Lieutenant Colonel Art Nalls, a God-fearing man, is cut from a slightly different cloth. ‘As soon as I gun the engine,’ he says, ‘people put down their hot dogs and look upwards with their mouths open like a bunch of baby birds waiting to be fed.’ That engine is a Pegasus and it powers the one and only Harrier flying in private hands. The FA.2 – XZ439 – is based at St Mary’s County Regional Airport, Maryland. Lieutenant Colonel Nalls is a former US Marine Corps Harrier pilot who simply cannot let go of the aircraft he fell in love with years ago and, even though he has flown sixty-five different types of aircraft, still believes is the best of the best. Nalls left the Marines in 1990 after being diagnosed with an inner-ear condition. He was, though, determined to fly a Harrier again. How could he not?
Born in Fairfax, North Virginia, Art Nalls majored in aerospace engineering at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Before being commissioned as a second lieutenant with the USMC in 1976, he won a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Nalls is not exactly a small man, yet his record was for making and riding the world’s smallest rideable bicycle; it stood just five inches high. Nalls went on to fly North American T-2C Buckeye jet trainers from the deck of USS Lexington, then Harrier AV-8As from USS Iwo Jima. After successfully landing an AV-8A that flamed out at 17,000 feet near Richmond, Virginia (the first time this had been done in the United States – he was awarded an Air Medal) and with 900 hours on the Harrier and over 400 deck landings under his belt, in 1985 Nalls became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, California, helping to put the AV-8B through its pre-service paces. He demonstrated the Mk 2 Harrier to the Spanish Navy on board the Principe de Asturias and to the Italians from the deck of the Giuseppe Garibaldi. Before his unexpected retirement in 1989, Nalls may well have clocked another world record, flying a total of six hours in Harriers without motive power. He had been testing the ability of their engines to relight after being switched off in flight rather than their qualities as gliders. Luckily for the intrepid Nalls, the Pegasus turbines fired up reliably and readily, although many pilots might have been disturbed to fly in such an accustomed silence for so many minutes before they could confirm as much.
Nalls moved on into the real-estate business, making enough money to think seriously of buying a Harrier, should one come up for sale, while improving parts of Washington DC that needed at least as much love and care as a second-hand jump jet.
Everett Aero, the specialist British ex-military aircraft supplier based at Sproughton, Suffolk, came up with the right machine at the right time. The Harrier on offer had begun life in 1979 as an FRS.1; it was later converted into an FA.2. After interviews with the British military and dealings with the relevant US authorities, and having loaded up with operating and maintenance manuals, Nalls handed over something like a million pounds – he will not say exactly how much he paid for the seven-ton aircraft, although the price was ‘non-negotiable’ – and shipped the FA.2 back to Maryland.
Since its return to the air after re-assembly on 10 November 2007, Nalls and Joe Anderson, a fellow former USMC Harrier pilot, have made over a hundred flights with their pet jet. It has a huge following. ‘Watching the Harrier,’ says Nalls, ‘is like watching a magic show.’ He talks fondly of the way his ‘puppet without strings’ dances, skates and plays in the air while hovering on a cloud of thrilling noise. While writing this book, I noted that Everett Aero had another FA.2 for sale in flying condition; a pair in flight would make a lot of people’s day in Maryland. Even so, the costs of running a Harrier cannot be underestimated. In 2010, Nalls reckoned on burning up fifty gallons of fuel between hangar and runway each time he flew the aircraft. This equals a gallon every six seconds. Owning a Harrier is not for the cash-strapped, nor the faint-hearted. Twelve minutes into Nalls’s second flight with XZ439, the hydraulic system failed. He had no brakes, no flaps and no landing gear. His one option, short of ejecting and losing the aircraft, was to land vertically. The US Naval Base at Pax River gave him permission to do so. It was Nalls’s first hover in sixteen years. Before he attempted to do so, Nalls pushed the Harrier through a number of positive-g manoeuvres in an attempt to shake free the landing gear; the trick worked, and XZ439 came down to earth with a relatively soft bump and only minor damage.
Three years later, when the British Harrier fleet was abruptly grounded, it had seemed, for a moment at least, that the redundant aircraft might fly again, across the Pond and with the US Marine Corps. In fact, seventy-two GR.7 and GR.9 Harriers – forty of them serviceable and not originally scheduled for withdrawal until 2018 – were sold by the MoD to the US Marines in a deal completed in June 2011 and described by Admiral Sir John ‘Sandy’ Woodward, commander of the Falklands Task Force, as ‘crass beyond belief’. The price was a give-away £112 million; the aircraft were not to be flown but instead to be broken up for spares to keep the USMC’s AV-8Bs flying until the arrival of the F-35B, just one of which would cost most of the sum paid for all the second-hand Harriers.
The British Harriers were in fine fettle when they were packed off to the States. As Rear Admiral Mark F. Heinrich, chief of the US Navy’s Supply Corps, put it, ‘We’re taking advantage of all the money the Brits have spent on them. It’s like we’re buying a car with maybe 15,000 miles on it. These are very good platforms.’ As it was, the Harriers – sixteen of which might yet fly with the USMC – were shunted out to the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, Tuscon, Arizona, where they were parked out in the open in what is effectively the world’s largest aircraft cemetery. Back to its old ‘Gotcha!’ form, the Sun newspaper headlined a photograph of the Harriers with the words ‘The Royal Flying Corpse’. At Tuscon, some 4,000 aircraft including B-52 Stratofortresses, F-14 Tomcats and A-10 Thunderbolts are grounded in 2,500 acres of desert where the sun blazes High Plains Drifter-style and summer temperatures rise to 40 °C, or 120 °F, and more. Jet aircraft do not fly here, but birds do and among them are falcons, eagles, ospreys, vultures, kites and, of course, harriers.
CHAPTER 8
WHAT FLIES AHEAD
At the end of 2012, and shortly after a visit to the F-35B Lightning II production line in Fort Worth, Texas for the Daily Telegraph, I received a package from Lockheed Martin, the makers of the Harrier’s successor. Inside was a 1/48th scale model of the complex and stealthy V/STOL jet. I soon knew where it belonged. The following month an Australian army friend flew off to Afghanistan on a six-month assignment to pilot Westland Apache attack helicopters with British colleagues from Camp Bastion, and I gave the model to his bright-eyed eight-year-old son Blake. When he grows up, Blake wants to be a military pilot. If he does, he may well fly F-35Bs. And supposing he does and that he retires at fifty-five in 2059, he will still be able to fly F-35Bs then alongside whatever their replacements might be. It is quite a thought.
In 1979, Tommy Sopwith, the former chairman of Hawker Aircraft, told Sir Peter Allen, president of the Transport Trust, how ‘we used to think of an aeroplane, then design it and build it in six weeks’. The great man was thinking of machines like the Pup and the Camel. It took twelve years to turn the first drawings of the P.1127 into the RAF’s first GR.1 Harriers. The Harrier was then in service, and in action until the very end of its life with the RAF, for the following forty-one years. Lockheed Martin began work on the F-35 in 2001, although the project had been through an experimental stage over the course of the previous five years and the original idea behind this Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) dates from 1993. The first F-35B, the V/STOL version of the type, made its maiden flight in 2008, while production of the F-35 in all its variants is scheduled to end in 2037. As each aircraft is designed to fly in front-line service for a nominal thirty years, this means that F-35Bs will in theory be hovering above the decks of Britain’s next generation of aircraft carriers until the late 2060s. Or when young Blake is due his bus pass.
Taken together, the active lives of these first- and second-generation jump jets will span more than a century. Tommy Sopwith lived to be 101 years
old; in his century, he oversaw the production of around ninety different types in military service, some fifty with the Sopwith Aviation Company and a further forty or so with Hawker Aircraft Ltd. and its successors. As the twentieth century progressed and technology developed, the design and manufacture of military aircraft became increasingly complex and expensive. Aircraft were required to live much longer lives than they had in the days when Sopwith’s team at Kingston could fly a new machine within little more than a month of sharpening a fresh set of pencils, rustling up a slide-rule and pinning a fresh sheet of paper on the drawing board. From planned start to finish, the F-35 programme will stretch across the same number of years it took to progress from the Wright brothers’ Flyer to the Harrier’s entry into RAF service and the first men on the Moon.
Considerable time and money have already been invested in the F-35, which is perhaps part of the reason why many critics, most of them confined to armchairs, have held it in their sights for a number of years: the slightest fault in development aircraft is inevitably jumped on by the media and bloggers as if they were willing the project, for whatever reason, to fail. Cost, though, remains the F-35’s Achilles heel. Delays have caused serious friction between the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin. The total cost to the USA for development and procurement has been estimated at $323 billion, with a total life-cycle cost of $618 million per aircraft. Meanwhile, according to a 2012 US Government Accountability Report, F-35 costs have increased 93 per cent, in real terms, over the 2001 estimate.
The F-35A version of the aircraft first flew on 15 December 2006. The F-35B followed on 11 June 2008, with BAE Systems’ test pilot Graham Tomlinson making the first full-stop in mid-air on 17 March 2010 and the first vertical landing the following day. The Navy’s F-35C took to the air on 7 June 2010. The handover of the first F-35B to the British government, represented by the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, was made at a ceremony at Fort Worth on 19 July 2012, and on 16 November the US Marines took delivery of F-35Bs at the Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma, Arizona.
Despite the negativity surrounding the programme, it is, of course, the F35-B version of this advanced warplane that will replace the Harrier, and so for this reason alone one needs to understand the aircraft. It is also a machine that, in one version or another, will be serving the air forces of a significant number of countries between 2015 and 2065. So might we even grow to be fond of it, as we have of the Harrier? And might it well prove the last piloted front-line aircraft produced by the US or Europe, as drones and other computer-guided aerial weapons make humans redundant?
I visited the Lockheed Martin factory on a blazing-hot December day, the lobby of its offices sporting a Christmas tree dressed in festive ribbons. Behind the management suites lay the mile-long aircraft assembly plant where B-24 Liberator bombers had been built in their thousands during the Second World War. This great industrial vista was relatively quiet since production of the F-35 was only just getting into its stride. Soon enough, though, Fort Worth will be rolling out 200 F-35s in peak years; the aim is to produce over 3,100 machines – a good deal more than the approximate total of 830 P.1127, Kestrel and Harrier airframes.
Outside the factory, an F-35B stood tethered and shimmering in the heat over a deep concrete ‘hover pit’. It is a handsome machine, much larger than a Mk 2 Harrier, and is powered by one of the world’s most powerful jet engines, the afterburning Pratt & Whitney 135 turbofan rated at 43,000 lbs of thrust. Empty, an F-35B weighs 32,300 lbs compared to the AV-8B’s some 14,000 lbs. Its top speed is Mach 1.6 compared to the AV-8B’s Mach 1.0. Much of this highly manoeuvrable stealth fighter’s appeal stems from the fact that it can undertake a number of roles, allowing it to replace a host of existing military aircraft, from AV-8Bs and A-10 Warthogs to F/A-18 Hornets and Tornados. Indeed, such is the theoretical versatility of the F-35B that, when the Eurofighter Typhoon is withdrawn from RAF service in around 2030, it may well become the one and only front-line British military jet.
The test pilot at the Fort Worth ‘hover pit’ stepped out to meet me. He was Billy Flynn, a senior Lockheed Martin test pilot, with combat experience flying Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18s in Serbia and Bosnia. What Flynn was keenest to show me was not the aircraft as such but the high-tech helmet, made by the US-Israeli company Vision Systems International, he wears when flying the F-35. When he puts it on, he looks like a cyborg. ‘Darth Vader never had a helmet like this,’ he joked.
This carbon-fibre helmet packed with hi-tech gadgetry weighs just 4.2 lbs. It is laser-scanned to fit each F-35 pilot individually. ‘This is an essential part of the F-35,’ Flynn told me. ‘It’s what makes such a difference. Through it, I can see 360 degrees all around the airplane.’ F-35 pilots can see the ground beneath their feet. ‘It’s a wild thing,’ said Flynn. ‘It’s virtual reality! Strange? It needs refining, but it’ll make a pilot and airplane an integral, all-seeing weapon.’ Flynn said no F-35 pilot would want to trade it for anything else.
Just like their wartime forebears, present-day pilots who fly restored Spitfires will tell you that the aircraft feels rather like a suit or skin of metal clothes you have put on and that the sensation of being one with the machine becomes all too real once this lithe fighter is aloft. But what the F-35 offers is something quite different. The machine and its entire navigation, communications, reconnaissance and weapons systems see with the pilot: pilot and aircraft fly symbiotically. The F-35 will put an end to notes written on knee-charts, hand-held binoculars and any other form of traditional or analogue activity so familiar to Harrier pilots. In fact, all the test pilots and engineers I met involved in the F-35 project at Fort Worth and the US Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, where extensive flying tests are being carried out, spoke quite lyrically about the computer wizardry of this digital-era aircraft.
The pilots said it was the easiest combat aircraft they had ever flown. The computer-controlled systems, fly-by-wire and autopilot of the aircraft are such that the F-35 really does feel as if it can fly itself, leaving its pilots free to concentrate on the purpose of their missions. I can vouch for this, more or less, because I was allowed to have a go with the F-35 flight simulator at Fort Worth. Like Mk 2 Harriers, the F-35 offers the pilot a commanding view from a raised seat in a generous and well-laid-out cockpit. What is remarkable is how few conventional instruments and controls there are. But when the battery is turned on, the F-35’s pilot systems light up on touch-pad screens, through head-up displays and, of course, through the ineffable workings of the cyborg helmet.
A touch of the starter button sets off an automatic engine, controls and safety check. The pilot needs to do nothing. This is a world away from the Harrier, let alone the aircraft I have flown with their analogue instruments, magneto checks, carb heat control and control surfaces connected by cables and wires to sticks and pedals. In just ninety seconds, the F-35 is ready to fly. The pilot’s principal controls – a left-hand throttle and a right-hand multi-purpose control stick – are light, smooth and progressive. The virtual aircraft shoots up very quickly into what I take to be a 3D map of Afghanistan or somewhere like it, all mountains, deep valleys and vast desert plains. So far, so very normal for a fifth-generation supersonic military jet. But then come the real surprises. Not only will the F-35B land itself, but it will also hover at the touch of a button. Really. Once pressed, that button sets in train a process whereby the aircraft will stop in the air and hang there, a lid behind the cockpit opening to set a giant fan in motion as the rear nozzle rotates downwards. The pilot’s hands are free. It is now the easiest thing to land vertically or to shoot off again in forward flight and into a very steep, very fast climb. In flight, the aircraft rolls and loops with the merest hint of firm pressure on stick and throttle. It really does seem all too easy, and yet the whole idea has been to make the F-35 a relaxed machine to fly.
As for launching weapons, this seems all too easy, too. The aircraft’s complex radar and sensors find enemy aircraft flying far beyond the
limits of the human eye. Because the F-35 sees in all directions, it can fire its weapons in all directions, too. A missile, mounted not on an external pylon but within a weapons bay, can be fired at a ‘bad guy’ with the F-35 pointing away from the target. It is very hard to miss as the latest technology ensures that missiles follow their targets automatically as well as with devastating precision. And, while a missile is finding its target, the pilot can be pressing on with other tasks. There is no need to look from the cockpit to see if the enemy has been taken out.
When I told the Lockheed Martin instructors – all of them former combat fighter pilots – that it seemed all too virtual for me, too much like a computer game, they laughed and told me that an entire new generation of ‘HUD [Head-Up Display] Babes’ had learnt to fly combat jets since the Harrier first went into service, but that they do make a point of reminding fighter jocks, they are flying real aircraft in real airspace.
It all seems so very logical and convincing – seductive, too – that one might have expected the various F-35s just to breeze into front-line service. The programme, however, remains a long way behind schedule. Design, development and testing have all thrown up teething problems that outsiders are determined to identify as fundamental flaws. Indeed, to say the F-35 is controversial is rather like saying Margaret Thatcher sometimes divided opinion. All modern military aircraft are astronomically expensive to develop, yet the cost overruns on the F-35 programme are unprecedented. Such figures are never easy to arrive at and can always be disputed, but the fly-away cost of a Dassault Rafale in 2012 was estimated to be $90.5 million (approximately £58.1 million), a Eurofighter Typhoon $104 million (£66.8 million) and an F-35B $237.7 million (£152.6 million). Should this stealthy new jump jet really cost so much, and is it worth so much, especially in an era where enduring economic recession and the availability of cheaper, rival technologies – drones, for example – suggest that both politicians and the military need to cut costs substantially? And can Britain really afford to commission two large aircraft carriers and to fly F-35Bs from them?
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