The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes will feature some superb profile illustrations. The first we commissioned was the BAe 1214-3, an unrealised Harrier replacement I’ve been in love with since I learnt about it in Bill Gunston’s ‘Warplanes of the Future’ in the 1980s. Now we’re offering you the chance to name* the 1214-3.

Here’s a couple of teasers from our forthcoming book:

The Pegasus engine with its steerable thrust blesses the Harrier with the ability to take-off and land vertically — and even fly backwards. Unfortunately you can’t put conventional afterburners on a Pegasus engine; there are several reasons for this – the hot and cold air is separated, the inlets do not slow the airflow sufficiently for serious supersonic flight, and the jet-pipes would be too short- and it would also set fire to everything (it was tried from the 1960s and proved problematic). This is a shame as a Harrier is desperate for thrust on take-off and could do with the ability to perform a decent high-speed dash. Though conventional afterburners are out of the question, you could however use plenum chamber burning (PCB). This technology was developed for the Mach 2 Hawker Siddeley P.1154 (think the lovechild of a Harrier and a F-4, with the wingspan of a Messerschmitt Bf 109) – which never entered service. PCB chucks additional fuel into a turbofan’s cold bypass air only and ignites it (a conventional afterburner puts the burning fuel into the combined cold and hot gas flows). This is great, but how do you incorporate this into swivelling nozzles without destroying the rear fuselage with heat and vibration? BAe thought it found the answer – get ride of the rear fuselage altogether, and mount the tail onto two booms. Worried that this already eccentric idea might seem too conventional, BAe decided to add an ‘X-wing’ configuration with swept forward wings (which were in vogue in the early 1980s). This did produce the coolest fighter concept of the 1980s, even in the -3 variant shown which had conventional tails.

The P.1214 would have been extremely agile (and short-ranged), probably comparable to the Yak-41. The P.1214 lost its swept forward wings when further studies revealed them to be of no great value. It now became the P.1216, which was intended to satisfy the USMC and RN’s desire for a supersonic jump-jet (a need eventually met by the F-35B). A full-sized wooden P.1216 was built to distract Thatcher from stealing children’s milk, predictably (as it was British) the whole project was scrapped. This was arguably a good thing as British military hardware testing and development was at its lowest ebb in the 1980s (see the Nimrod AEW.3, SA80 battle rifle, Foxhunter radar, Harrier GR5 compared to the US AV-8B, etc for details).

Prize for winning entry: your chosen name will be used in the book as the name of the P1214-3.

How to enter: we will only accept submissions in the comments section below this article at hushkit.net.

(*The name is unofficial and this competition is not affiliated with BAE Systems)

Profile illustrations by The Teasel Studio.

It’s that time of year again. The time when we all dress in masks and think about death! Oh wait, that sounds like all of 2020. To hell with reality… here are ten (plus) aircraft named after monsters, ghouls, dark forces, supernatural beings, and other Halloween things that go ‘bump’ or roar in the night. Arghhhhhhhhhh!

10. Lockheed AC-130 Spectre/Spooky/Ghostrider

What better aircraft to personify the spooky season than one that not only wields monstrous firepower but literally has “Spooky” in its name? (The now-retired AC-130U variant, anyway, named in homage to the gunship Herc’s predecessor, the venerable AC-47.)

9. Grumman Goblin

There must be an unwritten rule stipulating a porky aesthetic for any aircraft named ‘Goblin.’ The Grumman Goblin—Canada’s name for the FF-1 (its nickname of ‘Fifi’ was the opposite of scary) biplane fighter, built under license by Canadian Car & Foundry—is svelte and elegant compared to the other Goblin, the McDonnell XF-85 parasite fighter from around two decades later, but could still benefit from a few treadmill sessions.
RCAF Goblins were used early in World War II on the home front, even though Ottawa viewed them (correctly) as horrendously obsolete. A handful of Canadian-built Goblins were used by the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, one even shooting down a Heinkel biplane. But these were renamed ‘Delfin’ (Dolphin), so they forfeit their Halloween cred.

8. McDonnell F2H Banshee

In Irish folklore, the bean sí is a female spirit whose wailing heralds death. A number of them keening together means the death of a king or priest. Doesn’t get much more haunting than that!

While folklorists have sometimes erroneously described the song of a banshee as mellifluous and alluring, we now know that they sound like a pair of Westinghouse J34 turbojets. After all, the F2H was said to “scream like a banshee,” hence its official name. And these are people with an intimate knowledge of the metaphysical.

While the Banshee performed well, with excellent agility and high-altitude performance that made it the ideal escort for USAF bombers early in the Korean War, the boost in Halloween-ness that comes from being named for a Celtic myth is somewhat offset by the fact that it saw virtually no combat, being quickly outclassed by swept-wing types and doing its best work as a reconnaissance aircraft.

7. Yakovlev Yak-25RV ‘Mandrake’

While on the subject of beings with harrowing voices, how about an aircraft named for a plant used in witchcraft, whose root screams when it’s dug up and kills all who hear it?

This rather haphazard attempt at an answer to the U-2 spy plane is a bit more innocuous than its NATO reporting name suggests…except maybe to its pilots. Produced by taking a Yak-25 interceptor—known by the decidedly less Halloweeny code name of ‘Flashlight’—and replacing its swept wings with straight wings more than twice the span of the fighter, then offloading the cannons in favour of cameras, the end result was something that probably should’ve gotten an entirely new manufacturer’s designation, as the tail assembly was all the Mandrake had in common with its armed progenitor.
The aircraft proved challenging to fly at stratospheric altitudes—the margin between its maximum safe operating speed and stalling speed was only six miles per hour—which, combined with primitive systems, poor engine performance, and a reputation for excessive vibration made it a very taxing aircraft for its crew. A planned high-altitude interceptor variant was never built.

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6. Nakajima Ki-49 Donryu ‘Storm Dragon’

There is perhaps no beast as terrifying as a dragon. Seriously, have you not seen Game of Thrones? Didn’t you read The Hobbit? (You would be forgiven for not seeing the films, or forgetting that you had.) These are extremely accurate retellings of verifiable historical events!
These beasts have lent their names to a plethora of aircraft, from the excellent (Saab J35 Draken) to the useless (Douglas B-23 Dragon). But to see dragonized aircraft reach their most alluring, we’ve got to travel East.
Now, it’s prudent to remember that Eastern mythology regards dragons quite differently than that of the West. They’re less Drogon than they are demigods. The Chengdu J-10’s nickname of ‘Vigorous Dragon’ is probably the coolest ever bestowed upon an aircraft, but in China, dragons are often benevolent beings. In Japan, on the other hand, they’re usually not so friendly, and ‘Storm Dragon’ sounds pretty badass, too.

The Ki-49, officially the Army Type 100 Heavy Bomber (a misnomer if there ever was one, as its maximum bomb load was less than half that of a Vickers Wellington), was intended as a bomber that wouldn’t need a fighter escort. Contrary to the common narrative about Japanese aircraft, it was heavily armed and armoured, and later versions had self-sealing fuel tanks, and therefore, should’ve ranked high on the scary scale. However, the type proved underpowered and ultimately vulnerable, and was eventually relegated to less draconian tasks like transport and maritime patrol.

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5. Westland Wyvern

It’s interesting how many Asian aircraft are named after dragons, as dragons are usually sea creatures in their myths and don’t have wings. Wyverns, on the other hand, do have wings. In fact, it’s been noted that many of the ‘dragons’ found in our contemporary stories are, in fact, wyverns.

Alas, the aircraft that bears their name was infernal in all the wrong ways. Though it did see some combat in the Suez Canal crisis, the Westland Wyvern was plagued by a litany of mechanical and performance issues; most notably, early carrier trials revealed a tendency for the turboprop engine to flame out under the high g-forces of a catapult launch. This particular problem would eventually be rectified, but more than thirty percent of the production run was written off, and the type served only five years.

4. McDonnell F3H Demon

When you name your aircraft the Demon, it’s either got to be either menacing or murderous. Alas, the F3H was very much the latter, seemingly in competition with the Vought F7U Cutlass to create the most dangerous (for its pilots) naval aircraft in history.

Awkwardly proportioned and ungainly in appearance when viewed from the side, the Demon nonetheless looks like it should be a very fast aircraft. But as the old saying goes, looks can be deceiving. Despite its sleek shape, sharply swept wings, and afterburning turbojet engine, it was resolutely subsonic. Most of the type’s demons—pun somewhat intended—arose from poor powerplant choices. The F3H-1 featured the diabolical Westinghouse J40, which delivered only half the thrust it was supposed to and suffered from pitiful reliability. Eleven Demons were lost in accidents in just over three years, resulting in the deaths of four pilots, the entire fleet being grounded, a damning exposé in Time magazine, and a Congressional inquiry into the Navy’s aircraft acquisition process. The F3H-2M variant, upgraded to carry the then-new AIM-7 Sparrow missile, was fitted with the Allison J71, since unlike the far superior Pratt & Whitney J57, that engine could be inserted into the airframe without significant modification. With barely enough range to fly out of sight of the carrier, the new Demon was just as cursed.

But not all about the F3H was as devilish as things might seem. The type’s cockpit did possess excellent visibility—great for seeing the water rushing up to meet the doomed pilot as his mount plummeted off the catapult, its engine struggling to produce enough thrust to move a child’s wagon, if it hadn’t flamed out already—and it would go on to sire the #2 finalist on this list, which fared just a wee bit better.

3. PZL M-15 Belphegor

If naming an aircraft the Demon isn’t hellish enough, then how about one named specifically after one of the seven princes of Hell? Belphegor is an entity often associated with the sin of Sloth, appropriate for the slowest jet aircraft ever built, with a top speed of just 120 mph—significantly slower than that of the Antonov An-2 it was supposed to replace in the agricultural sphere. Being slower than an An-2 is blasphemy against the laws of physics, but the Poles somehow managed it (though the Belphegor’s stalling speed of 67 mph was a good bit higher than the Annushka’s). The prevailing wisdom is that the aircraft’s name was inspired by the fact that it’s so noisy; its Ivchenko AI-25 turbofan infamously sounds like an overpowered leaf blower. It’s also fitting that Belphegor the demon is said to seduce the unwary into thinking they’ve invented something that will make them rich. If that’s what the Soviets (at whose behest the Belphegor was conjured) thought they had with this thing, then the demon had surely deceived them, as it proved far too expensive to produce and operate on a large scale, difficult to handle compared to the famously docile An-2, and while effective enough at dusting crops, not so good as to justify the cost of replacing the trusty old Antonov.
The world’s only jet biplane gains significant Halloween cred because it shares its name with a death metal band. And because it’s ugly as sin. One can only imagine its creators extolling its ability to defend a field without spraying an ounce of chemical—one look at this ghastly thing coming, and every insect in Eastern Europe will instantly flee for its life.
To further highlight the demonic aircraft naming tendencies of a largely and adamantly Catholic (even in Communist times) country, we shan’t forget the seemingly innocuous and rather attractive TS-8 trainer, named the Bies—a folk name for Satan himself. I’m not sure what it says about a country’s aviation industry or its flight training curriculum when one of its instructional airframes is named after the personification of eternal suffering, but then, I’m not Polish.

I’ve selected the richest juiciest cuts of Hush-Kit, added a huge slab of new unpublished material, and with Unbound, I want to create a beautiful coffee-table book. Here’s the book link .  The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes. Preorder your copy today here!

2. McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II

You might’ve heard of this aircraft. One was used to fly an organ transplant from North Dakota to San Francisco back in the Eighties. Bet you didn’t see that one coming!
(Get it? You didn’t see it, because it’s a phantom? Ha ha, I’m so clever.)

Note from Editor: that joke is unacceptably poor. Carry on.

The F-4 is the second USN jet fighter to be called the Phantom, hence ‘Phantom II,’ but despite (officially) being the first American jet to make a carrier landing, the FH-1 Phantom had few accomplishments beyond being the mount of an unofficial Marine Corps display team, cleverly called the Marine Phantoms, and only sixty production aircraft were built. The Phantom II exceeded that run by the small margin of over five thousand. That’s a spooky amount of warplanes! But, while it’s undeniably a legend, and a good-looking one at that—who are these so-called ‘enthusiasts’ who keep calling the F-4 ugly, and what’s wrong with their eyes?—should it really have been called the Phantom? With a radar cross section somewhere between six and ten square meters, it stands out on a scope like a nudist in a nunnery, and most versions’ J79 turbojets belch out black smoke as if to mark their ethereal territory with it. And, if happen not to see it, you’ll definitely hear it.

Whatever your position, let’s all agree: Phantoms Phorever.

1. de Havilland Vampire

Were you expecting any other winner than Dracula’s favorite aircraft?
I must say, it’s not a good look the British, and not the land whose gushing veins nurtured Vlad Dracul, produced this entry. Bloody hell, Romania, step up your game!

-SEAN KELLY

What was the father of the modern fighter? You could present a reasonable case for the Gloster Javelin, with its large radar, four-missile armament and delta wing. In fact we happen to be sharing an interview with a Javelin pilot this week on Hush-Kit, in which we learnt that the ‘Tripe Triangle’ probably wasn’t as bad as we always thought it to be. Then again, you could argue a case for the F-4 being the father of the modern fighter, but that would be too obvious. And anyway, outside of the Jaguar and Mitsubishi F-1’s rear fuselage shape its general configuration was a design cul-de-sac.

How about the Skyknight? Well, it was a pioneering ‘missileer’ (more so than the actual F6D ) but aerodynamically it was old hat before its first flight. My money is on something that did not fly and wasn’t even intended to be a fighter: Convair’s spectacular Kingfish. A boat-like fuselage, ‘pork chop’ intakes Ã  la F-22, supercruise and accusations that sacrificed too much performance for stealth… now that sounds like a modern fighter. Not bad for 1959. It’s not too sad it lost the competition to replace the U-2 (now is it the band or the aeroplane that lacks the hyphen?) as the winner became the SR-71 Blackbird, which along with the bicycle, Concorde and Supernoodles is the zenith of human achievement.

Spain to buy more Typhoons?

Well I’m happy about that. Europe’s faith in the Typhoon is probably good news in the long term but I can’t help thinking they need to add something to Typhoon to visually differentiate newer models – what do they have now? Fuselage lugs for speculative conformal fuel tanks on newer models. Terrible. Now I like that the Heinz ketchup bottle (the glass one) remains unchanged and I like that Lyle’s syrup is still decorated with a decomposing lion-full of bees, but the Typhoon was never quite a design classic in the same way so change would be welcome.

Don’t get me wrong, from certain angles (especially from above and to the front) it can look very fast and, dare I say it, even noble. But it is no Rafale in aesthetics. I mean the Rafale is so fit that it even looks good with that refuelling probe, which resembles a broken section of kit sprue or the sting of a rather weedy robot scorpion, and it still looks handsome with two horrible bloated frankfurter tanks under the wings which on anything else would look like clown shoes. But Typhoon looks too plasticky and also looks a bit like a Mirage 2000 that’s been pimped up by a 19-year-old boy in the suburbs (or maybe in Theydon Bois). Actually, no. That would look amazing. It is more like a Mirage 2000 that has been too cautiously bastardised for a 90s anime (though admittedly it’s not bright red and piloted by a schoolgirl). The answer? Well if Eurofighter GmbH is listening I would propose the following: twin tails, a new intake, 25% more power and the mandatory adoption of either Swedish splinter or RAF Vulcan snow camouflage. Oh, and me and the boy in Theydon Bois (pronounced thae-don bwa or theydon boyz as you wish) both think it should have a metallic paint job.

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New European trainer

Airbus is considering a new training jet (or rather a system including an aeroplane) for Spain with eyes on the rest of Europe. The AFJT, which pronounced in Spanish is quite like aHAVVVVVVEFYATTTT (the middle of the word being a very bronchial affair). Clearly Airbus putting a J in the middle of an aircraft name for Spain is an act of war. If it happens, the aircraft will be an agile little machine with secondary aggressor, light fighter or attack capabilities. Speculative jet trainers have a very high rate of cancellation (second only to COIN aircraft as a type) and the timing is awful, but the civil side of Airbus is doing well at the moment and this confidence is spilling into the more troubled military side, so it could happen. It would face stiff competition from Leonardo’s M346 and the US-Swedish T-7 though.

I keep thinking I should do a top 10 cancelled jet trainers, then I remember how much work it would involve and how no one would read it. Would you? If you have a favourite cancelled jet trainer please do mention it in the comments section below. One of my favourites was the EADS Mako, what do we bet the new aircraft will carry some of this project’s DNA?

The Australian CA-31, at the bottom of this page, was also wonderful.

Bed calls. Sending my love to the aeroplane fans wherever you may be. Fly safe.

—Hush-Kit

The USAF operated a secret force of purloined Soviet fighters to expose USAF fighter pilots to the strengths and weaknesses of the aircraft they were likely to meet in war. Here former F-15 Eagle pilot Paul Woodford reveals his own personal encounters ‘fighting’ the air force’s strangest unit.

Read from the perspective of the MiG Aggressor pilot here

An aviation photographer and writer I follow on Twitter posted this the other day:

I couldn’t resist commenting:

My response triggered questions, mostly from people wanting to know when, where, and how it happened. Not that many years ago I could have gotten in serious trouble for even confessing to flying against a MiG, never mind sharing the details.

One of the aviation writers who participated in the discussion prompted me to tell the story on my blog. I’m flattered to learn a working aviation writer and journalist — someone who actually gets paid to do it — knows about my blog, but in fact I have told part of the story here. This is from a post I wrote in 2018:

In my day the USAF ran a super-secret program (finally declassified in 2006, which is why I can write about it now) called Constant Peg from an airstrip near Tonopah, Nevada, where it had a small squadron of MiG-21 Fishbeds and MiG-23 Floggers. Aircrews at Nellis AFB’s Fighter Weapons School, along with visiting aircrews taking part in Red Flag air war exercises, were able to go out in ones and twos to engage with the MiGs over Tonopah. It wasn’t adversary training, not really … it was a familiarization program, as in “here’s what a MiG looks like in the air, here’s how it flies and fights, here are its strengths and weaknesses” … the idea being to get the buck fever out of your system before you saw the real thing in combat. Great training, but strictly limited (as in you only got to do it once), rigidly scripted, nothing like actual air combat.

Here’s the rest of the story, as I remember it.

During my first two F-15 assignments, from 1978 to 1985, I frequently trained with and flew against USAF aggressor pilots trained in Soviet tactics and equipped with F-5E Tigers, roughly equivalent in size and performance to the MiG-21 Fishbed, which at the time was still one of the other side’s front-line combat aircraft. I’d heard whispers about a program where USAF fighter pilots got to fly against actual MiGs, but that was the extent of it — bar talk and rumor.

In 1984, I deployed from Alaska to Nevada for a Red Flag exercise. It was there I was read in to the Constant Peg program and realized I was going to get to see the MiG-21 and MiG-23 in action. The program was highly classified, not so much due to the fact we had MiGs, but to conceal how we obtained them. We had to be formally read in before participating; afterward we were read out and warned never to talk about it, even with F-15 squadron mates.

The MiG pilots were assigned to a unit called the 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron, the “Red Eagles.” They were experienced Air Force and Navy fighter pilots, a lot of them veterans of the F-5 Aggressor program, and many were “target arms” — Fighter Weapons School graduates. My Constant Peg flight consisted of me, a wingman, and two Red Eagle pilots — one flew the MiG-21, the other the MiG-23. We briefed at Nellis, three to four hours before our scheduled takeoff time. That allowed time for the MiG pilots to hop on their transport aircraft, a Mitsubishi MU-2, and fly uprange to the Tonopah Test Range airfield where the MiGs were based.

My wingman and I took off in our F-15s at the scheduled time, met a tanker over Caliente and topped off, and headed northwest to Tonopah. The MiG pilots monitored our progress on the radio, calibrating their takeoffs to give us maximum time with each. Which translated into the MiG-21 taking off just before we entered the working area over Tonopah and jumping us the second we did.

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Eagle versus the Russian Flanker here

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We took turns dogfighting the Fishbed, which was (to me, anyway) surprisingly nimble and tight turning, hard to see due to its small size, and hard to get a guns tracking shot on. The Fishbed, if it uses afterburner (as ours did the entire time we fought with it) has enough gas to fly for about 20 minutes. It was a busy 20 minutes for both of us.

As the Fishbed turned back toward Tonopah, almost directly below us, the Flogger joined our our wing. We didn’t do as much turning and burning as we had with the Fishbed. The Flogger, as we’d been briefed, doesn’t turn for crap, and bleeds off energy quickly. Instead, our MiG-23 pilot showed us how it flies, which is as poorly as it fights: difficult to control and unstable, especially with the wings swept aft. What it could do well, as its pilot showed us, was make a high speed, high-angle attack and then run. It accelerated away from us like nothing I’ve seen before or since, driving home the point that if you have a missile shot at a no-shit fast mover you’d better take it right now, because in a second it’ll accelerate right out of the firing envelope, and I guess that was the object of the lesson. The F-15 has the top speed advantage, but there isn’t enough fuel in the world to catch up with a Flogger determined to get out of Dodge. Read from the perspective of the MiG Aggressor pilot here

We did not land at Tonopah to debrief. The airfield was also home to the Black Jet, the F-117 stealth fighter-bomber, and everything there was classified to hell and gone, just like the airfield in nearby Area 51. Instead, we flew back to Nellis, followed a while later by our Red Eagle adversaries in their cushy little Mits.

One odd detail sticks in my memory. During the briefing and debriefing, I was distracted by the grotesquely long and curled pinky nail of our MiG-21 driver, apparently a fetish of his. In my Air Force, anything like that would have been a Be-No; apparently the Red Eagles had more freedom to indulge in personal eccentricities. Not sure why I’m sharing this memory, other than that it still gives me shivers.

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I believe Red Eagle pilots were dual-qualified, meaning that they flew and maintained proficiency in two aircraft simultaneously. Holding dual qualifications was common in the USAF of the 1950s and 60s but was rare in my day. I can’t recall if their other aircraft was the F-5 Tiger or A-7 Corsair II (probably the latter, since it was the aircraft their Tonopah colleagues, the F-117 pilots, were dual-qualified in). Perhaps someone who knows can enlighten us in a comment. Of course a few of the Red Eagles were also current in the Mits, the MU-2 twin turboprop they flew back and forth between Nellis and Tonopah.

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Well, those were the Reagan years, when budgets were fat and the military services could (and did) ask for the moon. The USAF had Constant Peg and three full-up F-5 Aggressor squadrons, one each in Europe, the Pacific, and CONUS. Imaging having all that, then asking Uncle Sam for a spiffy little business turboprop to get back and forth in — and getting it!

These programs ended, or were sharply curtailed, with the end of the Cold War. Constant Peg went away. The Aggressor squadrons were deactivated, eventually coming back in the form of what are today two small F-16 adversary training units, one at Nellis and one in Alaska, plus small contracts with civilian aggressors operating older foreign-built fighters (Hawker Hunters, Kfirs, and Mirages). With the post-Cold War integration of former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO, USAF pilots assigned to Europe have had limited opportunities to fly with, and train against, more modern Russian-built equipment. National air forces operating Russian aircraft now participate in Red Flag exercises at Nellis AFB. Training opportunities are there, but they are a far cry from what we had in the early 1980s.

I have to say, I think I got to fly the F-15 Eagle at precisely the right point in history, and will be forever grateful for the experience.

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Speaking to a former Soviet air force pilot convinced me the Su-15 was far better, and certainly more significant, than is commonly thought. The Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 was one of the best interceptors of the 1960s and ’70s. It had better acceleration and initial climb rate than the US F-106; compared to the British Lightning it had double the weapon-load and double the endurance. Vitally, this supersonic warplane was available in far larger numbers than either its British or American counterparts.

Before interviewing former ‘Flagon’ pilot Valeri Shatrov I had a vague idea of the Su-15 as a primitive interceptor with obsolete systems that lacked agility. I found his opinions and recollections absolutely fascinating, and in some case revelatory.

I should also note that I do not take any pilot’s opinions as entirely objective as most pilots have a bias towards their machine, but Shatrov’s answers were candid – and at times critical enough to be credible.

The Soviet approach

The West’s opinions of Soviet warplanes have often been wrong. Some overestimated, some are underestimated – and some misunderstood. Analysts often saw Soviet aircraft as inferior facsimiles of Western types, or else wildly inflated their true capabilities. To be fair, the facsimile claims have a meaningful historical origin. The Tupolev Tu-4 was a reverse-engineered B-29 Superfortress. The Tu-4 was an epic project. It was no easy thing to copy the most sophisticated aircraft in the world. It took the expertise of over 850 factories and institutes and involved the creation of over 105,000 drawings. However, with the brutal determination of Stalin driving its completion, quick work was made of it. The design was completed in less than a year and it entered service in 1947. The Tu-4’s (and so B-29’s) design informed the Tu-95 that remains in service today. 70 odd years later, the Russian Air Force’s ‘Bear’ carries Superfortress ‘DNA’ in its fuselage dimensions, circular cross-section, the pressurised shell fore of the wings and its thick wing roots.

You can read the rest of this article here (we’re moving some of our articles to Substack to combat plagiarism issues).

Rowland White had a smash hit a few years ago with Vulcan 607, the story how a farcically ill-equipped RAF managed to drop a bomb on a runway. The target was an occupied airport in the Falklands. The mission involved flying 6,600 nautical miles (12,200 km) and 16 hours for the return journey in terrible weather and facing enemy anti-aircraft defences. Organising the air-to-air refuelling effort for the mission was madly complicated; imagine the riddle of the chicken getting to the island cubed and you get the gist (or you might get a stock cube now I come to think of it). Rowland specialises in meticulous research and excellent story-telling, something he combines with an old-fashioned celebratory tone.

In this book he returns to the Falklands for the story of Harrier 809. Like Vulcan 607, the title includes a classic British aircraft name plus a number. The number refers to 809 Naval Air Squadron, a Fleet Arm Arm unit that was reformed in 1982 to take Sea Harriers to war.

The book features tropes long popular in military mythology – that of British forces being outnumbered and having to improvise to compensate for second-rate or incomplete equipment, unforeseen situations and leadership shortcomings. And of course, the perennial idiocy from Whitehall. Some very interesting historical examples of this rushed wartime improvisation are cited, such as the Royal Navy addressing the chronic shortage of fighter cover for merchant ships in World War Two with “A plan to fire knackered, battle-scared battle-scarred Hawker Hurricanes and Fairey Fulmars from merchant ships using catapults or batteries of 3-inch rockets was approved.”

What was the Sea Harrier?

According to a Sea Harrier pilot interviewed by this site it was an adaptation of land-based aircraft capable of a taking off and landing like a helicopter: “The modification from the already well-proven ground attack Harrier was a design masterpiece. It included a raised cockpit, a superb albeit physically tiny mono-pulse radar, the Blue Fox, a very reliable inertial standard navigation system (NAVHARS) and a very user-friendly Head-Up Display weapons aiming system including a hotline gunsight.”

But it was very slow for a fighter, and had short range and could only carry two guns and two missiles (large fighters of the time carried eight). It was not known how well it would perform against the Mirage, a type which had proven deadly in Israeli hands in the 1960s and 70s. Britain had had the wisdom to stay out of the Vietnam War, which meant it had little in the way (or likely no) combat seasoned pilots by 1982. The uncertainty of how well Sea Harriers would do in the war provides much of the tension in the earlier part of the book.

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When we chatted earlier this year, I asked Rowland what he believed is the biggest myth about British Harrier operations in the Falklands War. He replied. “That twelve Phantoms aboard the old HMS Ark Royal would necessarily have done a better job than twenty Sea Harriers. In the end it was, as it so often is, more a numbers game than anything. The F-4 was undoubtedly a more capable naval interceptor than the Sea Harrier. Heavily-armed, long-legged and equipped with a powerful pulse-doppler radar, Phantom on CAP ‘up-threat’ of the islands would have wreaked havoc against incoming Argentine raids – including the Exocet carrying Super Etendards. But six weeks is a very long time to keep just twelve Phantoms and their crews flying without any possibility of reinforcement or replacement. The F-4 was maintenance heavy and temperamental in comparison to the SHAR which chalked up astonishingly high mission availability rates during the war. Then there was the weather. Given the conditions in which some of the Sea Harriers were able to get back on deck it’s hard not to imagine that some of the F-4s might, at the very least, have suffered damage in landing incidents. Once your force of twelve F-4s is reduced to ten, or eight, or six serviceable airframes it all starts to look a little more tenuous. The SHARs, on the other hand, could be reinforced almost as required by RAF GR3s. In what was a largely visual fight against enemy aircraft that had little or no radar capability of their own, Sidewinder-armed GR3s were a viable alternative.”

The research is again first-rate and offers many treats and insights for dedicated aviation enthusiasts. There is certainly enough technical information to satisfy any gear-heads, and much of it is refreshingly drawn from first-hand sources rather than the usual Gunstonesque canon.

The story itself is exciting. It is a little jingoistic however, which may put some readers off, but is likely to delight the core readership. To be fair it seems an old-fashioned world view, though it is created with an old-fashioned diligence. Rowland White is a superb communicator, taking herculean research efforts and transmuting them into an easy to understand story. In reviewing this I took a second look at his other books, in his Big Book of Flight I was again impressed with the clarity and confidence of his style.

Next in his series is Dambuster 617 which keep his title convention and is no doubt to be followed by Lightning 111 or Spitfire 29.

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The Westland Wyvern was a beast of an aircraft, dwarfing its companions on the decks of the Royal Navy’s carriers in the mid-50s. It is rightly world famous as the first turbo-prop strike fighter and the last fixed wing product from Westlands before they turned to the dark side of aviation. Less well known is another of its claims to fame as the platform for the first underwater ejection.

Wednesday 13 October 1954 was a relatively normal day onboard HMS Albion in the Mediterranean. 813 Naval Air Squadron had recently embarked for the Wyvern’s debut appearance at sea and Lt B D Macfarlane RN lined up his aircraft for take-off. Moments after the flight deck officer gave the signal for launch steam filled the catapult piston and accelerated the aircraft to 70 knots in the space of around hundred and fifty feet. At this point a design flaw that had somehow escaped discovery during the Wyvern’s eight years of development revealed itself.
A pump located on the centreline drew fuel from both wing tanks and then drove it forwards six feet to the 3,500hp Armstrong Siddeley Python turboprop. Unfortunately, the acceleration from the catapult caused the fuel in the supply pipe to move backwards starving the engine at which point it flamed out. Lt Macfarlane disconcertingly found himself just above stalling speed in an aircraft whose engine was running down and with 24,000 tonnes of carrier just over his shoulder. Shockingly the Wyvern made a poor glider, it did however make a passable impression of a brick and started to sink rapidly after it entered the water.

Trapped inside and without an air supply Lt Macfarlane fell back on his training, despite it not specifically covering ‘being in an underwater death trap’. First, he jettisoned the canopy and then as the hull of the carrier thundered overhead pulled the ejector seat handle. At which point nothing happened. Remembering a similar situation occurring on the ground training rig he desperately made a second stronger pull on the handle. This triggered the first explosive charge, the expanding gases starting the seat’s movement before a second stronger charge propelled it and its occupant clear of the aircraft. [1]

Half drowned Macfarlane now found himself tumbling in the maelstrom of water under the Albion’s hull. As if that wasn’t enough, he soon realised he was being dragged deeper under the water. Somehow, able to free himself from the tangle of webbing that was his parachute he then discarded his dinghy pack and began to rise agonisingly slowly towards the surface. Staring death in the face for what must have been at least the fifth time that day Macfarlane desperately pulled the toggle that inflated his lifejacket. Moments later he burst out of the water less than two minutes after the Wyvern had staggered off the carrier’s deck.

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Macfarlane was only the 53rd member of the Martin-Baker Club [2] and the first to use one of their seats underwater, a situation that at that time hadn’t been considered by the company in the design. With the confirmation that ejector seats could work submerged the Admiralty began a programme of research to inform future designs. The Wyvern can then add a major contribution to air safety to its list of accomplishments. [3]

[1] The sequential explosions being developed by Martin-Baker to reduce the peak g pilots would experience on the basic early seats.
[2] Consisting of people whose life has been saved by one of the company’s seats. You get a tie.
[3] Since Macfarlane’s escapade there have been at least two other underwater ejections, one USN and one IN.

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Bing Chandler is a former Lynx Observer and current Wildcat Air Safety Officer. If you want a Sea Vixen t-shirt he can fix you up.

Thank you.

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