Indian Sea Harrier
Posted on 11/25/2007 8:30:46 PM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Half of Sea Harrier fleet gone in 20 years
KP Narayana Kumar and Rahul Chandran
New Delhi, November 26, 2007
When a Sea Harrier naval fighter aircraft crashed, killing its pilot, off the Goa coast in April, it appeared to be another tragic footnote to a string of isolated crashes involving India's fleet of combat aircraft.
Not so, if you connect the dots.
In the last three years, India, has logged at least 30 such accidents involving various fighter aircrafts. But, what was much more revealing about the April 6 crash, which killed Lt Commander Saurabh Tewari, was that it was the 16th Sea Harrier operated by the Navy to have crashed in the last two decades.
If 16 crashes doesn't seem like a big number in 20 years, consider this: these crashes have wiped out half of the Indian Navy's Sea Harrier fleet of 30 aircraft. Seven pilots, among the most elite flyers at the Navy have lost their lives in these crashes. And, every crash has happened during fairly routine sorties, as the Harrier has never seen battle since being inducted in 1983.
The Sea Harrier, known and often bought for its ability to take off vertically or with very short runs, was commissioned in 1983 from manufacturer BAE Systems Plc. The aircraft, which were first deployed on India’s aircraft-carrier INS Viraat and INS Vikrant, were considered ideal because Indian carriers had relatively shorter decks compared to carriers operated by naval forces of other countries.
The unusually high percentage of crashes involving Sea Harriers began coming into focus after Francis Noronha, a Right To Information (RTI) activist and freelance journalist from Goa, noticed the occasional news briefs and started connecting the dots.
Naronha informed Hari Kumar P, a fellow RTI activist, and then filed an RTI application. The Navy, citing national security, rejected the first RTI attempt. But he persisted and eventually succeeded when he moved the appellate authority for the RTI within the defence ministry.
Replying to Kumar's application in September, the integrated headquarters of the defence ministry disclosed that, between 1988 and 2007, seven pilots had lost their lives in 16 accidents involving Sea Harriers. The appellate authority, however, declined to share reasons behind these accidents.
Mint independently confirmed, from a report in the military journal, Military Balance, published by London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), that there were only 15 such fighter aircraft left in the Indian Navy's fleet. This was subsequently corroborated by the Navy spokesperson.
The “Sea Harriers are fully operational and capable of delivering the desired performance in Indian conditions. These aircraft are sustainable in the Indian environment,” the ministry reasoned.
However, Commander Gurinder Khurana, an expert in naval warfare associated with Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis said, “It has to be investigated whether the failure rate is due to human error caused by lack of proper training or whether there are some technical snags.”
Aviation experts and pilots note that the Harriers require a very high level of skill and consequently a low threshold for error at the controls, suggesting the blame for the crashes might lie primarily with the pilots. But, a naval aviator, who did not wish to be identified said, “Harrier pilots are the pick of naval aviators. They have to undergo a tough selection process and for every one that flies, 10 are left on the wayside.”
Indian Sea Harrier
Those are reputed to be among the very hardest types of airplanes to fly.
The Harrier is to complex and to high maintenence
Guess the US Marines & the Brits are having the same problems-
http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2003/national-reporting/works/national1.html
The Harrier needs to be retired.
The new lockheed jumpjet wh00ps its ass
I heard that too. It is like the pilot must be a hot jet and helicopter pilot at the same time.
That won’t be ready for another 6 years at the minimum.
Well, thanks to the brave men that fill the gap
To many hydraulics on the harrier
I expect the USMC to retire their harriers asap when the new F-35 comes on line. The Brit situation is more complicated, since they have a bigger stake in the Harrier. The aircraft and its engine were specially designed and built in England, and there's jobs and pride at stake...
A Harrier in civilian hands here in the states was just damaged after a lenghly restoration to fly.Not going to be cheap to repair.Good airplane for what it was designed for.
The Brits have already retired their SeaHarriers.They stopped manufacturing over a decade ago,but their attack variants are still around & getting upgrades-so they will be around for a while longer.
You tweaked my memory by mentioning “upgrades”. Is it true that the original Harrier was much more dangerous to fly than the B model? Which does the Indian Air Force operate?
Difficult to fly...but it saved Britain’s bacon in the Fauklands War. Although theoretically a more deadly fighter, the Argentine Mirage’s were no match for the
British flown Harrier.
The A-model had the worst record of any military jet.
That pulitzer winning pile of c*** rivals Gores’ nobel for credibility.
Hardly.
I don’t know about the differences with the American variants-but the Indian Navy(not airforce) uses the British Sea Harrier.It signed on for the FRS-1 variant(which was the earliest Sea Harrier model) & which served in Falklands.
The Brits developed an upgrade with a few newly built airframes as well,called the FA-2,but the differences were primarily for newer avionics & weapons capability-not necessarily improved flight characteristics.The IN is upgrading it’s Sea Harriers with new radars & missiles from Israel to bring it up to the FA-2 standard.
Probably does-I think the problem is that there are few Harriers flying.So if 15 out of 30 crashes,it’s considered a catastrophe.Only thing is that you ignore the number of hours it’s flown for 20 years.
The Argentinian Mirage III's in the Falkland Wars had no effective air-to-air missiles and were also encountering Harriers at the extreme edge of their fuel limits as they had no aerial refueling capabilities.
The entire "small carrier-Harrier" combination was a near disaster for Great Britain as I discussed in this Post 23 on an old Falklands War thread
The bottom line of the Falkland Wars was that ancient A-4 Skyhawks with "dumb bombs" were able to fly 400 miles from the Argentinian mainland, find the British fleet, drop those "dumb bombs" on British warships and cripple or sink far too many of those British ships.
That is simply not an acceptable level of performance for a carrier battle group which is why Britain is now regaining "real carrier" capabilities with the Queen Elizabeth class carriers.
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