Bell itself was no stranger to bold experimental aircraft design. The company, based at Niagara Falls Airport, New York, had designed and built the first US jet, the P-59 Airacomet in 1942; the X-1 rocket plane that first broke the sound barrier in 1947 with Chuck Yeager doing the ‘right stuff’; and, of course, the thousands of P-39 Airacobra and P-63 Kingcobra fighters with their piston engines mounted, unusually, behind the pilot, many of which were supplied to and flown very successfully by the Soviet Air Force during the Great Patriotic War against Germany of 1941–5.
The pieces of the complex development jigsaw that culminated in the Hawker P.1127 were slowly coming together: engineers, on both sides of the Atlantic, started to see the big picture. At much the same time as Bell built and hovered its jet test-rig, Rolls-Royce produced its Thrust Measuring Rig (TMR), or ‘Flying Bedstead’, a device designed under the direction of Dr Alan Griffith, the company’s chief scientist, and powered by a pair of Rolls-Royce Nene turbojets. The contraption, which looked like some early prototype for a British lunar landing module, was used for research into controlled hovering. It was a dangerous machine to fly, with sluggish throttle control, little in the way of stability, and just ten minutes of fuel. Rolls-Royce test pilot R. T. Shepherd managed a free test flight on 3 August 1954, but when the machine was transferred soon afterwards to the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough, it crashed, killing its pilot; the second TMR crashed in 1957. This risky machine did lead, however, to the development of Griffith’s RB.108 engine, a jet designed specifically for VTOL and hovering aircraft. The British government took an interest and, in October 1954, Short Brothers of Belfast was awarded a contract for two experimental VTOL aircraft based around the Rolls-Royce engine. Griffith himself was toying with the idea of a VTOL supersonic airliner powered by dozens of RB.108s that would have flown confidently from London to Sydney.
The tiny, bug-like Short Brothers aircraft, designated SC.1, were packed off to the RAE at Boscombe Down when complete in 1957. With its four RB.108s, mounted in the middle of the fuselage, blasting down and test pilot Tom Brooke-Smith at the controls, the second aircraft achieved the first untethered hover on 25 October 1958, two years ahead of the P.1127, while the all-important transition from vertical to forward flight, aided by a fifth, tail-mounted RB.108, took place on 6 April 1960. The SC.1 was a low-performance aircraft, with a top speed of 246 mph and a ceiling of just 8,000 feet, but the point of the exercise was to see if a jet aircraft could take off and land vertically, hover, and make the transition from vertical to forward flight. These things happen at low speeds. To ensure stability at low speed and when hovering, the engines of the delta-wing aircraft provided thrust to small control jets under the nose and tail and at the wing-tips. Information gathered from the RAE tests was supplied to Hawker, while the aircraft made themselves known to the public at the Farnborough and Paris air shows between 1958 and 1961. Sadly, the second aircraft, XG905, crashed at Belfast on 2 October 1963 when an auto-stabilizer failed, killing its pilot, J. R. Green, who had joined Short Brothers from the RAF, where he had been flight commander of 2 Squadron, based in Germany and flying Supermarine Swifts. Green’s death was a reminder of the fact that the SC.1, as indeed the P.1127 was to be, was very much an analogue aircraft from an era largely innocent of computers, although the Belfast-built aircraft were among the very first to employ fly-by-wire technology. The two aircraft, XG900 at the Science Museum, London and XG905 at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Cultra, Northern Ireland, have both been preserved. They led long lives for experimental aircraft, only retiring in 1971.
The ‘missing link’ between the SC.1, and all the earlier VTOL experiments, and the P.1127 was the work of neither an American nor a German or British engineer. The inventor of the idea of vectored jet thrust – the heart and soul of the Harrier and the Lockheed Martin F-35B or Lightning II scheduled to replace the British jump jet – was a Frenchman, Michel Wibault (1897–1963). Born in Douai, Wibault had established his own aircraft company in 1919. He made early use of all-metal construction and was well known to Vickers in England, a company interested in this aspect of his work. With the Germans closing in on Paris in 1940, Wibault escaped to London where, soon afterwards, General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, appointed him technical director of France Forever, an organization dedicated to galvanizing support for de Gaulle, in the United States. Wibault made his way to New York, where he took on a job with Republic Aviation and worked on designs for the XF-12 Rainbow, a sleek, four-engined, long-distance reconnaissance aircraft of which just two were built in 1945 before their role was usurped by now-redundant Boeing B-29 Superfortresses, and for the low-cost RC-3 Seabee seaplane, of which 1,060 were built, and some two hundred and fifty still fly today, a number of them in regular commercial service.
In New York, Wibault was introduced to Winthrop Rockefeller, the billionaire politician and philanthropist, who was to fund the French inventor for the rest of his career. While still in the United States in the early 1950s and now having the luxury of time to think, Wibault took out a number of patents related to VTOL flight. In 1955, he came up with the idea of an aircraft driven by a single turbine feeding four centrifugal compressors, which looked like giant 1950s hair-dryers, or snail shells, mounted in tandem on either side of the fuselage around the centre of gravity. These could be turned to any angle from straight down to the ground to facing horizontally rearwards; in other words, Wibault had come up with a convincing patent for a vectored VTOL jet. His design was a little complex in terms of mechanical engineering, but this was something that Hawker would sort out over the next few years.
The connection between Wibault and Hawker, however, had yet to be made. This came about when, after Wibault had failed to interest the French military and industry in his patent, an officer in the USAF, Colonel John Driscoll, introduced the French designer to Stanley Hooker. Hooker was the brilliant aero-engine designer who had formerly worked with Rolls-Royce and is famous today – or should be – as the brains behind supercharged variants of the wartime Rolls-Royce Merlin and the Bristol Olympus turbojet fitted to the Avro Vulcan and Concorde. He was also the engineer who came back from retirement to oversee the transition into production of the then-threatened but ultimately highly successful Rolls-Royce RB.211 jet engine, an achievement for which he was awarded a well-deserved knighthood in 1974.
At the time of this first meeting in Paris in late 1955, Driscoll was senior air officer with the Mutual Weapons Development Programme (MWDP), a NATO organization funded by the Pentagon and based in Paris. Driscoll had passed Wibault’s design on to the chairman of NATO’s Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development, Dr Theodore von Karman of the California Institute of Technology, who strongly recommended the proposal. The following March, Wibault sent Hooker a copy of a brochure outlining details of his VTOL design. Hooker forwarded this to Gordon Lewis, his young number two, who was to be jointly responsible for the Olympus turbofan and later, as technical director of Rolls-Royce, led the design of jet engines up to and including the EJ200 that today sends Eurofighter Typhoons rocketing and pirouetting through footless halls of contested air. Lewis simplified and lightened Wibault’s engine layout and, following a momentous meeting between Wibault, Hooker and other interested parties, the Frenchman agreed to work with Bristol. A patent for the revised VTOL power plant was filed on 29 January 1957; the names attached were those of Michel Wibault and Gordon Lewis.
Lewis and his colleagues did much work during 1957 on the design of a power plant that would be much lighter and simpler, as well as more powerful and efficient, than the original Wibault proposal based on the Bristol Orion jet. This was the Bristol Orpheus, and although Hooker had expected Shorts in Belfast to take up the bait, it was Hawker in Surrey who became interested. A week before he paid a visit to the 1957 Paris Air Show, Hawker’s legendary chief designer Sydney Camm (1893–1966) dropped a note to Stanley Hooker at Bristol:
17th May 1957
Dear Dr Hooker,
I saw recently a film on the Ryan V.T.O aircraft and it started me wondering whether we ought to give more attention to this possible development. I have also heard that you have given some consideration to it and I should very much like to have your views. My own view is that before we can go very far we would have to have in mind the practical application of the aircraft; in other words it could not be merely a research aircraft.
There are many aspects, of course, of this development. Up to the present I have thought that the arrangement in which engines are carried merely for take-off and landing would be bad for the overall efficiency but Rolls, on the other hand, have suggested that this is probably the best arrangement.
I am sorry I omitted to discuss this with you when I was down at Bristol. Perhaps you can drop me a line about it.
Best wishes,
S. Camm
Camm was to British military aircraft what Hooker was to the engines that sent some of the very best of them soaring skywards. Nurturing his career through the Windsor Model Aeroplane Club, by 1925 Camm was chief designer for the Hawker Aircraft Company. To the genius of Camm, we owe the Fury, Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest, Sea Fury, Sea Hawk and Hunter fighters. Now he was about to add what was to become the Harrier to this pantheon of inspired, highly effective and quintessentially British military aircraft.
At the Paris Air Show, Camm was taken around by Major Gerard Morel, the French representative of Bristol and Hawker, who asked him if he knew what Hooker and his colleagues were up to. This piqued Camm’s interest further. When he returned to Kingston, Hooker had sent him a brochure of the proposed Bristol BE.53 VTOL engine. Camm was not altogether convinced. He doubted Bristol’s claim that the engine would develop 11,000 lbs of thrust and, because of this, he thought it would be best fitted to a small STOL aircraft, although he was unsure quite what that aircraft might be. In any event, he sent one of his young senior design engineers, Ralph Hooper, to Bristol to see what was up and what Hawker might do with this undoubtedly interesting proposition.
This correspondence and these trips were made at the very same time as Duncan Sandys, the newly appointed minister of defence in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, was defending his White Paper on Defence in Parliament. Aiming to cut £100 million from Britain’s defence budget, Sandys’s Defence: Outline of Future Policy took careful aim at the RAF and the aircraft industry.
‘We are unquestionably moving toward a time when fighter aircraft will be increasingly replaced by guided missiles and V-bombers by ballistic rockets,’ the White Paper stated, adding soothingly, ‘but all that will not happen overnight. The introduction of these new weapons will be a gradual process, extending over a good number of years, and even then there will still remain a very wide variety of roles for which manned aircraft will continue to be needed.’
Would they? In fact, the Sandys report led to the cancellation of several key military aircraft projects, including Hawker’s supersonic P.1121 fighter, a promising successor to the superb and best-selling Hunter. In the event, only the English Electric P.1, the glorious and long-lived Mach 2 Lightning interceptor, was allowed to go ahead because work on the project was far advanced. The Lightning had made its maiden flight in April 1957, the same month the Defence White Paper was announced to the House of Commons, and it would have been very expensive to cancel it at this late stage. The only other aircraft approved was the TSR-2 (Tactical Strike and Reconnaissance Mach 2), a potentially very fine aircraft indeed developed jointly by English Electric and Vickers Armstrong. This project was to be cancelled in 1965 by Harold Wilson’s Labour government, which preferred instead to buy American McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers to the detriment of British industry and its workers – the latter were only rarely a Labour priority – and a few British Blackburn Buccaneer strike aircraft. Furthermore, the decision to buy Phantoms was only made after the Wilson administration had ordered and then cancelled swing-wing General Dynamics F-111 bombers from the United States. Huge sums had to be paid in compensation.
It is possible to see the logic of the Defence White Paper. How could fighters be of any use against nuclear missiles, and what fighters would there be to prosecute any kind of war if a single Soviet bomber got through to West Germany and dropped an H-bomb? At my London primary school in the 1960s, we used to sing these words to the tune of ‘Ten Green Bottles’:
Ten little H-bombs hanging from a wall,
Ten little H-bombs hanging from a wall,
And if one little H-bomb should accidentally fall,
There’ll be no more H-bombs and no blooming wall.
Recalling a well-known post-war Pepsodent toothpaste ad, older children had sung:
You’ll wonder where your mouth has gone
When you brush your teeth with Atom bomb.
However, as future Paris air shows at Le Bourget were to prove, such apprehensions did nothing to stop either the Soviet Union or the United States showing off one new advanced supersonic jet after the other. In 1961, the United States stole the limelight with a line-up of fighters and fighter-bombers that included the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom, Republic F-105 Thunderchief, Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and Vought F-8 Crusader. The North American A-5 Vigilante, a carrier-based strike and reconnaissance aircraft, also put in an appearance, while a menacing USAF Convair B-58A Hustler strategic bomber capable of Mach 2 flew to Paris across the Atlantic in just three-and-a-half hours.
If the cancellation of prized British supersonic projects that were also essential for the cash flow of aircraft companies like Hawker wasn’t bad enough, the government went a step further and pressurized the industry into mergers. As a direct result of the 1957 White Paper, English Electric, Bristol and Vickers Armstrong became the British Aircraft Corporation in 1960, while Hawker Siddeley subsumed Blackburn, de Havilland and Folland. The aero-engine divisions of Armstrong Siddeley and Bristol had merged the year before to form Bristol Siddeley, only to be taken over by Rolls-Royce in 1966. By this time, more than 70,000 skilled jobs had been lost.
The year 1957, then, was not exactly the best time for a hard-pressed British aircraft company with an illustrious past but an uncertain future to embark on a revolutionary new fighter aircraft. Remarkably, and despite Duncan Sandys and his White Paper, cuts and mergers, Hawker’s VTOL jet project was to triumph in adversity, and given what became its fifty-year history, forty-one of these in front-line service with the RAF, the Harrier was to score a great victory over political short-termism.
Appraisal of the Sandys review by those who love aircraft has, perhaps, always been as emotional as rational. Aspects of the report did, though, make a certain sense: Bloodhound missiles might well, for example, have provided a surer and more economical means of shooting down Soviet bombers over Britain than scrambled jet fighters. But, given the technologies of the time, the White Paper was at best over-optimistic, and it is only now, some five-and-a-half decades later, that the world’s military is contemplating, with some fervour, future generations of remotely controlled fighters and bombers. The controversial deployment of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) or drones like the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper is just the start.
As it was, Sandys was to be disappointed since, rather annoyingly, manned aircraft continued to prove themselves useful instruments of war. And just as his review was discredited, so too, in due course, was he, when Lonrho, a company of which he was chairman, was found to have bribed a number of African companies and also to have broken sanctions against Ian Smith’s Rhodesia after the former Hurricane and Spitfire pilot made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, breaking away from Britain. Sandys was also implicated in the notorious, and rather hilarious, Headless Man Affair of 1963, which involved a set of Polaroid snaps taken in 1957 with a Ministry of Defence camera, showing Margaret Campbell, the duchess of Argyll, naked save for three strings of pearls, fellating a naked man, his head out of shot, while a second naked man
masturbated behind him. Sandys was accused of being the ‘headless man’. But all this was not before, in a great blow to British pride, Sandys had given two fingers to the RAF and announced the abolition of Fighter Command itself, although this was delayed until it was merged with Bomber Command in 1968 to form Strike Command.
Aside from furthering his ministerial career by making budgetary cuts, it is hard to see quite what Sandys expected Britain, and indeed NATO, to gain ultimately from the 1957 Defence White Paper. Cancellations of what may well have been excellent aircraft depleted Britain’s aircraft industry of money, talent and skills. To his credit, Sandys introduced the Clean Air Act of 1956, established the Green Belts, now threatened by David Cameron’s coalition government in the 2010s, and formed the Civic Trust – he was keen on historic architecture and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1968, although his government had been responsible for the wilful and unforgivable demolition of the Euston Arch. Yet he did more than many other politicians to undermine an aircraft industry bristling with fresh ideas in the 1950s. That the Harrier – a resounding British success – ever got into the air was something of a miracle. There was more than a grain of truth to Sydney Camm’s famous dictum, stated at the time of the cancellation of the TSR-2, that ‘All modern aircraft have four dimensions: space, length, height and politics.’
Camm might have added that he was saddened, although not at all surprised, by the ‘politics’. In 2009, history was to repeat itself in comments reminiscent of Sandys’s White Paper on Defence made by Quentin Davies, Minister for Defence Equipment and Support, at an Unmanned Air Systems exhibition held that summer at the Ministry of Defence in London. ‘My own working assumption,’ Davies told his audience, ‘is that we certainly need the manned combat aircraft and are investing in some very good ones at the moment… that will take us through to the 2030s, but beyond that I think the name of the game will be UAVs.’
Harrier Page 4