Harrier
Page 12
Towards dusk on 1 May, 801 Squadron’s Lieutenant Steve Thomas and Flight Lieutenant Paul Barton shot off on combat patrol from the deck of Invincible. Shortly into their flight, they were called from HMS Glamorgan, a 6,200-ton County-class destroyer bombarding Argentine positions at Port Stanley: a pair of Mirage III fighters from Río Gallegos, Patagonia, had been detected, heading on course for the patrolling Sea Harriers. Blue Fox radar enabled the British aircraft to sight the enemy, closing at more than three miles a second in a dive from 40,000 feet and a distance of seventeen miles. As the Mirages neared, Barton pulled to the left, under and behind the delta-wing Argentine jets flown by Captain ‘Paco’ Cuerva and Lieutenant Carlos Perona. A mile behind Perona’s Mirage, Barton unleashed one of his two heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles.
‘The missile thundered off the rails like an express train,’ wrote Commander ‘Sharkey’ Ward DFC, AFC a decade later in his book Sea Harrier over the Falklands, ‘and left a brilliant white smoke trail as it curved up towards the heavens, chasing after the Mirage which was now making for the stars, very nose-high.’ Ward was 801 Squadron’s commander.
Paul was mesmerised as the angry missile closed with its target. As the Sidewinder made intercept, the Argentine jet exploded in a vivid ball of yellow flame. It broke its back as the missile exploded and then disintegrated, before its remains twisted their way down to the cloud and sea below.
Barton, however, had been uncertain of victory as he released the missile. He later recalled:
At first I thought it had failed. It came off the rail and ducked down. I had not fired a ‘winder’ before so its behaviour at launch was new to me. I was surprised not to see it home straight in. To see it duck down was disconcerting. I’d begun to wonder if it was a dud. It took about half a mile to get its trajectory sorted out, then it picked itself up and for the last half mile it just homed straight in. The missile flight time was about four seconds, then the Mirage exploded in a brilliant blue, orange and red fireball.
Perona had no idea the Harrier had been on his tail. Cuerva had caught sight of the Sidewinder and alerted his wingman, but he had been too late. Meanwhile, Thomas was in hot pursuit of Cuerva, who was now spiralling down towards the clouds in a tight escape manoeuvre. Thomas launched a Sidewinder as the Mirage vanished from sight. He missed – just – but this was not the end of the story.
Remarkably, Perona was still very much alive, his aircraft on fire, alarms ringing in the cockpit. The Argentine pilot shut down the damaged engine and ejected low over the shoreline of Pebble Island, a sheep farm established in 1846 and, in 1982, an Argentine naval air station as well as home to thousands of Rockhopper penguins. Wearing a light flying suit, Perona was determined not to ditch in the freezing-cold sea. He broke a foot on landing, touching down on terra firma with just fifty feet to spare.
Cuerva was less fortunate. With insufficient fuel to fly back to the mainland, he asked permission to land at Port Stanley, or ‘Puerto Argentino’. Under attack from HMS Glamorgan, Arrow and Alacrity, the airbase was on red alert. Three Argentine IAI Daggers, Israeli versions of the Mirage V, were flying low towards the British ships, with two more circling above; Cuerva could only be a danger to them; critical moments were lost as air controllers finally gave in to his urgent request. By now desperate to lose weight, and forward momentum, Cuerva dropped his radar-guided missiles, harmlessly. Inexperienced, or nervous, anti-aircraft gunners opened fire. ‘Me están tirando a mi… carajo!’ [‘They are shooting at me… fuck!’] were the pilot’s last words as, presumably injured and unable to eject, he crashed into the sea south of Port Stanley and his aircraft broke in two.
Soon afterwards, the Daggers attacked the British ships. One was downed with a Sidewinder fired from a Sea Harrier of 800 Squadron, flown from Invincible, by Flight Lieutenant ‘Bertie’ Penfold, one of a number of RAF pilots attached to the Royal Navy during the Falklands War, on his way back from a raid over Goose Green. The pilot, Lieutenant José Ardiles, was killed. At the time, his cousin, Ossie Ardiles, a much-feted footballer, was playing for Tottenham Hotspur. He was booed off the pitch by British supporters and loaned to Paris Saint-Germain for a year to keep him out of their way. Later, in the 1990s, Ardiles was to become Tottenham’s manager, both the Falklands War and the provocative headlines of the tabloid newspapers designed to fuel anti-Argentine fervour on the terraces long forgotten. The red tops had certainly had a field day. ‘Gotcha!’ The Sun had yelled when the Conqueror sank the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano on 2 May with the loss of three hundred and twenty three lives. And shortly before the war, a proposed peace settlement brokered by Peru had been met by The Sun’s ‘Stick it up your Junta!’ According to Roy Greenslade, The Sun’s deputy editor at the time, his boss, Kelvin MacKenzie, was delighted with Private Eye’s spoof Sun headline: ‘Kill an Argie and win a Metro’ (a small and then popular British Leyland car). ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’ joked the editor of the ‘Currant Bun’.
Killing was certainly no joke for the pilots involved in air-toair combat. Disturbed by what he had done, Flight Lieutenant Penfold did not fly again, and was sent back to the UK. Speaking about the attack to Peter Archer, a Press Association reporter on board Hermes, Penfold said, ‘I felt quite sick.’ His wife, Susan, was contacted at home in Somerton, Wiltshire. ‘I am proud of my husband,’ she said, ‘but I feel desperately sorry for the family of the other pilot.’ Mrs Penfold went on to say that her husband ‘had an attack of nerves before he set out with the Task Force, the fear of what you are going to do to other people when you get there’. He had also been apprehensive about the sea passage to the South Atlantic. ‘Being in the air force, he is not used to being on board a ship. He has only spent three days at sea, ever.’
A compassionate man, and a fine Harrier pilot, Penfold was not alone in finding the voyage trying. As Sharkey Ward recalled:
Invincible had been built by Vickers, and when they were given the plans for the ship by the naval architects at Bath, they insisted that with the proposed design there would be very high vibration levels in the ship at particular speeds, especially in the aft section where all the officers slept. The naval architects apparently told Vickers to mind their own business and build the ship. After the Invincible had been launched on her first high-speed trials, the heavy vibration set in just as the builders had predicted. And, now in a war situation, with the ship regularly having to manoeuvre at high speed, the problem had come home to roost. My cabin was no better than anyone else’s. Anything at all left on the desk would be removed by the vibration in less than thirty seconds – it was that bad.
Still, this sounded like luxury compared with conditions on board Hermes. As Wing Commander Squire noted in his diary for Tuesday 18 May, ‘I have been allocated a small cabin well aft, but my pilots are sharing cabins (i.e. using the floor) or pitching camp on the wardroom floor. The troops are in the passageways.’ Even more challenging than the accommodation on board was the attitude of the carrier’s captain. That same evening, Squire noted, ‘The ship’s commander (John Locke) invites me to his cabin for a drink. There, he tells me in confidence of the captain’s aversion to the RAF. He warns me of the difficulties that may lie ahead.’ When Squire spotted an opportunity, he commandeered a Sea King helicopter and flew through sea fog to visit Sharkey Ward on Invincible: ‘What an enormous difference,’ he noted, ‘in both atmosphere and environment.’
But whatever the inter-service tensions that arose, and whatever their complaints about who was getting the easier missions or better treatment on board their respective ships, the RAF and Royal Navy Harrier pilots held each other in great respect and during the exhausting days that followed, a strong camaraderie grew between them. After an inaccurate ‘visual sighting’ by pilots of 801 Squadron of what they took to be Super Étendards, prompting a wild goose chase by 1 Squadron Harriers, Squire recorded: ‘801 Squadron sends across a bottle of malt by way of apology.’
Only after the seventy-four-day wa
r had ended did hard-pressed RN and RAF pilots learn that Margaret Thatcher’s government had been prepared, or so it was rumoured, for the deaths of up to ten thousand servicemen and women: this was the estimated value of the Falklands in human life and the maximum number of casualties it was thought the British public would tolerate. Many commentators in the United States and senior members of the US military thought this was a war Britain could not possibly win on its own. In fact, it was the last war Britain fought on its own – albeit with background assistance from the US and Chile – and using largely all-British equipment and weaponry. And as for the Harrier, at the start of the war it was still an unknown quantity in terms of combat, as for that matter were Harrier pilots.
The first of May began with a dramatic attack, at 04.38 hours, on the runway at Port Stanley by a solitary RAF Vulcan bomber, XM607, captained by Flight Lieutenant Martin Withers. The Vulcan had flown 4,000 miles from the Ascension Islands, refuelled by an aerial armada of Victor tankers, to deliver its payload of twenty-one 1,000 lb bombs. At fifteen and three-quarter hours, it had been the longest bomber mission ever flown, and was surpassed only by those of USAF B-52 Stratofortresses flying from the United States to Iraq in 1991. This and six subsequent raids were also the first and last time the RAF’s awe-inspiring Avro Vulcan V-bombers, placed in service from 1956 and designed to carry H-bombs at the height of the Cold War, would see combat.
The day ended with Sea Harriers flown by Lieutenant Alan Curtis and Lieutenant Commander Mike Broadwater intercepting three low-flying Argentine bombers heading towards the British ships. ‘Tally Ho!’ called Curtis as he dived and, turning behind the lead aircraft, let loose a Sidewinder missile. The bomber burst into fragments that rained into a dark sea. Broadwater fired a Sidewinder at a second aircraft, but missed. The two surviving bombers vanished into the cloud and made for home. The odd thing for the British pilots was that the ill-fated bomber had been one of the twelve English Electric Canberras acquired by the Fuerza Aérea Argentina in the early 1970s. A stalwart of the RAF, this first-generation jet bomber made its maiden flight in 1950 and its photo-reconnaissance variant was still in action over Afghanistan as late as 2006. Curtis’s kill was akin to a Spitfire taking out a de Havilland Mosquito – the inspiration for the Canberra – during the Second World War. As it was, and by chance, another Canberra became the last Argentine aircraft to be shot down in the conflict, hit not by a Sea Harrier, but by a Sea Dart missile fired from the destroyer HMS Cardiff.
In their first day in action, Sea Harriers, or ‘Shars’, had proved their worth, and to Argentinian pilots these nimble, fierce and inescapable aircraft were soon to be known as La Muerta Negra, or ‘Black Death’. And the appearance of the Sea Harrier matched its performance: just like the Spitfire, it both looked right and was right. Indeed, I remember the first time I saw Sea Harriers at RNAS Yeovilton in early 1982 on a trip to visit Castle Drogo, the grandiose country house overlooking Dartmoor designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens for Julius Drewe, founder of Home and Colonial stores, at a time when Britain was just entering the age of aerial warfare and the Royal Navy was still in all its imperial pomp. Those FRS.1 Sea Harriers were swans compared to the GR.3, which seemed by comparison an awkward, if not exactly ugly, duckling. Their resplendent pre-Falklands uniform of dark grey, easily mistaken for dark blue, over white, and bold insignia, was very smart indeed. A raised canopy and a finely resolved nose imbued the Sea Harrier with poise, balance and, at last, an elegance lacking in the characteristically hunched-up RAF aircraft.
The Sea Harrier had emerged slowly in the early 1960s from a Royal Navy requirement to replace the de Havilland Sea Vixen and, from the end of the decade, a need to face up to the fact that the Fleet Air Arm’s fixed-wing combat aircraft would soon be facing the axe. Harold Wilson’s Labour government wanted to rid the Navy of large aircraft carriers like the Ark Royal and to replace them with a new type of small carrier – the command cruiser – suitable for helicopters but not for conventional fixed-wing aircraft. This prompted discussions between Hawker and the navy, and between 1972 and 1974 detailed design work on a Royal Navy ‘Maritime Support Harrier’ was largely completed. Only small numbers would be ordered as it was assumed that each of the three new light carriers would be equipped with just six V/STOL jets apiece. By this time, of course, Britain’s sway over the waves had been considerably diminished. The Navy’s last battleship, the fast 44,500-ton steam-turbine Vanguard, had been decommissioned and scrapped in 1960.
Hawker, meanwhile, had even been working on a proposal for an altogether smaller class of ship than the new small Navy carriers. In discussion with the boat-builders Vosper Thornycroft, the design team at Kingston worked up plans for deckless Harrier carriers. Attached to cranes, the jets were to have been swung out from the sides of the ships. The pilot would start up, hover and then make the transition to forward flight. On return, the aircraft would be picked up from the hover alongside the ship and swung aboard by crane. Demonstrated, without mishap, over land, the experiment was not carried out at sea. It would have been a lot to ask of a pilot returning from combat in challenging weather to perform such a finely calibrated manoeuvre.
The cockpit of this all-purpose interceptor, reconnaissance and strike version of the Harrier was raised by eleven inches to give the pilot a much better all-round view both on the deck and in the air. The extra space beneath the pilot’s feet contained new avionics and electronic equipment. The instrument panel included a larger Smith’s head-up display, driven by a digital computer. The nose contained the Ferranti Blue Fox radar that was to prove so very valuable in 1982. Revised weapon pylons were designed to carry RAF and US Marine Corps weaponry, including the American AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air and Martel and Harpoon air-to-surface missiles, the latter type intended primarily for strikes against ships. As a reminder that the Cold War had yet to go away, the Sea Harrier was also designed to carry a 600 lb WE.177A nuclear bomb; aircraft of this type were withdrawn from service in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. As a further reminder of that undeclared state of conflict, one of the primary tasks envisaged for the Sea Harrier when it was still on the drawing board was to intercept snooping Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 Bears over the North Atlantic and North Sea. Originally designed as a long-range bomber, the swept-wing Tu-95 would later be developed into a very effective missile platform and reconnaissance aircraft. Powered by four mighty Kuznetsov NK-12 turboprop engines designed by a team of Junkers and BMW technicians led by the Austrian SS Standartenführer Ferdinand Brandhorn and deported from Germany along with their factories, this remarkable machine first flew in 1952, long before the Harrier. It is not due for retirement until around 2040, long after the last US Harrier will have been replaced.
The tail fin of the Sea Harrier was larger than that of the GR.3 and, to deter corrosion by sea winds and salt water, the magnesium-zirconium casings of the Pegasus engine were replaced by aluminium. Larger wing-tip reaction control vents were fitted to assist pilots as they manoeuvred within the tight confines imposed by the superstructure and decks of carriers as they sometimes operated in harsh weather and rough seas. There was an improved autopilot and a faster Martin-Baker ejector seat: the Type 10 ‘zero-zero’ seat fitted to the ‘Shar’ – it could be launched at zero feet and at zero knots, i.e. with the aircraft stationary on the ground – would see the parachute open within 1.5 seconds of the pilot releasing the seat, compared with the 2.25 seconds of the Type 9 fitted to the GR.3. Three-quarters of a second might not seem a long time if you are sitting at a desk, but it is long enough if you happen to be the pilot of a combat jet that is about to explode or otherwise out of control: the minutest fraction of a second counts.
Since first tested successfully in 1949, Martin-Baker ejector seats have saved the lives of nearly 7,500 pilots. Today, the Middlesex-based company is still family-owned, supplying ejector seats to ninety-three air forces worldwide. Founded by the Irish-born engineer James Mar
tin and the Welsh-born former RFC and RAF pilot Valentine Baker in 1934 to build aircraft, this enduring company changed course in 1942 after a test flight of the prototype MB3 fighter on 12 September 1942 proved fatal for Baker. Deeply affected by his partner’s death, Martin switched from aircraft design to ejector seats, although not before his company had created the magnificent MB5, a machine that might well have given the P-51D Mustang more than a run for its money. Since Bill Bedford ejected from XP836, one of the prototype P.1127s, on 14 December 1961 on the approach to RNAS Yeovilton, at least a hundred RAF Harrier pilots alone have rocketed out of their aircraft strapped to Martin-Baker ejector seats; nearly all of them have survived and most have flown again soon afterwards.
All up, the FRS.1 was slightly heavier than the GR.3 – by just 100 lbs – and more expensive, with a unit price of £6.8 million compared to £5.5 million. This was a remarkable achievement by any standards; there was no delay in the project, and perhaps – as events turned out – this was just as well. Roy Mason, a former coal-miner and Secretary of State for Defence in Harold Wilson’s Labour administration of 1974–6, announced orders for twenty-four production Sea Harriers in May 1975. Even this small order had been a case of touch and go, as for much of the 1970s Britain was in the throes of a dismal economic recession, peaking, at first, with the infamous Three Day Week of January to March 1974 when electricity was rationed and factories ground along as best they could, and, later on, with the grim Winter of Discontent of 1978–9, when industrial unrest led to serious strikes at a time when Britain was hit by the fiercest blizzards since the Big Freeze of 1962–3. The future of companies like Hawker itself was unsure as both Tory and Labour governments set about merging and even nationalizing key sectors of British industry.