The first to do so was Bill Bedford. Born in Loughborough, Leicestershire, in 1920, Alfred William Bedford had been training as a steeplejack when the Second World War broke out. He was taken on as a sergeant pilot with the RAF’s 605 City of Warwick Squadron in 1941, flying Hawker Hurricanes. In the later stages of the war, he was based in Burma, India and Ceylon, and flew North American P-51 Mustangs and Republic P-47 Thunderbolts. A flying instructor with the Empire Test Pilots School at the end of the war, he had a brief spell as a test pilot with the RAE at Farnborough and the National Gas Turbine Establishment, before joining Hawker Siddeley in 1951, where he became the company’s chief test pilot five years later, a position he held until 1967, when he went into sales and marketing, retiring in 1983 as British Aerospace’s regional representative in South-East Asia. A record-breaking long-distance glider pilot, Bedford was renowned for his ability to send jets into the most dramatic and prolonged spins and to demonstrate, with what appeared to be consummate ease, how best to guide them back into level flight – although he did once come perilously close to the ground in a Hunter at the end of a dive that had seen the aircraft spin eighteen times.
Bedford, whose one serious wartime injury was caused when a lorry in which he was a passenger crashed, liked to say that the only truly dangerous situations he had been in were those involving his being driven in a car – or lorry – by someone else. Almost comically, he turned up for the maiden flight of the P.1127 on 21 October 1960 with one of his legs in plaster. Someone had driven him into a tree. Roy Orbison reached the Number One spot in the charts that week with ‘Only the Lonely’; but Bedford was not the type to go through heartbreaks over such a trifle as a broken leg when he was about to take the Number One spot in aviation history. His apparent insouciance and evident stoicism call to mind the story of Lord Uxbridge’s leg. Henry Paget, 2nd Earl of Uxbridge, was a cavalry and artillery commander at the Battle of Waterloo. After the eighth or ninth horse was shot from under him, his right leg was hit by a French cannon-ball. He was sitting, on horseback, next to the Duke of Wellington. ‘By God, Sir, I’ve lost my leg,’ said Uxbridge. ‘By God, Sir, so you have,’ replied the duke as the battle raged around them. Uxbridge would have fought on, but had to retire for his leg to be amputated without anaesthetic or antiseptic. The only comment he is said to have made during the surgical procedure was: ‘The knife appears to be somewhat blunt.’ Recovered, he announced: ‘Who would not lose a leg for such a victory?’ Uxbridge remained a serving soldier and rose to the rank of field marshal.
It was, then, a very British moment when Bill Bedford arrived at Dunsfold. He was declared fit, although restricted to ‘tethered hovering only’. This, though, is all that was needed on that momentous autumn day in the heart of England’s Home Counties. Bedford recalls looking at a ‘rather ugly aeroplane’ perched on the steel grid of a hover pit dug to disperse the downwards thrust of the exhausts, which, if directed just inches below the P.1127, might easily upset its balance. Then, after settling into the cockpit and with the engine spooled up, Bedford opened the throttle progressively, and ‘with a certain amount of uncertainty, the aircraft erratically got itself just into the air’.
Safely tethered, the experimental aircraft was doing what Camm, Hooper and Fozard had promised themselves it would. It was hovering, although just inches from the ground and tied like a restless dog to a kennel in a back yard. And, like an unruly hound, the VTOL jet needed taming. Hooper and Fozard watched as the bobbing P.1127 did its best during those early tests to topple over and to turn its tail into the wind, among other tricks. There was much to sort out, especially with the air intakes, and improvements were now designed and applied continuously as the P.1127 progressed towards the key moment when it would break free of its tethers and rise high enough to perform the all-important transition from vertical to forward flight. Of these early days, Bedford’s number two, Hugh Merewether, remarked that it was rather like ‘being a child trying to master learning to ride a bicycle in a corridor’: in other words, all rather wobbly, so Hawker assigned the engineer Robin Balmer to look after ‘stability and control’.
Even then, that first flight had been a very marginal affair; as John Farley, a test pilot with the RAE in the early days of the P.1127, revealed in a lecture given in 2000 to the Munich branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society, ‘about 700 lbs of electrical equipment, cabin conditioning, instruments and undercarriage components’ had to be stripped from the airframe before the aircraft would lift itself into the hover. Furthermore, the P.1127 and its first tentative hops were severely compromised by the thirty-five-minute hover life imposed on the engine. After that, the engine required a £60,000 rebuild; there were no flight simulators in 1960, so every hover was a costly adventure.
The more cerebral of the two P.1127 test pilots, Hugh Merewether had been born to British parents in Cape Town in 1924. He studied engineering at the University of Cape Town before joining the South African Navy. He transferred to the Royal Navy and for five years from 1948 worked under Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the Dambusters’ ‘bouncing bomb’ along with the massive Tall Boy and Grand Slam free-fall weapons dropped on Germany by Lancasters in the late stages of the Second World War, and later the pioneer of swing-wing aircraft. Wallis was head of research and development at Vickers Armstrong and had also developed the amazingly robust geodesic structures of the Wellesley and Wellington bombers; he and his fellow boffins shared offices in the Edwardian clubhouse of the defunct Brooklands Racing Circuit, Surrey, where in its interwar heyday many an aero-engined racing car had roared around at reckless speeds.
While working for Wallis, Merewether joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve, flying Gloster Meteors from Biggin Hill with 615 County of Surrey Squadron. His squadron commander was none less than the celebrated Neville Duke, the Tonbridge-born Spitfire ace with twenty-seven ‘kills’ to his credit. From 1951, Duke was Hawker’s chief test pilot; in 1953, the year of the queen’s coronation, he broke the world air speed record – achieving 727.68 mph past Littlehampton on England’s south coast – at the controls of a bright-red Hawker Hunter. By then, he was also president of the Eagle Club, founded by the Eagle comic, and was very possibly the model for the equally legendary, if fictional, Colonel Dan Dare, Space Fleet’s unflappable Pilot of the Future. It seems right; after all, Duke and his successors at Hawker really were testing the aircraft that future generations were to fly for several decades to come and with the P.1127 they were taking a leap – or hop, skip and jump – into entirely new territory.
The first conventional flight was made, successfully, from RAE Bedford on 13 March 1961, although on these early flights the aircraft, balanced on their tentative undercarriages, tended to skid around the runway. Transition from vertical to forward flight was made on 8 September 1961, just weeks after the Berlin Wall was rushed up around that city by the East German government. It had certainly been a momentous Cold War year, and one that had seen major advances in new technology. On 27 April, the twenty-seven-year-old Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man to travel into space. On 25 May, President John F. Kennedy had declared that the United States would land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. And on 30 October, a Soviet Tupolev Tu-95V ‘Bear’ long-range bomber, flown by Major Andrei Durnovtsev from a base in the Kola Peninsula in the far north-west of Russia, had released a 100-megaton H-bomb nicknamed the ‘Tsar Bomb’ over Mityushikha Bay on the Arctic Sea. It was the biggest explosive device ever activated.
The Harrier was truly the product of disturbing and even apocalyptic times. Earlier in 1961, an invasion of Cuba planned by Cuban counter-revolutionaries, funded and organized by the CIA and approved some while before by President Eisenhower, was stopped at the Bay of Pigs on the island’s south coast by loyalist forces led personally by Fidel Castro. His rather limited arsenal included Hawker Sea Furies, two of which performed well against enemy shipping and ground forces. Today, one is on display at the Playa Giron Museum, Matanzas, the oth
er at Havana’s Museum of the Revolution. The upshot of the Bay of Pigs episode was the establishment of Soviet nuclear-missile bases in Cuba. In October 1962, this prompted the Cuban Missile Crisis when President Kennedy, demanding the removal of the missiles, squared up to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. For more than a moment it really did look as if Armageddon were about to be unleashed on the world and that Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) would be the order of the day. Wisely, Khrushchev backed down. The Americans might well have unleashed the nuclear dogs of war and seen the developed world turned into heaps of radioactive ash.
Meanwhile, in December 1961 the second P.1127 prototype had broken the sound barrier, recording Mach 1.2 in a dive. Bill Bedford lost the aircraft a few days later, on its thirty-fifth flight, after a problem with an air intake caused him to lose control. He ejected safely; the aircraft was destroyed. But Bedford’s most spectacular accident, caught in full glare of the cameras and in front of 110,000 spectators, came later, with XP831 at the 1963 Paris Air Show. The nozzles refused to vector and Bedford came down with an almighty thump. ‘As I was completing my turn to straighten out,’ he recalled years later, ‘suddenly I found the aeroplane plummeting earthwards, completely out of control, and I arrived ignominiously with a major crash on the concrete platform that had been prepared for our competitor. [There was] dust, dirt, wheels, everything, flying all over the place, and I recall that the ground was much closer than it normally was when I got out of the aeroplane because the undercarriage had been amputated.’ Rather like Lord Uxbridge’s leg. The P.1127 was restored, but did not fly again; today XP831 is on display, suspended from the roof of a top floor in the Science Museum, London.
Other serious accidents were caused by engine failure. On 30 October 1962, Merewether crash-landed at RAF Tangmere with no power and the aircraft on fire. He could have ejected, but was keen to get the P.1127 down safely to find out what had gone wrong. On 19 March 1965, he was diving through 28,000 feet when the engine of his P.1127 failed. Just able to glimpse the RAF airfield on Thorney Island, a peninsula jutting into the sea at Chichester, West Sussex, he glided the aircraft down to a safe emergency landing.
Four more P.1127s were ordered. These were modified progressively, with the last of them, XP976, equipped with the latest Pegasus 5, boasting 15,000 lbs of thrust and the swept-back wings that would be carried through to the Harrier. Just, though, as it was proving its potential, gaining a good press and wooing crowds at air shows at home and abroad, the P.1127 project was nearly brought to a halt. The rival aircraft that Bill Bedford had referred to after making his heavy landing at Le Bourget in 1963 was the prototype of the Dassault Mirage IIIV, a sleek and beautiful supersonic machine designed in response to a NATO specification issued in August 1961 for a Mach 2 VTOL fighter. Working with Rolls-Royce, Dassault transformed the first of its Mirage prototypes into the Balzac V (the V standing for vertical), a test bed for the NATO fighter. Unlike the P.1127, the Dassault’s eight RB.108 engines were fixed; they would lift the aircraft off the ground, but forward flight was to be made with a Bristol Orpheus. The Balzac V first hovered in October 1962 and made its first transition flight the following March. The production prototype, the Mirage IIIV, was a much larger aircraft equipped with eight Rolls-Royce RB.162-1 VTOL engines and a Pratt & Whitney JTF10 turbofan, modified in France by SNECMA. The first IIIV made the transition from hover to forward flight in March 1966; the second prototype, equipped with a more powerful main engine, reached Mach 2.04 in level flight, only to be lost in an accident in November 1966. This loss, along with the two fatalities that had occurred during the testing of the Balzac V, prompted the cancellation of the project. Even if the Dassault aircraft had proved more successful than it did, its sheer complexity and nine engines would have made it unpopular and costly in service.
Other attempts at supersonic V/STOL fighters were made in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, although both projects were cancelled after tests that proved to be at best inconclusive, at worst disappointing. The first of the two was the EWR VJ-101C, designed and built by EWR, a consortium comprising Heinkel, Messerschmitt and Bölkow. The sleek aircraft was intended to be a replacement for the F-104G Starfighter. It boasted four Rolls-Royce RB.145 turbojets, each with 2,750 lbs of thrust, housed in a pair of tilting nacelles on each wing-tip, backed up by a further pair of RB.145s in the fuselage. Although complex compared with the P.1127, the VJ-101C was certainly fast; first flown on 10 April 1963, the first of the two aircraft built, X-1, became the first VTOL aircraft to break the sound barrier, even if this was achieved in a shallow dive. In September 1964, X-1 rolled uncontrollably as it attempted a vertical take-off. The pilot ejected with the aircraft just ten feet off the ground; although injured, he survived. The second prototype, X-2, was fitted with afterburners increasing the thrust of the wing-tip engines to 3,650 lbs. Although these promised high performance, they also generated a considerable degree of heat during vertical take-off and in the hover; ingesting its own hot gases, X-2 crashed while attempting to land on a raised platform. Back at the drawing board, EWR designers proposed a revised version of the aircraft – the VJ-101D – this time without the tilting nacelles, but its engine arrangement with five RB.162 lift engines and two RB.153 lift-cruise engines was complex, and by then the Federal government was unwilling to foot further development costs. The project was cancelled in 1968.
A further attempt was made by VFW (Vereinigte Flugtechnische Werke) which, from 1962, developed the VFW-Fokker VAK-191B. This was to have been a replacement for the Fiat G.91. First flown on 20 September 1971, the subsonic aircraft was lifted by a pair of Rolls-Royce RB-162-81s, each with 5,587 lbs of thrust, and propelled forwards by a single Rolls-Royce/MAN RB-193-12 with 10,150 lbs. Three VAK-191Bs were built, making ninety-one flights between 1971 and 1975, but although they incorporated new developments including fly-by-wire capability, they, too, were complex machines and, in any case, their performance was underwhelming.
It was their over-complicated engine arrangements that dogged the P.1127’s international rivals. The Balzac V, for example, employed much the same engine and nozzle arrangement as the Short SC.1. In 1964, Flight Lieutenant John Farley, who was later to become Hawker’s chief test pilot, was given the opportunity to fly both the SC.1 and the P.1127. Farley was with the Aerodynamics Research Flight at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Bedford at the time; the RAE was keen to compare the performance of the SC.1 and its multiple lift engines with the single-engine and vectored thrust set-up of the P.1127. ‘At the simplest level,’ Farley recalled in a paper he wrote in 2010, ‘both aeroplanes were similar because both were single-seat fixed-wing jet aircraft that could take off and land vertically. Both could fly on their wings, both could hover, both could transition to and from the hover and both used pure jet thrust to achieve this.’
The fundamental difference between the two, according to Farley, was that the SC.1 was very much a research project, while the P.1127 was the product of a company with a long line of highly successful fighter aircraft to its credit; Hawker was always thinking of an aircraft that could be placed into service even though there was no specific military requirement for it. What Farley found in practice was that the SC.1, with so many engines to look after and so much clever technology on board, was ‘demanding to operate and easy to handle, while the P.1127 was easy to operate but had demanding handling’. It took him, Farley wrote, ‘very many flights in the P.1127 before I could climb down the ladder without offering up thanks that I had not bent the thing. Yet after shutting down the SC.1, I always felt relief that it had not suffered one of several nasty failures.’ It was a five-engine aircraft operated by a single pilot, and this certainly felt like four engines too many.
While the SC.1 was like something Dan Dare might fly around Space Fleet headquarters in the then far-distant year 1999 on his way from briefing to spaceship, the P.1127 could be seen, said Farley, as a Hawker Hunter with an extra lever and one or two additional instruments in the cockpit. Bu
t if the pilot should pull the right lever at the wrong time, or the wrong lever at any time, the P.1127 might easily drop to the ground while attempting to fly forwards. Moreover, if while hovering the P.1127 was pointing away from the direction of airflow, the aircraft would turn on its tail as intake drag increased. To solve the problem of P.1127s moving around in circles, Hawker fitted them, and all following Harriers, with a simple wind vane in front of the windscreen to show the pilot where the airflow was coming from. So the P.1127 was, at heart, a simple machine, which made it a far more attractive proposition than the multi-engined Dassault.
The loss of French interest in a Mach 2 VTOL fighter would prove very significant indeed for the development of the Harrier, even if the Mirage IIIV had initially appeared to spell the end of the P.1127. The Dassault had been one of the four shortlisted entries in that 1961 NATO competition to find a fast VTOL fighter that would combine the roles of interception, ground attack and reconnaissance. The other entries were the Fokker-Republic D.24 Alliance, BAC 584 and Hawker P.1154, none of which ever flew, although the P.1154 came close. At Hawker, however, Ralph Hooper had already begun work on a design for a supersonic VTOL fighter, the P.1150. Larger than the P.1127, it would have generated its speed by burning fuel in the plenum chambers between the Pegasus engine and the forward nozzles – a process achieving much the same effect as afterburning in a conventional jet. With the promise of 33,000 lbs of thrust from the new Bristol Siddeley BS.100, the world’s most powerful jet engine, Hooper could look forward to a maximum speed of Mach 1.7 or about 1,300 mph.
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