Straight Up: A History of the Harrier Jump Jet

No fighter jet in history has attracted quite so many nicknames as the Harrier. To the public it was the Jump Jet.

To the pilots who flew it, it was simply the beast, a machine that could take off straight up, hover in place like an oversized dragonfly, and then, with a flick of a lever in the cockpit, go tearing off at nearly the speed of sound. For more than fifty years, in the hands of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, it did things no other combat aircraft on earth could manage, and it did them from farmland, forest clearings and the decks of ships too small for anything else to fly from.

This is the factual story of how it came to exist, the variants that carried it through the Cold War and into the Falklands, and the rather undignified way it eventually left British service.

A Frenchman's Idea and a Tethered Hover (1957 to 1960)

The Harrier's origin story starts, improbably, with a French engineer nobody in Britain had asked for advice. In the mid-1950s Michel Wibault proposed a fighter powered by an engine that could swivel its exhaust downward for takeoff and rearward for flight, an idea French industry showed little interest in pursuing.

It found a more receptive audience in Bristol, where engineer Stanley Hooker recognised that Wibault's swivelling-nozzle concept could be married to a new engine Bristol was already developing, one that combined the front fan of one existing design with the compressor and turbine of another. Hooker took the idea to Sydney Camm, Hawker's chief designer, whose company had spent the previous two decades building some of Britain's most famous fighters, from the Hurricane onward.

Camm's team began sketching a small, single-seat aircraft to sit around the new engine, and by 1957 Hawker was funding early design work on what it called the P.1127, initially without any government contract at all.

The engine at the heart of the project, which would eventually be named Pegasus, worked through four rotating nozzles, two at the front venting cool bypass air and two at the rear venting hot exhaust gas. Swivel all four nozzles downward and the aircraft could lift straight off the ground; swivel them rearward and it flew like an ordinary jet; anywhere in between, and the pilot could blend vertical lift with forward thrust during the tricky transition from hovering to wingborne flight.

It sounds elegant on paper. Building an aircraft that could actually survive the experience took rather longer, and it very nearly did not survive it at all: three of the earliest development aircraft were wrecked in crashes, one of them very publicly at the 1963 Paris Air Show.

The first genuinely airworthy prototype, XP831, made its first tethered hover at Hawker's airfield in Dunsfold, Surrey, on 21 October 1960, restrained by a cage of wires while test pilot Bill Bedford, flying with one leg still in plaster after a road accident, learned to keep the machine balanced on its own thrust. It was a cautious, almost comic beginning for an aircraft that would later be trusted to operate off the back of a warship in the South Atlantic.

Bedford went on to make the first free, untethered hover a month later, on 19 November 1960, and by the end of that year the P.1127 had also managed conventional horizontal flight, though not yet in the same sortie. Getting an aircraft to do both, and to switch smoothly between the two, remained the hard part.

The Kestrel and the Tripartite Trial (1961 to 1965)

As development continued through the early 1960s, the P.1127 acquired swept wings, a more powerful Pegasus engine and a new name, Kestrel, and attracted the kind of international attention that only a genuinely novel military aircraft can. Britain, the United States and West Germany agreed to run a joint evaluation, ordering nine Kestrel F(GA).1 aircraft in 1962 for a combined trials unit, the Tripartite Evaluation Squadron, based at RAF West Raynham.

British, American and West German pilots flew the Kestrel there from 1964, testing whether a jump jet could genuinely operate away from conventional runways, dispersed into fields and forest clearings where a fixed airbase would make an obvious and vulnerable target in any future European war.

The trial persuaded enough of the sceptics. The RAF ordered a production version, initially designated P.1127(RAF), into service in 1965, and in 1967 it was given the name originally intended for a separate, cancelled supersonic project: Harrier.

Into RAF Service: The GR1 and GR3 (1969 to the 1980s)

The Harrier GR1 formally entered RAF service with No. 1 (Fighter) Squadron at RAF Wittering on 1 April 1969, an appropriately awkward date for an aircraft that plenty of onlookers still assumed was some kind of elaborate joke. It was not.

The GR1 arrived loaded with equipment that was genuinely advanced for its era, including a head-up display and an inertial navigation system, both still novelties in front-line squadron service at the time.

Three further squadrons, Nos. 3, 4 and 20, were stood up in West Germany at RAF Wildenrath from 1970 to 1971, tasked with a very specific Cold War job: if Soviet forces ever attacked NATO's fixed airfields, the Harrier force was meant to scatter into forest clearings, farm tracks and camouflaged sites across the North German Plain and keep flying anyway, exactly the dispersed, runway-independent role the Kestrel trials had been designed to prove out.

No. 20 Squadron was disbanded in 1977 and its aircraft absorbed into the other two, which relocated to RAF Gutersloh, closer to the East German border, where they remained on Cold War alert for the rest of the decade. Through the 1970s the original GR1s were progressively upgraded to GR3 standard, with a more powerful engine, improved attack sensors and better electronic countermeasures, the version that would still be in front-line service when the Falklands crisis broke in 1982.

Guarding Belize (1975 to 1993)

Not every Harrier deployment involved a superpower standoff. From November 1975, No. 1 Squadron sent Harrier GR1As to Belize, then still a British colony, where a long-running territorial claim by neighbouring Guatemala had already prompted Britain to send a carrier group in 1972.

A small, quietly maintained detachment of Harriers, based at what became RAF Belize, remained an effective deterrent for close to two decades, a reminder that the aircraft's genuinely useful trick, needing almost nothing in the way of runway or infrastructure, was as valuable for propping up a tiny colonial garrison as it was for surviving a Warsaw Pact first strike.

British forces stayed in Belize until 1994, with the Harrier flight, No. 1417 Flight, part of the presence for most of that period.

Going to Sea: The Sea Harrier and the Ski-Jump (1975 to 1982)

The Royal Navy had lost its large conventional carriers by the mid-1970s and needed something that could operate from the much smaller Invincible-class ships then being built, none of which had a catapult or arrester wires. A navalised Harrier, developed as the Sea Harrier and first flown on 20 August 1978, was the obvious answer, and No. 800 Naval Air Squadron formed with the type at RNAS Yeovilton on 31 March 1980, embarking aboard HMS Invincible soon afterward.

What made the Sea Harrier's short takeoffs even more effective was an idea that had nothing to do with the aircraft itself. In 1973, a Royal Navy officer named Lieutenant Commander Doug Taylor, studying at Southampton University, wrote a thesis proposing that a simple curved ramp at the end of a carrier's flight deck could fling a heavily loaded jump jet into the air far more efficiently than a flat deck alone.

The idea was met with polite scepticism until trials proved it worked, and by 1980 the Royal Navy had fitted ski-jump ramps to its carriers, a 7-degree ramp on Invincible and her sister Illustrious, and a steeper 12-degree ramp on Hermes and the later Ark Royal. The first launch from an operational ski-jump took place aboard Invincible on 30 October 1980.

It is a rare example of a single university thesis changing the shape of naval aviation almost worldwide, since ski-jump ramps have since appeared on carriers built by several other navies.

Twenty Kills, Zero Losses: The Falklands War (1982)

When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982, the resulting war became, almost by accident, the Harrier's defining moment. The Royal Navy's task force sailed south with HMS Hermes as flagship and HMS Invincible alongside, carrying Sea Harriers of 800 and 801 Naval Air Squadrons, while the RAF committed Harrier GR3s of No. 1 Squadron to the ground-attack role.

Reinforcement aircraft, eight Sea Harriers and six GR3s, were carried most of the way south aboard the requisitioned container ship Atlantic Conveyor and flown off safely to Hermes and Invincible in the days before 21 May 1982; when Atlantic Conveyor was struck by two Exocet missiles and sunk four days later, it was helicopters lost aboard her that made the headlines, not Harriers, all of which were already flying from the carriers by then.

In the air, the Sea Harrier's performance startled almost everyone, including the pilots themselves. Flying against faster, more numerous Argentine Mirage III, Dagger and Skyhawk jets, Sea Harriers were credited with 20 confirmed kills for no losses in air-to-air combat, a record built substantially on the newly introduced AIM-9L Sidewinder missile, which could be fired from angles that would have made no sense to earlier, tail-chasing versions of the weapon.

Pilots fired 27 AIM-9Ls during the campaign and scored 19 kills with them, a hit rate above 70 per cent that owed as much to the missile's all-aspect seeker as to any dogfighting wizardry. The Harrier's celebrated ability to vector its engine thrust forward in flight, a manoeuvre known as VIFF, has become part of the aircraft's popular legend, but most Falklands kills were actually straightforward single-pass intercepts at medium altitude rather than close-in dogfights where VIFF might have mattered; it remained a useful trick in reserve rather than the war-winning party piece it is sometimes made out to be.

Meanwhile the RAF's GR3s flew around 150 ground-attack missions in support of British troops ashore, hitting Argentine positions at Goose Green and elsewhere. The war cost six Harriers and Sea Harriers in total, but not one of them fell to an enemy aircraft; two were lost to ground fire and the rest to accidents, including bad weather and deck landing mishaps, an unglamorous but honest footnote to an otherwise remarkable combat record.

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The Second Generation: Harrier II GR5, GR7 and GR9 (1985 to 2009)

By the mid-1980s the original Harrier's airframe, elegant as it was, had reached the limits of what could be squeezed out of it. Britain and the United States jointly developed a substantially redesigned successor, the AV-8B Harrier II, built around a larger, more efficient wing and a redesigned cockpit; the RAF's version entered service from 1987 as the Harrier GR5, later upgraded to GR7 standard with night-attack sensors and further again to GR9 with modern precision-guided weapons and updated avionics.

Confusingly for anyone assuming continuous Harrier combat service, the RAF's Harrier force sat out the 1991 Gulf War entirely; that job went to RAF Tornados and Jaguars, along with United States Marine Corps AV-8Bs, which flew roughly 3,400 sorties of their own from bases and amphibious ships in the region. British and Royal Navy Harriers would get their next taste of combat later in the decade, and it would prove considerably busier.

Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan: Joint Force Harrier (1999 to 2009)

In 1999 RAF Harrier GR7s deployed to Italy in support of NATO's air campaign over Kosovo, flying 870 operational sorties between March and June and dropping cluster bombs, unguided bombs and precision-guided weapons against Serbian targets without a single aircraft lost.

The following year the RAF and Royal Navy merged their Harrier squadrons into a single organisation, Joint Force Harrier, sharing aircraft, aircrew and maintenance between the two services under RAF Air Command, with jets able to fly from either land bases or the Navy's Invincible-class carriers as circumstances required.

Joint Force Harrier units supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Operation Telic, and then deployed almost immediately afterward into Afghanistan, where Harrier GR7s and, from 2007, the upgraded GR9 flew close air support for British and NATO troops under Operation Herrick from 2004 through 2009, a long, grinding, unglamorous campaign that generated a fraction of the newsreel footage the Falklands had, despite occupying Harrier crews for the better part of a decade.

The Sea Harrier's Swansong (1993 to 2006)

The original naval Harrier line did not stand still either. An upgraded Sea Harrier FA2 first flew in 1988 and entered front-line service in 1993, pairing a new Blue Vixen radar with the American AIM-120 AMRAAM missile to give the Fleet Air Arm a genuine beyond-visual-range air-to-air capability for the first time, a significant leap over the close-in, Sidewinder-only Sea Harriers of 1982.

It was not enough to save the type. In a decision that still divides opinion among naval aviators, the Ministry of Defence retired the Sea Harrier entirely in 2006, several years ahead of the RAF's own Harrier II fleet, leaving the Royal Navy without any beyond-visual-range air defence of its own until the F-35B arrived in the following decade.

Ground-attack duties passed to the RAF-operated Harrier GR7 and GR9, flown jointly by RAF and Royal Navy crews under Joint Force Harrier, but the Sea Harrier's distinctive silhouette, and its unmatched Falklands combat record, disappeared from British service for good.

The End of the Harrier Force (2010 to 2011)

The final act came quickly, and to many who had flown or maintained the type, brutally. On 19 October 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the entire Harrier force would be withdrawn from service by the end of March 2011, one strand of a Strategic Defence and Security Review forced through against a roughly 38 billion pound shortfall in the defence budget, at a moment when two new Queen Elizabeth-class carriers were already too far into construction to cancel.

Retiring the Harrier rather than the RAF's Tornado fleet was controversial at the time, not least because it left Britain without any carrier-capable fixed-wing aircraft at all until the F-35B entered service years later, and it meant the Harrier force missed the Libya campaign of 2011 by only a matter of weeks, a campaign that instead gave the RAF's newer Typhoon jets their first ever combat sorties.

In November 2011 the government sold the 72 remaining Harrier airframes to the United States Marine Corps for 110 million pounds, roughly 180 million dollars, to be stripped for spare parts supporting the Marine Corps' own AV-8B fleet rather than kept flying, a deal defended by officials as a pragmatic way to recoup value from aircraft that would otherwise simply have been scrapped, but one that struck many former Harrier pilots as a rather undignified ending for a genuinely unique aircraft.

Under the Skin: What Made It Fly

For anyone curious about the engineering rather than the history, the Harrier's party trick came down almost entirely to that one engine. The Rolls-Royce Pegasus (built originally by Bristol Siddeley, absorbed into Rolls-Royce in 1966) produced over 21,000 pounds of thrust in its later variants, routed through the four rotating nozzles that let a pilot blend vertical lift, forward flight and everything between with a single lever in the cockpit.

Later Harrier II variants cruised at high subsonic speed, comfortably short of the sound barrier, since the airframe was optimised for low-level attack and manoeuvrability rather than outright speed; what it sacrificed in top speed it made up for in an ability to operate from a farm track, a jungle clearing, a container ship or a warship deck barely 200 metres long, none of which a conventional fast jet of the same era could manage.

That combination of vertical or short takeoff and vertical landing capability, still commonly abbreviated V/STOL, was never matched by another Western combat aircraft until Britain's own influence resurfaced decades later in the design of the F-35B Lightning, whose lift-fan and swivelling rear nozzle owe an obvious conceptual debt to the Pegasus.

Legacy

The Harrier's story does not quite end with that 2011 sale, at least not everywhere. Britain was never the type's only operator: the United States Marine Corps flew its own AV-8A and later AV-8B Harriers from 1971 onward, Spain and Italy operated their own Harrier IIs, and India's Navy bought Sea Harriers in the 1980s to fly from its own carrier, INS Viraat, a ship with a particularly neat connection to the aircraft's British story: she had begun her career as HMS Hermes, flagship of the very task force that sent Sea Harriers to war over the Falklands in 1982.

When India finally retired its Sea Harrier fleet in May 2016, those aircraft became the last Sea Harriers flying anywhere in the world, closing out a chapter that had opened, more than half a century earlier, with a nervous test pilot and a tethered hover above a Surrey airfield.

Few aircraft manage to be simultaneously a Cold War survival gamble, a Falklands war-winner and a genuine engineering one-off; the Harrier somehow managed all three, and did it while taking off more or less anywhere its pilots asked it to.

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