Harrier
Page 10
Even the newly appointed poet laureate joined in, although Cecil Day-Lewis’s words were no better than those of Hatch and Trent. The Daily Mail commissioned Day-Lewis’s poem ‘Now and Then’; it appeared on the front page of the paper on 5 January 1968. Comparing Britain’s economic plight in 1968 to the Blitz, the poem concluded:
To work then, islanders, as men and women
Members one of another, looking beyond
Mean rules and rivalries towards the dream you could
Make real, of glory, common wealth, and home.
This was hardly the same Day-Lewis who had written the lyrical ‘You That Love England’ in the dire economic days of the early 1930s:
You that love England, who have an ear for her music,
The slow movement of clouds in benediction,
Clear arias of light thrilling over her uplands,
Over the chords of summer sustained peacefully;
Ceaseless the leaves’ counterpoint in a west wind lively,
Blossom and river rippling loveliest allegro,
And the storms of wood strings brass at year’s finale:
Listen. Can you not hear the entrance of a new theme?
The new theme entering my consciousness that May morning in 1969 was the sight of that terse Hawker Siddeley fighter from Kingston upon Thames springing into a cool blue morning sky, and the Jovian sound of its Pegasus jet, made in Bristol. Here, I remember thinking, was a sort of jet-age Spitfire, an aircraft that one could fall for; not as beautiful, perhaps, yet there was definitely something in the way she sounded, looked and moved. And that same morning, the Beatles were at Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes, south-west London, working on George Harrison’s sublime song Something.
The Harrier, though, was not some catwalk beauty but a dog of war, a bird of prey. Her namesakes are hunting thoroughbreds. There is the lithe, sturdy and cheerful hound bred to hunt foxes and hares and to run all day as part of a spirited pack. And there is the low-flying ground-attack hawk that sights and launches attacks on other birds, reptiles and rodents with a swiftness at once alarming, praiseworthy and admirable. The Hawker Harrier was to be their mechanical counterpart, a war-bird not just for the jet age but for the space age, too. She had been developed, after all, in part, by NASA. That same day I bunked off school to watch Squadron Leader Thompson raise the coal dust with XV741 at ‘RAF St Pancras’, the US Postal Service issued a handsome six-cent stamp I coveted, commemorating the first circumnavigation of the Moon by Apollo 8. Of the three-man crew, Frank Borman and Bill Anders had been USAF fighter pilots and Jim Lovell a US Navy test pilot. And it had been Apollo 8 that had brought back those famous – and numinous – photographs of the Earth inscrutably afloat in space: images that had shown us all just how special and beautiful our world was, and had reminded us anew that peace on Earth was truly something worth fighting for.
The contract for the first sixty production RAF Harriers had been signed in early 1967, and the first aircraft, XV738, flew on 28 December that year with Duncan Simpson in the cockpit. Simpson, on his way to becoming Hawker’s chief test pilot, had been apprenticed to de Havilland in 1945. He worked on designs of late-model Mosquitoes and on that famous aircraft’s supremely beautiful, if short-lived, piston-engined successor, the Hornet, before joining the RAF and flying Meteor jets with 222 Squadron. He was enticed to Hawker, his name becoming closely associated with the Hunter. He flew the P.1127 and trained the pilots of the international Kestrel squadron. In January 1969, Simpson was asked to work with a new Harrier Conversion Team at Dunsfold under the command of Squadron Leader Richard LeBrocq AFC. Technically, this proved to be a complex affair as the first two-seat Harriers had yet to be delivered, and so the test pilots had to guide their students through training flights on Hunters and Whirlwind helicopters. The flying circus moved on to Boscombe Down, and finally to RAF Wittering, Cambridgeshire, where the first Harrier was delivered to No. 1 Squadron (motto: In omnibus princeps, ‘In all things first’) on 18 April 1969. A fortnight later, 1 Squadron provided two of the Harriers for the Daily Mail Transatlantic Race.
The first Harrier GR.1 flown to RAF Wittering was, however, a different machine in many respects from the P.1127 and the Kestrel. Where these had been experimental and development aircraft, the GR.1 was fully combat-capable. The structure and undercarriage were stronger, the Pegasus 6 engine was more powerful and the systems incorporated into the aircraft were more sophisticated than those of the earlier types. The engine only needed an overhaul every 300 hours, a big improvement over the fifty hours of the Pegasus 5, and it could be self-started. The GR.1 had a maximum speed of 736 mph and was fitted with four underwing pylons to carry flares, up to 4,000 lbs of bombs, or unguided rocket packs, a pair of 100-gallon drop tanks or two 330-gallon long-distance ferry tanks. A central fitting under the fuselage accepted either a 1,000 lb bomb or a pair of 30 mm Mk 4 Aden cannons, each armed with 100 shells fired at a rate of 1,200 per minute. A five-camera reconnaissance pod could be fitted in place of bomb or cannons. The maximum range of a GR.1 was about 430 miles, but a probe allowed refuelling in mid-air. When fully loaded, the aircraft was unable to take off vertically, although it could still get into the air very quickly. And when lightly loaded, it could pull off stunts no other winged military aircraft could.
For pilots, the biggest difference was the cockpit. Although rather cramped, as those of most fighter aircraft tend to be – they need to be as wind-cheating as possible – this was now neatly arranged but dominated by a comprehensive head-up display, or HUD, the first fitted to a British military aircraft in service. Designed by the Spectro division of Smiths Industries, a company best known to the general public for its dials on car dashboards and the alarm clocks that woke us up for school, the HUD projected such essential readings as speed, height and altitude onto the windscreen; these could be read with the pilot looking far into the distance without the need to refocus his eyes. His eyes, of course, as there were, as yet, no women fighter pilots in the RAF. Although the GR.1 lacked radar, the aircraft was equipped with a Ferranti navigation-attack system that drove a moving map display in the cockpit covering a distance of up to 900 miles around the aircraft.
Rear vision was still limited and notably hampered by the ‘elephant ear’ air intakes. This was thought not to be a problem with what was still classed as a ground-support and reconnaissance aircraft. The low canopy helped keep air resistance to a minimum, although with that big engine directly behind them, pilots found the GR.1 a noisy aircraft; it was probably just as well that combat sorties flown on the German border were expected to last only twenty minutes. Some of these problems, or inconveniences, were to change with the arrival of the Sea Harrier (see Chapter Four) and with experience, as both the RAF and Royal Navy learned that the Harrier was a natural dogfighter and a truly multi-role warplane. As with the P.1127 and Kestrel, the Harrier’s ejection set-up was unlike other aircraft’s. When it was triggered, the canopy would be splintered into shreds by a cord wound through it before the Martin-Baker seat was sent hurtling skywards; this arrangement was essential, since if the canopy was shot away upwards in vertical flight, the pilot would smash into it when rocketed from the cockpit.
Orders for the RAF were now up to seventy-seven aircraft, including eight two-seat trainers. No. 1 Squadron received its full complement of eighteen Harriers by July 1970. A second squadron, IV (4), based at RAF Wildenrath on the German– Dutch border, followed. This was to have been it – just the two front-line Harrier squadrons – yet as the RAF took enthusiastically to this spirited and clever subsonic fighter, two more squadrons, 3 and 20, both based at Wildenrath, were equipped with the Harrier GR.1 and GR.1A – this with the uprated Pegasus 10 providing 20,500 lbs of thrust – during 1970. By 1973, all Harriers had been upgraded to GR.1A spec. The German squadrons were moved to RAF Gütersloh, seventy-five miles from the East German border, in 1977, although they were often dispersed into the surrounding countryside, hidden under trees and camouflage
netting, and taking off and landing in all weathers from and onto aluminium planking. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, 3 and IV Squadrons moved to RAF Laarbruch back on the Dutch border in 1992, while 20 Squadron was temporarily disbanded; it re-emerged the same year as 20 (R) Squadron, the renumbered Harrier training unit at RAF Wittering.
Built originally for RAF Typhoons and Spitfires soon after D-Day in 1944, Laarbruch has since become Weeze Airport, a haven for the low-budget airlines that have done a great deal, and not necessarily to anyone’s advantage, to change the face of European towns and cities over the past quarter of a century. ‘The problem with aviation,’ said Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, in 2012 while seeking to get permission from the aviation authorities for super-cheap standing-only flights, ‘is that for fifty years it’s been populated by people who think it’s this wondrous sexual experience; that it’s like James Bond and wonderful… when really it’s just a bloody bus with wings.’ So much for the sorcery of flight and all the designers, engineers, test pilots and service men and women who have helped make commercial flight a safe form of transport; so much, too, for Concorde and the Harrier and the history of an airbase from where, had war ever come, brave young pilots would have flown on terrifying ground-attack missions to keep Europe a safe and free haven for you, me and low-budget Irish businessmen.
The role of the German Harrier squadrons was to liaise and work closely with British and NATO forces on the ground. The fear of a Warsaw Pact invasion loomed in most West European minds until the glorious sight of the breaching, and then breaking, of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Very few people had predicted the sudden collapse of Stalin’s totalitarian empire so soon. In fact, most, if pressed on the subject, had imagined that the communist hegemony, so longed for by C. Day-Lewis and other fellow travellers in the 1930s, would endure for grim decades. Germany would remain the front line, as it had since 1945, and RAF fighters, whether the Harriers or their successors, would be ready to scramble at a moment’s notice well into the twenty-first century.
If the Warsaw Pact had launched an attack, the RAF’s Harrier fleet – normally thirty-six strong – would have been dispersed to those hidden sites. They would have operated from secondary roads, leaving the autobahnen free for conventional NATO jets. Equipped with chaff – strips of metal strewn from the aircraft to confuse enemy radar – and flares to fox heat-seeking enemy missiles, they would have supported troops on the ground while remaining ready to intercept supersonic Soviet fighters. Even such nimble machines as the MiG-21 ‘Fishbed’, which WarPac air forces deployed in large numbers, would have been unable to outperform, or outwit, the Harrier at close quarters.
One of the Harriers’ roles, carried out principally by 1 Squadron, based at Wittering, but joined on occasion by IV Squadron, was to conduct cold-weather operations within the Arctic Circle. The aircraft operated from the Royal Norwegian Air Force base at Bardufloss in northern Norway and continued to do so for many years. In the spring of 1940, before the Allies withdrew from Norway and the Germans marched in, Hawker Hurricanes had flown from Bardufloss alongside Gloster Gladiators in defence of the Narvik Front. In 1982, Harriers from 1 Squadron appear to have been caught up in a disturbing story that has refused to go away. On 11 March that year, a de Havilland Twin-Otter making a routine Wideroe Airline flight from Berlevag to Mehamn on the coast of Finnmark in northern Norway crashed on approach, killing all fifteen people on board. Although the official cause of the accident was air turbulence, witnesses believe the aircraft was in collision with a Harrier, and that the offending aircraft was hidden away very quickly as, despite being a member of NATO, Norway had forbidden military flights over Finnmark for fear of provoking the Russian bear. If nothing else, the story is a reminder of the dangers and costs involved in practising to defend Western Europe against a war that for many years had seemed inevitable.
The new Harrier force, meanwhile, carried out exercises in Cyprus and Sardinia, and demonstrated the RAF’s new-found potential to support Royal Navy operations at sea. Significantly, Harriers paid a call on HMS Hermes in 1971. This 23,000-ton aircraft carrier had been laid down in 1944 and was to have been launched as HMS Elephant. She was finally commissioned in 1959 and, twenty-three years later with ten RAF GR.3 Harriers and sixteen Royal Navy FRS.1 Sea Harriers, she sailed to the Falkland Islands as flagship of the British Task Force. (Today, in the guise of INS Viraat, the carrier sails on with the Indian Navy.) Then, in the summer of 1972, a new and specially equipped two-seat T.2 Harrier demonstrator flew twenty-one sorties from the deck of INS Vikrant, the 15,700-ton carrier launched as HMS Hercules in 1945. Never commissioned into the Royal Navy, the ship was sold to India in 1957 and sailed for many years with a squadron of Hawker Sea Hawks on board until these were replaced by Sea Harriers in 1983. The aircraft carrier is now a floating museum moored at Mumbai (formerly Bombay).
The pilot of the two-seat Harrier was John Farley, Hawker’s deputy chief test pilot at the time. Farley flew from Dunsfold, stopping off on his way to Bombay at Naples, Akrotiri (Cyprus), Teheran, Kuwait and Masirah (Oman). This was seven years before the Iranian Revolution that led to the overthrow of the secular Muslim rule of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in favour of a fundamentalist Islamic regime led by the fiery cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Farley would have had to fly a different route to India today.
Potential overseas sales, however, could be threatened by politics rooted in old grudges. Clearly impressed by the British aircraft, the Spanish Naval Air Arm was keen to buy Harriers. However, a venerable dispute over ownership of the Rock of Gibraltar meant that the Spanish government refused to buy military aircraft from the British government. Luckily, for both Hawker and the Spanish Naval Air Arm, there was a solution to hand: Spain could buy Harriers, built in Kingston, from the United States. The US Department of Defense added an extra number to the final batch of US Marine Corps Harriers it had ordered from Britain. Designated AV-8A, these were shipped in 1976 to the USA, where Spanish Navy pilots joined their American counterparts for training. Named Matadors by the Spanish, the British-American-Iberian Harriers were finally flown back to Spain where, based at Rota near Cadiz, they flew with Escuadrilla 008 and, at sea, from the timber deck of the carrier SNS Dedalo, the former 11,000-ton USS Cabot, launched in 1943 and sold to the Armada Espanola in 1972. Such was the antagonism Spain felt towards Britain at the time that John Farley was unable to fly over Spain to meet SNS Dedalo soon after the Spanish Navy first expressed interest in the Harrier; the carrier instead sailed to a point off the Portuguese coast, and Farley’s GR.3 was obliged to skirt the Iberian peninsula on its non-stop flight from Dunsfold. Relations between Spain and Britain improved after the death, in 1975, of the country’s fascist leader, Generalissimo Francisco Franco; British money, settlers and tourists invaded, and did their best to destroy the once beautiful Costa del Sol. In 1977, Spain bought four new VA-1 Matadors direct from Hawker, and, after re-equipping its navy with Mk 2 Harriers, sold its original jump jets to the small but ambitious Thai Navy in 1997.
By this time, the GR.3 Harrier had joined the RAF team, with most of the earlier production Harriers being updated to the latest specification. The GR.3, powered by the Pegasus 11 providing 21,500 lbs of thrust, certainly looked different with its dolphin-like nose. The ‘Snoopy Nose’, as the RAF knew it, housed Ferranti’s new laser rangefinder that allowed pilots, working with forward air controllers on the ground, to seek out and destroy targets with impressive accuracy. A Marconi radar-warning receiver mounted in the tail of the GR.3 meant that pilots could now tell if they were being tracked by enemy radar. These key changes, together with an auto-stabilizer to assist with VTOL manoeuvring and pedals that shook to indicate which one to press as side-force limits were reached when the aircraft took off and landed, made the Harrier a competent and formidable ground-support fighter-bomber.
The number of accidents involving loss of aircraft and pilots’ lives, however, was high. Flame-ou
ts, engine fires, loss of control when hovering, sticking nozzles, failure to make the transition from vertical to forward flight and bird strikes all contrived to cause the loss of thirty-two Harriers in British service in the 1960s and 1970s. This led, as we will see, to American commentators damning the Harrier as dangerous. This is not true, although the aircraft has always demanded careful and precise handling, especially at low speed and around airfields.
It was, in fact, a bird strike that took out a GR.3 on 1 December 1975, not in Britain, Germany or the United States, but in Belize, a small, self-governing British colony on the northeastern littoral of Central America and bordered by Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean Sea. Known as British Honduras until 1973, this was Britain’s one and only mainland colony in the Americas. Long ago, it had been home to the Mayans. Centuries later, conquistadors declared the area a Spanish colony, although as they could find no gold, they left it to others – English and Scots, and Caribbean pirates – to settle and trade there. The land was rich in mahogany; its motto even today is Sub umbra floreo (‘I flourish in the shade’ – by implication, that of the mahogany tree). The Spanish tried to reclaim this fertile land, with its exquisite stretches of coral reef, at various times but were finally repelled when an armada was taken to task in a brief engagement with the Royal Navy in September 1798. Central America as a whole was emancipated from Spanish rule in the 1830s and what was then named British Honduras became a Crown colony in 1862.
When, though, in the 1950s Honduras began to move towards independence, finally winning it in 1981, neighbouring Guatemala began invoking antique Spanish treaties to prove that it belonged lock, stock and mahogany tree to… Guatemala. This led to increasing fears of an invasion and to British troops remaining in Belize until 1994, two years after Guatemala finally backed down and gave up its claim. The fears were real enough. Since Washington and the CIA had engineered the overthrow of the populist left-wing government of Jacopo Arbenz, a former Army officer, in 1954, Guatemala had been thrown into turmoil. Military regimes, subservient to Washington, ran the country like some subtropical prison camp. Unrest and civil war became all but synonymous with what, by any standards, was by the mid-1960s one of the most brutal and brutalized countries in the world. Little was to change over the following three decades, during which tens of thousands of civilians were ‘disappeared’ by government and military, just as they were, of course, in Argentina under the rule of the military junta finally ousted in the aftermath of the Falklands War.