Times have certainly changed considerably from 1993, when the F-35 emerged from the US Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter Project announced that year. In 1996, this duly morphed into the US Joint Strike Fighter Program, the purpose of which was to develop a stealth fighter to replace several front-line aircraft including the F-16 Fighting Falcon, a highly successful design from the mid-1970s still in production at Fort Worth, the F/A-18 Hornet and the AV-8B Harrier II.
‘It’s what we call a South West policy,’ Steve O’Bryan, Lockheed Martin’s fast-talking Vice-President, F-35 Business Development, told me when we met in the Oval Room of the company’s offices at Fort Worth. A former F/A-18 US Navy pilot who flew on the first ‘shock-and-awe’ missions to Baghdad in 2003, O’Bryan explained how impressed he was by the efficiency, and profitability, of South West, the Texas-based airline that operates a single type of aircraft, the Boeing 737. Each of its 572 jets flies six trips a day. ‘Like South West, everything’s the same,’ says O’Bryan, who predicts total sales of 3,100 F-35s, ‘so everything’s easier and cheaper, too.’
The US government alone plans to buy 2,443 F-35s in three variants. The F-35A is a strike fighter; it will take off and land conventionally and is intended to replace both the USAF’s F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolt IIs. The F-35B is the V/STOL version for the Marines; it can operate from more or less anywhere. The F-35C is intended for the US Navy; it has folding wings for easier stowage on carriers, can be launched by catapult and is fitted with an arrestor hook for deck landings. The remaining 500 or 600 F-35s are to be bought, incrementally, by ‘JSF partner nations’: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, Norway and Turkey. There may also be sales to Israel, Japan and Singapore.
Along with the United States, Britain is a ‘Level 1 Partner’, although it has paid just $2 billion, or 4 per cent of the current costs, while building a part of the aircraft and gaining 100 per cent of the benefits. As the US Marine Corps will receive their first F-35Bs before the RAF and the Royal Navy, both British services will also be able to see how the Americans get on with the new aircraft, and to learn from their experience. Quite how many F-35Bs Britain will finally order and place in service is a multi-billion-dollar question and one that will only be answered with any degree of certainty by the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review. Initially, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour governments were to have ordered 138 F-35s, but this figure was revised downwards to forty-eight F-35Bs by David Cameron’s coalition government. Even then, the politicians had been confused over which version of the aircraft they wanted; at first it was the F-35B, then the F-35A, and now it is the F-35B again.
This takes us back to politics. Two new Royal Navy aircraft carriers have been ordered – HMS Queen Elizabeth II and HMS Prince of Wales – but one may be sold on if finances prove too tight for comfort and this will mean a reduction in the number of UK orders from Fort Worth. However, as British jobs will be lost with each cancelled F-35B, future governments will need to think as hard about Britain’s aerospace industry as they will about the nation’s defence. As things stand, 15 per cent of each F-35 put into service around the world over the next twenty-five years will be made in Britain. So Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Martin-Baker and some 130 other companies spread the length and breadth of the country will still be able to participate in the design and manufacture of a leading-edge military aircraft. While some might entertain moral qualms about such undertakings and others anxieties about their spiralling costs, on balance this capability is probably one that any of the smaller, self-respecting post-industrial nations like Britain needs to retain – even if not necessarily to the extent of France and Sweden, two countries that still manufacture sophisticated and entirely home-grown combat aircraft.
‘It’s impossible for Britain to go it alone,’ Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge told me. Burridge is the former commander-in-chief of British forces in Iraq in 2003, head of RAF Strike Command from 2003 to 2006 and, today, vice president of Strategic Marketing, Finmeccanica UK, where he is involved with the development of Italian-built F-35s. A highly experienced pilot with a first-class Cambridge degree in physics, he has climbed Mount Everest and is also a member of the council of the Defence Manufacturers Association. Burridge continued:
The MoD has to think very hard in its 2015 review whether or not it wishes to develop the Typhoon, or to buy further F-35s, and nothing else. This would have quite profound consequences for European industry. Not to develop the Typhoon, which still has potential sales in Oman, UAE, Saudi and Malaysia, would mean that British expertise would wither on the vine.
Burridge, like others concerned for British and European industry, would like to see F-35s operating alongside upgraded Typhoons, a pairing, perhaps, of twenty-first-century Mustang and Spitfire. However, a number of factors – harsh economic conditions, the changing face of warfare and the public’s diminishing appetite for military adventurism – mean that the very nature of the fighter aircraft is rapidly mutating. ‘We could go 100 per cent unmanned after F-35,’ Burridge said. ‘It’s a plausible position; but there’s a limit, politically and morally, for robotic warfare, and [there are] a lot of questions concerning the ethics of extra-territorial attacks and extra-judicial killings.’
As it was, shortly before Christmas 2012, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, the Chief of the Air Staff, announced the formation of a new grouping known as Remotely Piloted Air System (RPAS) pilots. Because they will have to gain basic flying qualifications, this new generation of pilots will wear the same ‘wings’ and will stand – or perhaps sit, given the nature of their job – to win much the same medals RAF pilots have cherished for generations. The ‘lethal precision of their weapons’, Sir Stephen told the Royal United Services Institute, means that RPAS pilots will be seen increasingly as ‘a cost-effective way to conduct warfare’. They will not, though, be chasing the shouting wind in the cockpits of Typhoons, nor flying F-35s through footless halls of air; instead, they will be flying computer screens.
Meanwhile, at much the same time as Dalton’s announcement, turkey vultures were winging low over the magnificent wooded estate of Pax River on the fringes of Chesapeake Bay as I drove in with Harv Smyth to observe F-35s on test. It was winter, breezy and close to freezing. At warmer times of the year, ospreys and bald eagles circle the 14,500-acre US naval air base, whose 22,000 personnel include twenty-two British pilots, engineers and commanders lodged with the F-35 test team. Among the latter I found the RAF’s quietly spoken Squadron Leader Jim Schofield, who flew seventy hours in Harriers in combat in Iraq in 2003. He learned to fly, on a Piper Super Cub, before he could drive.
A pilot for the Shuttleworth Collection of vintage aircraft, Schofield is also a member of the Somerset-based Yakovlevs display team, flying sensationally aerobatic, piston-engined Yak-152s. Intriguingly, the Yak-141, that prototype vertical take-off and landing fighter jet intended for the Soviet Navy and first flown in 1987, was a significant influence on the F-35. This should not be surprising, since the Yakovlev Design Bureau had begun a partnership with Lockheed Martin in late 1991, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
‘I’ve flown ten front-line fighters,’ Schofield said. ‘The F-35 is by far and away the easiest. Flying it is a “no brainer”, landing is very, very easy. I’ve flown the aircraft up to Mach 1.6 and pulled up to 7 g. The helmet gives me a God’s-eye view. Astonishing. And, when you press that hover button, it’s as if engineering and electronics have overcome the law of physics. Extraordinary.’
Peter ‘Wizzer’ Wilson, a BAE Systems test pilot who flew Sea Harriers with the Royal Navy from 1990 to 2000, told me:
The new technology takes workload and risk away from the pilot. It’s amazing how one press of a button will set in motion so much magic around you. The one time you get to hear something mechanical working hard is when the big [vertical lift-off] fan behind you spools up; it sounds like an angry mosquito
! The [Rolls-Royce] fan is also very smooth in motion, which has really helped as we’ve practised precision deck landings at sea on USS Wasp; it’s a quantum step in every way from the Harrier.
Flying the F-35 is neither as ‘visceral’ nor, to use Jim Schofield’s term, as ‘thrilling’ as a Harrier, yet it is clearly more comfortable and far less demanding on the pilot than its Anglo-American predecessor. Meanwhile, the prototype F-35B – X-35B – is already a museum piece, housed in the Boeing Aviation Hangar of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. It might seem an odd thought given the F-35 has yet to enter service, but however impressive such fifth-generation fighters might seem and however important they may prove to so many people’s security, jobs and freedom, these machines are already beginning to seem a part of military aviation history. It is virtual pilots who are now reaching for the sky. From 2012, the RAF began flying General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone aircraft from Kandahar, Afghanistan with ‘pilots’ based back home at Waddington, Lincolnshire, a former home to Lancasters and Lincolns, Washingtons and Vulcans. To date, these ten robotic aircraft have been used, the RAF says, for surveillance missions, but they can be fitted with laser-guided bombs and missiles and will, doubtless, be used in combat. Aimed at saving the lives of servicemen and reducing costs, the Reapers, which cost $16.9 million (£10.85 million) apiece, are grim news indeed for advocates of manned military aircraft and those who make them.
As its enthusiastic and experienced pilots attest, the F-35 represents a quantum leap over the Mk 2 Harrier. But although the two aircraft employ rather different technical means to reach the same ends, it could be argued that, without the Harrier, there would have been no F-35B. The Harrier certainly blazed the way for V/STOL on the modern battlefield and at sea, and until the advent of the F-35B, it remained the world’s only effective fighting aircraft with this capability. Whether the F-35B proves as successful remains to be seen. The Harrier has certainly set the bar very high.
EPILOGUE
THE WINDHOVER
Even with a crosswind, the ‘plastic-wing’ Harrier AV-8B twin-seat trainer feels certain in the hover. Kitted out with a Stability Augmentation System, it chevvies on an air-built thoroughfare in gently pattering rain with the confidence of a kestrel fluttering over the verges of country roads or, in this case, an American freeway. My skipper, sat up front, tells me she could still roll dangerously – and even fatally – if the aircraft side-slipped excessively. And the margins are tight. Sitting on a column of hot air thrusting down from the fast-spooling and noisy Pegasus turbine, it is impossible to forget that the Harrier’s wings are, for these few minutes, all but redundant, and that an aircraft without wings is as every bit an oddity as a bird unable to fly.
The way the pilot checks wind direction and degrees of side-slip remains as special as it is simple and foolproof – that weathervane perched on the nose of the Harrier in front of the windscreen. It glows at night. And it takes pilot and passenger back to the earliest days of aviation – to windsocks at the sides of airfields – and to an era long before computers, head-up displays, fly-by-wire, digital technology and Stability Augmentation Systems. This seemingly crude device connects Harrier pilots to the elements in a direct and unambiguous fashion; when there is no wind flow over or under your wings, and you happen to be motionless fifty feet up in the air, knowing which way the wind is blowing is vital.
Throughout its life, the Harrier has relied on this little ‘ten cent’ weathervane that might have been fashioned in a medieval village forge or else bought from a local DIY store. Yes, it could have been replaced by a glowing digital gizmo, but then it would have become just one more piece of kit to weigh the Harrier down, to fiddle with, to maintain – and to go wrong. The weathervane works, its message understood as clearly and directly as the positions of the hands on an unmarked clock-face. There has been no need to improve it. And yet without it, this hover in American drizzle would have been much trickier than it was.
As the pilot guns the Harrier up and away from vertical to horizontal flight and into the sun, the aircraft is transformed into an aerial hot-rod, its acceleration sensational and climb rapid, its responses instant, fluent and thrilling. Its thrust is more than double that of a Hawker Hunter and a third greater than an English Electric Lightning’s. It rolls, loops and, of course, ‘viffs’ with consummate ease. It is, without doubt, a fine and furious flying machine. With its high seats and bulbous canopy, it offers peerless panoramas of landscape and big skies. It can even seem normal – as normal as a fast military jet ever is – until it comes back to the hover, and attention switches to that life-saving weathervane again.
The basic quality of this simple device reminded me then, as it does now, of the sheer wonder of vertical flight in a winged aircraft that has never tried to ape a rocket or compromise its pilots’ comfort and sanity. The very latest technological advances of the jet age were never quite enough, it seems, to ensure safe flying in the hover and at very low speed. Safely back on the ground, I read some informative and entertaining passages in Bill Gunston’s book on the Harrier published some thirty years ago. The former RAF pilot – he flew de Havilland Venoms – and author was recalling the early days of the P.1127:
As there were only small gyroscopic effects, [Sydney] Camm was hopeful that complex, triply-redundant three-axis auto-stabilisation would not be needed. Hugh Conway, former managing director of Shorts and well up in the SC.1 auto-stab problems [see Introduction], later became managing director of Bristol Siddeley Engines. He gave a long briefing to Camm on what had to be done. After he had gone, the Hawker boss said, ‘We are only ignorant buggers here at Kingston, and don’t understand all that science. We’ll leave the P.1127 simple, and let its pilots fly it.’
Camm was only half-joking. The first flight of the P.1127 really was done as much on a wing and a prayer as it was by maths and science. Many of those involved in the project were unsure if the aircraft would take off vertically. Was the Pegasus turbine sufficiently powerful? How would the aircraft manage the transition to forward flight? How would she handle? Bill Bedford was concerned that his leg, weighed down in plaster of Paris, would be a burden. Bits of the aircraft, including its radio, were stripped away to reduce weight, while, according to Gunston, ‘Hooker [technical director, Bristol Engines] suggested to Camm that “perhaps the first flight should be in the conventional [runway] mode, to check handling qualities”. Camm snapped back, “All Hawker aircraft have perfect handling qualities; the first flight will be a VTO [vertical take off].”’
The test pilots made it all look easy, perhaps too easy in the case of John Farley, who, when demonstrating the aircraft, would fly down runways with the machine rotating around its yaw axis as if side-slip was a game to be toyed with. In practice, few, if any, Harrier pilots were able to match Farley’s supreme mastery of the Kingston jump jet. As we have seen, ‘shakers’ were in due course fitted to the rudder pedals; the relevant pedal shook, encouraging the pilot to respond appropriately when the aircraft needed help to stay with the wind; Farley described the effect as like ‘a rather nice relaxing calf massage’. The weathervane was added, too. These aids to safety were all the more welcome because in low-speed flight ‘intake momentum drag’, caused by air passing into the elephant-ear intakes on either side of the cockpit, inclined the Harrier to pitch or yaw, if not to roll: side-slip did that.
All this seems a world away from the hover-at-the-press-of-a-button capability of the new F-35B, but it is these idiosyncrasies and fundamental aspects of flight and the need to master them that have made Harrier pilots a breed apart. The Harrier itself still flies on, a truly legendary machine that, long ago, spread its wings from its Surrey nest to become the most radical and unlikely of great military aircraft. Perhaps some of the conflicts it has been engaged in have been questionable, yet the brilliance of its design cannot be denied and it seems a great pity that the Harrier will be remembered as the last British-born fighter jet – one of the last, in fact, of all B
ritish aircraft. Political hot air – Camm’s fourth dimension – has seen to that.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am very grateful to all the individuals, pilots and aircrew who have assisted me in understanding the Harrier and experiencing it close-up. Special thanks must go to Ralph Hooper OBE, FREng, FRAeS, Group Captain Harv Smyth DFC, Commander Nigel ‘Sharkey’ Ward DSC, AFC, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge KCB, CBE, ADC, FCMI, FRAeS for helping me to place the Harrier in perspective in terms of design, combat – from the Falklands to Afghanistan – and politics.
Thanks must also go to Laurie A. Quincy of Lockheed Martin for facilitating my visit to see the F-35B in production at Fort Worth, Texas, and on test at Pax River, Maryland; to test pilots Billy Flynn, Peter ‘Wizzer’ Wilson and Squadron Leader Jim Schofield; and to Paul Davies of the Daily Telegraph, who sent me to report on the controversial new American jump jet.
My editor, Angus MacKinnon, who knows a thing or two about military aircraft as well as modelling them, commissioned this book and saw it through to take-off in print. Many thanks are due to him, to my unflappable desk editor Louise Cullen, to my copy-editor Ben Dupré, and, as always, to my high-flying agent Sarah Chalfant.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Attrill, Mark,
Harrier: Inside and Out (Crowood Press, 2002)
Bicheno, Hugh,
Razor’s Edge: The Unofficial History of the Falklands War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006)
Harrier Page 23
