Joint Force Harrier Read online

  Compared with landing, the take-off is incredibly easy. You simply line up the Harrier where the marshaller tells you, ensure that all your pre-take-off checks are complete and you’ve got all the switches and controls in the right place, then give a thumbs-up to the marshaller and wait for the Flight Deck Officer to give the signal to launch.

  ‘That was a bit disappointing, actually,’ Dunc said. ‘In all the Hollywood films this always looks quite dramatic, with a snappy salute and a sort of lunge towards the sharp end of the boat with a kind of pointy outstretched arm. Not on this ship. The FDO took a quick look round, made sure the traffic light thingy was green and then, with typical British reserve, raised a very small green flag to just above shoulder height like a bored railway platform attendant.’

  The moment you’re clear to launch, you park the throttle firmly in the top left-hand corner of the cockpit, keeping your feet forced down hard on the brakes to run the jet up to its highest possible power setting before accelerating down the deck. As you imagine your feet going off the end of the ramp, you rotate the nozzles downwards to provide lift, until the forward speed of the Harrier has increased enough for the lift generated by the wings to keep the aircraft in the air. You carry out post-take-off checks and make sure there are no problems with the aircraft before popping up the gear and flaps, and gradually move the nozzles to the fully aft position.

  Most pilots never tire of launching off ski jump at the front end of a CVS – the military designation enjoyed by the British Invincible class carriers. The feeling as you accelerate down the deck towards the ramp and then smash up into the sky is simply breathtaking.

  The build-up to the launch was also interesting for pilots unused to operating on board ship. Much more time than normal is allowed for the pilot to get to the aircraft, to do a walk-round inspection and then get strapped in. Given the sea’s constantly moving surface, extra time is needed for the alignment of the navigation kit and other systems. On top of that, normally only half of the external inspection can be carried out because the tails of the aircraft often hang precariously out over the side of the flight deck. The pilots have plenty of time to sit in the cockpit with the canopy open and watch the naval hardware being energetically manoeuvred, all with the accompaniment of the constant hum of the four Olympus gas-turbine engines of the carrier throbbing away far beneath them. Aircraft engines are only started when directed by the FDO and, from that point on, all actions are initiated only with permission from the deck marshallers, or ‘chock-heads’ as they are affectionately known.

  Some of the chains that tie the aircraft down to the deck will be removed and then power and flaps checks can be carried out. This done, the rest of the chains are released and the pilot taxies against power, following the marshallers’ exact directions. Their job is extremely skilful, as they manoeuvre the aircraft within inches of one another, giving encouraging nods to the pilots while marshalling them past other aircraft or close to the side of the deck.

  I looked round the wardroom, waiting for the squadron’s Qualified Flight Instructor, Lieutenant Commander Neil Bing, known as ‘Bing Bong’, to appear. The QFI had, I hoped, a message for me, and for Dunc.

  Dunc seemed to have run out of steam, so I prodded him by asking: ‘And how was your first landing?’

  ‘Ah, yes, well, the landing. That really focuses the mind. I know what the sequence is supposed to be.’ Dunc stood slightly back from the bar and began checking off the points on his fingers.

  The sequence sounds simple enough. You fly the Harrier downwind at 600 feet, then turn base leg towards the ship, selecting the short take-off and landing flap and staying level around the turn. Then you move the nozzles to sixty degrees and start descending towards the deck, continuing the turn to roll out so that the aircraft is pointing slightly towards the ship, at an angle of about ten degrees. You work out where to take the hover stop with the nozzles, depending on the wind, but ideally at about a third of a mile out. Then you adjust your forward speed to come alongside the ship, about one wingspan out from the side of the deck and at about ninety feet up. That height puts Flyco – the Flying Control Position on the port side of the bridge – on the horizon.

  ‘I did all that, no problem,’ Dunc said, taking another mouthful of beer as he described his approach. ‘Then I looked for the deck marshaller, who ran out in his bright yellow coat and pointed at the spot he wanted me to land on.’

  The carrier has several Harrier landing spots, from number two near the bow to number six at the stern.

  ‘At first he clearly didn’t think I was exactly on the spot, and gesticulated wildly to let me know that he thought I was a buffoon who should definitely have done better through training. When I was positioned more to his liking he then ran off, very sensibly.’

  Dunc was recounting all this light-heartedly, but performing a vertical landing on a moving deck is extremely demanding for any pilot. Throughout the deceleration it’s vital to monitor the engine very closely to make sure that the aircraft has the performance to hover and won’t just sink into the sea as the forward speed washes off.

  And the really tricky bit is what comes next. Once established in a steady hover alongside the ship, the pilot has to transition across the deck exactly level and stop crisply on the centreline. Then he has to check his references to ensure that he isn’t drifting forwards or backwards, and then take a little power off to lower himself smoothly but firmly on to the deck. As the wheels touch the steel he slams the throttle shut, puts the nozzles aft and taxies forward under the marshaller’s directions to be positioned, probably with the aircraft’s nose hanging over the side of the ship.

  Dunc took up the story again. ‘I was unlucky enough to be the first pilot to launch from this boat since the squadron reformed with the GR7s. So this meant that, as it was the first sortie with a new aircraft, and with a crab driving it as well, there was an audience watching from one of the upper decks – I believe you call these people “goofers”.’

  I couldn’t tell whether he was showing off his grasp of the lingo or just taking the piss. Probably the latter.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘my first attempt at landing on the ship went reasonably well to start with, right up to the point where I was supposed to “transition across the deck exactly level”. I looked down and could see that the chock-head was indicating number four spot for me. Not perfectly, but reasonably steadily, I positioned myself on the centreline, checked the fore and aft references and took off a little power to start the aircraft descending towards the deck.’

  He was now in his stride, enjoying telling the tale and talking fast as he recalled the intensity of his first deck landing.

  ‘This seemed to take longer than I was expecting. I took a bit more power off. But I found this new rate of descent a bit alarming, so I put the power back on again. And as I was doing this the aircraft hit the deck. Then I remembered that at this point I was supposed to have slammed the throttle shut. Too late. With the power still on I bounced back up into the air. Not considered good form on any landing especially when you’re bouncing left, towards the edge of the flight deck.

  ‘Oh Christ, I thought, I’m going off the side on my first landing attempt. I chopped the throttle back to idle and dropped back on to the deck, hitting with the left outrigger first, and several feet further left than I’d intended. It was such a heavy impact that I thought the outrigger was going to break and then the aircraft would roll over the side.

  ‘But luckily the old girl held together and I was able to taxi forward. I noticed the hordes of goofers watching, and probably laughing, as I taxied towards my parking spot. As I shut down and waited for the other aircraft to land behind me, I thought about what had just happened and about all those people watching, and I comforted myself with the thought that perhaps it was one of those landings that felt a lot worse than it looked. This cosy feeling lasted right up until the moment when I climbed out of the aircraft, where the chock-head was waiting for me. �
�Fucking hell, sir,” he said, “that was shit!” ’

  I smiled at Dunc as Neil Bing finally appeared beside us, his face serious.

  ‘Boss,’ he said, nodding briefly to me, then turning to face Dunc. ‘I’ve just come back from the hangar, and it isn’t good news. We all know the Harrier’s a really tough aircraft, but that landing of yours, Dunc, was so heavy it’s bent the main wing spar. It’s a non-flyer, pretty much a write-off, and we’re going to have to divert back to Cyprus immediately to have it lifted off by crane and wait there for a replacement cab to be flown out from the UK. That means we probably won’t be able to get to Oman in time for Exercise MAGIC CARPET. The captain isn’t happy about any of that, and the CAG’s out looking for blood. Yours, to be exact.’

  I’d never actually seen anyone literally turn white before, but the blood simply drained from Dunc’s face when Neil mentioned the Air Group Commander. He could see what was left of his career in the Royal Air Force vanish straight down the pan.

  ‘Really?’ he croaked.

  But I couldn’t keep a straight face any longer. ‘No,’ I said, ‘not really. The aircraft’s fine. Just try and do a bit better next time, eh?’

  ‘You bastard!’ he spluttered, realizing it was all a wind-up, then checked himself: ‘Sir …’

  The strength of our relationship with Dunc was evidence of how well the new joint squadron was gelling. The Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force are two of the best-trained, most highly committed and supremely professional armed forces anywhere, but they have rarely seen eye to eye on anything, from the Loyal Toast and passing the port to the use of a razor.

  More seriously, as far as harmony within a joint unit was concerned, there are important differences in the way the Royal Navy and the RAF train the people who work on their aircraft.

  It’s a fact that RAF aircraft engineers are initially trained to a higher standard than our Royal Navy aircraft maintainers – though it’s also generally accepted that this is not necessarily a good thing – because of the different ways the two services work. Naval maintainers are taken through basic training and then sent to a squadron to learn their trade on the job. The RAF feed their engineers through a much more comprehensive training programme so that when they arrive on a squadron they are already fully trained and can be put straight into a primary job.

  Neither philosophy is right or wrong – they’re just different – but the discrepancies between them had proved to be the source of some friction within the joint squadron before 800’s recommissioning. My Navy maintainers had been growing just a little tired of being repeatedly told that they weren’t as good as their RAF counterparts. In fact several of them had told me they were really looking forward to getting back into a ‘proper’ dark blue unit again.

  My own impression was that almost all the Navy guys in 3 Squadron who were anticipating going to 800 NAS were desperate for it to happen because they had been working within the RAF system for so long, some of them for nearly four years. Most of them agreed that enough really was enough. As one of the chief petty officers told me: ‘If I’d wanted to work for this length of time with the RAF, I’d have joined the bloody RAF.’

  Inter-service rivalry is often seen as a good thing, on the basis that it makes you support your own side all the more. But I knew very well that a lot of effort could be wasted if Royal Navy maintainers became too determined to prove to their RAF counterparts that they could do the job just as well as them, when their actual job was to make sure that the aircraft were properly and correctly maintained and get them into the air.

  And it wasn’t just the maintainers. One evening shortly before we recommissioned I was in the bar of the officers’ mess at Cottesmore with some of my pilots. We were talking about the forthcoming changes when one of my pilots remarked, succinctly and somewhat irreverently: ‘It’ll be a great relief when we finally get back to the Royal Navy and its traditions, instead of the RAF and its habits.’

  But even after 800 NAS had formed, there were still RAF personnel involved with the squadron. Of the twenty-six excellent Air Force engineers who remained with us in our unit for the first six months, about half told me they would have been very happy to stay on longer because they really enjoyed what they did and liked working with the Navy.

  But we knew we had to guard against just becoming a small and insular Navy unit. People just had to accept that despite the apparent separation into light and dark blue, and whatever the views of the personnel of both services, all Harrier pilots were now a part of a joint force – Joint Force Harrier. For some, that was a slightly bitter pill to swallow. There were those who still believed that the services should be separate, that the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force should continue to operate largely independently.

  But the reality is that the RAF is extremely good at what it does, which is getting aeroplanes into the air and then operating them to the very limits of both the aircraft’s and the pilot’s ability. And although some of the 800 NAS personnel may have been relieved to be working in a naval environment again, there was absolutely no doubt that we had all learnt an enormous amount during our time in 3 Squadron. After all, we in the Navy hadn’t been involved in any form of land-based expeditionary operations for about half a century – since the Suez crisis – so we had a hell of a lot of catching up to do.

  Indeed, without that solid grounding and invaluable experience behind us, I would have been a lot less happy about our forthcoming detachment to Afghanistan.

  This was particularly important to me because there was another factor in this situation. Some time before we flew out to Kandahar I’d had some long chats with fellow Navy officers and the message had been clear: our performance would be very closely scrutinized. To be fair, any unit deploying to the frontline for the first time is under the spotlight. But the concerns I shared with every other squadron boss in a similar position were compounded in my own mind because we were the sole Navy component of JFH.

  At a squadron level, people were less concerned about this. They were just eager to do a good job. And I didn’t share the pressure I’d put on myself. In any case, in the end it was simple: 800 NAS had a difficult and dangerous job to do, and I could see the most effective way to validate both Joint Force Harrier and the squadron itself. Since actions speak louder than words, the best justification for the squadron’s existence was for us to do a proper professional job of whatever task we were given.

  Even so, the warnings I’d been given irritated me. I was very much aware that I was the commanding officer of a brand-new squadron and that in less than six months we would be flying out of Britain to operate in one of the most hostile environments on the planet. Afghanistan was exactly the kind of operational theatre where any shortcomings in our training and equipment, as well as in our personal abilities and commitment, would become very clear very quickly.

  In this most difficult of environments the slightest mistake or error could result in the loss of an aircraft or, infinitely worse, the loss of a life, either of a member of the squadron or one of the troops we were supporting on the ground. That was the major concern for me.

  And all I could do was ensure we did everything possible to prepare the squadron for the baptism of fire to come.

  3

  Since its inception in April 1933, 800 Naval Air Squadron has flown some fifteen different aircraft types in a wide variety of roles. These include dive-bombing the German cruiser Königsberg at Bergen flying Blackburn Skuas; carrying out reconnaissance sorties during the Korean War using Supermarine Seafires, and, latterly, low-level strikes with Blackburn Buccaneers. In the Falklands War, flying Sea Harriers from HMS Hermes, the squadron was back doing air-to-air combat, and this is the discipline that has occupied 800 NAS for most of its history.

  Air-to-air – with all the images of Top Gun and dog-fighting that it conjures up – is arguably the crème de la crème of military aviation, but with the demise of the Sea Harrier that role could no longer be filled by our aircraf
t. Instead the squadron had descended, literally and figuratively, to the opposite extreme, and become a bunch of mud-movers, as ground-attack specialists are somewhat disparagingly known.

  That, at least, was one opinion, held mainly by those who were still in a state of mild shock that the squadron was no longer engaged in fighter missions. But the reality was that the unit had been given a different job of work, and that job was ground attack.

  In fact the Fleet Air Arm has a proud, if little known, lineage in this discipline, especially in Aden and Korea and, most significantly, Suez, which was entirely a land war. In that conflict RAF bombers operated from Cyprus and Malta, and Royal Navy Hawker Sea Hawks – an aircraft designed for both air-to-air and ground attack – carried out many sorties from the three British carriers Albion, Bulwark and Eagle.

  During the Pacific Campaign in the Second World War, Royal Navy aircraft were flown from a variety of airfields, so operating from Kandahar would not be a novel experience for the service in that respect. Besides, during Operation TELIC in Iraq, Harriers – both US Marine Corps and British aircraft – operated from land bases as well as from carriers. But the Afghanistan ‘det’ would be the first time Royal Navy aircraft had ever been stationed in a landlocked country to conduct a dedicated ground-attack campaign, based essentially within a war zone itself.

  This was the first time in thirty-five years that any of 800’s pilots had been given ground attack as a primary mission. And the about-face in terms of tasking required a whole new outlook.

  Fighter pilots are trained to think in three dimensions, to keep an accurate air picture running in their head of exactly who’s behind, in front, above and below them, and many are very disparaging about the mud-movers. I’ve heard comments like: ‘Their necks are fused.’ ‘They can’t look up and they can only think in two dimensions.’ ‘They can only see what’s right in front of them.’ ‘They’re the kings of tunnel vision.’