No, I'm being precise. That the nearest points of the Falklands & Argentina are roughly 500km apart is true, but mentioning it in the context of air attacks from Argentina on MPA is misleading.
Also misleading. If I say 'several', do you think of 1.5 or 2? No, you think of , 6, 7 - something of that order of magnitude. Words matter. They have meaning over & above their dictionary definitions. They have associations, & choosing one word over another, even though they have overlapping definitions, can completely change the weight of a phrase or sentence in the minds of those who read or hear it. Politicians know that very well.
'Some measure' was so little that they only tried to fight air-air on one day, because fuel limits encountered then made them realise it was pointless. The Daggers & Mirages had only a few minutes in the target area, & the Skyhawks could only reach the targets with a bomb load with aerial refuelling.
Firstly, such numbers are no longer possible. As already explained, that's a lot more than Argentina has operational fighters, & restoring that number to operational condition would be noticed.
Also, there was no single 55 aircraft raid. Check up the times of engagements. There were two separate encounters (no losses on either side) between Harriers & Mirages, one in the morning & one in the early afternoon, before the main effort in the late afternoon. Both times, the Mirages had to withdraw because of fuel limits. The Mirages approached in widely spaced pairs, which I suspect was because they hadn't wanted to waste any fuel forming up into a larger group.
When we look at the late afternoon fighting, we see the last shoot-down was 1 hr 35 mins after the first.
What you have represented as simultaneous raids by 55 aircraft were in fact sequential attacks by much smaller waves. The late afternoon maximum effort was in at least three waves over more than an hour and a half, & there had been two previous, completely separate, smaller attacks.
When you think about the mechanics of it, it's obvious why the attacks were in waves. Consider how long it would take for 16 Daggers to take off from San Julian & form up for a single attack, or for 12 or 16 A-4s to refuel. Also, think about the mechanics of refuelling 28 A-4s, out & back, on two separate vectors., with only two tankers - and getting them to co-ordinate over the target with four other flights, two of them taking off from the same bases, each of which had a single runway & limited dispersal. San Julian, for example, has 8 shelters with a single route to the runway, & no taxiway or anywhere else to wait for takeoff except the approach from the shelters. . . Rio Gallegos at least has a parallel taxiway & somewhere to park fighters while they're waiting to take off, but 24 in one go? Tricky, tricky.
The best you can get is a stream, or waves, & they picked the latter. Many turned back without engaging because they hit fuel limits before finding targets. That wouldn't happen if they were all converging on MPA, but that would also present a much easier target for the defenders than what happened on May 1st 1982, when the Argentinean aircraft were deliberately dispersed, because they were seeking targets across a lot of sea. That's much harder for short-range fighters to engage. Much longer-range Typhoons, able to use drop tanks, carrying far more missiles, & able to engage from much greater distances, wouldn't necessarily shoot down every attacking aircraft in a raid on MPA, but I think Argentina would run out of aircraft to attack with before MPA was put out of action.
What you should be proposing is raids on the ground based radars, simultaneously with a raid on MPA. That way, the defenders have to make choices.
