Harrier
Page 15
At it was, the Argentinians had surrendered unconditionally on 15 June 1982, the day before Peter Squire’s diary records, ‘I have managed to complete a Rubik’s Cube’, and the Battle of Britain Association sent a message to 810 Squadron, ‘From the Few to the Very Few! Congratulations on a job well done.’ The end of the conflict did wonders for Margaret Thatcher at the polls, ousted the military regime, and prompted the return of parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law in Argentina. It also landed the British with a £2 billion bill as a strong military garrison was established on West Falkland to protect the islanders from future attack. Post-war euphoria saw the money voted through Parliament. Intriguingly, this was just the kind of expenditure that Lord North, the eighteenth-century Tory prime minister, had been concerned to avoid after the Falklands Crisis of 1770.
In June 1770, the Spanish governor of Buenos Aires, Francisco de Paula Bucareli y Ursua, dispatched five frigates under General Juan Ignacio de Madariaga with a complement of 1,400 marines to seize the Malvinas. The small British force there under the command of Captain George Farmer RN was forced to capitulate. Westminster reacted angrily, demanding that North act. But, although preparations were made for war with Spain, which by now had allied itself with French ministers spoiling for a fight with the perfidious English, the king of France, Louis XVI, backed off and the Spanish, fearful of fighting the British alone, opened negotiations with North’s government. In the event, Spain withdrew and Britain regained its South Atlantic settlement, although the rather vague treaty signed between the two parties acknowledged that the return of the British did not ‘affect the question of prior right of sovereignty of the Malouine, otherwise called Falkland’s Islands’.
Although the North administration won plaudits for seeing off the French and Spanish, it was concerned not to spend ambitiously on this faraway corner of the world. It commissioned Dr Samuel Johnson, the eminent man of letters, to write a pamphlet – ‘Thoughts on the late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Island’ – to dissuade too enthusiastic a support for this distant and still tentative British sphere of interest. ‘Thrown aside from human use,’ wrote Dr Johnson, ‘stormy in winter, barren in summer, [this is] an island not even the southern savages have dignified into habitation, where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia, of which the expense would be perpetual.’
Britain had other, more important matters at hand and in mind in 1770. In January, British troops clashed with American colonists; in March, they shot dead five Americans in Boston: the US War of Independence was brewing. Elsewhere, British trade and empire stretched to new limits with Captain Cook’s discovery of the east coast of Australia. Meanwhile, at home the Industrial Revolution had truly begun: James Hargreaves had that same year taken out a patent for the Spinning Jenny and James Watt was beginning work on his improved steam engine. The modern world was well on its way.
Despite their defeat in 1982, for Argentinians the Falklands were to remain a matter of fervent and even quasi-religious national pride. The unshakeable belief that ‘Las Malvinas son argentines’ was written into the new constitution of 1994. And, when in 2012 the economy was dipping badly, the Argentine president, Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, began a new bout of sabre-rattling over the sovereignty of the Falklands at the same time as introducing new anti-terrorism laws that many Argentine intellectuals believe may be used against those who disagree with the government. A discussion paper – ‘Malvinas: an alternative view’ – written by a group of leading intellectuals, academics and ‘free thinkers’ (doubtless the government knows where they all live) and published on the internet on 2 April 2012, ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of the invasion of the Falklands, stressed that:
Our worst tragedies have not been caused by the loss of territories or the lack of natural resources, but rather the absence of respect for life, for human rights, for institutions and essential values of the Republic such as freedom, equality and self-determination… the [Argentine] soldiers fallen in Malvinas demand above all that we do not again fall to the temptation of ‘cheap patriotism’ which took away their lives, nor use them as an element to sacralise positions that in any democratic system are debatable.
The Argentine government, however, refused to listen. In February 2013, Hector Marcos Timerman, the country’s minister of foreign relations, came to London to tell Westminster how the Falklands would be taken over by his country within twenty years, whatever the people of the islands wanted. As the then twenty-two-year-old managing editor of the short-lived afternoon newspaper La Tarde in 1976, Timerman had initially supported the newly installed dictatorship but then changed tack the following year when the regime kidnapped and tortured his father, Jacobo Timerman, the influential editor and publisher of the centrist daily La Opinión, which had become increasingly critical of the regime. Jacobo Timerman was released in 1979 and sought exile in Israel. He had believed that he could play ball with ‘soft liners’ in the junta, yet, as his biographer Graciela Mochkofsky says, ‘There were power struggles inside the armed forces, but there were no “soft-liners” when it came to disappearances and torture camps.’
Despite these sorry events, Hector Timerman still evidently believes that the Falkland Islanders have no right to self-determination; they are underdogs and must ultimately pay the price for daring to live in what is apparently Argentine living space, even though it is hundreds of miles across the sea from Buenos Aires. How the Germans who settled in Argentina from 1945 would cheer him on. Even now, at 6 p.m. every day, grenadiers march out of the Casa Rosada, the presidential mansion in Buenos Aires, and goose-step across the road into Plaza de Mayo, where they lower the Argentine flag for the night.
Perhaps some accommodation between Britain and Argentina can be reached in the future, and a way found to share the islands’ bountiful fishing rights and, if they prove commercially exploitable, their untapped oil and gas reserves. But it seems unlikely. Some things and some countries never really change, just as some politicians will always appeal to the flag rather than to common sense. That said, the Falklands conflict certainly changed both British fortunes of war and the Sea Harrier. The lessons learned in aerial combat were put to good use in a number of modifications made to the FRS.1 that had been developed rapidly but not in time for deployment in the South Atlantic. In 1985, a contract was issued to British Aerospace – Hawker Siddeley Aviation had been merged into this corporate giant in 1977 – for two updated FRS.1s, the first, ZA195, being flown in September 1988 by Heinz Frick, a Swiss-born former RAF fighter pilot with extensive experience of Hunters, Lightnings, Phantoms, Jaguars and Harriers who had left the service in 1978 and become British Aerospace’s chief Harrier test pilot in 1988. A total of forty-seven FRS.2 Sea Harriers were produced between 1993 and 1998, of which twenty-nine were rebuilds of FRS.1s. The aircraft were redesignated FA.2 in 1994; this was because, since the Falklands, the Sea Harrier was seen as first and foremost a fighter attack aircraft rather a than a fighter with reconnaissance and nuclear strike capability.
With a fuselage lengthened by very nearly three feet, a new wing, and greater firepower and load-carrying capability, the FRS.2 was a bigger aircraft than the original Harriers. A new and slightly bulbous nose housed the Blue Vixen all-weather radar system Falklands pilots had longed for; a ‘multimode’ system, it mapped the ground, detecting and tracking targets. A new surveillance camera was also installed in the nose. A greatly improved GPS air-navigation system, an updated radar-warning receiver and countermeasures were welcome improvements, as was an improved cockpit and head-up display. In terms of weaponry, the FRS.2 was armed with a pair of AIM-9/L Sidewinders for Falklands-style dogfights and another of Raytheon AIM-120A air-to-air missiles, which now allowed pilots to take out targets fifty miles away, over the horizon and out of sight. The fifth weapon carried was an MBDA Sea Eagle, a radar-homing and sea-skimming missile with a range of over fifty miles. This was a formidable machine th
at was to see action in both the Balkans and Sierra Leone (see Chapter Six). In 2002, however, the Ministry of Defence announced the withdrawal of the Sea Harrier at the behest of Tony Blair’s right-wing New Labour government.
The reasons given for the decision were twofold. The Pegasus engine fitted to the FRS.2 was insufficiently powerful when working in hot climates like the Persian Gulf, and a replacement would be too expensive, not least because the future role of the Harrier, whether flown by the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force, was to be in ground attack. The Sea Harrier was, as we have seen, essentially an interceptor, and this role was presumably considered redundant by the MoD because Britain’s future wars would be against countries, or factions within those countries, lacking combat aircraft. This was a point of view, but a typically short-sighted one. As Group Captain Harv Smyth DFC, who flew the GR.9A in action in Afghanistan until the last Harriers were taken out of service in 2010, put it: ‘Because we [Joint Fighter Command] are asked to do a lot around the world, and because over the past twenty years every major mission we’ve undertaken has been a surprise, we really do need to be prepared.’
The last FA.2s, despite having many years of life in them, were retired from Sharkey Ward’s old 801 RNAS in March 2006. This, though, was not quite the end of the story. At least one other navy saw the attraction of the Sea Harrier. In 1979, having considered the Soviet V/STOL Yak-36M and Y-38, the Indian Navy ordered six Sea Harrier FRS.1s, which were delivered in December 1983. These were followed by a further seventeen FRS.1s and six two-seat trainers, although Indian pilots were also trained in Britain. As we have seen, the Indian Sea Harriers replaced veteran Hawker Sea Hawks and, equipped with Sea Eagles for anti-ship missions and French Matra Magic missiles for air-to-air combat, they flew from the decks of the newly modified 15,700-ton light carrier INS Vikrant, the former HMS Hercules, launched in September 1945 but never commissioned, then laid up and supplied to the Indian Navy in 1957 as part of Britain’s war debt to India. Placed in service in 1961, this was India’s first aircraft carrier; her Sea Hawks saw action in the war against Pakistan in 1971 and Vikrant was only retired in 1997.
Indian Harriers of 300 INAS (Indian Navy Air Squadron) fly today with INS Viraat, which is none other than the former HMS Hermes, flagship of the Falklands campaign. Launched in 1953, Viraat was due to retire in 2012–13, but delays in procuring two large carriers, a new 40,000-ton Vikrant, due in 2017, and the 65,000-ton Vishal, scheduled for 2023, may yet see Viraat celebrate its seventieth year in service. The question of exactly how long the Sea Harriers, which have never been in combat, will remain in Indian service appears moot: by early 2013, just twelve aircraft survived out of the original twenty-nine; the others had all crashed, although the surviving FRS.1s have been upgraded, from 2005 onwards, with new Israeli avionics and Rafael Derby air-to-air missiles made by Hindustan Aeronautics of Bangalore.
To bridge the gap between old and new carriers, the Indian Navy bought the 45,400-ton former Soviet Russian carrier Admiral Gorshkov, launched in 1982. Suitably modified, the INS Vikramaditya was due to enter service in November 2013. Significantly, this and the new Vikrant-class carriers will be seaborne platforms for Russian MiG 29-K and, possibly, French Dassault Rafale supersonic interceptors. They will mark the Indian Navy’s move away from small carriers, V/STOL, the Sea Harrier and British aircraft. The Indian Navy had, in fact, been considering Russian aircraft for its carriers in the 1980s, but the Sea Harrier had won the day. The British aircraft’s rival was the Yakovlev Yak-38. For a moment it had looked as if this multi-role Soviet V/STOL aircraft might have been not just a challenge to the Harrier, but a technological leap ahead of it. In some ways it was. The Yak-38 offered pilots an automatic, hands-free landing system, a godsend in bad weather at sea. All the pilot had to do was to fly to a point astern one of the three new Kiev-class carriers for which the Yak-38 was designed. At about 3,300 feet, the ship’s electronics took control of the aircraft’s computer, guiding it to a precise position on deck, bringing it down to land gently and shutting off its engines.
Unlike the Harrier with its single engine, the Yak-38 had three engines. A pair of Rybinsk RD-38 turbojets with a combined thrust of 15,740 lbs lifted and lowered the aircraft, while forward flight was achieved with a vectorable Tumansky R-28 V-300 turbojet with 15,000 lbs of thrust. This system worked, and the Yak-38, first flown in 1971, began sea trials with the Soviet aviation cruiser Kiev in 1975. And yet, although the Yak-38 was faster and notionally more advanced than the Harrier, just 231 examples were built, and all had been retired no later than 1991. In practice, the aircraft suffered so badly from hot weather and humidity on trials in the Black Sea and, critically, in the Indian Ocean that it was unable to carry external stores and take off at the same time. An oxygen-boosting intake system fitted during overhauls from 1979 helped, but the V/STOL Yak was to make a very poor impression when it was deployed in Afghanistan in spring 1980: the aircraft could carry just two 100 kg bombs and were not flown in hot, daylight hours.
The Yak-38, code-named ‘Forger’ by NATO, was an elegant-looking aircraft and a development of the Yak-36, a prototype developed from 1961 as a Soviet rival to the P.1127. However, because there was nothing like the Pegasus in the pipeline, Yakovlev engineers placed a pair of Tumanksy R-27-300 turbojets alongside one another, each with a thrust of 11,688 lbs, in a rather ungainly fuselage sporting a necessarily massive twin air intake. Each engine provided downward thrust through a single nozzle on each side of the aircraft’s centre of gravity. Like the P.1127, the Yak featured a bicycle undercarriage and outrigger on the wing-tips. Two of the initial four Yak-38s were destroyed in crashes. Nevertheless, a first free hover was achieved in June 1963, a successful transition to forward flight six months later. One of the aircraft was given star billing at an air show held at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on 9 July 1967 as part of the official celebrations held that year to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Yakovlev engineers, however, would have much preferred to develop the first Russian VTOL aircraft around a powerful single engine like Pegasus.
The Yak-38’s poor performance encouraged the Indian Navy to look to the Sea Harrier. And, by 2013, the Indian Sea Harriers, although few in number, had outlived both their Russian rivals and their British siblings. Some years earlier, however, a Mk 2 Harrier had been developed, and it was this aircraft that the RAF and Royal Navy pilots flew together, in a Joint Harrier Force formed in 2000, until the end of 2010, and the US Marine Corps remains faithful to it to this day. In fact, it was American involvement in the Harrier story that was to take the Hawker aircraft to new heights even while the Mk 1 aircraft were fighting in the South Atlantic. The second-generation Harrier was, in the very best sense, an Anglo-American hybrid. The final brand-new FA.2s counted in by the Royal Navy from the factory at Kingston upon Thames on 24 December 1998, and photographed alongside a surviving P.1127, were the last all-British Harriers and also the very last all-British fighter aircraft. The future would be international.
CHAPTER 5
FOREIGN LEGIONS
Even after David Cameron’s government had axed it in late 2010, the Harrier would always have Paris – and the US Marine Corps. It was in Paris, more than half a century earlier, that USAF Colonel John Driscoll, head of NATO’s Washington-funded Mutual Weapon Development Project (MWDP), had met Michel Wibault and introduced him to Stanley Hooker in Bristol; it was in Paris that USAF Colonel Bill Chapman, Driscoll’s successor, had agreed to the MWDP funding 75 per cent of the development costs of the Pegasus, the heart of the P.1127 and every last Harrier built. And without the involvement of the US Marines and their enduring enthusiasm for the aircraft, the Harrier would never have flown, nor fought for as long as it has; it was the Marines who had ensured that a second generation of the jump jet from Kingston upon Thames became a reality; and once again, it was the British who were the beneficiaries of American largesse, as they had been before, especially from the moment when, following the Japa
nese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the US government, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was able to lend an enormous helping hand to its old English-speaking cousin on the other side of the Atlantic.
The American love affair with the Harrier was tested from early on. The first US pilot to be killed flying the aircraft was Major ‘Chuck’ Rosburg at Dunsfold on 27 January 1969. A U-2 pilot posted to Britain to evaluate the GR.1, Rosburg had landed on what was intended to be his last Harrier flight before packing up and going home. For whatever reason, he told Dunsfold Control, ‘There’s something not quite right. I’m going to take it up again.’ He did, vertically; but as Rosburg made the tricky transition with XV743 to forward flight, he lost lateral control and side-slipped at a 90-degree angle towards the ground. He ejected, sideways, and hit the deck.