Good question Chris.I love the desert camo, but can anyone tell me why fighters or Bombers of that period never wore that scheme?
The short answer is 'I don't know', but around that time it was being said that Transport Command (and later Air Support Command - the 'ASC' is where the callsign 'ASCOT' came from, btw) was the only Command which was always operational, in the sense that they were already doing in peacetime much of what they would do in wartime.
While most of the aircraft of the other operational home Commands (Bomber, Fighter, Coastal) were committed to NATO CFE, the transports generally ranged much further afield (eg Beverlies on the 'slip' to Singapore, down to Libya (El Adem), Nairobi, Aden, etc) and it's possible that someone in authority in Transport Command took the not-unreasonable decision that if we were going to fight a war it might well be somewhere hot and desert-like.
It's worth remembering too that in '66-'67 we were heavily-engaged in up-country ops in Aden and that might well have had an influence.
Also, transports may well land in unfriendly territory, or near the front lines, so needing all the ground camouflage help they can get, while combat aircraft generally don't - in the types of wars we fought in the Middle East, enemy 'counter-air' strikes were pretty unlikely.
The black undersides were pretty uncontroversial - it was SOP that any deep-penetration mission would take place at night - but comment was made at the time that the camouflage experts had now gone 180 deg away from their wartime choice of dead-matt black to avoid showing up in searchlights, and had now chosen high-gloss for the same purpose. As Garry says, they later changed it again.
Another thought is that the NEAF Vulcans based in Cyprus were not only committed to NATO (wartime targets in USSR) but were also on centralised servicing, which would have made it difficult to rotate aircraft between UK & Akrotiri if a complete repaint was necessary.
However, as I said, all these are just my deductions based on observation: if anyone really knows why, please sing out!
Cheers,
Kevin
