks, being at most six feet deep at high tide and led the crew back to the worksite. Soon he spotted what he estimated to be a fourteen-foot lemon shark and declared that work would only take place at low tide. The most nerve-wracking moment came later during “magic hour” (the time after sunset before it gets dark). With crew in the water, Stears saw not only sharks but “a whole shoal of barracuda.” No one was bitten, and John Stears earned an Academy Award for his work on Thunderball.

Two of the models were kept by producer Kevin McClory and displayed in his Paradise Island home. McClory sold his house to Club Med in the mid-1990s and discarded the models along with the Thunderball Bomb Sled on the property. This Vulcan models were saved from the garden shed by two brothers. One was acquired by the Ian Fleming Foundation in 2004, and we duly restored it. The other was auctioned and now resides in private hands. Sadly, the Bomb Sled was destroyed by developers when they bulldozed the house.