Picking up on the NATO specification, the P.1150 duly became the P.1154 and won the competition. In doing so, it also put the nose of French manufacturers and politicians out of joint. They refused to support the perfidious anglais and, without international co-operation, the NATO project fell apart. At home, the situation, which might have been rescued through domestic orders for the very promising P.1154, had only worsened when the RAF and the Royal Navy disagreed over its specification. The RAF wanted a fighter as per the NATO specification, one that would replace the single-seat Hawker Hunter, while the Royal Navy was adamant that what it needed was a carrier-based high-altitude two-seat fighter to replace the Sea Vixen. This disagreement led, ultimately, to the Navy pressing successfully for the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom, while the RAF continued to root for the P.1154, which had been worked up in detail by chief designer John Fozard and chief engineer Barry Laight with the new Blackburn division of Hawker Siddeley.
The RAF named it the Harrier. It was immensely sophisticated, with advanced digital avionic, navigation and attack systems; and indeed, it was one of the first military aircraft that was as much a ‘system’ as a jet-powered flying machine with guns attached. It was designed to be easy to service – the powerful BS.100 engine could be unplugged and removed from beneath the fuselage – while its structure made use of lightweight titanium and bonded honeycomb panelling and other components. The engine’s main functions were controlled electronically, while the aircraft was equipped with both auto-stabilization and autopilot, two of the measures aimed at reducing the workload of pilots, who would now be more able to concentrate on missions and combat rather than on the well-being of their aerial mount. Tests, meanwhile, proved that the BS.100 was reliable and able to generate a considerable maximum thrust of 35,900 lbs.
Understandably excited by the prospect, the RAF envisaged eight operational squadrons of Mach 2 P.1154 Harriers based in Britain, Germany, the Middle East and the Far East. Flying as V/STOL aircraft from conventional bases, and capable of carrying an impressive payload of weapons, the supersonic Harrier would also have been flown from roads, forest clearings and other forward bases. With a folding nose, it would also have been able to operate from carriers – if, that is, the Royal Navy were ever to change its mind about the aircraft. The P.1154 was, in effect, the Lockheed Martin F-35B of its day, a supersonic V/STOL fighter designed to do more or less exactly what its twenty-first-century successor will be able to do when, and if, it goes into service with the RAF from 2018 and the Royal Navy from 2020. With the P.1154, Hawker and Britain were well ahead of the international game. Wing assemblies and fuselage jigs were fabricated at Kingston. Hawker expected to supply the RAF with 157 single-seat P.1154s and twenty-five two-seat trainers.
In one of its last gasps, the Conservative government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home announced that orders would be placed for the new aircraft. A few months later, the Tories were out and Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government cancelled the P.1154 in February 1965. Thousands of jobs were lost, as was Britain’s lead in supersonic V/STOL military design. It was not a great moment for British aviation, but that’s politics, and economics. Labour had no particular animus against Hawker; it was a matter of cost, although a case of short-sightedness, too. Britain’s loss was to be America’s gain. It had been a truly fascinating few years, with Britain pioneering, developing and realizing a technology that could have been a world-beater, and doing so well ahead of the Americans, French and Russians. Indeed, confidence in VTOL and V/STOL design was riding so high in those years that, at much the same time as Hooper, Fozard and Laigh were developing the P.1154, Armstrong Whitworth was busy at work on its AW.681, a long-range four-engine V/STOL military transport aircraft to replace the piston-engined Blackburn Beverley and Handley Page Hastings. In later stages of the design, the AW.681 was shown with four Pegasus turbofans, each rated at 18,000 lbs of thrust, and with vectored nozzles, mounted on pylons under the high wings. It would have been the most advanced aircraft of its type, with a range of over 4,000 miles and capable of carrying an impressive payload and flying as fast as a Boeing 747. To see an AW.681 take off vertically would have been a thrilling, not to say startling, experience. A prototype was scheduled to fly in 1966, and Armstrong Whitworth was confident of orders for fifty aircraft. In the event, the Wilson government cancelled this remarkable aeroplane on the same day as the P.1154. The decision led to the closure of the Armstrong Whitworth factory in Coventry and the loss of five thousand skilled jobs.
The RAF, though, was not going to throw in the towel and, undaunted by the loss of the P.1154, it now suggested that the P.1127 should be developed into a combat aircraft. The P.1127 was about to turn into the Kestrel.
CHAPTER 2
KESTREL BREEDS HARRIER
‘Drei hundert und zwei!’ (‘Three hundred and two!’) It was 1965 and these words were uttered by the dry-humoured Colonel Gerhard Barkhorn as he walked away from XS689, the Kestrel jump jet he had dropped too soon from the hover and badly damaged at RAF West Raynham, Norfolk.
Barkhorn was the Luftwaffe’s second-highest-scoring ace of the Second World War, with 301 ‘kills’, and along with fellow top guns and Jagdgeschwader 52 (JG52) veterans Günther Rall, Johannes Steinhoff and Erich Hartmann, he had been asked in the mid-1950s to assist in the formation of a new West German Bundesluftwaffe. Now Barkhorn was one of several German, American and British pilots who formed the Tripartite Evaluation Squadron (TES), and he could mischievously claim the Kestrel as the 302nd Allied aircraft he had brought down.
The TES had emerged from talks held at first between the British and German governments and then with the MDWP and Americans. The idea was to test the P.1127 in the role of a NATO fighter since it was well ahead of US VTOL aircraft, and its potential was being recognized, even if slowly. For once, one of the heroes of the hour was a politician, Peter Thorneycroft (1909–84), a former Royal Artillery officer educated at Eton and the Royal Military Academy, Greenwich, and Minister for Aviation in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government of 1957–63. It was Thorneycroft who took on the tricky negotiations between the German and British governments and armed services and, as a result, helped the P.1127 turn into the Kestrel and so prepared the nest for the Harrier in years to come. Meanwhile, the new civilian head of MWDP, Larry Levy, was soon lobbying vigorously for a NATO squadron of combat-capable P.1127s.
The formation of the TES, funded equally by the three participating nations, achieved two important things. It changed the role of the P.1127 from that of an experimental aircraft to a potential front-line fighter, and it put the Hawker jump jet into the hands of American pilots who were to assure the future of the Harrier for decades to come. In June 1962, nine modified P.1127s had been ordered for the planned international squadron. Equipped with a more powerful Pegasus 5, producing 15,500 lbs of thrust, the new aircraft were different in so many ways from the original P.1127s that they deserved a designation of their own: Kestrel FGA.1 (Fighter Ground Attack Mk 1). Aside from the more potent engine, the Kestrel was readily distinguishable from the P.1127 by its larger, swept-back wing, longer fuselage and higher tail.
Speaking to the BBC years later, John Fozard said that the brief from the Hawker management was to make a much better aircraft than the P.1127 while making as few changes as possible to the specification and keeping the budget to a minimum:
Well, we changed about 93.5 per cent of the drawings, and I don’t regret one drawing change because with the experience we had with the ‘Eleven Twenty-Seven’ [and] the Kestrel… we got a really proven, been-through-the-fire, operational aircraft that went into service exactly on schedule in 1969.
That aircraft, of course, was the Harrier.
The TES was created on paper in 1963 and formed in the autumn of the following year. It made its first flight on 1 April 1965, while the Kestrel itself had first flown in March 1964. The squadron was led by Wing Commander David Scrimgeour and had a real kestrel as a mascot. Born in 1927 and joini
ng the RAF two months too late to serve in the Second World War, Scrimgeour had experience with the Hawker Tempest and Hunter, de Havilland Vampire and Venom, and the Gloster Meteor. He flew ninety-eight TES test flights and in 1970 was appointed commander of RAF Wildenrath, where he oversaw the introduction of Harriers in West Germany.
In 1956, Scrimgeour had been posted to the US Air Force Base at Nellis, Nevada, as part of a military exchange programme, where he flew F-86 Sabre and F-100 Super Sabre jets. British and American pilots had worked in close collaboration since the entry of the US into the Second World War in 1941, and they would continue to do so in the decades ahead, flying Harriers in combat in Afghanistan until 2010, when the RAF jets were axed, leaving the US Marines to fight on with their McDonnell Douglas AV-8B Harriers. The US Marines, however, had not been asked to join the TES, even though it was they who were to make the Harrier very much their particular weapon of choice.
By November 1965, TES pilots had made 930 flights with the Kestrel. The squadron went quiet after that, although it was not formally disbanded until April 1966. Its Kestrels had flown to and from RAF Bircham Newton, Norfolk – closed the following year – and had landed and taken off from the abandoned airfield at North Pickenham and a field called Rabey’s Wood. They were also seen emerging from trees and launching simulated ground attacks in the surreal landscape of the Stanford Battle Area, the immense Army training base near Thetford. This had been created in 1942, as the British and American armies prepared for D-Day, and had involved the evacuation of six villages. A Second World War ‘Nazi’ village was duly constructed on the site and much later, in 2009, an ‘Afghan’ village complete with a mosque and marketplace inhabited by Afghan nationals and former Gurkhas. Largely out of bounds to the public, this is where several memorable scenes in Dad’s Army, the evergreen BBC TV comedy, were filmed between 1968 and 1977; it can be visited just before Christmas each year when a carol service, with music provided by the Royal Anglian Regiment, is held at St Mary’s Tofts, a medieval church which is now surrounded by barbed-wire fencing but had been extended and restored with glorious aplomb by the Victorian Gothic Revival architect Augustus Welby Pugin.
The Kestrel was unarmed, although the TES did fit practice bombs to wing pylons designed to carry long-range fuel tanks. Nose cameras were fitted to record and evaluate the extensive range of tests made, from vertical take-offs and landings in demanding locations to simulated ground attacks. With the tests complete, six TES Kestrels were sold to the US military at a knockdown price – a portent of what was to follow when the RAF’s Harriers were withdrawn forty-five years later. Designated XV-6A, they proved immediately popular with the US Marine Corps. In April 1966, a Kestrel was operated successfully from the deck of the 13,600-ton commando assault ship USS Raleigh. Commissioned in 1962, the Raleigh was named after Sir Walter Raleigh, who had attempted, unsuccessfully, to colonize North America in the 1580s, and decommissioned in 1991 after serving in the First Gulf War, in which Marine Corps AV-8Bs were to see extensive action. Flights on and off the USS Independence, a 60,000-ton aircraft carrier commissioned in 1958 and decommissioned forty years later in 1998, followed in May.
So keen, in fact, were US Marine officers to fly the jump jet that in September 1968 a pair of them turned up unannounced at the Hawker pavilion at the Farnborough Air Show to watch the new Harrier perform its party tricks to the usual adoring crowd. They asked if they could have a go. As Lieutenant General Tom Miller recalled years later:
We had not had any experience of asking foreign countries to fly their airplanes before, and when we mentioned it, there was a number of questions as to how much flight experience we’d had of all kinds of airplanes and whether we felt that we were capable of flying it. We felt that certainly there was not any problem for us flying it; it was just convincing the British that we were capable of flying it.
We had hoped we could, and fortunately on a Saturday next to the last day of Farnborough, Mr Bill Bedford came up to us and informed us that we had been approved to fly the airplanes, and we had originally thought if we could get two or three flights each, that would be really all we could ask for. Well, Mr Bedford apologized to some extent that they could only give us ten flights each. So we kind of swallowed and said thank you very much and accepted.
The US Marines have never stopped loving the Harrier. And yet, when the Kestrels, or XV-6As, arrived in America, they were pitted against two hopeful homespun VTOL aircraft, the Lockheed XV-4 Hummingbird and the Ryan XV-5 Vertifan. Two Vertifans were built, one for the military and one for NASA. The two-seat delta-wing aircraft was powered by a pair of General Electric J85 turbojets, each providing 3,000 lbs of thrust; these were used in both vertical and forward flight. In VTOL mode, the engines drove three large fans concealed by what looked like giant garbage-can lids, in the wings and nose of the aircraft. Generating a combined 16,000 lbs of thrust, the fans had no difficulty in lifting the Ryan XV-5 off the ground and maintaining the aircraft in a hover. The problem, though, lay in the fact that, together, fans, ducting and turbines were space-consuming and, if this was to be the basis for a small VTOL fighter, then the resulting aircraft would have little room for fuel, weapons and stores. The fan, however, was a perfectly good idea and was to reappear in the Lockheed Martin F-35B sixty years on. Both XV-5s were responsible for the death of test pilots – Lou Everett in 1965 and Bob Tittle the following year – although tests continued until 1971.
The Hummingbird was a failure. Both prototype aircraft crashed, the first on 10 June 1964, killing its pilot. Theoretically, the downward thrust of this twin-jet aircraft was to have been increased by augmentor ejectors activated by opening large vents in the top and bottom of the fuselage. Although the first aircraft achieved transitional flight, it had been a touch-and-go affair. Its downward thrust of just 7,500 lbs was far less than half that of the Kestrel or, indeed, of the Ryan Vertifan. The project was dropped after the second crash in 1969.
Problematic, and even downright dangerous, neither of these US VTOL prototypes had the obvious competence, nor anything like the performance, of the Kestrel. And as films, photographs and the surviving XV-5 on display at the Fort Rucker Aviation Museum, Alabama demonstrate, they were awkward machines: the Kestrel was much more a case of what looks right is right. During their spell with TES, Kestrel pilots had discovered what was to be the Harrier’s trump card in aerial combat. This was ‘vectored manoeuvring’, or what pilots call ‘viffing’: by rotating the nozzles in forward flight, the aircraft can be made to perform stunts denied to its rivals and enemies. It can jump, and even brake to what feels like a halt, in the air, allowing faster interceptor jets to pass by and turning the Harrier from pursued to pursuer.
Upon completion of testing and evaluation, conducted at Edwards Air Force Base, California, Fort Campbell, Kentucky and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, two XV-6As were handed over to NASA for further research. In 1974, one of these aircraft, XS689, was presented to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Washington DC. American interest in the Hawker jump jet had, in fact, preceded the formation of TES, and it had been this early interest that had encouraged British officials to support the international squadron that brought Colonel Gerhard Barkhorn to Norfolk twenty years after the fall of the Third Reich.
When, in early 1961, Peter Thorneycroft had been encouraging the Germans, Hawker was already in discussion with the US military. A senior American military official journeyed to Kingston upon Thames in May 1962 to discuss a proposal whereby, if the P.1127 proved to be a better bet than the Lockheed and Ryan VTOL jets, the US could well be interested in working with Hawker, but on the strict understanding that the P.1127s in service with the US armed forces – as many as a thousand – would be built in the United States. This was exciting stuff, and Hawker was soon holding talks with Northrop, who sent a team to Kingston in July 1963 that, significantly, went on to Germany to view US military operations there. The United States had acquired very few foreign aircr
aft since the First World War, when American airmen had flown machines like Avro’s 504K along with French Nieuport 28s, SPAD VIIs and XIIIs, and later Fokker D.VIIs requisitioned from the defeated Germans. In the jet age, the English Electric Canberra had been built under licence by Martin in Maryland; as the B-57, it was to fly extensively in action, notably in Vietnam, while two survivors owned by NASA continue to fly research missions over Afghanistan. The Americans had become used to selling their aircraft around the world. The P.1127, though, appeared to be about to change what had become almost a US military creed, if not exactly an official policy.
The RAF, meanwhile, had viewed the Kestrel as a stop-gap on the way to the supersonic P.1154. When the latter was cancelled in February 1965, it was time for the Kestrel to evolve into the Harrier. A part of that evolution was a further upgrade of the Pegasus engine. One of the Kestrels – XS693 – was selected as the test bed for the Pegasus 6. With the promise of 19,000 lbs of thrust, the latest version of the Bristol Siddeley engine offered the level of performance deemed necessary by the RAF.
On 21 September 1967, Squadron Leader Hugh Rigg was flying the uprated Kestrel from Bristol to the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment (A&AEE) at RAF Boscombe Down, Wiltshire. A top-secret testing and research centre, Boscombe Down is close to the Army’s Salisbury Plain Training Area and to that far older secret, Stonehenge. As Rigg closed in on Salisbury Plain, and with Stonehenge clearly in sight, the new engine decided to pack up. Once he had decided, correctly, that there was nothing else he could do to save the aircraft, Rigg – an experienced display pilot – ejected at 200 feet.
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