Harrier
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Taken together, these concerns mean that Britain is both unwilling and unable to make military aircraft of its own – should it even want to – unlike the French, with the Dassault Rafale, and the Swedes, with the Saab Gripen. Given this situation and the fact that Britain cannot really afford to spend fortunes the country does not have to invest in a new nuclear deterrent, it might have been wiser to have kept a Harrier carrier and a fleet of Harriers in service while slowly adapting to the F-35B programme, thereby spreading future costs and maintaining an active force that could have been deployed at a moment’s notice to global ‘hot spots’.
As it was, the Hawker design office closed in 1985, but it had not been slack in coming up with new designs, one or more of which might well have superseded the Mk 1 Harrier and even negated development of the Mk 2. In fact, there had been several dozen proposals from the late 1960s, some more flights of the imagination than others, and at least one that progressed as far as mock-up stage. This, though, was the central purpose of any design office – to come up with a continual stream of new ideas and at the same time to work hard on the development, production and upgrading of aircraft about to go into production or already in service. Alongside V/STOL designs, the Hawker office produced drawings for simple fighters like the P.1201 of the mid-1970s; this featured a variable-incidence wing that, if the aircraft had been built, was to have encouraged a clean flow of air into the jet intake even when the P.1201 was pulling high g’s. In practice, this proposal would have produced a highly effective dogfighter. The major effort, however, went into the design of supersonic V/STOL aircraft. The big question here was how to minimize the amount of the airframe exposed to the blast of a super-hot afterburning jet; aside from the basic issue of protecting the fuselage, there was also the specific need to reduce the heat profile of all military aircraft in the new era of heat-seeking missiles. One Hawker suggestion, the P.1212, featured a delta wing with a cut-back trailing edge and booms carrying fins, undercarriage and armament. Soon enough, this was developed into the P.1216, with its striking outboard tailplanes on booms. In a lecture he gave to the Hawker Association at Kingston in April 2003, Ralph Hooper recalled Margaret Thatcher’s evident enthusiasm for the P.1216 on her prime-ministerial visit to the Hawker factory in December 1982. What she saw was a full-scale mock-up of an aircraft that has intrigued the school of ‘what-might-have-been’ aviation historians and model-makers ever since.
The putative P.1216 had been shot down by politics, yet this time not by government ministers unable to tell a Harrier from a Hunter, but by British Aerospace; the company was concerned that promotion of the aircraft might upset negotiations over who got to build which parts of the future Eurofighter or Typhoon. The P.1216 would certainly have been a handsome aircraft and, if it had made it into production, would have replaced GR.3 Harriers from the late 1980s. Its advantages would have included supersonic performance guaranteed by a plenum chamber-burning Rolls-Royce RB.422 turbojet. Lift, hover, forward and reverse thrust would have been gained through three rather than four nozzles, with one on each side of the fuselage’s centre of gravity and one aft; all three, of course, would have been vectorable. While there was nothing fundamentally wrong with its design, the P.1216 would probably have proved a project too far for British Aerospace. And yet, the combination of supersonic performance and V/STOL capability would have meant a machine that might have taken on the roles both of fast tactical strike aircraft like the Jaguar and of the Harrier itself. Even though the P.1216 project was shelved, it did offer further proof of how far in advance of its international rivals Hawker was through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
There were, however, to be a number of potential Harrier challengers. Some were to fail because their design was too complex or they were too expensive to develop, others because they simply didn’t work. In the first category were the Heinkel-Messershmitt-Bölkow X-1 and X-2 VTOL jets of the mid-1960s. The first, which made its maiden flight on 20 September 1963, broke the sound barrier before crashing a year later. The second was cancelled in late 1965 because its six Rolls-Royce RB.145 turbojets were a luxury that neither German industry nor the German military could afford and certainly not in the rough and tumble of combat, where mechanical simplicity is often a virtue. The aim of the German military aircraft conglomerate had been to produce an aircraft that would supersede the F-104 Starfighter, offering V/STOL capability and a devastating turn of speed. Later, the American Rockwell company’s futuristic-looking XFV-12 supersonic VTOL interceptor and strike aircraft was built in 1977 but cancelled four years on when, after a number of tests, it proved incapable of producing enough thrust for vertical flight.
The Russians came closest with the Yak-41, first flown on 9 March 1987. This was a supersonic development of the Yak-38 from a team led by Alexander Sergeyevich Yakovlev and designed primarily to protect the Soviet Navy’s fleet at sea. Like the P.1216, it featured a top-mounted wing and twin booms. Where it differed was in its employment of not one engine like the Harrier, but three. The main engine, an R-79V-300 with 30,864 lbs of thrust for forward flight, was supported by a pair of RD-41 engines rated at 9,040 lbs each for vertical flight. Yakovlev’s chief test pilot, Andrei Sinitsyn, achieved a first hovering flight on 29 December 1989, transitional flight on 13 March 1990 and a successful VTOL landing on the carrier Admiral Gorshkov on 26 June 1991. The dates are significant because between them the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union exorcized Stalin and Lenin’s ghosts, and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved. Not only would the Admiral Gorshkov no longer be on stand-by for a war against Western Europe and the United States, but both the Soviet state and an entire political system that had readied so many complex and potentially devastating machines for war were suddenly redundant.
To many commentators in the West, it seemed not only that the Cold War was over, but that history was also about to be rewritten. Given the liberalization of the global market and the triumph of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, it seemed that Western free enterprise was now the model for a global economy to follow. As nation followed nation into this apparently blissful world of free trade and rampant consumerism, there would be no other way forward.
For a brief time, the entire military apparatus designed and built up over the previous forty-five years to assure a nihilistic state of Mutual Assured Destruction if either NATO or the Warsaw Pact blinked first seemed not just unnecessary but even absurd. Now the most impressive aerial displays put on by the RAF were not made with Cold War jets, nor even by the Harrier, but by the Red Arrows and their BAE Systems Hawks.
The Hawk was a simple and supremely agile jet trainer that had been designed at Kingston upon Thames by a team led by Ralph Hooper and John Fozard. It also soon proved itself an able light fighter and strike attack aircraft well suited to the needs of smaller nations. It could undertake point defence or deliver munitions in small and sometimes very nasty wars when the United Nations was looking elsewhere – wars about which no one in the rest of the world appeared to know, much less care, and in which complex military hardware and technology were neither affordable nor practical. For a while, and until NATO, the United States and Britain too became embroiled in small yet escalating conflicts in former Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan, aircraft like the Hawk appeared to be a more rational, and profitable, way ahead for aircraft manufacturers than increasingly expensive and complex jets.
First flown on 21 August 1974, the Hawk has outsold the Harrier and remains in production in 2013. It began life in 1968 as a private venture by Hawker. The RAF had been asking for a replacement for its Folland Gnat jet trainers since 1964. When Hooper and Fozard set to work, the Hawk appeared very quickly indeed. The RAF ordered 175 aircraft in March 1972 and these were placed in service in late 1976. The Hawk could break the sound barrier in a shallow dive and, more importantly, could pull 9 g in a turn, well beyond the RAF’s normal upper limit of 7.5 g. This meant that the little aircraft was a natural for the most ambitious air displays; it also meant that i
t was very strong. Fitted with underwing pylons, it could carry a pair of Sidewinder missiles along with a 30 mm Aden cannon in a pod under its belly, or a useful variety of ordnance. The US Navy was suitably impressed, and just as the Harrier became a great Anglo-American success story, so did Hooper and Fozard’s latest aircraft. In the United States, the Hawk was manufactured by McDonnell Douglas as the T-45 Goshawk.
The Hawk’s progress charted complex and very particular political and military developments around the world. In 1980, for example, the Finnish Air Force ordered fifty aircraft, assembled in Finland by Valmet Lentokonetehtaat (Valmet Aviation Industries). The Hawk was chosen because a Finno-Soviet treaty of 1948 allowed the Finnish Air Force just sixty front-line fighters. Hawks, however, counted as trainers; they also happened to suit operating conditions in Finland. Although the Harrier would have been a good choice, too, hiding in the country’s great carpet of forests and taking off and landing on its lonely roads, the jump jet was a front-line fighter and so forbidden by the 1948 treaty. Although the treaty was rescinded in 1991 at the end of the Cold War, the Finns had become fond of the Hawk, ordering further aircraft and upgrading the entire fleet, which is now armed with Russian Molniya R-60/AA-8 air-to-air missiles and is expected to remain in service into the 2030s.
Being less expensive to buy and operate, and easier to fly and service than most conventional front-line fighters, the Hawk also proved very attractive to a number of distinctly unpleasant regimes. The Indonesian government of General Suharto bought Hawks in the 1980s and 1990s, but further sales were blocked, late in the day, by Tony Blair’s New Labour government, which at the time preached an ‘ethical foreign policy’, due to the violation of human rights in East Timor. This tiny South-East Asian country had declared its independence from Portuguese rule in 1975. Almost immediately afterwards, Indonesia invaded and occupied East Timor, believing its newly independent neighbour had turned to communism. On the quiet, Washington and Whitehall supported the move. During the following fifteen years, some 18,600 inhabitants of East Timor were killed while, out of a population of about three-quarters of a million, a further 84,200 lost their lives through Indonesian actions that brought about illness and starvation. The UN finally sent in troops, with Indonesian agreement, in 1999; they stayed until 31 December 2012, although the sovereign state of Timor-Leste had been created ten years earlier. Today, far from being communist, the new republic is, along with the nearby Philippines, one of the world’s most intensely Catholic nations. A dirty war had been fought, using British and American jets, rockets and machine guns against defenceless civilians, for no reason at all.
In January 1996, four protesters cut through a barbed-wire perimeter and broke into the BAE factory at Warton, Lancashire. Attacking a Hawk bound for Indonesia with hammers, the ‘Ploughshare Four’ – Lotta Kronlid, Andrea Needham, Joanna Wilson and Angie Zelter – caused £1.5 million worth of damage. Arrested, they were later acquitted when the jury at their subsequent trial at Liverpool Crown Court in July 1996 agreed that, under the auspices of the Genocide Act, they had used ‘reasonable force to prevent a crime’ – that is, the killing of further civilians. Sixteen Indonesian Hawks, however, were still on order three years later until the government ban took effect, and only after many more civilian deaths in East Timor.
Although the exact role of the Hawk in East Timor remains unclear, the relationship between Hawker, and later BAE, and questionable regimes in faraway countries of which we knew little, between war, human rights and the law, had clearly become far more opaque than it had been during the long certainties of the Cold War. Spare parts for Hawks sold, alongside secondhand Hunters, to Zimbabwe were banned after that country’s involvement in the brutal Second Congo War of 1998–2003, a conflict involving several African countries and leading to the deaths of five million people. The brutish regime in Harare, under Robert Mugabe, turned to China instead, investing in the Hongdu K-8 Hawk look-alike. Sales of Hawks to Iraq, meanwhile, had been blocked in the 1980s at a time when Saddam Hussein was busily gassing Kurds in the north of the country. In 2010, seven years after Saddam’s deposition, a new Iraqi government was lobbying to buy at least twenty new Hawks.
And yet, it was events, notably in Iraq, that saw sophisticated military aircraft and the Harrier in particular back in the front line – and in fact more active than they had been throughout the decades of the Cold War. Somehow it seemed odd, though, that the Harrier, initially placed into service to support NATO forces and to protect Western Europe against the mighty Soviet military machine, would end its days with the RAF and Royal Navy tackling small groups of local gunmen in the wilds of Afghanistan and fighting in a war that many had questioned since its beginning and that no one, except the most crimson redneck, really believed in by the second decade of the twenty-first century.
By then, there were those who evidently saw the Harrier as an artefact from a bygone age, a thing of dangerous and perhaps ineffable beauty. In 2010, visitors to Tate Britain were confronted by the sight of an FA.2 Sea Harrier hanging by its tail from the vaults of the Roman-style Duveen Galleries, its wings marked with feather-like brushstrokes and a slightly mangled Jaguar ground-attack jet sprawled across the marble floor. The installation was by the British artist Fiona Banner and entitled ‘Harrier and Jaguar’. The Tate explained the work thus:
Here, Banner places recently decommissioned fighter planes in the incongruous setting of the Duveen Galleries. For Banner these objects represent the ‘opposite of language’, used when communication fails. In bringing body and machine into close proximity she explores the tension between the intellectual perception of the fighter plane and physical experience of the object. The suspended Sea Harrier transforms machine into captive bird, the markings tattooing its surface evoking its namesake the Harrier Hawk. A Jaguar lies belly up on the floor, its posture suggestive of a submissive animal. Stripped and polished, its surface functions as a shifting mirror, exposing the audience to its own reactions.
‘Harrier and Jaguar remain ambiguous objects implying both captured beast and fallen trophy,’ wrote Banner herself, adding:
I remember long sublime walks in the Welsh mountains with my father, when suddenly a fighter plane would rip through the sky, and shatter everything. It was so exciting, loud and overwhelming; it would literally take our breath away. The sound would arrive from nowhere, all you would see was a shadow and then the plane was gone. At the time Harrier jump jets were at the cutting edge of technology but to me they were like dinosaurs, prehistoric, from a time before words.
I, too, remember Harriers rifling through Welsh mountains, riding the contours, skimming across lakes and vanishing, thunderously, into the low vaults of rain-heavy Cambrian skies: mechanical dragons, perhaps, but never ‘dinosaurs’. The metal husks of the aircraft were discovered, after the Tate show, in a scrap yard in the Harrow Road in north-west London; they had survived wars, but not Art.
James Dyson, the vacuum-cleaner magnate and champion of British engineering and manufacturing industry, bought a GR.7 Harrier to serve as a gate guardian in the car park of his headquarters in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. While Dyson’s motive was a homage to British design and a powerful visual reminder of Hooper and Co.’s ingenuity, the Harrier he chose has a rather remarkable story attached to it. It was the aircraft that Wing Commander Mark Leakey had crashed into the Mediterranean in November 1997. Leakey recalled:
I was commander of a squadron, responding to Saddam’s sabre-rattling. During a night low-altitude bombing detail on the ship’s splash target using night-vision goggles and an infrared system, awful weather and twenty days without a break led me to over-correct on my approach. I could not stop the rate of descent, flew into the sea alongside the ship and briefly lost consciousness on impact. What I did not know at the time was that the aircraft had rolled on its back and I not only pulled the life jacket toggle, but also the seat-firing handle and had ejected down into the water. I should not have survived the impact [on crashin
g into the sea]; but having survived that, I should never have survived being ejected down into the sea.
He did, and it was not for the first time. In 1982, shortly after the end of the Falklands conflict, the engine of Leakey’s GR.3 had given up the ghost. He ejected over the South Atlantic and was rescued by the crew of a Royal Navy helicopter. The Mediterranean crash, however, was to affect Leakey deeply. A medical check-up revealed that while he had survived the impact almost miraculously, he had a brain tumour; it would, most likely, kill him within ten years, but possibly within as little as nine months. Having lost his squadron, no longer flying and – mistakenly as it turned out – fearing a court martial, Leakey turned to God. He recalled his upbringing in Burundi and Rwanda, his brother’s early death from leukaemia, the violence he had witnessed in Africa at a young age, and his promise to himself to become a doctor to help luckless people in these poor, conflict-cuffed countries. He had put these things out of mind, though, after university when he joined the RAF as a fighter pilot, flying Harriers in Germany, Hawks in Wales and F-16s with the USAF from Tampa, Florida. Grounded, he thought about them again.
Two things happened next. First, Leakey was promoted, flying a desk initially with the MoD and, after a course at the Royal College of Defence Studies, moving on to become a principal staff officer with NATO and, after further promotion to Air Commodore, to an appointment as chief planner for British operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Africa. Second, he became director of the Armed Forces Christian Union, a body founded originally as the Army Prayer Union in 1851 by Captain John Trotter when serving in India with the 2nd Life Guards. Leakey, who finally left the RAF after twenty-eight years, is also involved with Flame International, a group working for reconciliation in those parts of Africa most torn apart by conflict. By common consent, this former Harrier pilot has earned his wings a second time; his is truly a swords-into-ploughshares story, and the Harrier on display like some holy relic outside the Dyson headquarters is Leakey’s unexpected and deeply affecting memorial.