Neville Duke, Hawker’s former chief test pilot, who lived in a house in the grounds of Dunsfold, was among the first on the scene with his wife, Gwen, nursing the stricken pilot as best they could until an ambulance arrived; but Rosburg was dead. Thirty-five years old, he was a father of four children; at home in the States, his wife Shirley was expecting a fifth. Duke, a charming and modest man, was, along with Johnnie Johnson, one of Britain’s most successful Second World War fighter pilots; he shot down twenty-seven German aircraft, and probably three more, flying American Curtiss Tomahawks and later Spitfires. Not a man to talk about warfare or ‘heroics’, Duke told me that Rosburg’s death had made him think of how much his generation owed the Americans, and how lucky he was to be alive after his worst accident, when in June 1944, as the commanding officer of 145 Squadron in Italy, the engine of his Spitfire Mk VIII was holed by flak. When he tried to bail out, the harness of his parachute caught in the canopy. Hanging upside down from the stricken aircraft, he broke free at the last possible moment; he, and the Spitfire, plunged into Lake Bracciano, twenty miles north-west of Rome. Unable to release himself from the parachute, he was in real danger, but was rescued by two local village boys who swam out from the shore. The villagers looked after the twenty-two-year-old British pilot until he was picked up by advancing American soldiers and driven back to his squadron.
At Dunsfold, a quarter of a century later, Rosburg had fallen foul of the fact that the Harrier was unstable in the hover and at low speeds; he might have been saved had he booted the rudder and turned the aircraft into the wind to allow the ailerons to do their bit to keep the Harrier steady. Perhaps. As we have seen, Harriers were to be fitted soon afterwards with wind vanes in front of the windscreen, a simple and infallible device that made for much safer hovering. When, however, the Harrier went into service in the US, many of its pilots were to die in accidents, putting a strain on what was to remain a special relationship in spite of these casualties. In the Harrier’s first decade of service, twelve US Marine Corps (USMC) pilots were killed, the first on 18 June 1971, when thirty-three-year-old Major Michael J. Ripley, a decorated combat pilot who had flown in Vietnam, crashed into Chesapeake Bay on a test flight from Pax River (US Naval Base Patuxent River, Maryland). The eldest of Ripley’s three sons, Charles, later recalled the excitement of hearing the sound of a Harrier approaching everyday around noon: ‘My father would fly over and he’d tip his wings at us.’
Charles Ripley had, in fact, been speaking to two reporters from the Los Angeles Times, Alan C. Miller and Kevin Sack, who were to win the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for National Journalism with their long, thoroughly researched and well-written three-part feature on the Harrier that had been published the previous year. Miller and Sack tore into the Harrier with gusto, as if determined to end a relationship that their investigations led them to believe was mad, bad and not so much dangerous as deadly. In their opening salvo they wrote:
The Harrier is the most dangerous airplane flying in the US military today. Over the last three decades, it has amassed the highest rate of major accidents of any Air Force, Navy, Army or Marine plane now in service. Forty-five Marines have died in 143 non-combat accidents since the corps bought the so-called jump jet from the British in 1971. More than a third of the fleet has been lost to accidents.
Lesson one seemed to be: never trust the British. ‘The Marines have known for years they were flying a plane bedeviled by mechanical problems… just about anything that could go wrong has gone wrong.’ There was the ‘temperamental engine’, a ‘persistent source of trouble, playing a role in more than half of all Harrier accidents between 1980 and 2001’. According to retired USMC Major Clinton M. Higginbotham, who had spent much of his career maintaining the Harrier, ‘It was just a bad engine from Rolls-Royce.’ In any case, it took 550 man-hours to replace this piece of ‘cantankerous’ British junk compared to the ten man-hours it took to refit an F-16 Fighting Falcon with a proper, all-American General Electric F110. The Harrier’s cost per flight hour in 2001 was $5,351 compared to the $3,871 of a USMC F/A-18C Hornet. ‘The Class A mishap rate for the first model of the Harrier,’ meanwhile, ‘was astronomical – 31.77 accidents per 100,000 hours. Notoriously unstable, it had a propensity for rolling over and slamming into the ground. Well over half were lost to accidents. One tragedy-scarred squadron dubbed the plane “the Widow-Maker”’ – which, of course, is what Bundesluftwaffe pilots, among others, had nicknamed the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. To cap it all, the Harrier was apparently useless in combat, and as Michael O’Hanlon, a defence analyst at the Brookings Institution, told reporters: ‘You can find missions the Harrier can perform, but I question whether any of them are missions only the Harrier can perform.’ As for the very idea of VTOL flight, this was clearly nonsense:
Named after a low-flying marsh hawk [the polar opposite, of course, of a noble, high-flying American mountain eagle], the Harrier has a massive Rolls-Royce engine that supplies 23,800 pounds of thrust through four nozzles that pivot down to produce a shimmering blast of hot air. The thrust can propel the plane off the ground and into a hover, a process pilots compare to balancing an elephant on the head of a pencil.
And what could be more absurd than that?
While there was a distinctly and unnecessarily anti-British tone to their prize-winning article, Miller and Sack did, in fact, identify the several key reasons why the USMC Harrier appeared to be so much more dangerous and so much less effective than its British cousins. The first of these related to maintenance:
[Gunnery Sergeant John Higginbotham,] a senior Harrier mechanic at Cherry Point [North Carolina], said it was not so long ago that, with just three years under his belt, he was the most experienced mechanic in his squadron. In Britain, where maintenance-related mistakes are relatively rare, some Harrier mechanics have worked on the plane for more years than their American counterparts have been alive. Some Marine leaders acknowledge that the Harrier, quite simply, is often too complex for the recent high school graduates who typically maintain it.
Miller and Sack also discovered that all too many USMC pilots flew all too few hours with the Harrier on a regular basis. ‘Investigators looking into the 1981 crash of a Harrier flown by 1st Lt. David S. Noble made a disturbing discovery. He had flown just 7.5 hours in the previous 30 days – half of what the Marines say is needed to fly the Harrier safely.’ Worse still for the future, perhaps:
Retired Lt. Col. John W. Capito, a former Harrier squadron commander, interviewed young pilots for the Harrier Review Panel and learned that many were flying just four to five hours a month right out of flight school. ‘It’s not enough time to fly a Cessna, much less a Harrier,’ Capito said. ‘These guys were getting a third of the flight time they needed and then people were wondering why they get into accidents.’
Perhaps the most revealing line in Miller and Sack’s article was a quote from Susan Page, the widow of Colonel John H. Ditto, the highest-ranking American officer to die in a Harrier, and a pilot with 4,900 hours and two tours of Vietnam in his logbook, for the most part flying A-4 Skyhawks and F-8 Crusaders. In January 1981, with 13.7 flight hours with the Harrier, he lost control in a vertical take-off and ejected into the ground. ‘I would love to think that there was something wrong with that airplane,’ Page told Miller and Sack, ‘love to think that in that heap of metal maybe they missed something wrong with it.’ The implication – and certainly the one the LA Times journalists wanted their readers to draw – was that it was preferable to believe design flaws in a British aircraft had been responsible for Ditto’s death rather than pilot error and, further, that buying British had been a mistake.
At the end of their Harrier-busting mission, Miller and Sack profiled the forty-five USMC pilots who had died flying their ‘lawn dart’. Causes of death included flying after too little sleep, a flashlight dropped into the engine during maintenance, becoming disoriented in fog, taking off in heavy wind, flying into a mountain, the sea, or dense low cloud, a control
stick jammed by a metal hose-connector left in the cockpit, banking too steeply, parachute failure, colliding in mid-air, being struck by lightning, prematurely exploding bombs, an incorrectly maintained engine, a wrong-sized engine component, being shot down over Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm or hit by an Iraqi ground-to-air missile, a broken fan blade, a fractured canopy and crashing in the hover. Sad and sometimes avoidable, this litany of fatal errors and deadly failures does not tell axiomatically of a poorly designed aircraft. Indian Navy pilots were to have an even worse time with the Harrier than the US Marines. Nevertheless, Miller and Sack’s article underlined the fact that too many decent men were dying in training – let alone combat – and enough was enough. Highly trained Harrier pilots, and loving fathers, were surely not meant to be some latter-day equivalent of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Understandably, the passions of bereaved families were fuelled by speculation – or could it be fact? – prompting concerns that the US Marines had been sold one of the world’s very worst aircraft. ‘He felt that most of the pilots he knew were very competent,’ said Robert Van Sickle of his father, Captain Michael R. Van Sickle, who died when his Harrier crashed in 1992 during simulated bombing runs in Kuwait. ‘They were just faced with a machine that was extremely dangerous and hard to control.’
Regardless of whether or not Miller and Sack were suffering from a bout of Anglophobia when they wrote their article, there is no getting away from the fact that the Harrier’s US safety record was poor. This, though, does seem to have been the result of a combination of inadequate and even improper maintenance, and pilot error. The Indian Navy’s safety record with its Sea Harriers was even worse than that of the US Marines with the AV-8B, while the British, Spanish and Italians fared extremely well in comparison. Perhaps Miller and Sack were also – consciously or not – following in the paths of other aggressive and eagle-eyed journalistic campaigns fought in the States against suspect machinery. One only has to think of Ralph Nader’s memorable assault on the Chevrolet Corvair, a rear-engined family sedan that was accused of being ‘The One Car Accident’ in Nader’s ‘Unsafe at any Speed: the Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile’, published in 1965. This was the culmination of a campaign Nader had begun from the late 1950s, attacking the US automobile industry’s inadequate safety record in both scholarly and mainstream magazines, and his subsequent influence on US journalism was both profound and lasting.
Such anxieties about the jump jet had certainly not been entertained by the USMC’s Colonel Tom Miller and Lieutenant Colonel Bud Baker when, packed off to England in 1968 by Major General Keith Barr McCutcheon – himself a highly decorated Marine pilot who had served in the Second World War and the Korean and Vietnam wars, and who had taken a shine to the idea of the British aircraft – they had approached Hawker representatives at that year’s Farnborough Air Show, and blagged ten flights apiece at Dunsfold. Their enthusiastic reports did much to encourage the US Navy to order a batch of twelve aircraft from Hawker the following year using money earmarked for F-4J Phantoms, although the hard work of persuading Congress had been down to McCutcheon.
It had been a huge step for the US military: American was biggest and best, but as there was no American answer to the Harrier, the military establishment gave in. Not only did Bud Baker get to command the first dozen Harriers, which were designated AV-8A, with Marine Attack Squadron 513 based at Yuma, Arizona and flying from USS Guam, a 19,395-ton Iwo Jima-class amphibious assault ship launched in 1963, but Kingston got to build these machines and, by 1976, another 100 aircraft in four further orders. First delivered in 1970–71, the AV-8As were flown out in kit form from England, by Lockheed C-5 Galaxy and Lockheed C-141 Starlifter jet transports, to the McDonnell Douglas plant at St Louis, Missouri, where they were put back together again. The original plan had been to build the AV-8As under licence at St Louis, with Pratt & Whitney supplying American-built Pegasus engines. The relatively small numbers of aircraft involved meant that the costs would have been too high, although the idea was soon to be revived.
Meanwhile, the Harriers were put through their paces at Pax River and aboard USS Guadalcanal, a sister ship to Guam, and the newly commissioned 16,405-ton landing ship or amphibious transport dock Coronado. Both types of ship had been designed with helicopters in mind, yet the AV-8A proved to be a welcome guest. At Pax River, Major Harry W. Blot, the US Harrier project officer, developed the art of ‘viffing’, or vectoring in forward flight, using the Harrier’s nozzles as extremely powerful air brakes. Significantly, the US Harriers were also fitted with the Sidewinder missiles that were to prove so effective in the Falklands War when fired from Royal Navy Sea Harriers.
The US Marines cherished their Harriers, despite a high accident rate, but were soon asking for more power. A gutsier Harrier would be able to carry more bombs, rockets, missiles, guns and fuel. A proposal for a Pegasus 15 promised 24,500 lbs of thrust, but given the engine had a fan blade 2.75 inches too big to fit into the existing Harrier airframe, clearly a bigger aircraft was the answer. With a larger wing, new avionics and plenum chamber burning, the AV-16, as the project became known, would be supersonic and thus an aircraft with appeal to both the US Navy and the Marine Corps. For a moment, it seemed as if the supersonic jump jet Hawker had wanted to build ten years earlier was a real possibility. Cost and politics soon intervened. The US baulked at the idea of paying the entire cost of the development of the AV-16 with Britain getting the benefits for nothing in strictly financial terms, while the question of jobs – who would get to build the supersonic jet and where – was uppermost in the minds of many US politicians and manufacturers. The tentative ‘Joint Advanced Harrier Programme’ was dropped in 1975.
It was, however, resurrected soon afterwards, although in a cheaper and more manageable guise, but only after the British agreed to drop their own plans for an improved Harrier. In August 1981, after much wrangling, Britain agreed to buy the proposed new Mk 2 Harrier – the American AV-8B, the British GR.5 – with McDonnell Douglas manufacturing 60 per cent of the aircraft, measured in terms of man-hours, and British Aerospace making the remaining 40 per cent. As for the engine, the latest version of the Pegasus would be built by both Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce which, by now, had taken over Bristol Siddeley: Rolls-Royce would be responsible for 75 per cent of construction and for final assembly. The aircraft would be completed, ready for delivery, at St Louis, with those destined for the RAF being shipped back across the Atlantic. This was not exactly a case of ‘coals to Newcastle’, but it did mark a fundamental change in the Harrier programme, with the Americans, who had done so much to engender the P.1127 and the AV-8A in the first place, setting the pace and calling the shots from now on, and with the British cast as subcontractors. As it turned out, British personnel involved in the development of the AV-8B found their work much easier in the United States than it had been at home. John Farley, Hawker’s test pilot, recalled:
I didn’t always enjoy working on the Harrier/Sea Harrier programme in the UK as it was too political… we seemed to spend all our time pitching the aircraft to politicians to save the project from cancellation. With the Marines, the reverse was true; there was never any doubt that they would get the aircraft they wanted from the project.
The Mk 2 Harrier was not just a bigger aircraft than its predecessor, but a substantially different one. Its new wing, with a 20 per cent greater span and 14.5 per cent increase in area, was made of carbon fibre, 300 lbs lighter than it would have been in metal and four times as strong. To date, this was the largest carbon-fibre component employed in a military aircraft. All told, carbon fibre, also used in the rudder, flaps, nose, forward fuselage and stabilizing surfaces on the tail, added up to 26 per cent of the total weight of the AV-8B, a saving over metal of 480 lbs; and because every extra pound imposes a penalty on small combat aircraft like the Harrier, this was a significant saving. Large slotted flaps allowed greater lift, especially in STOL mode, and more control at slow speed, w
hile the greater strength of the new wing meant the Mk 2 could carry more than the AV-8A and GR.1. The Mk 2 was slower in terms of top speed, but this was not particularly important to the US Marines, for whom the aircraft was to be used first and foremost skimming trees, waves and dunes in support of ground troops.
A larger cockpit, and raised seat, was crowned with a bubble canopy giving the pilot a good all-round view. Instrumentation was quite different. Instead of an array of analogue dials and scatterings of switches, the pilot was faced with a neat display of screens: the Harrier had truly entered the digital age just as, in fact, the mobile phone and desk-top computers were quietly revolutionizing the working lives of manufacturers, politicians and journalists. A new ‘hand-on-throttle-and-stick’ arrangement allowed pilots to keep their hands on these all-important controls while operating other devices as well as weaponry. Switches and buttons built into the throttle and control stick operated by gloved fingers and thumbs spelt an end to pilots having to fumble, ‘hands-off’, for the right switch. Such controls would shortly become familiar to Formula One racing drivers and, all too soon, to millions of people around the world as they played the relevant computer games and convinced themselves they could out-fly a Harrier pilot. Yet whatever digitally empowered armchair pilots might like to believe, the virtual experience can only ever approximate to real flight in wind or low visibility, in uncertain and possibly lethal conditions.
A prototype Mk 2, converted from an AV-8A, first took to the air at Lambert-Louis airport on 9 November 1978, three-and-a-half years after the North Vietnamese took Saigon and the tragic twenty-year Vietnam War came to a bruised and bloody halt. It was the sway of public opinion in the United States, along with North Vietnamese military prowess, that had done so much to put an end to a war fought for a dogma – the Domino Principle – which posited that the whole world would go communist if the United States stayed at home and did nothing. In the end, the communist world collapsed pretty much all by itself. If wars had to be fought after the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, they would surely be the kind of small, localized conflicts to which the Harrier would be ideally suited. The Cold War, however, with its threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, still raged, albeit without a single atomic bomb being dropped in Europe or anywhere else, for that matter. No one could predict how warfare would twist and turn in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
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