by Mike Brooke
George later told me what had happened. The normal procedure was that all the variables, such as the aircraft’s weight, the ambient temperature, headwind and ramp angle were put into a calculation that came up with a distance. This distance was measured back from the top of the ramp and marked on the ground. This gave the Harrier pilots their start point. On this occasion a new young scientific civil servant had been given this job. When the distance was calculated he proceeded to mark it out from the bottom of the ramp. Hence the jet was now a good 25 yards further away than it should have been. So when George gave it maximum forward thrust the Harrier arrived at the 22° upsweep doing a lot of knots more than it should have been doing. The resultant G-force from the up-thrust of the ramp was just too much for the nose wheel leg, which gave way. Then the nose hit the deck and the ensuing sparks gave me the impression of rockets! Trials and errors, eh?
Note
28 See A Bucket of Sunshine by this author published by The History Press, 2012.
28 FIASCO
In the mid 1960s the British government began looking around for a radar system that could be used to provide Airborne Early Warning (AEW) for the UK Air Defence Region. At the time, the only recognised AEW aircraft in British service inventory was the FAA’s Fairey Gannet AEW.3, operated from RN aircraft carriers. These aircraft were fitted with the AN/APS-20 Radar, which had been developed during the Second World War and was rapidly becoming obsolete. In the early 1960s work had been started on an AEW platform to replace the Gannet, which would have a new type of radar system mounted on a new aircraft, the Hawker Siddeley P.139B. This proposal would use two radar scanners at the front and back of P.139’s rather tubby fuselage; this arrangement was known as the Fore-Aft Scanner System (FASS). While the defence cuts of the mid 1960s led to the cancellation of the P.139B, work continued on a wholly British-designed radar system. Strategic thinking led to a decision that the RAF also needed an AEW aircraft to operate as part of the national air defence strategy.
The type of radar that had been proposed for the jet-powered P.139B was deemed by the experts at RSRE, Malvern, to be the best for the job; it was known by the horrendously complex, descriptive title of Frequency Modulated, Interrupted Continuous Wave. I will make no attempt to explain what that really means or how it works! However, the scanner size required was big and thus a large, turbojet-powered airframe would be needed. Designers at Hawker Siddeley came up with a proposal that would see the new radar system installed in their Nimrod aircraft. This proposal was initially rejected by the MOD as being too expensive. In the interim, to provide a land-based AEW aircraft, radar systems from withdrawn Royal Navy Gannets were installed in similarly surplus Avro Shackleton maritime patrol aircraft and, in 1972, commissioned into RAF service. At around the same time, it was decided not to proceed with proposed FMICW radar technology as the basis of a UK AEW system, as American research had shown that a different type of radar, known as Pulse-Doppler (PD), was superior. As a consequence, the idea of a new land-based AEW aircraft for the RAF was re-examined, and this time it was decided that the Nimrod met the requirements. There were a range of options:
• Purchase the US PD radar system and all its associated avionics and fit them into the Nimrod.
• Purchase the US PD radar and combine it with a British avionics package.
• Purchase the US Navy’s Hawkeye radar system and combine it with a British radar transmitter, receiver and avionics package.
• Go back to square one and develop a wholly British radar system and avionics package using a twin scanner FASS.
While the fourth option would create and sustain many thousands of British jobs, it was also far riskier than purchasing an off-the-shelf product or spreading the risk across multiple partners. A politico-industrial conundrum.
Meanwhile, the US had made an offer to NATO to purchase several of the new Boeing E-3 Sentry AEW aircraft, which were then being delivered to the USAF; this option was intended to provide AEW cover for Europe’s NATO nations without them having to rely on the United States. In 1980 that procurement matured as the NATO E-3A Component manned by personnel from around NATO. However, the complex multilateral negotiations were obviously too much for the UK government and eventually led them to pursue the all-British development route.
In 1977 an RAF Comet 4, XW 626, was modified for flight testing with the nose only radar and conducted a series of trials, the results of which proved promising enough for an order of three prototype AEW Nimrods to be built, using redundant MR1 airframes. The first of these was rolled out in March 1980, flew for the first time in July and was intended to test the flight characteristics. The second airframe planned to carry out trials on the Mission Systems Avionics, based around a GEC 4000M computer, which processed data from the two radar scanners and all the other mission-related equipment.
As far as I recall, until mid June 1980 the Comet XW 626 was flown and operated by a joint BAe/GEC/Marconi trials team based at Woodford airfield, just south of Manchester. Our aircrew became involved as time went by. Whenever I heard about these trials it never seemed to be good news. Progress was very slow, the aircraft often being offered for flight far too late in the day to maximise its long endurance. Various faults recurred, not least of which involved the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU), which was a small jet engine specially installed in the tail of the Comet. The APU’s electric generator was needed because the Comet’s four R-R Avon engines could not produce sufficient electrical power for both the aircraft and the radar systems, which was only half the full system as no rear scanner was fitted. As the first of the three AEW Nimrod airframes were being prepared for trials at Woodford, it was agreed that the Comet would be taken over by RRS and operated from Bedford. Complementary radar trails would continue in parallel with the early Nimrod trials. On Thursday 12 June there was a handover ceremony and party at a hotel near Woodford, hosted by the BAe Woodford Director of Flight Operations, Charles Masefield, and his team. The following day the RRS ‘Heavy Mob’ flew the Comet back, with a selection of boffins down the back. I flew the Canberra I had taken up there, via another flight trial, back to Bedford in formation with the Comet.
Now it was our responsibility. The trials progressed but only spasmodically. On 24 July, just over a month since its arrival at Bedford, I flew XW 626 as co-pilot to ‘Captain’ Geoff Mannings. We flew out over the North Sea and when settled ‘on condition’ we started the APU and then, when we were sure that it was producing the volts and amps required, told the seven guys down the back that they could start squirting the radar beams out over the ether. It wasn’t long before the big red light that told us that the APU had shut down came on. All the radar stuff was turned off and that was the end of the trial for today. The only recourse was to jettison a lot of fuel, about 8 tonnes of the stuff, into the North Sea and go home.
This was not a rare occurrence. The APU was a unique installation and it had been given, quite rightly, rigorous safety protection systems. The trouble was that these various limiters were totally automatic so any small excursion outside the speed, sideslip or air temperature limits shut the thing down, and there seemed to be no method of restarting it in flight. In my experience it wasn’t the first time, and wouldn’t be the last, where the special trials equipment, that was not the item under test, caused the failure of the prime test mission.
We soldiered on with the AEW Comet programme but, after I had moved on, it was pensioned off. The AEW Nimrod prototypes’ problems with mission systems control and integration, radar cooling and synchronisation of the forward and aft scanners all became too vast to be cured. On top of that, by late 1980 the US solution, in the shape of the Boeing E-3 Sentry, was already up and running. During an earlier visit to RSRE Malvern for a briefing on the UK’s AEW programme I had been taken aside by the RAF’s liaison officer into another room. He had flown in both the E-3 and the AEW Nimrod and told me, in somewhat hushed tones, that based on his observation of the two systems’ performance, he thought
that the latter would never come to fruition. He opined then that the RAF would be better off if the Nimrod programme was cancelled and the Sentry was procured instead.
In the end that is what happened. The integration of all of the AEW Nimrod’s systems into a single package proved too difficult for the underpowered computer, which had an ultimate data storage capacity of only 2.4MB. Additionally, when operating at full power, the radar scanners and on-board electronic systems generated a significant amount of heat. A system was developed to channel this via the fuel system, from where it could then dissipate, but it only worked satisfactorily when the fuel tanks were at least half full.
Many of the developmental problems were not purely technical but revolved around who was the prime and who was the secondary or subcontractor. Who had overall control and fiduciary responsibility? Millions, if not billions, of pounds were wasted. The AEW Nimrod airframes were flown to RAF Abingdon, where they languished for many years before being ‘recycled’ with cutting tools. After the TSR-2 debacle it was unforgiveable that the UK government and its aerospace industry had repeated the same sort of expensive fiasco! Then, many years later, it all happened again with the Nimrod MR4, so proving the adage that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history!
29 MOVING ON AGAIN
This tour as OC RRS was supposed to be my one flying tour as a squadron leader and last for about three years. It should have been followed by a staff tour; that is ‘flying a desk’ somewhere. However, in the middle of 1980 I encountered Wg Cdr Jim Watts-Phillips at a Farnborough social event; he was the CO of ETPS. He asked me if I would be happy to return to the school as a tutor. I told him that I would be delighted.
I later received a phone call from one of the ETPS tutors who had mentored my course in 1975 – that favourite son of the Falkland Islands – Peter Sedgwick. He had left the RAF and was now in the employ of BAe/HSA at what had been de Havilland’s airfield at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. There the CTP, Mike Goodfellow, was building up a team for the flight test programme of the company’s new regional airliner – the HS 146. Peter told me that he had recommended to Mr Goodfellow that I be invited for an interview. After Pete had called me, I said that I would need to talk over the options with my wife and look into the implications of leaving the RAF only two years before my pensionable option date, at my 38th birthday. In the end I thought that there was nothing to lose by travelling down the A1 to Hatfield to see what was on offer. I spent a very interesting couple of hours there, talking it all over with Mike Goodfellow and getting a guided tour of the production area. We then discussed all the working arrangements and he told me who else would be on the team, many of whom I knew. We also talked about remuneration and that sort of thing. I promised to give him an answer within a week. Next I looked into the likelihood of receiving approval to retire prematurely. I discovered from the ivory tower that dealt with such things that, because I was actually replacing someone who had unavoidably been unable to take up the post at ETPS, it was ‘going to be difficult’! The other factor was that instead of a pretty good gratuity and, in time, a graduated pension, I would receive a grant of just £2,400. After talking it over, my wife and I were not too keen to lose out financially and I personally felt that, in terms of the sort of flying that I enjoyed, the ETPS job was a better offer. I rang Mr Goodfellow to give him the news.
Then it all happened again. Dave Eagles CTP at BAe Warton rang me and said that they had a job that might suit me. I arranged to go to Warton and see Dave. He and the Director of Flight Operations, Paul Millet, interviewed me; however, it soon transpired that not being qualified on the Jaguar would probably be a big hindrance, as the company could not afford to pay for the conversion course. Moreover the same problems about leaving the RAF so near my gratuity and pension date applied, so that job went by the board too! In the meantime I had received full and official notice of my move back to Boscombe Down.
Then there was a nice irony. Since I had done the ETPS course in 1975 the school had acquired two Jaguar trainers and I was to attend the Jaguar OCU starting in early November. I made a mental note to ring Dave Eagles again after that! So it was off to Bonnie Scotland and RAF Lossiemouth in the far north; and it was winter. I had received all the usual joining instructions for the course, which was called a Senior Officers’ Short Conversion Course; as I was a short senior officer I thought that quite appropriate. I would be allowed only twenty flying hours to get a thorough working knowledge of the Jaguar and its somewhat complex navigation and weapon-aiming system – standby for another acronym – NAVWASS! This was particularly important because I had been told that when I arrived at ETPS I would be the aerosystems specialist among the tutors and the Jaguar was central to that part of the syllabus. The NAVWASS depended on gyroscopes and accelerometers to work out where it had gone from its starting point, which the pilot had to enter accurately.
The Jaguar programme began in the early 1960s, in response to a British requirement for an advanced, supersonic, jet trainer to replace the Gnat and the Hunter T7. This coincided with a French Air Force requirement for a cheap, subsonic, dual-role trainer and light attack aircraft to replace three older combat aircraft. In both countries several companies tendered designs: BAC, Hunting, Hawker Siddeley and Folland in Britain; Breguet, Potez, Sud-Aviation, Nord, and Dassault in France. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed in May 1965 for the two countries to develop two aircraft, a trainer and a strike/attack aircraft.
This joint Anglo-French venture was launched in 1966 to produce an aircraft that would suit both air forces’ needs. As in all international collaborative ventures, all sorts of other factors went into the mixing pot: industrial, political and national status being the main ingredients. The final outcome was that the RAF decided that their need for a new trainer could be met from another source and that the Jaguar would become a fighter-bomber and reconnaissance replacement for the McDonnell F-4 Phantom, so freeing that aircraft to move into the air defence role. So the number of two-seat aircraft was scaled down to 35 and the single-seat order increased to 165. In the end the Jaguar entered RAF service in 1974, six years after the flight of the first protoype.
On 9 November 1980 I travelled north by train to Elgin, where RAF transport took me to my final destination – the Officers’ Mess at RAF Lossiemouth. It was an all-day expedition but, until darkness descended, with much fascinating scenery. The next morning I started the inevitable series of lectures uncovering the mysteries of all the Jaguar’s inner workings, with many hours spent on the NAVWASS. The cockpit of the Jaguar was the most modern that I had thus far sat in. It was a mix of the familiar and the foreign: those were the French bits. For instance the fuel gauges for the three main tanks were cleverly combined on two dials with a display that helped monitor that the CG stayed within its limits. They were also in litres, which was new to me. Dominating the lower part of the instrument panel was the circular Fresnel lens of the coloured moving map display. I supposed that this would make up for not having a navigator with me and, what’s more, it couldn’t talk back. Mostly the cockpit was well-arranged and felt a comfortable place to work.
After three weeks of ground training it was time to climb into the Jaguar flight simulator to practise starting everything, including the inertial navigation system, then ‘flying’ around using the HUD and learning how the weapon aiming system worked. Inevitably the simulator instructors would throw emergencies at us at the most inconvenient moments. The visual system for the Jaguar simulator, like the aircraft’s role, majored on low flying. Hence there was a very large, detailed, three-dimensional model over which ‘flew’ a small fibre-optic head and tiny lens feeding the TV signal onto screens ahead of the cockpit windscreen. In those days, when computer-generated imagery was still some way off, it was as good as you could get and gave a pretty realistic view of the outside world. That was until you flew down certain valleys (or should I say glens?) where the staff had planted very small toy monsters, which appeared 100f
t high! As they say, age is mandatory but maturity is optional.
Eventually we had to give up the fairground ride practice and go do the real thing. When I arrived in the OCU crew room I was told that my instructor would be one Flt Lt Whitney Griffiths. I soon picked up from sniggers and whispered asides that Whitney was the ‘hard man’ on the staff. I met up with him later that day and he briefed me for our first sortie. He certainly came over as abrupt and unsmiling so I promised myself that I would try my best not to upset him.
So much for the plans of mice and men! The next morning we walked out to Jaguar T2 XX 146 and I climbed up the ladder to start the pre-flight checks, which included getting the inertial navigation system out of its inertia. After the external inspection I started strapping in. It was much harder than in the simulator because now I was wearing the bulky and rather unyielding immersion suit, lifejacket and anti-G suit for the first time. Then disaster struck. I had just finished connecting everything and was about to start the internal checks when I realised that the rudder pedals were too far forward; my little legs couldn’t reach them! The adjustment was done by a handle at the very base of the centre pedestal, behind the stick and almost on the floor. As we were now in communication I had picked up already that Mr Griffiths was getting a little impatient with my tardiness. Then all he could hear were my grunts and sharp intakes of breath as I struggled to reach that wretched handle. I turned my microphone off and continued the struggle in silence, well as far as Whitney was concerned. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not reach it!
‘What the hell is going on up there?’ came ringing in my ears.
‘Sorry, Whitney, but I can’t adjust the rudder pedals; I can’t reach the handle now that I’m strapped in,’ I explained. ‘I’ll have to unstrap and then sort it out. Sorry.’