Harrier

by Jonathan Glancey

  As it was, the Hawker Aircraft Company bought the Gloster Aircraft Company in 1934, and merged with the automotive concern Armstrong Siddeley and its aircraft subsidiary Armstrong Whitworth the following year. Hawker Siddeley then took over A. V. Roe (as in Avro and Lancaster). Until 1963, however, Hawker aircraft were marketed under their own name, as were the products of other Hawker Siddeley subsidiaries. British aircraft manufactured in the 1960s as diverse as the Blackburn Buccaneer, Gloster Javelin, de Havilland Sea Vixen, Folland Gnat and Avro Vulcan were all Hawker Siddeley products, as were the Blue Streak, Red Top and Sea Dart missiles. Railway locomotives, metro trains and Westinghouse brakes and signals were too. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a Canadian railway industry Hawker Siddeley subsidiary built new trains for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority; other MBTA trains at the time were built by Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm, a fascinating case of old wartime sparring partners turning swords into ploughshares.

  Throughout this long and convoluted history, and even into the era when, in 1977, Hawker Siddeley was made a part of state-owned British Aerospace (BAe, later privatized in 1981), Sopwith remained a consultant to the aviation giant he had spawned in Kingston in that former ice-skating rink two years before the outbreak of the First World War. His centenary was celebrated with an appropriate military fly-past, and he died at the age of 101. Intriguingly, William Manning, the engineer who had built the Avis machine Sopwith learned to fly on in a workshop in Battersea, went on, after a spell working with Fiat on the racing seaplanes of the 1930s, to a research post at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, where he was co-inventor of the probe-mounted valve that allowed the Harrier, among other RAF aircraft, to refuel in mid-air.

  The RAF has flown Sopwiths and Hawkers made in Kingston from its inception in 1918 to the present day: the Harrier may have bowed out in 2010, yet the Hawk trainer, developed from 1968 by a design team led by Ralph Hooper and John Fozard, and first flown in 1974, is still in production. It serves with the RAF and many other air forces around the world and has been the choice of the virtuoso RAF Red Arrows display team since 1979. The Hawk, though, is not built in Kingston; the factory closed in 1992, to be replaced as we have seen by that other great British product, horrid housing.

  But back to the Surrey Comet of 1959:

  A huge new office block housing the Company’s administrative section, design and pre-production departments has been built on the Richmond Road frontage… for all its size it does not obtrude but enhances the landscape, hiding as it does the gaunt factory buildings to which it is attached.

  And its grandeur notwithstanding, this was not a luxurious building:

  Plainly, almost austerely, panelled in oak, the boardroom, situated centrally on the first floor, is flanked on each side by the offices of the directors and their immediate staff. On the other side of the corridor is a department which is a source of great pride to the Hawker team – the design section under Sir Sydney Camm. He is able to step across from his offices and see an army of experts at work on many various projects.

  The design section is where Ralph Hooper and his colleagues worked. Their open-plan office covered 50,000 square feet under a 400-foot span ‘daylight roof’.

  The county newspaper was giving me a very good idea of what it might have been like to work here in the heyday of the transformation of the experimental P.1127 into the world’s first successful V/STOL fighter jet, the Harrier. ‘There is,’ the article went on, ‘an almost monastic calm in the design office and thus it is a dramatic moment for the visitor when he is conducted through the double doors to a platform overlooking the factory floor. Contrasting the cloistered quiet of the office is the din of the Hunter production floor.’ This was ‘Aircraft Factory No. 1’, built by the government and used by Sopwith throughout the First World War. It was meant to have been a temporary structure, but endured until 1992. The P.1127 is not mentioned in the newspaper article except in reference to work being carried out on ‘a vertical take-off machine’ in a new 11,000-square-foot Research and Development building facing the Thames behind the factory. Significantly, though, the Surrey Comet noted a new ‘computing section’ next to the design department in which the ‘most expensive piece of furniture’ was ‘a £40,000 electronic computer which works out problems that could not be attempted by mere humans’. In 1959, the average salary of a ‘mere human’ in Britain was a little under £900.

  That new company computer is a reminder of the fact that the design of P.1127 pre-dated the digital age. Most of the design work on the jump jet was done with pencils, paper and slide rules, and on drawing boards. In fact, when later in 2012 I spoke to test pilots of the Lockheed Martin F-35B, they all made the point that, as far as they were concerned, the Harrier – which they all knew and most had flown in combat – was a distinctly analogue aircraft, while the F-35B, its much bigger and hugely more complex successor, is digital.

  I met Ralph Hooper at the former Hawker social club. The club, now a local authority sports centre, is where ex-Hawker employees still gather. Hooper, who lives within walking distance of the club, is tall, alert, drily and even sardonically witty, and not a man given to unnecessary reminiscence. Like so many engineers, he seems as if he might have no time for anything like small talk. He wondered what on earth we might talk about given that the story of the Harrier had been told so many times and suggested that, if I had the patience, I could find everything I needed to know in a library. When I explained that I was as interested in the politics that had shaped, driven, buffeted and undermined the Harrier and in the tortured story of twentieth-century British manufacturing, Hooper then sat down and duly proceeded to reminisce until we agreed that mutual exhaustion had set in. Modest British engineers like Hooper, and the many others I have met over the years, seem to be wholly unaware of the fact that meeting them face-to-face is an honour. And, unlike architects, for example, they do not talk about themselves without a good deal of prompting.

  Libraries can indeed fill in the gaps. Ralph Spenser Hooper, lead designer of the P.1127 and chief designer of the Harrier until 1965, was born in Hornchurch, Essex in 1926. In 1933, the family moved to Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire. Hooper’s father was a civil servant with the Board of Trade, and his mother, a nurse in the First World War, was a descendant of Edmund Spenser, the author of the epic Elizabethan poem, The Fairie Queene. The young Ralph Hooper, however, was more interested in Meccano construction sets – he connected his alarm clock to the bedroom light-switch – and his Hornby trains; his grandfather was a rolling-stock draughtsman with the London and North-Eastern Railway at Stratford Works, London. Ralph made model aeroplanes and was apprenticed, in 1941, to Blackburn Aircraft based at Brough, a few miles west along the Humber from Hull. At the time, the company – later also absorbed into Hawker Siddeley – was working on the Firebrand, a powerful if problematical Fleet Air Arm fighter just too late to see service in the Second World War.

  Hooper spent two years in Blackburn’s workshops, a further two years studying aeronautics at University College, Hull and a final year in Blackburn’s offices. His apprenticeship complete, he went on to the new College of Aeronautics at Cranfield, Bedfordshire – where he learned to fly, going solo in a Tiger Moth after four hours and twenty minutes’ instruction – and from there to a job with Hawker’s experimental drawing office. He had, he says, been thinking of working for Vickers at Brooklands because the factory was close to the Surrey Gliding Club at Redhill, of which he was now an active member, but, as fate had it, Sydney Camm offered five shillings a week more than Vickers was prepared to pay, and that settled the matter.

  At Hawker, the first project Hooper worked on was the P.1052, the forerunner of the graceful, successful and long-lived Sea Hawk, the company’s first jet, which served with the Fleet Air Arm and several foreign navies in front-line service until 1983, when India finally replaced its examples with Sea Harriers. After the Sea Hawk, Hooper worked on the P.1067, the future Hawker Hunter,
one of the most graceful of all military jets. No fewer than 1,972 were made, and although English Electric Lightnings replaced the RAF’s Hunter F.6 interceptors in 1963, four Hunters were still in service with the Lebanese Air Force in 2013. The next project, the P.1121, was a supersonic fighter shot down by the Duncan Sandys White Paper. Hawker’s Ron Williams, meanwhile, was hard at work on designs for the highly ambitious P.1129, the company’s proposal for a replacement for the RAF’s English Electric Canberra long-range nuclear strike and reconnaissance bomber, and rival to the ill-fated TSR-2. In the event, a government contract for that aircraft was awarded to English Electric and Vickers. This proved to be an unexpectedly lucky break, and a turning point for the P.1127. Lucky, because the TSR-2 was, of course, to be cancelled in 1965 – and lucky, too, for the jump jet Hooper was working on, since there was nothing else on the drawing boards at Kingston after the loss of both the P.1121 and the P.1129.

  As it was, Hooper’s visit to Bristol in 1957 to discuss the B.53 engine, and Stanley Hooker and his assistant Gordon Lewis’s mutual visit to Kingston, led him to believe, in tune with Sydney Camm, that it would lack the power needed for a VTOL aircraft. He drew up outlines for the first P.1127, a small, battlefield liaison or Army-support STOL jet, which – being only a very expensive type of air taxi for generals – no one really believed in. Luckily, neither Hooper nor his colleague John Fozard gave up on the B.53 or the idea of a convincing VTOL jet. What they needed, though, was more power from the Bristol engine. The answer lay under their nose at Kingston. The exhaust of the single-engine Sea Hawk was bifurcated – divided into two branches – emitting thrust from either side of the jet fighter. This unusual arrangement reduced the loss of thrust that would have occurred if the Sea Hawk had been fitted with a long single exhaust stretching from its Rolls-Royce Nene engine to its tail. Hooper and Fozard hit on the idea of bifurcating the exhaust of the B.53, and thus allowing it to feed two pairs of exhaust nozzles rather than the single pair proposed by Bristol. Fozard added the idea of counter-rotating the two sections of the engine, the bypass fan and the high-pressure compressor; along with their associated turbine stages, these were to rotate in opposite directions to counterbalance the gyroscopic effect that could otherwise send an aircraft trying to take off vertically into an inelegant and probably dangerous tizzy. The front two nozzles were fed with air from the low-pressure compressor, and the rear two with hot jet exhaust; to move together, front and rear nozzles were connected by motorcycle chains. Now, a dream fusion of power plant and airframe was about to become a reality: the Bristol Siddeley Pegasus and the Hawker P.1127 jump jet.

  Two key problems, however, created a dark cloud through which it would take great skill in the coming months to pilot the P.1127 from drawing board to production. The first was the simple fact that there was no demand for Hooper’s aircraft; the second that there was very little money to pay for research and development. Camm and Hooper paid a visit to NATO’s Mutual Weapon Development Project (MWDP) in the course of 1958, and as the design became ever more convincing – with further improvements to the engine to increase its power, and with reaction control vents, or ‘puffer jets’, to give thrust to nose, tail and wing-tips to allow the aircraft to manoeuvre in the hover and at very low speeds – USAF Colonel Bill Chapman, the new head of MWDP, offered to stump up 75 per cent of the engine’s development costs, leaving Bristol to pay the other 25 per cent.

  The Americans were actively looking for a replacement for the Fiat G.91. This was the lightweight Italian machine that had won a competition in 1953 for a fighter that could take off from grass strips and European city streets and would go on to equip a number of NATO air forces, including the Italian and German. The Fiat G.91 would be a hard act to follow. It was a great success, stayed in production until 1977, and was finally retired, from the Portuguese Air Force, in 1993. MWDP was considering the idea of a VTOL successor to the G.91 and the Italian fighter was powered by a Bristol Siddeley Orpheus turbojet with 5,000 lbs of thrust, so it was only natural that it should keep a weather eye on what Camm and his talented young colleagues were up to at Kingston. It was, though, as John Fozard told the BBC years later, a curious and complex set-up:

  We had an aeroplane, paid for and funded on UK money, with an engine that was going to fly the aeroplane which was three-quarters owned by some Americans based in Paris, and the rest of it owned by Bristol. And the paperwork for that took some sorting out, I can tell you.

  After continuous discussions between Hawker and Bristol, the new BE.52/2 Pegasus 1 first ran, or span, at Bristol’s Patchway factory in September 1959. It produced 9,000 lbs of thrust. More would be needed, but the new engine was a success, and five months later the Pegasus 2 offered 10,000 lbs of thrust. A further six months of intensive work by programme manager John Dale and his team squeezed another 1,000 lbs from the compact engine. This was just enough, Hooper, Fozard and Camm believed, to achieve VTOL flight with the P.1127. Indeed, throughout its long life the Harrier and its predecessors were always in need of extra power.

  By now Camm, although still not entirely convinced about the project, had committed Hawker to building two prototypes. This was brave, for despite valuable help with wind-tunnel testing from NASA – its German scientists were keen to see proof of a production VTOL jet – and from the Aircraft Research Association at Bedford and discussions with the Structural Research and Transonic Wind Tunnel departments of the RAE, there was no guarantee of a production contract from either the RAF or NATO. Although there had been talks between the various interested parties throughout 1957 and 1958, if anything, the Americans seemed far more interested than the British. Ralph Hooper and Robert Marsh, Hawker’s Head of Projects, visited NASA and Bell Aircraft on a trip to the US, as did Hawker’s chief test pilot, Bill Bedford, and his number two, Hugh Merewether. Both were able to fly the Bell X-14, which was a less sophisticated VTOL machine than Hawker’s, but it had flown successfully from February 1957, and after its Armstrong Siddeley Viper turbojets were replaced by General Electric engines in 1959, it served as a test aircraft with NASA until 1981. As the upgraded X-14A, its flight-control systems were similar to those fitted to NASA’s lunar landing module. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, was another of the twenty-five test pilots who flew the open-cockpit Bell VTOL machine without serious mishap.

  Although the US was to play a very important role in the development of the Harrier – notably through the work of NASA’s John Stack, who proved with a free-flight model that transition from vertical to forward flight was perfectly feasible with the P.1127 – perhaps it was this early eagerness from across the Atlantic that prompted the new British Ministry of Aviation to offer Hawker £75,000 for work on the two experimental P.1127s in October 1959. The following June a contract was issued asking for these two aircraft and a further four prototypes.

  The first of the two experimental VTOL machines, XP831, was unveiled at Hawker’s test airfield at Dunsfold, Surrey on 31 August 1960, after arriving from Kingston the previous month. It was compact, rounded and more sparrow than bird of prey. Its small wings – a single unit, in fact, doubling up as a fuel tank – were carried high on its shoulders to protect the fuselage from the hot blast of the exhausts. This arrangement gave the aluminium-clad machine its characteristic hunched look, exaggerated by the two ‘elephant ear’ air intakes on either side of the cockpit and by the downward-inclining curves of the wings. These were designed, in part, to reduce the incidence of Dutch Roll – tail-wagging and rocking from side to side – endemic to aircraft at a high angle of attack, when there is a difference between where the wing is pointed and the direction of the air flowing over it.

  Because the wing was so high, conventional landing gear was out of the question – struts that could stretch far enough down to the ground would be far too long to fold into the wings, and they would also considerably reduce the fuel capacity of the aircraft. So the P.1127 sat on a narrow bicycle undercarriage with the high wings supported by tall
and spindly outriggers. In flight, these retracted into the wing-tips. ‘They’re going to snap off like carrots,’ a sceptical Camm told Hooper. This unusual, delicate-looking yet necessary arrangement made XP831 look as if it were just touching the surface, like a long-legged mayfly dancing upon a stream. It also looked impatient to be off.

  Its bug or garden-bird aesthetic was certainly very different from Camm’s sleek Hunter or indeed from any mainstream jet, either sub- or supersonic, flying from airbases in the United States or the Soviet Union. With a big engine squeezed into a small airframe, the P.1127 did not look like a fighter jet should – certainly not in the eyes of RAF pilots yearning for Mach 2 – nor was it armed; it was a purely experimental aircraft to prove what might be possible in the future. Weight had to be kept to an absolute minimum and, even then, there was still no guarantee that the Pegasus engine would be sufficiently powerful to allow the aircraft to perform the tricks Hawker’s sorcerers believed it should. Bristol had increased the thrust of the Pegasus to 11,300 lbs, but stressed that the engine fitted to XP831 would have a brief working life. The extra thrust was vital given that the engine had to raise the aircraft off the ground, maintain a hover, and feed high-pressure air to the reaction control vents at the nose, tail and wing-tips to ensure that the pilot was able to keep the aircraft stable while standing still on nothing more than a column of hot air above the runway. It was these jets of air, passing over ailerons, tailplane and rudder and regulated by movements of the stick (control column) and rudder pedals, that were to allow Group Captain Gary Waterfall to make a final bow with his GR.9A to the assembled crowd at RAF Cottesmore half a century later.

  The canopy of this curious-looking aircraft was set low with little in the way of all-round vision, and in this respect the P.1127 would not have made an ideal fighter. Its cockpit, however, would have been familiar to any RAF or Fleet Air Arm pilot, save for the nozzle-control lever positioned immediately alongside the throttle. Although the controls were fundamentally simple, it still took great skill and a steady nerve to fly the new VTOL jets and to get the best out of them. And the best, as we will see, was extraordinarily good by any standards, although given that this aircraft could stop in mid-air and even fly backwards, it was always going to have been an exciting challenge, even for pilots able to take it by the horns and put it through its truly unique paces.