HARRIER
Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Jonathan Glancey, 2013
The moral right of Jonathan Glancey to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders.
The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify
any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Extract from Spirit of the Air © MOD Crown Copyright 2006.
Extracts from ‘Now and Then’ and ‘You Love that England’ by C. Day-Lewis,
in Collected Poems (London: Enitharmon Press, 2004).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 9781843548911
E-book ISBN: 9781782394433
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CONTENTS
List of illustrations
Preface
Introduction: To tread upon the air
1 A leap of imagination
2 Kestrel breeds Harrier
3 Cold War warrior
4 Baptism at sea
5 Foreign legions
6 New wars for old
7 Wing feathers clipped
8 What flies ahead
Epilogue: The Windhover
Acknowledgements
Select bibliography
Index
‘The airplane won’t amount to a damn until they get a machine that will act like a hummingbird, go straight up, go forwards, go backwards, come straight down and alight like a hummingbird.’
Thomas Alva Edison
‘All modern aircraft have four dimensions: space, length, height and politics.’
Sir Sydney Camm, Hawker Aircraft
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. VZ-9 Avrocar. © Bettmann/CORBIS.
2. Convair XFY Pogo. © Bettmann/CORBIS.
3. Ryan X-13 Vertijet. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
4. Short SC.1. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
5. Frank Whittle, John Herriot and Stanley Hooker. Copyright Rolls-Royce plc/Courtesy of Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust.
6. Bill Bedford. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
7. Sydney Camm. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
8. Hawker P.1127, XP831, first tethered flight. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
9. Hawker P.1127, XP831, HMS Ark Royal. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
10. FGA.1 Kestrels. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
11. Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
12. Hawker Siddeley P.1154. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
13. Yakovlev Yak-38s. US Navy/Wikimedia Commons.
14. Harrier analogue cockpit. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
15. Harrier updated cockpit. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
16. FRS.1 Sea Harrier. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
17. Commander Nigel ‘Sharkey’ Ward and Lieutenant Commander Kris Ward. SWNS.
18. Sharkey Ward landing FRS.1 Sea Harrier at Pebble Mill. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
19. FRS.1 Harrier landing on HMS Hermes. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
20. GR.3 Harrier, Belize. Mirrorpix.
21. GR.3 Harrier, West Germany. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
22. GR.3 Harrier, RAF Gütersloh. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
23. FRS.1 Sea Harriers from HMS Invincible. © Imperial War Museums (HU 92567).
24. AV-8A landing on USS Franklin D Roosevelt. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
25. USMC AV-8A. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
26. GR.7 Harriers painted in camouflage. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
27. GR.7 Harriers, Ahmed Al Jaber Air Base. © PA Images.
28. USMC AV-8B Harrier. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
29. GR.7 firing CRV-7 rockets. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.
30. AV-8B Harrier II. © George Hall/Corbis.
31. Northrop Grumman X-47B. Rex.
32. Lockheed Martin F-35B. Rex/Layne Laughter/US Navy.
33. GR.9 Harriers farewell flight.
PREFACE
The weather was hostile. Blustery. Ice-cold winds. Grey skies barely visible through banks of low cloud. Conditions, in fact, that would have been all too familiar to the pilots of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force who flew to victory in the Falklands War nearly thirty years earlier. As some two thousand military personnel, their families and friends – and not forgetting the media – stared into the unforgiving sky, sixteen Harrier jump jets, in diamond formation, each of four aircraft, thundered towards RAF Cottesmore to land, vertically, and to shut off their engines simultaneously. But not before one of these GR.9A Harriers – the final development of this legendary military aircraft, painted for the occasion in glossy ‘retro’ camouflage – stopped in midair, turned to the control tower, and, landing light blazing, made a deep and courtly bow to those assembled below and, by extension, to everyone who, one way or another, had been a part of the story of the Harrier over the previous half-century.
That aircraft was ZG506, flown by Group Captain Gary Waterfall, commander of Joint Force Harrier, controlling Harrier squadrons of the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm (Royal Navy), and the last station commander of RAF Cottesmore, which itself was closed shortly after this final, highly emotive flight of Britain’s jump-jet force. That afternoon – 15 December 2010 – the sixteen jets had flown low in homage, and as a farewell, over the RAF bases of Cranwell, Coningsby, Marham, Scampton, Waddington and Wittering, with their ghosts of Spitfires, Dambusters, Cold War V-bombers, Phantoms and generations of officer cadets earning their ‘wings’. They flew, too, above the still-handsome town centres of Stamford and Oakham and over the soaring medieval towers of Lincoln Cathedral before returning to their Rutland base, by now wreathed in eerie and ever-shifting tendrils of low rolling mist.
As the Rolls-Royce engines of the pugnacious jets span on cue to a collective stop, and a haunting silence, those gathered on the ground or clambering from cockpits knew all too well that this was truly the end of an era. The Harrier had been in service with the RAF for forty-one years, and in action, from the Falklands War to the most recent missions in Afghanistan. The Harrier was a development of the Hawker P.1127, the world’s first successful vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. On the drawing board in 1957, the revolutionary P.1127 made its maiden flight on 19 November 1960; one way or another, the jump jet born and nurtured in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey spanned half a century in the service of the country that invented and manufactured this magnificent flying machine – a fighter aircraft that, perhaps justly, has been dubbed the jet-age Spitfire. It is a machine – the product of an optimistic new Elizabethan age when British design, technology, engineering and aircraft not only matched but led the world, if only for what proved to be an unduly brief time – that has spanned my life, too. As much an emotion as a brilliant invention and a finely resolved and hugely characterful machine, the Harrier ranks in the pantheon of the wor
ld’s greatest aircraft.
Now, out of the blue, one of the world’s most potent and proven combat aircraft was to be taken out of service to save the British government some £900 million. That decision had been announced to Parliament on 12 October 2010, shortly before the fiftieth anniversary of the P.1127’s first hover, as a result of the latest Strategic Defence and Security Review. The effect of the cuts was immediate. The following month, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, like her sister ship Invincible another victim of the latest round of government spending cuts, made a final voyage with Harriers on board, from Tyneside, where she was built, and launched in 1981, to Hamburg.
On 24 November, four Harriers, led by Lieutenant Commander James Blackmore, blasted off the ship’s deck on a flight to RAF Cottesmore. This would be the last time a British military aircraft would operate from a carrier. A replacement carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, and the supersonic Lockheed Martin short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35B stealth jets she is meant to take to sea, will not be ready for active service until 2020. Watching the Harriers abandon their floating nest, the Ark Royal’s skipper, Captain Jerry Kyd, said it was like ‘taking the teeth from a tiger’, while General Sir David Richards, Chief of the Defence Staff, noted in a decidedly low-key manner that the decision to decommission the Ark Royal had provoked an ‘understandable emotional response’.
‘Understandable’ and ‘emotional’? Certainly. And besides, by axing both such a formidable fighting machine as the Ark Royal and the seventy-nine-strong Harrier force, Britain had deliberately opened a gaping hole in its defence strategy. The ever-controversial Commander Nigel ‘Sharkey’ Ward, who had led Sea Harriers to victory from the deck of HMS Invincible in spectacular style in 1982, and whom we will meet again in this book, told the British media:
The connived withdrawal of the Harrier from service is an appalling miscarriage of justice, and of operational wisdom; the reprehensible actions of those who contrived this as ‘a logical operational decision’ must be condemned as disloyal and against the direct interests of our national defence capability.
To make matters seem much worse than they were, the perfectly serviceable, and saleable, Ark Royal was sold, like Invincible before her, for scrap to Leyal Ship Recycling, a Turkish company on the Aegean coast, while the Harriers were flogged off, at bargain-basement price, to the US Marine Corps to be broken up for spare parts for the Americans’ highly prized AV-8B Harrier II force. In 2013, these Harriers are still active in Afghanistan, and the Marines intend to hang on to them until 2030 if they possibly can.
The GR.9A Harriers that flew for the last time in service that December afternoon at Cottesmore were not machines, or a type of aircraft, due or fit for retirement. In fact, the latest Harrier model had only been delivered to RAF Cottesmore, and so also to the Ark Royal, between 2004 and 2009, while in July 2008 a contract had been awarded to QinetiQ, the Farnborough-based aerospace company, to further upgrade and maintain the Harrier fleet until 2018. Imagine buying dozens of Aston Martin DB9s, kitting them out with every latest James Bond-style gizmo and then selling them to an American car dealer for a few thousand quid, each to be broken up into spare parts for DB9s built under licence in the United States. Madness? Well, yes. And yet, as this biography of the Harrier will show, while tracing its genesis, development and action-packed service history, politics have toyed with this magnificent British flying machine from one end of its long, if now truncated, life to the other.
In November 2011, perhaps stung by criticism both within and without the armed services, Peter Luff, a junior defence minister and former PR man, announced that seventy-two of the Harriers bound for the United States would be converted to match the Marine Corps’s AV-8B fleet, but as the career of junior ministers rather resembles that of inexperienced pilots flying into fog for the first time, it was hard to know. The following year, Mr Luff was no longer a junior minister of defence and was, in any case, due to leave Parliament at the next general election. As it was, in 2012 the US Naval Air System Command said that at no time had there been plans for upgrading and operating British Harriers for service with the Marine Corps. The aircraft were for spare parts, and that was that.
Intriguingly, the Harrier – in the guise of the prototype Hawker P.1127 – was nurtured into RAF service at a time when a Conservative government was hell-bent on destroying the very idea of fighter aircraft in favour of ground-to-air missiles. Half a century on, meanwhile, a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats ditched the Harrier while setting its cost-cutting eyes on pilotless ‘drones’ that would, if possible, supersede jet fighters and more or less every other fixed-wing military aircraft in the near future. It was, however, a Conservative government that had gained most, politically, from the sheer efficacy of the Harrier in the early 1980s: British victory in the Falklands War in 1982, in which Harriers flown by the Royal Navy and the RAF played a vital and legendary role, had led to a landslide political victory for Margaret Thatcher in Britain’s 1983 general election. Indeed, on 17 December 1982, Mrs Thatcher had paid a visit to the Hawker Siddeley factory at Kingston upon Thames. The prime minister had posed, beaming, for press photographers from the cockpit of a Harrier. ‘I would have loved to have flown in it,’ she had said. No one had doubted her.
Inevitably, the prospects of any British military aircraft are highly susceptible to the Mad Hatter logic of Westminster and Whitehall. The loops, stalls and spins of politicians can either buoy up or bring down the very same machines – from Spitfires to Harriers – that have fought for our hard-won freedoms. And the Harrier was, of course, very much a servant of democracy: it should never be forgotten that, in one of its finest moments, it did its bit in helping to bring down the cruel and puerile military government of the Argentine Republic, a dismal regime that had killed many of its own people – some 20,000 – including students, trade unionists, journalists and the daughter of Livio Dante Porta, one of the country’s finest engineers, who had pushed so hard for the development of a clean and efficient steam-railway technology fit for the twenty-first century. Many of the ‘disappeared’ were pushed from aircraft over the Río de la Plata or the South Atlantic. These ‘death flights’ were planned by Vice Admiral Luis Maria Mendia (1925–2007), the former head of Argentine naval operations; a document signed by the admiral called for the ‘physical elimination by using planes that, in flight, would throw out the prisoners drugged beforehand’.
Back under the cold, grey clouds of Rutland on 15 December 2010, Air Vice Marshal Peter Dodworth, one of the first four RAF pilots to be trained on Harriers, told reporters:
[The Harrier] was an exciting adventure for us. The first time I did a conventional take-off I was astonished by the acceleration. My first vertical take-off was exhilarating. It is pretty sad to see the demise of the aircraft after forty-one years. I watched it develop into the formidable and effective fighter jet it is today. It has been amazing for me to see it fulfil its potential.
Air Vice Marshal Graham Williams, who delivered the first Harrier into service at RAF Wittering in 1969 and who flew the triumphant return leg of that year’s Transatlantic Air Race from New York’s Empire State Building to London’s Post Office Tower, added:
The Harrier means everything to me. It is just one of those planes that becomes a part of your life. It was so different from everything else, and it was the greatest fun, almost better than sex. Today is also a very sad day for me, because it seems that politics and finance has got in the way of what still is a very viable aircraft. The Harrier still has ten to fifteen years of life left in it. To go and dump it like this is almost criminal.
Walking away from Harrier ZG506 without stopping to look back, Group Captain Gary Waterfall, one of the 135 RAF Harrier pilots and fifty-three Navy pilots facing an uncertain future, was stoical. ‘Without doubt this is an emotional day for all those who have been fortunate to be involved in one of the true icons of aviation, alongside Concorde and Spitfire.’ But, he adde
d, ‘life goes on, and it’s always important to look forward, not back. Right now, though, our thoughts are with everybody involved with Harrier over the years as we bid a fond farewell to a truly remarkable aircraft.’
As he said this, Harriers and Sea Harriers were still reaching for the sky, in their inimitable way, with the Indian, Italian and Spanish navies as well as the US Marine Corps. It is not quite time to say farewell to the instantly recognizable, compact and much-loved British jet that revolutionized flight and could not just fly like a hummingbird but sting like a bee, wasp and hornet rolled into one.
INTRODUCTION
TO TREAD UPON THE AIR
History records, in myth, legend and fact, all too many vertical descents, from hilltops, temples and church towers, which led to the deaths of early would-be aviators. The dream of flight is as old as the hills – and certainly as old as the temples of the ancient Greeks. According to Aulus Gellus, the second-century Roman author, it was the Greek philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and politician Archytas (482–347 BC) who designed and built the world’s first self-propelled flying machine. A steam-powered jet called the Pigeon, it was said to have flown 650 feet. Did it? Who knows? But Hero of Alexandria, a Greek mathematician and engineer, published notes on a steam turbine, and possibly built and demonstrated it, so perhaps the Greeks were as ahead of their times and the rest of the Western world in this respect as they were in architecture, science, sculpture and philosophy.
For all the intriguing flying machines that may or may not have taken to the air between Archytas’ Pigeon in Athens of the fifth century BC and the Wright brothers’ Flyer in 1903, the ability to take off and land vertically was far beyond the capabilities of heavier-than-air machines, whether legendary or not. Interestingly, though, vertical flight by lighter-than-air machines was achieved some two hundred years before the prototype Hawker P.1127 rose into the air, by itself and with no guiding strings attached, on 19 November 1960. While attempts had been made, on paper at least, by Roger Bacon in England in the thirteenth century and Leonardo da Vinci in Italy in the fifteenth century to develop vertical take-off ornithopters, the first successful vertical take-off with humans on board – in fact, the first ever free flight by humans – was made by the Montgolfier brothers, inventors and paper manufacturers, from the grounds of Château de la Muette on the edge of Paris on 21 November 1783.
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