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Harrier in Action (Aircraft 58) By Don Linn

The worth of a fighter aircraft cannot be fully realized until it is tested in combat, wargames and mock combat are fine for training, but until an enemy has been met and locked in a life or death struggle, the metal of either a fighting man or fighting aircraft can not be ascertained. The Harrier, after some thirteen years of operational service, has met the enemy, locked him in mortal combat, and come av/ay the winner. Operating under severe winter weather conditions, in the rough wind swept South Atlantic seas off the Royal Navy assault carriers HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, Royal Navy Sea Harriers engaged Argentine Air Force fighters, naval vessels and ground targets with great suc­cess. During these combat actions in the South Atlantic the Harrier, the worlds first operational Vertical/Short Take Off and Landing (V/STOL) jet fighter, has proven its worth.

The road to success has been a long and hard one, a road that was paved with hard work, perseverance, disappointment and uncertainty dating back to early 1957 and the Harrier's predecessor, the Hawker Siddeley P.1127. The P.1127 was the end result of a private, but very determined effort by both Hawker Siddsley and the Bristol Engine Com­pany, the manufacturers of the Pegasus turbojet engine which was the heart of Hawker's V/STOL program, to produce a practical V/STOL military aircraft.

Hawker's Chief Designer, Sir Sydney Camm, led the design team that began work on Project 1127 in 1957. Working under Camm were two young design engineers, Ralph Hooper and John Fozard, who would play a major role in designing the P.1127, and con­tinue their efforts throughout most of the Harrier program. From those first design discussions in 1957, the P.1127 finally emerged, a V/STOL that was destined to become a new chapter in aviation history. It took nearly two years, until June of 1959, with Bristol making a maximum effort, to develop the BE.53 turbojet engine, before the project started to take shape. The BE.53 was the key to the whole program and it wasn't until the follow­ing August that the first positive results were realized when bench tests of the new turbo­jet achieved 11,000 lbs. static thrust.

Meanwhile, Hawker was struggling alone, operating solely on company funds when the Ministry of Supply authorized the building of two research prototypes. The official perfor­mance and specifications were written as Experimental Requirement E.R. 204D. This pro­vided Hawker with the badly needed financial backing to contine with the P.1127's development. This of course came after Hawker had spent millions of pounds of company funds on design work. However the P.1127 program had been progressing well at Hawker's Kingston-on-Thames factory, and on 17 August, 1960, the first P.1127, carrying the serial number XP831, was rolled out. Five weeks after roll out, nearly two years after Hawker decided to proceed with the project, the P.1127 prototype made it's first flight from Dunsfold. With Bill Bedford, Hawker's Chief Test Pilot at the controls and with all sorts of instrumentation wires hanging off the aircraft (to save weight all but the most rudimentary instruments had been remcved), the aircraft lifted vertically into the air. To prevent mishaps the machine had been tethered by 18 inch cables, and so, while this historic flight was neither high nor of long duration it was extremely successful.

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