Promised super-carriers are still lurking just over the fiscal horizon

As a hopelessly patriotic sort of person, I have a fantasy of one day being on holiday in the south of France and looking up from, say, a biography of Nelson, to see an aircraft carrier appear on the horizon. Only instead of it being an American one, it will be British. No doubt the captain will come ashore in a smart launch and, if I were to be lucky, he might invite me aboard for a sundowner. All would be well in the world, and I would sleep soundly, dreaming of past glories at the Nile and Trafalgar.

I am not the only one with this fantasy. Geoff Hoon says he has now taken personal charge of the Government's pet defence programme - to build two super-carriers for the Royal Navy. These will be the largest warships ever built in Britain, with four acres of flight deck apiece. In fact, they are so big that no single yard can build them and they will be constructed in bits, by a consortium of companies, before being put together by a "physical integrator", otherwise known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of US vice- president Dick Cheney's alma mater, Halliburton. The Navy is salivating at the prospect of having some smart new toys to play with. The current military vogue is "expeditionary warfare", and Vice-Admiral Charles Style, commander UK maritime forces, says: "I absolutely believe this is a very relevant and important capability." Even the Department of International Development, eager to carpet-bomb Africa with aid, or, more usefully, help the victims of natural disasters, wants the carriers. So, how come, six years after they were first proposed, they have not yet been ordered?

Here is the rub. Despite all the brouhaha over the surprisingly fierce negotiating style of Mr Hoon, these carriers have got no further than the drawing board. They have, however, been provisionally named HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales. Something about those names, chosen by an administration that axed the Royal Yacht, worries me. Are they just a bit too unreal, a bit too good to be true? The last vessel to be named Prince of Wales, also the pride of the fleet, sank in unfortunate circumstances in 1941, after Churchill rashly sent it to defend Singapore without enough escorts.

Sadly, there is not much prospect of the super-carriers having enough escorts either. Another handful of frigates and destroyers have been cut, so the Royal Navy now has just 28 afloat, half the number it had at the time of the Falklands. Assuming a typical carrier battle group has at least six escorts, the Navy will be stripped bare to provide the minimum support, once these ships are supposedly at sea from 2012 onwards.

All this points to the really serious question: can we afford them? The initial cost estimate, now six years old, was that the carriers would cost £3 billion, plus their air complements. In theory, we should be able to find the money. After all, Britain is the world's fourth largest economy and a global trading nation. The trouble is that, over the past decade, the defence budget has been halved in real terms by both the Conservatives and Labour, to just 2.4 per cent of GDP. Every bill that comes in from Iraq is quibbled by the Treasury and the MoD has been reduced in effect to cannibalising future capability in order to fund Tony Blair's wars. Furthermore, as far as I can see, such are the burdens on the defence budget, the MoD has resorted to some pretty novel accounting. It treats some items as "near cash", an oxymoronic concept. It also records its hardware as £27 billion of capital assets. All those weapons, so expensive to maintain, depreciate rapidly and so are an odd kind of capital.

But there is really only one very significant thing you need to know about the Ministry of Defence's budget. It is to be found in note 21 to the accounts of a quango called the Defence Procurement Agency and it says future commitments "contracted but not provided for: £14.4 billion". That is the current cost of newly ordered weapon systems, which have yet to be paid for. But the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales have not even been ordered yet, nor have their 70 joint combat fighters. The MoD protests otherwise, but that number looks to me like the black hole in the defence budget, blown by, inter alia, the Eurofighter. No wonder those doughty Scottish regiments are being merged or axed.

The "black hole" is also the ultimate financial consequence of the dualarchy which runs our country. On one side, there is Tony Blair, strutting around the world with a sword in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, sending the Armed Forces into battle. On the other side, there is Gordon Brown, with a fundamentally different idea of Britain as a soft power, a welfare state, whose principal foreign policy ought to be a "Marshall Plan" for the Third World. Mr Brown evidently has no time for the Armed Forces. Gerald Howarth, a Conservative defence spokesman, recently asked in a parliamentary question what defence establishments Mr Brown had visited. And the reply? Too expensive to find out. If any readers have ever seen Mr Brown at a defence establishment, perhaps they might write in to The Daily Telegraph to help solve the mystery.

The military are caught in the middle of this two-personality state - forced to deploy in Iraq and elsewhere, but without the proper support of the Treasury. So here is a pre-election challenge to Mr Blair and to Mr Brown, assuming they are speaking to each other. When will you order these carriers, and where, exactly, is the money to come from? Unless they can give satisfactory answers, my approach to the carrier question will be not to believe the Government, until I see the vessels bobbing on the horizon.

Bandit, Here is my response to your current post:

VIFFing is really cool, and yours is that it must be disposable since you can't find it on the JSF, then why is it being implemented and developed on the next generation of aircraft such as the Raptor F/A22 (and possibly others)? VIFFing is cool, but that is because of the position of the exhausts. If you look at the Harrier it has four main nozzles for lift, two on each side in a line on the fuselage. When you use the nozzles in air to air combat you are in wing born flight, but are tossing in this extra vector in the y axis.
***I agree with you here, that the VIFFing is probably better if generated around the center of gravity of the aircraft rather than at the aft end of the airplane. It does more than just reduce the turn rate of the aircraft, it allows it to operate at full throttle when other craft might have to operate at reduced throttle in order to avoid flameout. When the pilot wants to regain his kinetic energy and punch the throttle, he has a lag time between the punch and the time the engine fully throttles up. The Harrier has no lag time there, so he stays on your tail longer than most other aircraft could, surprising the other pilot with its consequent ability to accelerate rapidly.

When you get to the F-35B instead of four exhaust nozzles like the Harrier you have a mid body lift fan and the exhaust nozzle bends 90 degrees. This is all coordinated by computer which is good news for pilots. The hover transition has always been one of the most dangerous parts of flying the Harrier. In wing born flight the nozzle acts just like a conventional exhaust. When entering the vertical flight mode a bunch of doors open to expose the lift fan and the part of the nozzle that articulates. Basically when Lockeed won the contract Harrier like VIFFing died.
***This remains an open question in this forum at this time: Why did the JSF folks drop VIFFing? I do not have an answer but my speculation is that it has something to do with the weight of the aircraft. As the weight goes up, the benefits of VIFFing probably see a rapid dropoff in benefit. If the pilot VIFFs correctly, he entraps the air on top of the wing, ending up with what is termed a “fully blown” wing, which means that the boundary layer is re-energized rather than detaching. When the Marines discovered this ability, they managed to cause the turn radius of the Harrier to reduce so significantly that the designers at first thought it was beyond what the Harrier was aerodynamically capable of. It was the first military jet aircraft that had a tighter turn than its design specs. But I do not know just yet. I have noticed that you keep trying to steer the conversation to the JSF rather than answering the questions I present. I might as well clear up one SNAFU right here, even though you did not answer my questions. When I said that it “would be a good simulation of going against someone with stolen JSF-type of technology”, I had a brainfart and confused the JSF project with the FA/22 Raptor and in my mind I was thinking of something more along the lines of NGF, i.e. Next Generation Fighter. When I googled for Vectored Thrust and JSF, I proceeded from a false positive because I was only looking for the thrust vectoring and in the interest of time efficiency I didn’t read further that the 2D thrust vectoring on the JSF would not be suitable for VIFFing. It really is a mystery to me why Lockheed dropped VIFFing. My understanding was that the Boeing competitor did still have VIFFing.

Here is the reason that I believe VIFFing is not the end all and be all of ACM maneuvers. The Harrier wing does not perform well compared to most fighters in a 2 circle fight. An example of that is when two aircraft merge head to head and both aircraft elect to turn across the other's tail. Each aircraft is scribing its own circle across the sky and the guy that completes his circle first (has the highest turn rate) wins. The Harrier's sustained rate is less than most fighters.
***This appears to be the basis, even the crux of your argument. Earlier you said that “moving the nozzles in a dogfight may be good for one guns defense, but it hardly makes up for a lack of turn rate. The Harrier is not much of a dogfighter.” This is also where you are flat wrong. The Harrier is reputed to have the tightest turn in the industry, due to its VIFFing maneuver. A Harrier without VIFFing is truly a plain-Jane aircraft. All of this discussion moving forward from saying that the Harrier has a poor turn rate and/or radius proves that you have only been up against a declawed Harrier. If you try that head-to-head maneuver against a Harrier, he will be waxing your tail faster than you can say SAFMA.

If one aircraft chooses to reverse at that merge then we get one circle flow. The two aircraft are fighting over the same circle. The guy with the shortest radius now wins. This usually ends in a slow speed fight where the Harrier would win, not so much because it can fly slower but because by using the nozzles it can slow down faster and the other aircraft flushes out in front.
***Ummm, right here you actually bolster my point rather than your own. Your approach appears a bit adilpated.

Additionaly, weapons mechanization has gotten much better in the 20 years since your post by the Harrier pilots was written. The AIM-9 of today achieves a much quicker self track and AIM-120 allows for much better WVR and BVR shots than the AIM-7E from 2 decades ago.
***Of course if you add nice after-market weapons & radar, it makes any plane work better. That is POTO (Pointing Out The Obvious), just like pointing out that it’s the pilot skill that makes all the real difference. But that radar/missile upgrade would be available to both the Harrier pilots as well as F14 or F15 or JSF pilots, so the advantage is nullified when talking about Harrier vs. others, which would be used to determine how good a dogfighter the aircraft is. In the peacetime exercises, both sides have skilled pilots and similar weapons systems, so we get to see the capabilities of the aircraft.

If you are fighting against that Harrier to negate that advantage you manuever to deny that flow.
***In the air to air exercises so far against the Harrier, it appears that F15 and F4 and F5 pilots were unable to “deny that flow” and lost at a kill ratio of 7 to 1.

You use the capabilities of your aircraft, most likely quicker energy addition
***Note that the Harrier is really good at this quick energy addition because it doesn’t have to reduce throttle at lower speeds.
and pitch rate to defeat his manuever.
***Harrier’s pitch rate is unmatched when it VIFFs.

The problem for the Harrier pilot post-VIFF is that he just dumped a bunch of energy, even if he tosses the nozzles for just a second.
***This is flatly untrue. Please see the excerpt of Bruce Myles’ book which I will post following this.

If he doesn't get that shot he is going to be SAFMA (Sucking A Fat Man's A$$).
***Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but he’s still riding the other guy’s tail, even if he can’t yet get the shot, right? If you have someone on your tail and you’re trying for “quick energy addition”, that means you’re pushing balls-to-the wall throttle and/or afterburners, presenting a juicy target to a heat-seaking missile. And the fact that the Harrier could turn inside of him would mean that the other guy isn't going to be losing the Harrier any time soon.

Your posts by the Harriers fighting the F-15s site the concept of reversing into one circle flow which was uncountered by the F-15s.
***So that means the F15 pilots sucked? Our highly trained pilots couldn’t beat a “ fresh-from-formation squadron team”? Something doesn’t add up here.

Here are some example kill ratios. Does every other allied pilot suck somehow?

VENUE ADVERSARY KILL RATIO

(Sea Harrier Wins: Adversary Wins)

Decimomannu 81 F15 & F5E 12:4

Decimomannu 83 F16 31:14

Alconbury F5E 3:1

NATO Sea Exercise F14 3:1 to 10:1

United Kingdom F4 10:1

Australia Mirage III 3:1

United Kingdom Lightning 2:1

This is much easier to explain on a white board. I know this is a pretty detailed answer, but I hope it explains my lack of enthusiasm over the Harrier. I won't go into its safety record, but I've lost several friends from flight school in them.
***Duly noted, the Harrier is a very difficult plane to fly, but that doesn’t say anything about its reputed dogfighting capabilities.

Bandit, the more I tango with you the more I’m reminded of story of the guy who claimed to have wrestled a Grizzly bear. He said it was no big deal, but his cohorts checked on his story and found that what he wrestled was a one-eyed, de-clawed, de-fanged Grizzly. His story just didn’t add up, and your posts are starting to fail the smell test. There’s just no way that a run-of-the-mill aviation afficianado such as myself should be able to get on your six o’clock in this forum and stay there, after all you supposedly get paid to know ACM. As an example I cite your response in a prior post:
>This will pitch our nose up instantaneously about 20 degrees, diffuse the hot gases of >our exhausts and hide the exhaust from you by placing our wing between your missile >and the source of heat.
ROTFLMAO! Where do you get this stuff? That is pretty funny.
***Note that this was an ACTUAL maneuver that was used in ACTUAL A2A combat against an ACTUAL enemy flying a supposedly superior Mirage. For my source material I cite page 184 of the book, “Aircraft Versus Aircraft” by Norman Franks as well as other books such as “Harrier: Ski-Jump to Victory”. Lt. Paul Barton used the maneuver (and probably several others used it in similar situations, because the Argentinians were launching their AAMs firstoff as a tactic) on May 1, 1982 and shot down Lt. Carlos Perona. The fact that you are “ROTFLMAO” when reading first hand source material that was subsequently used successfully in combat shows that something just doesn’t add up, the equation does not balance.
Note that you only answered ONE question, and the following questions remain unanswered and my contentions are undisputed:
Why is VIFFing being implemented and developed on the next generation of aircraft such as the Raptor F/A22 (and possibly others)?
If it's such a non-starter, why are we pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into developing this technology?
What is the origin of this vectored thrust approach?
Did it come from the Harrier or some egghead doing simulations who thought it was a good idea so let's spend some money on it?
And if it did come from the Harrier, and it is being developed due to the successes of Air-to-air engagements of the Harrier vs. Air Superiority Fighters, then how can you say the Harrier doesn't have a magic move?
What is the gold standard when it comes to this kind of information and how can normal civilian slugs obtain it?

Here is some more source material, this segment is about how VIFFing was first discovered. Since this is an educational exercise in a commentary forum, this excerpt should qualify as fair use under the copyright laws. I do recommend reading this book, and this sampling should serve as a good advertisement for it. Any scanning/transcription errors are entirely my own.

Chapter 9 of the book, “Jump Jet: The Revolutionary V/STOL Fighter” by Bruce Myles.

Marines Discover Power of Thrust Vectoring: VIFF

Major Harry Blot, U.S. Marine Corps pilot and test pilot with 2500 hours flight time on twenty-five different types, was based at the U.S. Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River in 1969 when he was assigned to preliminary evaluation of the Harrier. His first flight was a depressing experience. The Harrier was the most demanding airplane he had ever flown. He did not like its rearward visibility, and it didn’t turn fast enough. It also had another annoying feature. Whenever he put the jet nozzles down in forward flight, the nose would pitch up almost thirty degrees. He thought it was a nice attack aircraft, but as a fighter, forget it.

In 1971, Harry Blot was assigned to the newly formed Harrier Squadron VMA 513 and made Project Officer in charge of thrust vectoring. The Marines cancelled two squadrons of F4 Phantoms to make room in their budget for the Harriers. Now, the pressure was on to prove that the new airplane could fight its way out of trouble in air combat, without fighter cover. Thrust vectoring, changing the direction of the Pegasus engine’s thrust by swiveling the nozzles in flight, had already shown how dramatically it could decelerate the airplane. The marines were convinced there was untapped potential in it, and on an early sortie Harry Blot rolled the wings in the direction of a turn, then put his nozzles down. That infuriating pitch-up of the nose now sent the Harrier into a rate of turn he’d never experienced before.

The Marines had discovered the power of VIFF. It is a technique which has given Harrier pilots immense confidence. In one-on-one dogfights, they have been “shooting down” aircraft like the F14 Tomcat. With VIFF, the Harrier pilot can accelerate and decelerate without throttle movement, increase his rate of turn, and fly at abnormally low speeds. No opponent can predict what his next move will be, which means a massive injection of one-upmanship in that vital psychological aspect of air combat.

The story of VIFF reveals the surprise and incredulity of the aircraft’s own designers when the Marines told them of how they stretched the Harrier’s flight envelope. One man, though, was quite unsurprised by the dramatic improvements in the aircraft’s performance. For almost ten years, aircraft designer and engineer Dr. John Attinello had been virtually a lone voice proclaiming the potential of using an engine’s thrust in flight for things other than propulsion. The work of the Marines and the parallel test flying by NASA’s Langley Research Center were now producing results which effectively said “I told you so.”

In the early 1950’s, Attinello was a designer of U.S. Navy aircraft, tackling problems associated with landing and taking off from carriers. The design constraints of making an aircraft compact enough for the restricted elevator size while fighting the size increases that came from making it land at low speed, convinced him then of the sweeping benefits that V/STOL could bring to naval aviation. The first time he saw the Harrier, flying off the U.S.S. Guam in 1971, its unique “four poster” arrangement of two jet nozzles each side excited him. Here was the ideal vehicle to test and prove the integration of propulsion and aerodynamics to gain super performance. It was to be an uphill task.

Attinello first discussed his thoughts on thrust vectoring with Hawker Siddeley during an official V/STOL study visit in 1961. He was convinced from his calculations that the extra amount of lift from thrust vectoring would produce a significant improvement in maneuverability. However, his calculations were based on the early 1960 wind tunnel tests on the P1127 airplane by NASA, and Hawker’s people then, and later, produced figures showing, to their satisfaction, that the best one could expect was an improvement in lift of perhaps half of a G. Now, most fighters are stressed for about seven G. Clearly, as far as they were concerned, Attinello’s improvements could be achieved more cheaply and just as effectively by adding a few square feet of wing area. Back in 1961 Attinello did not feel quite confident enough of his own calculations to argue a convincing case.

It may seem almost bizarre that Hawker Siddeley, the airplane’s designers, should have been so unimpressed about an inherent characteristic of their own machine, a characteristic which, with hindsight, was begging to be exploited. At the time, they were designing a ground attack/reconnaissance aircraft, not a pure, highly maneuverable fighter. In 1965, when the Royal Air Force was laying down its operational requirement, there was no funding available for special development of thrust vectoring in forward flight. Besides, they were planning to go to war low level in northwest Europe with top cover from Phantoms and Lightnings. Another important point is that although Hawker failed to develop this enormous bonus, it is a tribute to the beautiful simplicity of the Harrier concept that the Marines were able to unleash the latent performance.

Attinello’s interest never flagged, and around 1967, as the Vietnam war escalated, his work there for the Institute of Devense Analyses gave him renewed impetus. His boss in the Weapons System Evaluation Group, General A.J. Beck of the USAF, was closely interested in Attinello’s theories on VIFF. He asked him to carry out a study, called “Project Red Baron,” on the air combat maneuverability of American fighters there.

American pilots were flying high wing loading Phantoms against low wing loading MIGs. In some flight regimes, the high wing loading airplane had the advantage, and vice versa. Attinello decided it would be nice for a fighter pilot to have his cake and eat it too. This meant the high wing loading aircraft could engage the low wing loading plane whenever he chose to do so. This concept brought him straight back to VIFF. Wing loading is a major factor in an aircraft’s maneuverability. In simple terms, it is the weight of the aircraft divided by the square footage of the wing. Low wing loading helps reduce the radius of a turn and also an aircraft’s ability to pull sustained G’s. The Harrier is a high wing loading airplane. It seemed to Attinello that using thrust vectoring in the high wing loading Harrier one could exploit the aircraft’s characteristics to a point where one was approaching the ideal.

General Beck was impressed but he wanted to test the reactions of his own pilots who’d had a chance to fly the airplane. Colonel J.M. Broughton was assigned to check with one of the USAF project pilots who had been flying the Kestrel in England. The memo which Col. Broughton wrote in January 1968 detailed the alarming experience of a Lt. Colonel Campbell. This seemed to signal the end of VIFF as a serious contender for U.S. Government funds. Remember that at this time, the Marines had not even expressed interest in the airplane.

The damning part of the memo read, “There have been some nozzle deflections in excess of the 180 knot restriction. Lt. Colonel Campbell inadvertently activated the nozzles on downwind leg at 240 knots. Although he immediately noted his error and reactivated the nozzle control, the aircraft reacted violently. Control forces were severe and the deceleration was described as far in excess of speedbrake action. It threw him up against the windscreen and made control of the aircraft momentarily difficult…. The tests were abandoned due to the fear that the aircraft would be stressed beyond its structural capability. The maneuver is recommended for a desperation type situation only.”

That memo blocked Attinello. People pointed to it and said that even if the forces he computed could provide the additional maneuverability, the horrendous control problems would make it unusable. Then, in the autumn of 1968, Attinello attended a briefing given by Tom Miller and Bud Baker on their first flights in the Harrier, the flights which convinced them the Marines should go all out for it. Attinello, like a dog with a bone, raised the memo with the then Coilonel Miller. Well, had Tom Miller tried deflecting the nozzles in flight, and had he been thrown around the cockpit? Yes, he’d certainly done it. No, he’d remained firmly in his seat. According to Tom Miller, Dr. Attinello ran up to him and stopped just short of kissing him. He certainly wrung his hand! It was the clue Attinello needed to put together his official report of October 1969. That report led to the involvement of NASA, but, just as important, it made Colonel Bud Baker a disciple of the Attinello theories of thrust vectoring. When the Marines formed their first squadron, Bud Baker, the first Commanding Officer, made the exploration of VIFF a priority.

The Defense Department asked NASA Langley to review and comment on the Attinello report. They decided it had real promise, and a flight test program was worked out, using a Kestrel from the 1965 Tripartite Squadron trials which had been sitting unused in a hangar at Langley, Virginia. Lee Person was assigned as Project Test Pilot and Dick Culpepper as Project Engineer. Culpepper and Person recall that Hawker Siddeley made discouraging noises. Putting the nozzles down at high speed, they said, could burst the ducts leading to the reaction control “puffers” at wing tips and tail. The engine, they said, could literally come apart. There could be very serious handling problems, particularly at high angles of attack, directional instability. As another pilot put it, “Faced with that sort of advice, that test pilot was a real brave guy. He was really pushing the frontiers.”

The first part of the program was straight and level, conventional flying, with Lee Person aloft in the single seat Kestrel and Dick Culpepper in radio contact on the ground. They started off at 260 knots and changed airspeed by gradual increments. Hawker Siddeley’s warnings were engraved on Person’s mind. He selected say 35-40 degrees of nozzle angle, and started off with power well back, bringing it up slowly until it got to just below the engine’s maximum fan speed, at ninety percent. His eyes concentrated on the duct pressure, the angle of attack and the jet pipe temperature dials. To lee Person’s delight, not to say relief, the airplane didn’t come apart around him. That was straight and level flight.

At around 300 knots and 15,000 feet he tried the nozzles at thirty degrees, then forty-five degrees, the hover stop, and right on through ninety degrees to the braking stop. Contrary to the experience of the USAF pilot, Lee Person was not thrown around. In fact, it felt very good. He did find that strong nose-up trim change any time the nozzles were deflected down from the aft position, but it very quickly became a natural action to coordinate this nozzles-down position with forward stick to maintain the aircraft’s attitude. At nozzle angles of ninety degrees and beyond, the deceleration effect was very much higher than anything he ever felt before. But, during this slamming deceleration, the negative G straps on his thighs and shoulder harness restrained him. It was very easy to visualize an enemy pilot over-shooting and presenting a target straight ahead. Encouraged, they expanded the flight envelope further. The next step was turning flight, maneuvering the airplane first without nozzle deflection, to get a baseline from which to work. Then they put the Kestrel into turns at various nozzle angles, holding the airspeed and measuring the forces and the accelerations they were getting. There was a really big improvement in turn rate. It was time to test it in combat maneuvers.

At around 450 knots, Person would throw the nozzles all the way down and roll the wings into the turn as the nose pitched up. This creates very rapid, very hard deceleration and hard turn. It brought the airplane into an area of very high angles of attack which Hawker had never encountered on the aircraft. It became a “cushion” turn. Suddenly, the pilot was pushing on the stick instead of pulling because it was wanting to pitch up so much. They ended up with thirty units of angle of attack on these hard break maneuvers. Did Hawker Siddeley have any strong feelings on that? Back came the reply, “You have more experience on this than we do.” Both Rolls Royce and Hawker Siddeley reckoned, on paper, that the engine would surge or flame out at this angle of attack because it simply could not get enough air in. The NASA team proved it just was not so, and the engine and airframe designers were delighted to be proved wrong.

This initial exploration of VIFF lasted from January 16, 1970 to the end of June 1970. Person and Culpepper were overjoyed with the results so far. They just could not see any problems. Two things had clearly emerged. The tremendous deceleration capability, and the ability to maintain a constant turn rate with decreasing airspeed. The use of large amounts of nozzle deflection increased the aircraft’s rate of turn while slowing it down. What was happening was that although the wing was losing lift, this was being compensated by the lift from the deflected engine thrust. Thus, in a turning dogfight when an opponent had reached the point of stall, the Harrier would still be turning at ever decreasing speed and radius. When the enemy was forced to break out of the turn, the Harrier could reverse back towards him, throwing the nozzles aft and getting immediate maximum acceleration. Of course, the throttle setting had never been altered, and only the nozzle lever had been used. When the thrust was directed straight back again, there was no gradual build up. Acceleration was instantaneous.

No other aircraft in the world could do it. To a fighter pilot, it was almost a magical quality. As Lee Person put it, “I was enthused as hell.” So, too, was the pilot of the highly maneuverable T38 aircraft which had now joined the program to simulate dogfight situations. Trying to follow the Kestrel through hard break maneuvers, the T38 pilot exclaimed one day, “Hey, you just made a square corner and you’re coming right back at me!” The story was repeated on the ground and one of the experienced NASA test pilots refused to believe it. He flew the chase plane on the next sortie. After they landed, on the way back to the office, he grinned, “Do you know something? That airplane turns a square corner!”

The Kestrel, as the intermediate aircraft between prototype P1127 and fully fledged Harrier, had a limited wing and limited amount of thrust. So, although it was an ideal platform for proving the principles, it was clearly not as advanced as the Harrier in either airframe or engine. Even so, the Kestrel, using VIFF, did very well against the T38 whose wing loading was about the same as a MIG21. Starting out in a defensive position each time, the Kestrel either managed to “draw,” with no one getting the advantage, or it won outright. The advantages of the new techniques were spelled out during these dogfights. With VIFF, the Kestrel at the very least did not lose. Without VIFF, the simulated MIG21 wiped it clean every time.

By this time, the Marine pilots of VMA513 had started their exploration of VIFF. Although Project Officer Harry Blot was becoming firmly convinced of its benefits, the large majority of the other squadron pilots were still skeptical about its usefulness. It did not help its case when the flying qualities of a Harrier were fed into a computer and matched against other aircraft. The computer readout said the Harrier using VIFF could pick up perhaps half a G increase in turn rate, but the energy degradation associated with that made it look of dubious value. That just did not match with Blot’s experience as a pilot, so the Marines persevered and put a pilot in a cockpit simulator linked with a computer. With a flesh and blood pilot “in the loop” the Harrier did very much better in these simulated combats than the earlier computer readout had predicted. Why this should have been true was puzzling. The next part of the actual flying program helped solve the mystery.

At Point Mugu, Harriers flew against Phantoms, Skyhawks and T38’s, and, using VIFF, beat them. According to that computer analysis, Harriers should not have been able to stay in the sky with them. Most significantly, the airplane, using vectored thrust, was turning much more quickly than the designers said it could. Harry Blot telephoned Harrier Chief Designer, John Fozard, in England and told him the rate of turn they were achieving. “I’ve got a stopwatch, and I can pick out a spot on the ground, go all around a circle, come back to that spot, and click my watch. Alright, it’s unsophisticated, but if my math is correct, I’ve just gone through 360 degrees in so many seconds and that’s the turn rate, whichever way you cut it.” John Fozard was not in business to knock his own airplane, but at first he could not believe it. The more the Marines flew his aircraft, the better they found it. Fozard may have been incredulous, but if one is going to have feedback from customers, how nice to be told your product is even better than claimed.

The Marines were now convinced, as their flight hours mounted up, that, properly flown, the Harrier should be able to beat any airplane in the sky in a dogfight. The facts they were documenting from this experience also revealed the basic flaw in the input which had produced the depressing results from the first computer tests. Certainly, it was true that thrust vectoring was only producing half a G extra lift, but the Marines discovered that a short burst of thrust vectoring took advantage of the tremendous pitch up to tighten their turns. Since they did not leave the nozzle deflected for too long, they were not losing the energy the computer said they would lose. They also made another significant discovery. If the pilot did it correctly, he entrapped air on top of the wing, ending up with what they termed a “fully-blown” wing. That, said the Marines, was how they were turning circles faster than the designers believed the aerodynamically capable of.

There were still quite serious engine limitations for VIFF, simply because no one had thought of using it in air combat before the Marines bought it. Now, they wanted these limitations lifted so they could keep their eyes out of the cockpit in a fight. They also felt the drive system for the nozzles needed strengthening. Rolls Royce and Hawker Siddeley agreed to modify all Marine Corps’ Harriers on the production line.

Aggression and “press-on” are prerequisites of the successful Marine Corps attack pilot. They decided that VIFF was an essential tool in their fighting repertoire, and they were pushing on with a program which simply ignored the problems as if they did not exist. Rolls Royce, the makers of the Harrier’s Pegasus engine, were aghast at one incident. For takeoff and landing, the engine has a rating which is higher than the nozzles aft rating. Nozzles aft, in conventional flight, the Pegasus puts out generally 16,000 pounds of thrust. The so-called normal lift rating, though, is about 20,000 pounds of thrust, a considerable difference for a little 16,000 pound airplane. This increase in rating is controlled by a sort of fuse, which screws in. The fuse is a jet pipe temperature limiter plug costing about eighty-five dollars. This takeoff and landing limit is restricted to two and one-half minutes. Well now, thought some bright Marine Corps aviator, just how long does the average dogfight last? Two and a half minutes! And wouldn’t he love to get all that extra thrust in combat. The Marines came up with what they call the 675 plug which allows the engine to run at 675 degrees C jet pipe temperature, giving 19,000 pounds of thrust with the nozzles aft. They put it in a couple of Harriers and carried out flight testing. It worked. Then they formally asked Rolls Royce for clearance to use it on the engines of the entire Harrier fleet. The answer was an emphatic, “No.” Rolls Royce went even further, “Do that to our engines, and we’ll add a penalty to the contract.” The Marine retort was crushing. They referred them to the last three engines Rolls Royce had stripped down for inspection. Surely Rolls Royce realized that those engines, which they reported in better condition than average, had been subjected to just this treatment? The Marines do not intend to use this extra thrust in everyday flying, but, in combat, engine wear and tear is of academic consideration.

As far as the Marine Corps was concerned, the contribution of NASA was invaluable in proving the VIFF concept. Marine Corps pilots were showing what VIFF could do for the Harrier. At the same time, Person and Culpepper were putting test and evaluation numbers on the maneuvers, making the Marines’ assertions irrefutable. By this time, in June 1972, NASA was progressing towards flight tests of the only Harrier fully modified at that time for thrust vectoring. NASA had exhausted the possibilities of the Kestrel by the end of 1970. If they were to pursue their pioneering work, they needed a Harrier. The problem was that the only Harriers potentially available at that time were the six development batch machines. These were aircraft set aside in England purely for development flying. They were specially instrumented for different aspects of performance, including navigation and attack, aerodynamics, weapon carriage, etc. John Attinello flew to England to try to arrange this for his NASA colleagues.

On the morning of October 10, 1970 at Hawker Siddeley’s offices at Kingston upon Thames, near London, Attinello had a meeting with Ralph Hooper, Hawker’s Chief Engineer, and John Fozard, the Chief Designer. Also present were Captain “Doc” Townsend, United States Navy, who was the fighter desk officer at Naval Air Systems Command, and then Colonel Noah New, who was the Marine Corps officer responsible for attack aircraft. New is now an admirer of Dr. Attinello’s work. That day, though, he listened as John Fozard showed viewgraphs of calculations refuting Attinello’s claims of greagly increased lift from thrust vectoring. What was said seemed to confirm New’s conviction that thrust vectoring would be more useful for defensive than offensive maneuvers. The Harrier was, after all, being procured for close air support, and Colonel New told the meeting that the evaluation of thrust vectoring in flight was “not an immediate objective.” As we now know, opinion on the value of thrust vectoring changed very rapidly amongst the decision makers in the Marine Corps, but at that time, Colonel New felt the Marines would not tolerate a delay in their program by diverting one of these six Harriers for NASA testing.

It seemed to be yet another setback. However, Colonel New’s feelings on the matter were to some extent academic, for the control of the development batch was firmly in the hands of Air Commodore Eric Burchmore, Head of the Harrier project for the Ministry of Defense and liaison man between U.S. and U.K. governments for the Marine Corps buy. Shortly thereafter, Burchmore was to meet a very influential friend of Lee Person. He was Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. At that time, Armstrong was head of NASA’s headquarters office, and he met Burchmore when he flew to England to discuss a number of joint programs, and to press NASA’s case for a Harrier.

This posed a big problem for Burchmore, for the Marine Corps’ buy of Harriers was officially supposed to be “off the shelf.” Although there was clearly going to be a spinoff benefit to the Marines, the flying of the development aircraft was for RAF purposes. Burchmore, with the support of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, detached the number two aircraft, XV277, and ordered it to be modified for NASA. The RAF, which was giving VIFF a very low priority, was furious. Now, however, they are modifying all their Harriers to match the Marines’ ability to vector throughout the flight envelope. At that time, Eric Burchmore’s bold and farsighted decision made him an unpopular man in many quarters.

It had taken a great deal of perseverance, but NASA now had its Harrier. Armstrong then threw his considerable weight behind the idea of a joint U.K.-U.S. VIFF program between USMC and NASA and the Royal Aircraft establishment at Bedford in England. This was signed in June 1972, and flying continued through until 1976. Yet, despite the results it was producing, the skepticism remained, even in the least expected quarters. Many people seemed to think that they were, quite literally, crazy. Person and Culpepper gave one briefing at the Institute of Defense Analysis in Washington, when some very senior, highly respected U.S. Air Force officers actually laughed out loud at their assertions. They were aviators of the old school who pointed to the Harrier’s loss of energy when the nozzles went down. What they ignored was that fighter pilots had always given up energy in the hard break maneuver with thrust off, brakes out, trying to force an overshoot. They could not accept that the Harrier offered them that same capability, only magnified many times.

Both NASA and Marine Corps pilots were discovering that the more they pushed the Harrier, the more it continued to surprise them. Pilot after pilot has described it as “completely viceless.” Pilots being what they are, they pushed it to its limit. According to one of the Marines’ most respected pilots, they are still trying to reach that limit. “It’s a pilot’s airplane. It’s way out and far beyond what Hwker Siddeley ever figured the airplane was going to be used for. You can wring it out until the airplane just won’t do any more, but we don’t know where that is. We always run across a lack of intestinal fortitude on the part of the pilot before we reach there. This airplane will do anything. It’s just a fantastic airplane.”

In Operation Battlecry at Point Mugu, Marine pilots flew against various aircraft including F4 Phantoms which were simulating MIG21’s. They were beginning to refine the VIFF procedures (Illust. #1). The Harrier always started off in the defensive position with the “enemy” behind. It is an attack airplane and history showed they were most likely to start any aircombat in this situation. That is fine because thrust vectoring was made for it. In a dogfight, the airplane which can turn just a little better is able to “track” the other and loose off some sort of weapon which will shoot the opponent out of the sky. Against the Phantom, the Harriers frequently shook them off simply by deflecting thrust and sliding to the inside of the circle. The Phantom pilot could not match the turn, and swiftly, as his arc became wider, he was faced with a dilemma. Should he try to tighten his turn or get out by banging open the throttle and zooming high? Phantom pilots swiftly discovered they could not live with Harriers in a tightening, decelerating turn. When they zoomed, however, the Harrier simply reversed out of his slow turn, banged the nozzles aft, and drove up behind the Phantom “like and elevator.” When the Phantom pilot eventually committed himself, as he had to, and went downhill again, the Harrier flipped over with thrust vectoring and sat on his tail again. Very demoralizing.

Most Harrier pilots will try, in most situations, to win conventionally by staying fast. The reason is simple. They are better prepared, fighting at high speed, to counter any threat from another enemy who might happen along, or from their opponent’s partner who is sitting up above just out of the fight waiting his chance. But, simulator experience has shown that even with the latest generation of high performance fighters, dogfights can degenerate in speed very quickly, right down to 120-150 knots, with the aircraft jockeying for advantage on the point of stall. There, the Harrier is in its element. Low wing loading airplanes normally revel in a low speed flight by forcing an opponent to go slow. When he goes past on the outside of the turn, they reverse on him, forcing him slower and slower until he is shot down. As the Phantom pilots discovered in Operation Battlecry, the high wing loading Harrier, using VIFF, is unbeatable at this tactic. A NASA pilot had great fun one day in the U.K./U.S. XV277 program using this facility against an agile Hawker Hunter. The Harrier sat there, essentially in a hover, with just a tiny bit of forward speed. The red-faced Hunter pilot was running around him. Every time he tried to get away, the Harrier would point its missile at him.

VIFF has emerged as another potential dogfight winner in the “yoyo” (Illust. #2). In a level turn, at maximum power, the opponent’s turn is resulting in a large radius. However, the Harrier pilot pulls up, squeezing his turn into a small radius at the top of the loop, by using his nozzles. He has now gained height, and therefore, more potential energy over his opponent as the nozzles pitch the Harrier quickly into the dive, pulling maximum G at the bottom of the dive and rolling to get closer to his opponent. Although he has accelerated quickly in the dive, he has done it without throttling back because, of course, he can reduce horizontal thrust with VIFF. The tremendous thrust to weight ratio of the aircraft is right there, available, whenever he needs it. By then, he is right where he wants to be – behind the enemy.

Vietnam veterans flew through and survived the constantly escalating missile threat. In Vietnam, Marine pilots had a lot of different missiles fired at them, ranging from the large “telephone poles” down to the little hand-held Strelas. They saw the big ones a long way off, from their dust cloud on the ground at launch and sometimes from a white contrail behind. In the early days, the standard evasive maneuver was to roll towards it and dive down, then the SAM would turn to come after the plane. Once it had got its nose down, the pilot pulled hard up, and the SAM could not “hack” it. The enemy countered that by firing one high and one low. The answer to that was a barrel roll or some other maneuver that the missile could not follow with its stubby wings. Against hand-held infrared missiles which cannot be jammed, the tactic is to stay low and fast. Here, the Harrier pilot has an advantage denied to others. First, the exceptional maneuverability which VIFF gives you, and the fact that the nozzles are conveniently under the wing, which blanks out the plume of heat the missile’s seeking. The Harrier pilot can turn towards the missile which no longer has anything to aim at. He can decelerate and turn so fast, the missile is going to get badly confused.

Vietnam veteran Major Drax Williams, USMC, thinks that Harriers flying at 450 knots, about 150 feet above the ground are not going to tempt too many pilots down into the fight. He recalled an exercise when he and his wingman were attacked from the rear quarter by a pair of simulated MIG21’s, diving down to try to lock on with heat seeking missiles. The “enemy” was forced down to low level in an effort to pick up the infrared plume from the confusion of heat signals thrown up from the ground. His wingman spotted the “bandits” at six o’clock about 8,000 feet behind and called “hard right.” The wingman made a flat slicing turn at maximum G, using thrust vectoring to turn at around nineteen degrees per second. Drax Williams went straight up, initially giving the enemy fighters a planform view which blocked out his infrared sources. Nozzles at twenty degrees to get the initial pitch up, then over the top of the loop. He and his wingman were now separated in the vertical by about 2,000 feet, both pointing at the enemy. The bandits went for the high man, and Drax pointing down went into what is called a “dustoff” maneuver, flying straight at them. They pitched up and tried to barrel roll in behind him which presented a “shot” to Drax’s wingman. Even Harrier pilots are fallible. He missed. Major Williams was left in a last-ditch situation with the enemy behind him.

It was time for the High-G Barrel Roll (Illust. #3). He tried to knock off every possible knot of airspeed to force a massive overshoot by his opponents. In a conventional fighter, he would have throttled back, put out his airbrakes and flaps, while rolling upwards through 360 degrees. But, he would have telegraphed his intention to the opponents the moment the flaps went down. Without touching the throttle, he slammed the nozzles down to sixty degrees, and the nose pitched up fifty degrees. He stood on the rudder and rolled, decelerating at about fifty knots per second. Going over the top he was down to about eighty knots as the enemy streaked past below. His nozzles aft, with instant thrust, he was in pursuit.

The skill of the pilot determines how well the Harrier is going to perform in air combat. VIFF alone is not going to save his life, which is why the Marines, and increasingly the Royal Air Force in Germany, spend so much of their time practicing the techniques. However, the Harrier pilot has an advantage denied to any opponent. The enemy can never predict what the Harrier is going to do next, because it does not rely on normal aerodynamic forces. In combat, successful pilots see the continually changing scene, and subconsciously compute the projected flight position of the enemy. Nevertheless, this relies on previous experience of the combat behavior of conventional aircraft. The Harrier will rarely follow this mental forecast of a flight path so it drains an opponent’s confidence. VIFF has confronted the enemy with a profound psychological disadvantage – the unknown.

I found an excerpt from a magazine, “NATO Warplanes”, which I believe is from 1985 and has the page #37 on the bottom. I apparently used it as a bookmark for the Jump Jet book by Myles… The back has a ripped up picture of a Sea Harrier, and the front has a tear off which includes a table showing the Kill Ratios of the Sea Harrier vs. Other aircraft. Here’s the Table:

Sea Harrier Success Record in Combat Engagements During Peacetime Exercises
(Figure 3)

VENUE ADVERSARY KILL RATIO

(Sea Harrier Wins: Adversary Wins)

Decimomannu 81 F15 & F5E 12:4

Decimomannu 83 F16 31:14

Alconbury F5E 3:1

NATO Sea Exercise F14 3:1 to 10:1

United Kingdom F4 10:1

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