Joint Force Harrier Read online

  The third of April 2006 was the day that 3 (F) Squadron RAF – the ‘F’ standing for ‘fighter’ – one of the Royal Air Force units flying within the new Joint Force Harrier (JFH) construct, was being decommissioned. It was then to be immediately recommissioned as a Eurofighter Typhoon squadron. Those were the first two ceremonies of the day. The third and final event was where I came in: the recommissioning of 800 NAS as a purely Royal Navy squadron to fly the Harrier GR7, but still operating within JFH.

  At that time 800 NAS was still smarting from the retirement of its long-serving Sea Harriers. The original idea of JFH had been to bring the Navy’s Sea Harrier fighters and the RAF’s ground-attack Harriers together under a single command. But then the decision was made to take the Sea Harrier out of service. With its demise the Fleet Air Arm lost its ability to provide air defence for the rest of the Navy.

  Without the Sea Harrier, the Falkland Islands would probably still be flying the Argentine flag, and all of us in the Navy knew it. And if another hostile power suddenly decided to appropriate one of the other odd bits of territory Britain still has dotted about the globe, there wouldn’t now be very much that the Royal Navy, at least, would be able to do to stop them. And we all knew that as well.

  I don’t think anyone in the Fleet Air Arm was happy when the axe fell on the Sea Harrier but, in the end, it really was the only sensible option.

  The final version of the Sea Harrier, the FA2, was fitted with enhanced avionics, top-drawer radios and navigation kit, plus the ground-breaking Blue Vixen radar system, one of the best in the world and later used as a development base for the state-of-the-art radar installed in the new Typhoon. The Blue Vixen, linked to the brilliant Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAM missile (also known as the ‘Slammer’), created a fantastic weapons system that allowed the FA2 to excel in the long-range firefight. This was an environment where speed and manoeuvrability were much less important than target acquisition and a good long-distance missile. And in this situation the Blue Vixen and the AMRAAM proved an unbeatable combination. The Sea Harrier’s excellent operational ceiling also helped. It could climb higher than the RAF’s Tornado F3, for example, being able to get above 30,000 feet while carrying a full war load on the wings.

  Towards the end of the Sea Harrier’s career there was a fierce debate about whether or not it could hold Q – that is, act as the QRA (Quick Reaction Alert) fighters used to intercept unknown aircraft approaching the United Kingdom – for a short period of time, to relieve the Tornado F3 fleet. At that time the Tornado fleet was short of two squadrons’ worth of the best-capability F3s, which had been loaned to Italy to plug the gap between their old Lockheed F-104 Starfighters and the Italian Air Force’s own Typhoons.

  The response from the RAF to this suggestion was a refusal, on the grounds that, because the Harrier wasn’t supersonic, it didn’t have the capability to do the job required. The Tornado is supersonic, and the RAF maintained that this meant it could reach the intercept point quicker than a subsonic Harrier, but this argument is somewhat simplistic and misleading. Nobody would dispute that, once in the air, the Tornado could go like a bat out of hell and reach any designated point faster than a Harrier, but the crucial phrase is ‘once in the air’.

  With its new navigation system, the Sea Harrier FA2 could get off the ground in about five minutes, but to get a Tornado airborne took significantly longer. In the extra time the Sea Harrier could travel about sixty miles, which, for an aircraft based at a Scottish airfield and responding to a Russian Bear or Badger bomber heading south towards the UK, might easily be a third of the distance to the intercept. So in most cases, from the time an alert was declared to the time the intercept would take place, there would actually have been little difference between the Harrier’s and the Tornado’s response times.

  And there were other factors too. The Harrier, with a full weapon load, would be doing about Mach 0.85 at around 35,000 feet. The Tornado, carrying a similar load, would realistically be stuck about 10,000 feet lower and, even though it might be supersonic, it wouldn’t be overtaking the Harrier very quickly. Partly for noise abatement but mainly to save fuel, the Tornado would be unlikely to travel all the way to the intercept at high supersonic speeds. And, finally, with its Blue Vixen and fully integrated AMRAAM system, the Sea Harrier actually had a better long-range weapon capability than the Tornado did at the time, particularly in its ability to engage targets at very high altitudes.

  As a Sea Harrier pilot, I felt that allowing the FA2 to hold Q might have relieved some of the pressure on the Tornado F3 force, and been a sensible role for the jet to occupy as it approached the end of its service life. In defence of the UK, the always underestimated ‘Shar’ would, I suspect, have acquitted itself just fine. But the aircraft did have its limitations.

  Even in its ultimate FA2 form, the Sea Harrier didn’t have a tremendous range or endurance compared with more modern aircraft but, from a fleet defence point of view, it had been exactly what we needed. It was small, simple, robust, reliable and easy to maintain.

  Its major disadvantage, though, turned out to be its engine. Operating in the hot air of the Middle East, or even the Mediterranean summer, it didn’t have sufficient thrust to land vertically on the deck of a carrier if it was still carrying all of its weapons. And dumping unused Slammers – each one costing the British taxpayer just under £200,000 – into the sea before being able to land was neither an attractive nor an acceptable option. In short, the Sea Harrier was an evolutionary dead end. But the Navy, to its credit, had the good sense to recognize this. Money allocated to the aircraft’s development was diverted and enabled the service to buy into the Joint Force Harrier programme and share the RAF’s ground-attack Harrier GR7s. And in retrospect this was a good decision.

  If the Royal Navy hadn’t taken this route, the retirement of the FA2 wouldn’t have merely marked the end of an era, but could also have spelt the end of naval fixed-wing aviation itself. If the Royal Navy had decided to persevere with the Sea Harrier FA2, in 2006 the aircraft would probably still have reached the end of its operational life, and there would have been no replacement on the horizon.

  Instead the Fleet Air Arm now had access to a proven machine that had played a crucial role in nearly every war of recent years. And that, sadly, couldn’t be said for the old FA2, although it wasn’t for want of trying.

  We’d pushed very hard to get involved in the 1991 Gulf War with our Sea Harriers. That year my squadron was on the Ark Royal in the eastern Mediterranean, basically acting as the Cyprus guard ship. We were able to demonstrate that we could reach the areas to the west of Baghdad from the carrier’s position, though that would have meant overflying Israel, which might not have been the smartest of ideas. But in fact we never got involved, and with hindsight I believe this was probably the right decision.

  I think the real question here is: what would the Sea Harrier have been able to do if we had got involved? The answer is: not a lot. The FA2 was a fighter aircraft, and the reality is that after the first two or three days it would have had almost nothing to do, because what was left of the Iraqi Air Force stayed firmly on the ground. There were very few pure fighter tasks, only CAP – Combat Air Patrol – around the carriers, and even that would have been problematic for the Sea Harrier.

  This was because the carrier zones were so far from mainland Iraq that the FA2, with its very limited endurance, would have had to spend a lot of its time getting fuel in the tanker stacks, and not very long on task. The F-15Cs, in contrast, which carried out the majority of the air-defence tasks during this period, could manage about ninety minutes on task before they needed to refuel. The bottom line was that the UK’s contribution to the 1991 Gulf War simply didn’t require the Sea Harrier’s participation.

  But during Operation TELIC, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the RAF’s Harrier GR7s played an important and valuable role. And I know that because I was flying one of them.

  And I can say categorically that for all my time
flying Harriers – nearly twenty years now – while I felt a sense of achievement returning from deployments to Bosnia, it was coming back from Operation TELIC in 2003 as one of the first two RN pilots to migrate over to the RAF as the JFH concept took root that was truly a defining moment in my flying career. I suddenly realized that with the right gear – and even then I believed that the Harrier GR7 was the right gear – your effectiveness on the battlefield was just immense.

  The reality is that, as a fighter pilot, you’re unlikely to ever find out how good the combination of you, your aircraft and your weapons really is. The last time any British fighter actually shot down an enemy aircraft was over the Falklands. You can practise and train, and do as well as you can in exercise scenarios, but you never actually know whether you are good enough at your job. And that’s because, unless there’s another major conflict, you will simply never face an armed enemy aircraft in air combat. But when you’re employed in air-to-ground operations you’re fulfilling your primary tasking all the time. You know immediately if you’ve delivered the weapon correctly and accurately. That gives you a kind of immediate and unarguable feedback that simply doesn’t exist in the world of modern air-to-air combat.

  In the Balkans campaign in the mid-1990s, FA2s were used to attack Serb positions with 1,000lb bombs, but there were severe problems with aiming these. Operational constraints meant that the bombs had to be dropped from high level, around 10,000 feet, but the sighting system was designed for fairly low-level releases, so the pilots had to try to compensate for this inadequacy in their attacks.

  The result was at best crude and the bombing very inaccurate and not particularly effective. The Harrier GR7, in contrast, was designed from the first for Close Air Support operations. Its primary weapons are bombs of various sizes, CRV-7 rockets and the Brimstone and Maverick anti-armour tactical air-to-ground missiles. And that was the aircraft that 800 NAS was now going to be flying.

  With the recommissioning of the squadron in April 2006, the focus of Fleet Air Arm fixed-wing aviation changed dramatically, through the simple expedient of now possessing the right aircraft to do the job required in today’s theatre. With the GR7, we were no longer in the business of fleet air defence. Instead we were going to have to learn a new discipline – Close Air Support and ground attack.

  And we needed to get up to speed quickly. Because, while both services enjoyed the ceremony, at Cottesmore that day in April, I was only too aware that the Harriers were needed to support British troops fighting in Afghanistan, and that we were scheduled to deploy there in under six months.

  But before we went we would be indulging in more traditional pursuits. Within a fortnight we’d be embarking aboard HMS Illustrious in the Mediterranean.

  2

  We took off from RAF Cottesmore just after 10am on 13 April 2006, flying as two three-ship formations, split by forty minutes, and routeing down across France. An Air Group normally deploys to its parent aircraft carrier in a civilized and agreeable manner off the south coast of England, usually just off St Catherine’s Point, which is nice and close to the Royal Naval Air Stations at Yeovilton and Culdrose in the event of any problems with either aircraft or ship. It was different for us, because the joining point for the squadron was further away. In fact it was nearly 2,000 miles further away, because the Illustrious was already in the Mediterranean, steaming just off Crete and heading east towards the Suez Canal.

  Each formation was accompanied by an RAF Vickers VC10 tanker that stayed with them as far as Sardinia and then turned for home after giving each jet a last top-up. Averaging about 360 knots with the tanker trail, the transit took nearly five hours. And at the end of it one of my pilots, Lieutenant Brian Semple, known in the squadron as ‘Bernard’ and fresh out of the training squadron, successfully recovered on board a ship for the first time in his life. And the challenge of that was not to be underestimated. It was not just his first carrier landing, it was the first time he’d ever deployed as part of a Naval Air Squadron.

  ‘It’s strange, boss,’ he told me in the briefing room afterwards, ‘but when we were out there in the low wait I was watching you, focusing on your aircraft, but also watching the ship steaming along. And then the sun glinted off the rank tabs on your shoulder – those three thick gold bars – and it suddenly dawned on me that I’d finally made it to a Navy squadron.’

  That might seem a strange remark, but I knew exactly what he meant. Although Bernard was a Royal Navy lieutenant, he had never really been in the Royal Navy. He was one of the first-ever straight-through GR7 Harrier pilots, so apart from his brief few months at Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, his flying grading at Yeovilton in Somerset and the odd visit and hold-over, he’d never really spent any time in the Navy itself. All the rest of his military career up to that point had been spent entirely within the RAF’s pilot training system, just wearing a different colour uniform. So, for him, being a Royal Navy pilot in a Royal Navy squadron on a Royal Navy ship was in every way a new experience. And he wasn’t the only member of the squadron discovering for the first time what life was like on board a warship.

  Implicit in the Joint Force Harrier concept is the ability to mix Royal Navy and Royal Air Force personnel within the same squadron, and one of our first ‘tame crabs’ was Squadron Leader Dunc Mason, a former Red Arrow pilot and all-round good egg.

  Dunc was a big, well-built guy and kept very fit. He was always quite jovial and gregarious, and had a great sense of humour – which, as he often pointed out, he really needed if he was going to be forced to continue working with the Royal Navy.

  He was posted at pretty short notice to the fledgling Naval Strike Wing – which at the time consisted only of 800 NAS – from 1 (F) Squadron RAF as one of the flight commanders, and deployed to the carrier just ten days later. He’d served for three years on 3 (F) Squadron, flying Harriers from 1997 to 2000, but hadn’t previously ‘enjoyed’ landing an aircraft on a carrier at sea.

  But at least he didn’t have to fly out to the ship in a GR7: instead he embarked like a gentleman up the gangway when the Illustrious docked in northern Crete. When I saw him for a drink in the wardroom bar a few days later, he explained what a delightful experience that had been.

  ‘I carted all my kit on to the boat …’

  ‘In the Royal Navy, Dunc,’ I interrupted, ‘a boat is something you either row or sail, or a submarine. This is a ship.’

  His smile said he knew what I was up to.

  ‘Anyway, I was told to follow someone who had some idea where the hell he was going, because it’s ridiculously easy to get lost on this thing. There’s a maze of compartments, rooms, cabins, galleys, gulches, corridors, staircases, even a bloody great hangar. None of the spaces have any windows, so you’ve no idea where you are in the ship, and there’s not even a signpost pointing the way to the officers’ mess …’

  ‘That’ll be the wardroom,’ I said.

  When he said he returned to his own room, I was about to say ‘cabin’ but instead took another sip of my beer and let him continue: ‘It was a surprisingly spacious seven foot square and was going to be my home for the next two months. Luckily I hadn’t brought a cat with me, because there was sod-all room to swing one.’

  Shooting a mock-defiant look at me, he pressed on: ‘The bed – I refuse to call it a bunk – was easily two or three centimetres wider than the width of my shoulders, so that was pretty much like sleeping on a plank, and it’s even got straps, for God’s sake, so I can lash myself into it in a rough sea. That’s really encouraging. And I didn’t discover the icing on the cake until we sailed off into the Mediterranean.’

  He paused and sank a significant proportion of his beer.

  ‘Which was what?’ I asked.

  ‘My room is conveniently located right next to the rudder. This primitive steering device is in constant motion and sounds like a distressed whale. It takes some getting used to.’

  ‘Some people,’ I pointed out, ‘find the noise com
forting.’

  ‘They must be completely bloody demented,’ he laughed.

  ‘It’s life on board ship,’ I said. ‘You’ll get used to it. So how was your first flight?’

  When Harriers are launched from a ship everything is calculated down to the tiniest detail, much more so than when operating from a land base. And that means from the take-off run required in the heat of the Mediterranean or, as would become much more crucial later in the deployment, of the Indian Ocean, to the amount of fuel required on recovery to guarantee that the engine has enough performance to keep the aircraft in the hover while the pilot manoeuvres over the designated landing spot on deck.

  ‘The planning was interesting. You’re taller than me, just, so how the hell do you manage in that bloody room?’

  Dunc had a point. Planning, briefing and post-mission debriefing is conducted in a large – by Navy standards – space near the stern of the ship, apparently purposefully designed with numerous hanging metal boxes and other accoutrements fitted with razor-sharp corners on which to slash your head open. So anyone standing over five feet three – which was pretty much everyone – ended up walking around there with a constant stooping gait to avoid head injuries.

  ‘And the take-off?’ I asked.

  A huge grin creased Dunc’s face. ‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is really something else. It was exhilarating!’

  The first few sorties we’d planned for our new pilots were fairly simple, designed to allow them to settle into the routine of operating from a carrier. The focus was on getting them to the right bit of the sky at the right time and letting them practise instrument flying in case of poor weather on return to the ship after a mission. But the big event of the first sortie, and in fact of every sortie, was undoubtedly the landing, and I knew Dunc had had an ‘interesting’ first landing on board.