Harrier E-Book

Jonathan Glancey

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 427

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The British designed and built the Harrier, the most successful vertical take-off-and-landing aircraft ever made. Combining state-of-the-art fighter plane technology with a helicopter's ability to land vertically the Harrier has played an indispensable role for the RAF and Royal Navy in a number of conflicts, most famously the Falklands War. Jonathan Glancey's biography is a vividly enjoyable account of the invention of this remarkable aeroplane and a fitting tribute to the inspiration and determination of the men and women who created it, and the bravery of the men who flew it, often in the most dangerous conditions.

Leseprobe

HARRIER

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Jonathan Glancey, 2013

The moral right of Jonathan Glancey to be identified as the author of thiswork has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designsand Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the priorpermission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders.The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectifyany mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Extract from Spirit of the Air © MOD Crown Copyright 2006.Extracts from ‘Now and Then’ and ‘You Love that England’ by C. Day-Lewis,in Collected Poems (London: Enitharmon Press, 2004).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 9781843548911E-book ISBN: 9781782394433

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

Preface

Introduction: To tread upon the air

1   A leap of imagination

2   Kestrel breeds Harrier

3   Cold War warrior

4   Baptism at sea

5   Foreign legions

6   New wars for old

7   Wing feathers clipped

8   What flies ahead

Epilogue: The Windhover

Acknowledgements

Select bibliography

Index

‘The airplane won’t amount to a damn until they get a machine that will act like a hummingbird, go straight up, go forwards, go backwards, come straight down and alight like a hummingbird.’

Thomas Alva Edison

‘All modern aircraft have four dimensions: space, length, height and politics.’

Sir Sydney Camm, Hawker Aircraft

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.VZ-9 Avrocar. © Bettmann/CORBIS.2.Convair XFY Pogo. © Bettmann/CORBIS.3.Ryan X-13 Vertijet. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.4.Short SC.1. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.5.Frank Whittle, John Herriot and Stanley Hooker. Copyright Rolls-Royce plc/Courtesy of Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust.6.Bill Bedford. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.7.Sydney Camm. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.8.Hawker P.1127, XP831, first tethered flight. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.9.Hawker P.1127, XP831, HMS Ark Royal. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.10.FGA.1 Kestrels. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.11.Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.12.Hawker Siddeley P.1154. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.13.Yakovlev Yak-38s. US Navy/Wikimedia Commons.14.Harrier analogue cockpit. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.15.Harrier updated cockpit. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.16.FRS.1 Sea Harrier. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.17.Commander Nigel ‘Sharkey’ Ward and Lieutenant Commander Kris Ward. SWNS.18.Sharkey Ward landing FRS.1 Sea Harrier at Pebble Mill. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.19.FRS.1 Harrier landing on HMS Hermes. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.20.GR.3 Harrier, Belize. Mirrorpix.21.GR.3 Harrier, West Germany. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.22.GR.3 Harrier, RAF Gütersloh. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.23.FRS.1 Sea Harriers from HMS Invincible. © Imperial War Museums (HU 92567).24.AV-8A landing on USS Franklin D Roosevelt. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.25.USMC AV-8A. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.26.GR.7 Harriers painted in camouflage. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.27.GR.7 Harriers, Ahmed Al Jaber Air Base. © PA Images.28.USMC AV-8B Harrier. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.29.GR.7 firing CRV-7 rockets. Courtesy of Philip Jarrett.30.AV-8B Harrier II. © George Hall/Corbis.31.Northrop Grumman X-47B. Rex.32.Lockheed Martin F-35B. Rex/Layne Laughter/US Navy.33.GR.9 Harriers farewell flight.

PREFACE

The weather was hostile. Blustery. Ice-cold winds. Grey skies barely visible through banks of low cloud. Conditions, in fact, that would have been all too familiar to the pilots of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force who flew to victory in the Falklands War nearly thirty years earlier. As some two thousand military personnel, their families and friends – and not forgetting the media – stared into the unforgiving sky, sixteen Harrier jump jets, in diamond formation, each of four aircraft, thundered towards RAF Cottesmore to land, vertically, and to shut off their engines simultaneously. But not before one of these GR.9A Harriers – the final development of this legendary military aircraft, painted for the occasion in glossy ‘retro’ camouflage – stopped in midair, turned to the control tower, and, landing light blazing, made a deep and courtly bow to those assembled below and, by extension, to everyone who, one way or another, had been a part of the story of the Harrier over the previous half-century.

That aircraft was ZG506, flown by Group Captain Gary Waterfall, commander of Joint Force Harrier, controlling Harrier squadrons of the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm (Royal Navy), and the last station commander of RAF Cottesmore, which itself was closed shortly after this final, highly emotive flight of Britain’s jump-jet force. That afternoon – 15 December 2010 – the sixteen jets had flown low in homage, and as a farewell, over the RAF bases of Cranwell, Coningsby, Marham, Scampton, Waddington and Wittering, with their ghosts of Spitfires, Dambusters, Cold War V-bombers, Phantoms and generations of officer cadets earning their ‘wings’. They flew, too, above the still-handsome town centres of Stamford and Oakham and over the soaring medieval towers of Lincoln Cathedral before returning to their Rutland base, by now wreathed in eerie and ever-shifting tendrils of low rolling mist.

As the Rolls-Royce engines of the pugnacious jets span on cue to a collective stop, and a haunting silence, those gathered on the ground or clambering from cockpits knew all too well that this was truly the end of an era. The Harrier had been in service with the RAF for forty-one years, and in action, from the Falklands War to the most recent missions in Afghanistan. The Harrier was a development of the Hawker P.1127, the world’s first successful vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. On the drawing board in 1957, the revolutionary P.1127 made its maiden flight on 19 November 1960; one way or another, the jump jet born and nurtured in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey spanned half a century in the service of the country that invented and manufactured this magnificent flying machine – a fighter aircraft that, perhaps justly, has been dubbed the jet-age Spitfire. It is a machine – the product of an optimistic new Elizabethan age when British design, technology, engineering and aircraft not only matched but led the world, if only for what proved to be an unduly brief time – that has spanned my life, too. As much an emotion as a brilliant invention and a finely resolved and hugely characterful machine, the Harrier ranks in the pantheon of the world’s greatest aircraft.

Now, out of the blue, one of the world’s most potent and proven combat aircraft was to be taken out of service to save the British government some £900 million. That decision had been announced to Parliament on 12 October 2010, shortly before the fiftieth anniversary of the P.1127’s first hover, as a result of the latest Strategic Defence and Security Review. The effect of the cuts was immediate. The following month, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, like her sister ship Invincible another victim of the latest round of government spending cuts, made a final voyage with Harriers on board, from Tyneside, where she was built, and launched in 1981, to Hamburg.

On 24 November, four Harriers, led by Lieutenant Commander James Blackmore, blasted off the ship’s deck on a flight to RAF Cottesmore. This would be the last time a British military aircraft would operate from a carrier. A replacement carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, and the supersonic Lockheed Martin short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35B stealth jets she is meant to take to sea, will not be ready for active service until 2020. Watching the Harriers abandon their floating nest, the Ark Royal’s skipper, Captain Jerry Kyd, said it was like ‘taking the teeth from a tiger’, while General Sir David Richards, Chief of the Defence Staff, noted in a decidedly low-key manner that the decision to decommission the Ark Royal had provoked an ‘understandable emotional response’.

‘Understandable’ and ‘emotional’? Certainly. And besides, by axing both such a formidable fighting machine as the Ark Royal and the seventy-nine-strong Harrier force, Britain had deliberately opened a gaping hole in its defence strategy. The ever-controversial Commander Nigel ‘Sharkey’ Ward, who had led Sea Harriers to victory from the deck of HMS Invincible in spectacular style in 1982, and whom we will meet again in this book, told the British media:

The connived withdrawal of the Harrier from service is an appalling miscarriage of justice, and of operational wisdom; the reprehensible actions of those who contrived this as ‘a logical operational decision’ must be condemned as disloyal and against the direct interests of our national defence capability.

To make matters seem much worse than they were, the perfectly serviceable, and saleable, Ark Royal was sold, like Invincible before her, for scrap to Leyal Ship Recycling, a Turkish company on the Aegean coast, while the Harriers were flogged off, at bargain-basement price, to the US Marine Corps to be broken up for spare parts for the Americans’ highly prized AV-8B Harrier II force. In 2013, these Harriers are still active in Afghanistan, and the Marines intend to hang on to them until 2030 if they possibly can.

The GR.9A Harriers that flew for the last time in service that December afternoon at Cottesmore were not machines, or a type of aircraft, due or fit for retirement. In fact, the latest Harrier model had only been delivered to RAF Cottesmore, and so also to the Ark Royal, between 2004 and 2009, while in July 2008 a contract had been awarded to QinetiQ, the Farnborough-based aerospace company, to further upgrade and maintain the Harrier fleet until 2018. Imagine buying dozens of Aston Martin DB9s, kitting them out with every latest James Bond-style gizmo and then selling them to an American car dealer for a few thousand quid, each to be broken up into spare parts for DB9s built under licence in the United States. Madness? Well, yes. And yet, as this biography of the Harrier will show, while tracing its genesis, development and action-packed service history, politics have toyed with this magnificent British flying machine from one end of its long, if now truncated, life to the other.

In November 2011, perhaps stung by criticism both within and without the armed services, Peter Luff, a junior defence minister and former PR man, announced that seventy-two of the Harriers bound for the United States would be converted to match the Marine Corps’s AV-8B fleet, but as the career of junior ministers rather resembles that of inexperienced pilots flying into fog for the first time, it was hard to know. The following year, Mr Luff was no longer a junior minister of defence and was, in any case, due to leave Parliament at the next general election. As it was, in 2012 the US Naval Air System Command said that at no time had there been plans for upgrading and operating British Harriers for service with the Marine Corps. The aircraft were for spare parts, and that was that.

Intriguingly, the Harrier – in the guise of the prototype Hawker P.1127 – was nurtured into RAF service at a time when a Conservative government was hell-bent on destroying the very idea of fighter aircraft in favour of ground-to-air missiles. Half a century on, meanwhile, a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats ditched the Harrier while setting its cost-cutting eyes on pilotless ‘drones’ that would, if possible, supersede jet fighters and more or less every other fixed-wing military aircraft in the near future. It was, however, a Conservative government that had gained most, politically, from the sheer efficacy of the Harrier in the early 1980s: British victory in the Falklands War in 1982, in which Harriers flown by the Royal Navy and the RAF played a vital and legendary role, had led to a landslide political victory for Margaret Thatcher in Britain’s 1983 general election. Indeed, on 17 December 1982, Mrs Thatcher had paid a visit to the Hawker Siddeley factory at Kingston upon Thames. The prime minister had posed, beaming, for press photographers from the cockpit of a Harrier. ‘I would have loved to have flown in it,’ she had said. No one had doubted her.

Inevitably, the prospects of any British military aircraft are highly susceptible to the Mad Hatter logic of Westminster and Whitehall. The loops, stalls and spins of politicians can either buoy up or bring down the very same machines – from Spitfires to Harriers – that have fought for our hard-won freedoms. And the Harrier was, of course, very much a servant of democracy: it should never be forgotten that, in one of its finest moments, it did its bit in helping to bring down the cruel and puerile military government of the Argentine Republic, a dismal regime that had killed many of its own people – some 20,000 – including students, trade unionists, journalists and the daughter of Livio Dante Porta, one of the country’s finest engineers, who had pushed so hard for the development of a clean and efficient steam-railway technology fit for the twenty-first century. Many of the ‘disappeared’ were pushed from aircraft over the Río de la Plata or the South Atlantic. These ‘death flights’ were planned by Vice Admiral Luis Maria Mendia (1925–2007), the former head of Argentine naval operations; a document signed by the admiral called for the ‘physical elimination by using planes that, in flight, would throw out the prisoners drugged beforehand’.

Back under the cold, grey clouds of Rutland on 15 December 2010, Air Vice Marshal Peter Dodworth, one of the first four RAF pilots to be trained on Harriers, told reporters:

[The Harrier] was an exciting adventure for us. The first time I did a conventional take-off I was astonished by the acceleration. My first vertical take-off was exhilarating. It is pretty sad to see the demise of the aircraft after forty-one years. I watched it develop into the formidable and effective fighter jet it is today. It has been amazing for me to see it fulfil its potential.

Air Vice Marshal Graham Williams, who delivered the first Harrier into service at RAF Wittering in 1969 and who flew the triumphant return leg of that year’s Transatlantic Air Race from New York’s Empire State Building to London’s Post Office Tower, added:

The Harrier means everything to me. It is just one of those planes that becomes a part of your life. It was so different from everything else, and it was the greatest fun, almost better than sex. Today is also a very sad day for me, because it seems that politics and finance has got in the way of what still is a very viable aircraft. The Harrier still has ten to fifteen years of life left in it. To go and dump it like this is almost criminal.

Walking away from Harrier ZG506 without stopping to look back, Group Captain Gary Waterfall, one of the 135 RAF Harrier pilots and fifty-three Navy pilots facing an uncertain future, was stoical. ‘Without doubt this is an emotional day for all those who have been fortunate to be involved in one of the true icons of aviation, alongside Concorde and Spitfire.’ But, he added, ‘life goes on, and it’s always important to look forward, not back. Right now, though, our thoughts are with everybody involved with Harrier over the years as we bid a fond farewell to a truly remarkable aircraft.’

As he said this, Harriers and Sea Harriers were still reaching for the sky, in their inimitable way, with the Indian, Italian and Spanish navies as well as the US Marine Corps. It is not quite time to say farewell to the instantly recognizable, compact and much-loved British jet that revolutionized flight and could not just fly like a hummingbird but sting like a bee, wasp and hornet rolled into one.

INTRODUCTION

TO TREAD UPON THE AIR

History records, in myth, legend and fact, all too many vertical descents, from hilltops, temples and church towers, which led to the deaths of early would-be aviators. The dream of flight is as old as the hills – and certainly as old as the temples of the ancient Greeks. According to Aulus Gellus, the second-century Roman author, it was the Greek philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and politician Archytas (482–347 BC) who designed and built the world’s first self-propelled flying machine. A steam-powered jet called the Pigeon, it was said to have flown 650 feet. Did it? Who knows? But Hero of Alexandria, a Greek mathematician and engineer, published notes on a steam turbine, and possibly built and demonstrated it, so perhaps the Greeks were as ahead of their times and the rest of the Western world in this respect as they were in architecture, science, sculpture and philosophy.

For all the intriguing flying machines that may or may not have taken to the air between Archytas’ Pigeon in Athens of the fifth century BC and the Wright brothers’ Flyer in 1903, the ability to take off and land vertically was far beyond the capabilities of heavier-than-air machines, whether legendary or not. Interestingly, though, vertical flight by lighter-than-air machines was achieved some two hundred years before the prototype Hawker P.1127 rose into the air, by itself and with no guiding strings attached, on 19 November 1960. While attempts had been made, on paper at least, by Roger Bacon in England in the thirteenth century and Leonardo da Vinci in Italy in the fifteenth century to develop vertical take-off ornithopters, the first successful vertical take-off with humans on board – in fact, the first ever free flight by humans – was made by the Montgolfier brothers, inventors and paper manufacturers, from the grounds of Château de la Muette on the edge of Paris on 21 November 1783.

What a magnificent and thrilling sight this great paper and varnished taffeta hot-air balloon must have made as it rose 3,000 feet above cheering spectators. The blue-and-gold balloon was seventy-five feet high and adorned with images of fleur-de-lis, signs of the zodiac and suns emblazoned with the face of King Louis XVI. The crew, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, a chemistry and physics teacher, and the Marquis d’Arlandes, an Army officer, flew the best part of six miles in twenty-five minutes and brought their craft down to land safely.

The sheer exoticism of its decoration, and the magic nature of its flight, must surely have set Parisian minds racing back through childhood stories of fairies, dragons and flying carpets. Antoine Galland’s French translation of The Arabian Nights, published between 1704 and 1717, had been a huge success; by the time of Pilâtre de Rozier and d’Arlandes’ flight, many Parisians would have been familiar with tales of magic carpets, of how Prince Husain, the eldest son of the sultan of India, bought such a carpet in Bisnagar that could rise in an instant – vertical take-off, of course – and transport him, in ‘the twinkle of an eye’, to places ‘many a day’s journey and difficult to reach’. Stories of flying carpets go back even further than these tales, a thousand years old or more. King Solomon was said to have flown on a green-and-gold silk carpet measuring sixty miles square; it could carry 40,000 passengers, or a hundred times more than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. Even today, Iranians tell wondrous stories of magic carpets used, at least in one case, for warfare. In 1213, or so the story goes, Prince Berhoz of Khorasan in eastern Persia married a young Jewess, Ashirah, whose father wove magic carpets. Berhoz commissioned from his father-in-law two dozen flying carpets supported on bamboo frames. Two soldiers were assigned to each carpet, which was equipped with bows and poison-tipped arrows and fireballs, and when Berhoz’s father launched a war against the neighbouring shah of Khwarzem, this mythical thirteenth-century fighter-bomber squadron made a successful attack on the shah’s castle, setting it ablaze. It was not so very different from a Harrier operation in Iraq or Afghanistan some eight hundred years later.

In India, meanwhile, many stories are still spun, often with impassioned seriousness by fervent Hindu nationalists, concerning ‘vimanas’, or highly advanced rocket-powered aircraft that were flown across the subcontinent very many thousands of years ago by the enlightened high priest-kings of the Rama empire. The ‘ancient’ manuscript relating to flying machines, however, seems to have been dictated by the mystic Pandit Subbaraya Shastry (1866–1940) some time after the end of the First World War. A Hindi translation published in 1959 included diagrams of complex jet engines, although these were the work of T. K. Ellappa, a draughtsman at an engineering college in Bangalore.

Flying chariots are, of course, staples of tales told in India’s national epic, the Mahabharata, dating from much the same time as the Bible. One such spherical vimana was apparently able to fly up, down, backwards and forwards. In the Sanskrit Samarangana Sutradhara, a wide-ranging treatise on classical Indian architecture written in the eleventh century by Paramara, king of Bhoja of Dhar, we learn that a vimana must be:

Strong and durable… like a great flying bird of light material. Inside one must put the mercury engine with its iron-heating apparatus underneath. By means of the power latent in the mercury, which sets the driving whirlwind in action, a man sitting inside may travel a great distance in the sky. The movements of the Vimana are such that it can vertically ascend, vertically descend, move slanting forwards and backwards. With the help of the machines, human beings can fly in the air and heavenly beings come down to earth.

Quite clearly, the design team at Hawker Siddeley, the best part of a thousand years later, had been extraordinarily slow on the uptake.

British observers, meanwhile, appear to have missed the flight of a latter-day vimana, allegedly constructed by Shivkar Bapuji Talpade (1864–1916), a Sanskrit scholar, his wife and an architect friend, and flown successfully to a height of 1,500 feet over Chowpatty Beach, Bombay (now Mumbai), in 1895. It landed automatically. The Marutsakha, or ‘Friend of the Winds’, was powered by a ‘mercury ion engine’, but sadly, said Talpade, a paucity of personal funds, a lack of sponsorship and imperial animosity ensured that this sensational performance was a oneoff. After his death in 1916, his relatives are said to have sold the machine to Rally Brothers, a firm of British exporters based in Bombay. Presumably the brothers Rally assumed that the British government would have no interest in the world’s first successful heavier-than-air flying machine, or perhaps they were simply too dull to make sense of its highly advanced Vedic jet technology.

However fanciful, stories like these drawn from across at least two-and-a-half thousand years continued to haunt the imaginations not just of poets, novelists and artists, but of inventors and pioneer aviators, too. Even so, the first reliable VTOL aircraft were the rigid airships – an advanced form of hot-air balloon – that took to the air at the beginning of the twentieth century. The very first was Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s Luftschiff Zeppelin 1; it made its maiden flight, over Lake Constance, on 2 July 1900. During the First World War, the Zeppelins became the first successful long-range bombers. On 13 October 1915, L.15 bombed central London, damaging the Lyceum Theatre at Charing Cross, killing seventeen people and injuring twenty more.

The aim, post-war, sought by the Germans, the British and the Americans was to nurture enormous dirigibles or rigid airships that could fly across continents and oceans, and take off, land and moor in city centres. Rather fancifully, it was assumed that mighty airships would tie up at the top of the Empire State Building. The idea of using airships as airliners and bombers was abandoned after a number of spectacular accidents – in particular, the loss of the British government-sponsored R101 over France on 5 October 1930, and the fire, caught on newsreel, that destroyed LZ 129 Hindenburg as it attempted to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey on 6 May 1937. Still, these impressive, if flawed, machines highlighted some of the advantages of what might be achieved by aircraft that could take off and land vertically, and that could hover, whether benignly or menacingly, over ‘targets’ and city centres – which, as the Zeppelin raids over London proved, had become one and the same thing.

It was the Germans who took the next successful step in the story of vertical flight with the maiden flight of the world’s first practical helicopter on 26 June 1936. This was the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, designed by Heinrich Focke and Gerd Achgelis. It was an instant success, and a step forwards from the autogyro, a small aircraft invented by the Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva and first flown on 9 January 1923. The helicopter blades of the autogyro were not driven by or connected to the aircraft’s engine, but, rotating in flight, they allowed the pilot to fly very slowly, something that fixed-wing aircraft were unable to do without stalling. The arrival of the Fw 61 meant that pilots were now able to take off and land vertically, to fly just above the ground if necessary at low speed and, of course, to hover. This ability to stay still a few inches above the ground was, although it sounds odd to say so, a giant leap for aviation.

What neither the airship nor the helicopter could do, though, is what aircraft like the Sopwith Camel and Fokker D.VII had been doing in the late stages of the First World War: flying fast and aerobatically. These, in modern parlance, were ‘air superiority’ fighters and their latest equivalents, the Supermarine Spitfire and Messerschmitt Bf 109, were both making their maiden flights in the mid-1930s. But despite the undoubted success, and omnipresence, of the piston-engined fighter and bomber in the Second World War, the next challenge for military aircraft design – a step aside from the helicopter, an aircraft that was to succeed brilliantly in its own right, and from the burgeoning dream of supersonic flight – was surely a fighter that could take off, land and hover like the Fw 61, and shoot off at great speed and with great dexterity to engage the enemy. If such an aircraft proved feasible, it would also mean that air forces would be able to fly it from the most basic forward air bases; there would no longer be a need for long grass strips or concrete runways. The potential was enormous. But how to get there?

There were several routes that, one way or another, led to the Hawker P.1127 prototype and so to the Hawker Siddeley Harrier. Equally, the development of pilotless aircraft, or drones – which might yet altogether replace manned fighter aircraft, however ingenious these can be, in years to come – evolved at much the same time. In 1941, Robert Lusser (1889–1969), a German aircraft engineer, moved from Heinkel, where he had been working on a rival to the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, to Fieseler. Here he played a key role, with Fritz Gosslau of the engine manufacturer Argus, in the design and development of the Fieseler Fi 103, dubbed the V1 flying bomb (V standing for Vergeltungswaffe, or revenge weapon) by the Nazis. Wernher von Braun, meanwhile, was at work on the V2, a vertical take-off rocket and worryingly effective long-range ballistic missile against which there was then no defence. Both V1 and V2 were produced too late in the day to radically affect the outcome of the Second World War. However, Lusser and von Braun teamed up after the war, working at Huntsville, Alabama in the United States on the rocketry projects that would see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the Moon less than a quarter of a century after VE-Day.

The importance of these weapons – one leading to the ‘drones’ employed frequently by the US military in recent years, the other to NASA’s successful manned space rockets – had much to do with the urgency that had driven their development. With Germany under aerial assault night and day by British and US bombers, escorted later in the war by powerful and well-armed long-range fighters, scientists and engineers were propelled into thinking quickly and creatively. What was the type of aircraft, or drone or rocket, best able to defend Germany from Allied bombers?

One answer, which led to a cornucopia of imaginative ideas, was for aircraft that could be deployed from makeshift airfields established along the bombers’ anticipated flight paths. These machines needed to be cheap and quick to build, easy to transport, and yet capable of climbing rapidly and hitting the enemy’s bombers hard. Here truly, as the Allies approached the German border from the west and the Russians from the east, were desperate measures for desperate times. The sheer ingenuity of many of the designs called for by the Luftwaffe’s Emergency Fighter Programme of spring 1944 – which featured various forms of high-speed jets, some with swept wings, others with delta wings and vertical take-off aircraft too – was extraordinary. A number of books have been published in recent years on these ‘secret’ Nazi aircraft designs. While some were little more than sketches on scraps of paper, others were not only promising but were even taken up after the war by the Allies, especially in the United States and the Soviet Union.

One of the most promising was the Bachem Ba 349 Natter (Viper), a small vertical take-off rocket-powered interceptor designed by Erich Bachem, a Fieseler engineer, and produced under the auspices of Heinrich Himmler’s SS at a purpose-built workshop at Waldsee in the Black Forest. The idea for such an aircraft had, in fact, been proposed by Wernher von Braun in 1939, and although enthusiastically received by Field Marshal Ernst Milch, the partly Jewish Air Inspector General who had done much to create the new Luftwaffe that went to war that same year, it was rejected by the Reich Air Ministry, which believed it to be both unnecessary and unworkable.

Designed to be constructed using semi-skilled labour, the Natter was essentially a wooden aircraft powered by the Walter 109-509A rocket motor. This produced 3,740 lbs of thrust boosted by a further 4,400 lbs generated by four Schmidding 109-533 solid-fuel rockets bolted in pairs to either side of the fuselage. Launched from a steel guide tower, the Natter should have climbed vertically at the astonishing rate of 37,400 feet a minute, reaching a top speed of 621 mph; as Allied bombers rarely flew much above 20,000 feet, the rocket plane, armed to the teeth with a formidable cluster of Henschel unguided rockets in its nose cone, might well have spelt sudden death for many unsuspecting bomber crews. Once the rockets had been released, the Natter’s pilot would escape and parachute back to safety and the next mission, while the expended fuselage would, ideally, strike another enemy bomber and destroy it.

Progress on this secret machine was rapid. On 3 November 1944, a prototype, piloted by Erich Klockner, was carried, it seems, up to 18,000 feet by a Heinkel He 111 bomber, and then released. It flew surprisingly well and landed safely. In late February 1945, a successful vertical rocket launch was made with a dummy pilot. On 1 March, a Natter lifted off with Oberleutnant Lothar Siebert aboard. The launch was radio-controlled; the pilot was to take control as the machine descended towards enemy bomber formations. At about 1,600 feet, however, the aircraft inverted and, flying at fifteen degrees to the vertical, vanished into the clouds; it reappeared and within thirty seconds smashed into the ground, killing Siebert. The war, of course, was all but over at this point, and although the Germans are said to have had ten further Natters ready on launchers at Kirchheim, near Stuttgart, these saw no action – despite Squadron Leader Paddy Payne, Warrior of the Skies, nobly attacking a fully functioning, bright-red Natter with his late-model Spitfire in the pages of the Lion comic I pored over as a young boy in the 1960s. One of the surviving Natters was shipped to the United States for inspection; today, it rests, unrestored, in a warehouse belonging to the Smithsonian.

There were several other intriguing designs on the drawing boards of German aircraft manufacturers as late as the end of March 1945, some of which seem even more futuristic, and might have been more successful, given time, than the Bachem Ba 349, of which a total of thirty-six appear to have been built. Focke-Wulf offered the Triebflügeljäger, or Thrust-Wing Fighter, an astonishing wingless VTOL interceptor. Sitting on its tail with its nose cone pointing skywards, the Triebflügel was to have been powered by ramjets located on the tips of the three blades of a giant propeller designed to spin around the centre of the fuselage. The aircraft would have taken off vertically, rather like a helicopter, and then levelled out with the jet-powered blades acting like a giant airscrew and propelling the fighter forwards at what Focke-Wulf engineers calculated would be a top speed of 621 mph. It looked like a machine Dan Dare’s mortal enemies, the Treens, might fly on short missions across Venus in the pages of the Eagle, the British boy’s comic launched in 1950 that celebrated the kind of technological progress that led to the Harrier and men on the Moon. It was not until 1955 that the Americans released information on this top-secret VTOL jet.

Meanwhile, Heinkel proposed the Lerche (Lark), a VTOL fighter and ground-attack aircraft that was also to have stood on its tail at take-off. Eschewing jet or rocket propulsion, the Lerche was to have been powered by a pair of 2,000 hp Daimler-Benz 605D V12s, the ultimate development of the engine produced in tens of thousands and fitted to the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter. These were to have driven two large contrarotating propellers set within an ‘annular’ wing – a metal ring encompassing the centre of the fuselage – and, theoretically, would have given the Lerche a top speed of 497 mph and a ceiling of 46,910 feet. This remarkable aircraft might well have flown successfully. Its appearance, at the bitter end of the battle for Germany, would certainly have been a shock to Allied aircrew. It would have seemed wingless, an aircraft, or spaceship, from the pages of a science-fiction fantasy, a machine inhabiting a parallel universe to that of Spitfires, Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Flying Fortresses. Even today, the Lerche retains something of the look of a flying machine that might have been dreamed up by NASA scientists and engineers twenty years later – and NASA was, of course, well staffed with brilliant young ex-Nazi engineers and scientists.

Heinkel drew up a further design, very similar to the Lerche, for a turboprop version designated Wespe (Wasp). Although the first turboprop plane to fly was a specially adapted British Gloster Meteor in September 1945, the idea had been proposed and tested, although neither in flight nor with a full-scale aircraft, by György Jendrassik, a Hungarian mechanical engineer, in the late 1920s. German industry had access to this research, and during the Second World War various companies – BMW, Hirth and Daimler-Benz among them – invested in turboprop development. But as the fruits of their experiments were not expected to be seen until sometime late in 1945, and probably later, the Wespe was never going to be built, still less flown in action. While it was fortunate that Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich missed its target by 988 years, the pace of research and development in the German aero-industry in the last two or three years of the war was unprecedented and remains unsurpassed.

The memory, and perhaps the blueprints, of such aircraft lived on well into the following decade. In 1959, SNECMA, the French engine company, unveiled its sensational C.450-01 Coléoptère. A test bed for its latest, experimental pulse-jet engine, the Atar 101 E.5V, this tail-sitting jet featured an annular wing and was very much the jet descendant, or younger sibling, of the Lerche and Wespe. Promising great things, it did actually take off, on 6 May 1959, but crashed two months later while attempting the transition from vertical to forward flight; the pilot ejected safely, although the aircraft was written off.

If the Coléoptère was to be a product of prolonged post-war experimentation with new forms of military aircraft, the wartime VTOL machines proposed, or tested, by the Germans were the products of an ever-increasing urgency. For pilots, they were, or would have been, uncomfortable machines to operate. Even if the Lerche and Wespe could have been built in time to take on the aerial armadas of four-engined Allied aircraft carpet-bombing German towns and cities in 1945, pilot error would surely have led to any number of accidents. Lying prone in a cockpit staring up at the sky was never going to be an easy way for a pilot to take off, while having to land an aircraft vertically on its tail after an adrenaline-sapping mission was asking a lot of even the coolest and most competent airman. In any case, such landings would have made these aircraft easy prey for marauding and highly potent Allied fighters, which were by now capable of flying at very nearly 500 mph and diving close to the speed of sound and were armed with batteries of cannons and large-calibre machine guns.

The boundless ingenuity and invention of German engineers, however, was to be redeployed and nurtured once the Axis powers had been defeated and especially during the Cold War, when, as we will see, a VTOL fighter capable of tackling some of the very same missions originally plotted for these Nazi ‘science-fiction’ aircraft became both desirable and then a reality. That aircraft – the Harrier – was, of course, a jet. One wartime German design that was to use piston engines showed that there was an alternative route to vertical take-off and landing. This was the Focke-Achgelis Fa 269, a tilt-rotor VTOL fighter. In this design, a piston engine – BMW or Daimler-Benz – was to have been mounted in the fuselage behind the pilot. Transverse drive shafts were to set two giant propellers, one fitted in either wing, spinning downwards and so lifting the Fa 269 vertically like a helicopter. These would then pivot behind the wings and push the aircraft forward.

Much test work was carried out, using a wind tunnel, at the Focke-Achgelis works at Hoykenkamp in Lower Saxony, founded in 1937 to manufacture helicopters. The factory, however, was bombed heavily and work on the Fa 269 ended in 1944; Focke-Achgelis engineers were not exactly relieved, but they knew full well that the aircraft was unlikely to fly before 1947. Forty-two years later, the first US Bell Boeing V-22A Osprey took to the air; it had taken that long to make the Fa 269 concept a reality. Even then, the Osprey was beset by development problems and several machines crashed with fatal results during the 1990s. Although taken into service with the US Marine Corps in 2000, the Pentagon only sanctioned full-scale production as recently as 2005. Today, the Osprey operates with the Marines, the US Navy and the US Air Force. Like the Harrier, it can be based on land or fly from carriers at sea. It has seen action in rescue and combat roles in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan and has become, after a long, expensive, controversial and even tragic birth, one of the brightest stars in the constellation of current US military aircraft.

While the Osprey proves that the Harrier is not the only solution to vertical and/or short take-off and landing (V/STOL) flight, its role is and always will be quite different from that of the jump jet still flown, and enthusiastically so, by the US Marine Corps. The turboprop Osprey is a successful marriage of helicopter and aeroplane; it can seat twenty-four troops and has a top speed of around 300 mph. A combat US AV-8B Harrier is a single-seat interceptor and ground-attack fighter and flies close to the speed of sound. It nonetheless remains intriguing that this military tilt-motor aircraft, a type that might have made its debut in Germany in 1947, took to the air nearly thirty years after the Hawker P.1127.

Mention has to be made of one other type of Nazi German VTOL aircraft, although this one remains the stuff of apocryphal stories, bar-room tales, internet conspiracies and blurred photographs. Given the German proficiency in photography at the time, technically and artistically and in the most demanding theatres of war, it does seem odd that those involved in such specialist design were unable to take one half-decent snap of a flying saucer. Allegedly, a certain Dr Richard Mehta, ‘sometimes known as the “Father of Saucerology”’, according to a host of copy-cat websites, was hired by the Luftwaffe, or even by a secret branch of the SS, to build a ‘flying saucer’ to take out Allied bombers by rockets and, presumably, to take them by goggle-eyed surprise, too. Dr Mehta was, it seems, then recruited by the US after the war to work at Avro Canada, where he worked on classified designs for flying saucers.

In 1953, Avro Canada did, in fact, reveal a mock-up of a flying saucer, the Avrocar designed by John ‘Jack’ Frost, a British engineer who had arrived in 1947 from de Havilland, where he had been chief designer of the DH 108 Swallow, a small jet based on the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet. Flown by test pilot John Derry, DFC, a former RAF Typhoon pilot, the Swallow was the first British aircraft to push through the sound barrier. From 1952, Frost worked on the development of a new form of gas turbine, or what he called the ‘pancake engine’, with jet thrust exiting around the rim of the engine. This configuration led, naturally enough, to a machine with a central engine and exhausts all around its rim that did indeed look very much like a flying saucer.

Visiting US Air Force officials were clearly impressed, agreeing to fund the aircraft along with Avro Canada. Later on, the US Army came on board, and eventually, despite some terrifying tests with the proposed power plant – engine fires were endemic – the first Avrocar was completed at Avro Canada’s Malton plant, Ontario, in May 1959. A first free flight was achieved on 12 November 1959 – although, far from boldly going where no man had gone before, the Avrocar rose just a few feet above ground and wobbled precariously at a top speed of 35 mph. On 9 June 1961, a demonstration flight for USAF and NASA witnessed a second prototype lifting itself over a six-foot-wide ditch and flying at just under 25 mph. The scream of its exhaust was painful to anyone coming anywhere near the Frisbee-shaped aircraft, while the heat generated inside the cockpit was enough to melt instruments. Many Americans claim to have seen flying saucers spinning in the night skies above them in the years ‘Jack’ Frost toiled away north of their border trying to make this type of machine an earthly, as opposed to an extraterrestrial, reality. Whatever those many Americans saw – especially those abducted and subjected to X-rated probing by inquisitive visitors from other worlds – Avro Canada would have been able to assure them, categorically, that their UFOs were not from Planet Ontario. The project was cancelled by the US military in December 1961. By then, the Hawker P.1127 had been flying successfully for over a year.

Back in 1945, however, with Hitler and the Third Reich dead and disposed of, German ingenuity was being forcibly exported in human form to the Soviet Union and the United States and, to a lesser extent, to Great Britain and France. But if the Second World War was over, leaving sixty million dead in its devastating wake, a Third World War threatened almost immediately. This was not simply the result of a clash between political ideologies, of communism – ‘the Red Menace’ – versus freedom, democracy and capitalism; rather, it was due to the simple fact that Stalin’s Soviet Union had either invaded or controlled Eastern Europe, and from 1949, with its new-found ally, the People’s Republic of China, seemed hell-bent on some form of world domination. This is certainly how many ordinary people, as well as politicians and the military, felt in the West, and in fact they continued to do so right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. While the threat of the Cold War prompted the design and accelerated the development of an enormous variety of fast, powerful jet interceptors and fearsome long-range bombers to carry nuclear weapons, it also led to the genesis of the Hawker P.1127, an aircraft that the military thought of as almost effete in its early years. If there was to be a shooting war with the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and China, then most RAF and USAF officers, not to mention politicians and military strategists, believed this would be fought in the air with Mach 2 fighters and Mach 1 bombers, with guided missiles and stand-off nuclear weapons.

But such an insane contest would have seen the probable destruction of every key military airbase in Europe, East and West, if not the kind of Armageddon that many feared and was so brilliantly satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove, in which a crazed, cowboy hat-toting US pilot, Major ‘King’ Kong, signalled the end of the world by riding an H-bomb like some bucking bronco onto a Russian target from his Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. Any air force units that survived might only be able to take to the contaminated skies again to protect what was left of democratic Europe in aircraft that could be operated from a secret bunker, road or forest clearing. And if they were to do so, discreetly, suddenly and unexpectedly, those aircraft would need V/STOL capability. Which is why, even while the main thrust of military aircraft development in the US, USSR, Britain and France was towards conventional supersonic jets requiring sophisticated and high-maintenance airbases, the dream – fast becoming a necessity – of VTOL and V/STOL flight was harboured in the late 1940s, nurtured throughout the 1950s and became a reality in the 1960s.

Winston Churchill, the British wartime premier who had done so much to help destroy Hitler, the odious Nazi regime and all its ‘perverted science’, was on the attack again mere months after the defeat of Germany and Japan. On 5 March 1946, now Leader of the Opposition in Britain, he gave a speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

The term ‘iron curtain’ was not new. Writing in Das Reich in spring 1945, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, expressed concern at agreements made by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Yalta Conference that February to carve up Europe after the imminent German defeat, and made the point that ‘an iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered’. If this was rather rich coming from a man who himself condoned the savage and senseless slaughter of millions of hapless people, Goebbels was not altogether wrong. As the war drew towards its appropriately Gotterdammerung-style finale in Europe, senior Nazis outdid one another in seeking last-ditch alliances with the Allies, who they believed were, at heart, as fiercely anti-communist and anti-Stalin as they were. While there was more than a grain of truth in this, the Allies were determined to force Nazi Germany into an unconditional surrender and, as this required the full force of the Red Army and a huge sacrifice from the Soviet Union in terms of human life, no one in Britain or the United States in their right political mind in 1945 was going to turn against Stalin at that point. Indeed, such was the support for good old ‘Uncle Joe’ that Churchill’s iron curtain speech was widely condemned. Churchill despised Stalin and communism as much as he loathed Hitler and Nazism. And yet, he was one of the very politicians who, even if he had little choice in the matter, had allowed the iron curtain to descend in the first place.

The reality of this new political divide in Europe was soon evident. In June 1948, Stalin blockaded Berlin in a blatant attempt to isolate the city, cutting its transport links to West Germany and so to supplies from the Allied powers – Britain, France and the United States. These, along with the Soviet Union, had been the occupying nations in Berlin, a city geographically stranded since the Nazi surrender in the new Democratic Republic of Germany. An iron curtain had indeed descended around Berlin, and the one way in was by air. In a spirited and defiant rescue operation that lasted the best part of a year, Allied aircraft flew 200,000 missions bringing food and supplies to Berlin, for the loss, through accidents, of seventeen US and eight British aircraft and the death of 101 military personnel and civilians.

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was founded the following year: its mission, according to Lord Ismay, its first secretary-general, ‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down’. The Russians retaliated with the establishment of the Warsaw Pact in 1955. In between, the United Nations went into battle, with South Korea against North Korea and its backer, China, in the Korean War of 1950–53. The United States was to be militarily engaged, in one part of the world or another, from then on and up until the present day.

It was the US Navy that made the first demand, in 1948, for VTOL aircraft and, curiously given the nature and design of aircraft carriers, it asked for tail-sitters. The idea, however, was for these fighters to operate from platforms mounted on the afterdecks of cruisers and destroyers. So where a warship might have been equipped with a helicopter, now it might carry