I was on Victorious as a Tiff apprentice maintaining the Deck Landing Projector, a stabilised light system the pilots followed that landed them at the first arrestor wire, we deployed the first Buccaneer2 aircraft, lost one on launch off Cornwall due to an error in tailplane angle with empty drop tanks, crew ejected OK, some months later a nice new shiny Buccaneer arrived in Hong Kong with 6 hours on the clock on a cargo raft complete with a test pilot to prove the tailplane setting was correct and not what the squadron engineers had worked out, that the settings in the manual were wrong. To cut a long story short the crew ejected on launch as the aircraft rolled and stalled, the test pilot was flown ashore leaving the wardroom mess manager with a large unpaid bar bill.
I was in Flyco one afternoon when Cdr Air informed one Buccaneer pilot that if he got the aircraft wet he would be washing it all day Sunday on his own, yes he was that low.
We also entered into an aircraft launch competition with the USS Enterprise that had 4 catapults to our two, but we had auto align rollers on the catapults, however the Americans decided they would interfere with our launches by beating up our deck with Phantoms at mach1 plus, we replied with two Buccaneers at sea level at each side at mach1, yes the Buccaneer was designed subsonic but it could go supersonic.
There were a few British aircraft that went supersonic by accident one being the VC10 which had excursions to mach1when descending to JFK airport unless they were careful
