combat aircraft

HARRIER

‘PADDLES’

One of the biggest challenges in trying

to land the Harrier was that while

vertical landings required a descent,

the AV-8A aforded nothing in the way

of downward visibility. ‘In the AV-8A,

you couldn’t see down at all,’ Bill Spicer

recalls. ‘To your left and right you’re

looking into an intake. You couldn’t

see your wings.’ With this lack of visual

references, and no two-seaters for pilot

training until 1976, early AV-8A trainees

relied on instructors acting as landing

signal oicers (LSOs) to talk them in on

approaches to vertical landings.

LSOs were also critical for shipboard

operations, albeit in an unconventional

manner. As Spicer explains, ‘The LSO

didn’t have much work to do on

recovery. He’d compute the average

hover weight, but the pilots kept

pretty good track of their hover weight

coming back to the ship. Normally, we

were so low on fuel that hover weight

wasn’t a problem. The more important

mission of the LSO was the launch,

because he had to compute the wind

over the deck, and he would give you

the numbers for your short takeof and

the nozzle settings. Sometimes it’d

be 60°, sometimes it might be 65. His

numbers had better be right, because if

they weren’t, you’d end up in the drink.’

Ground-based talk-downs during

vertical landings were also common

during distributed operations where

engineers would bulldoze a clearing

in the woods and create a temporary

vertical landing zone with Marston

matting. During these operations,

a pilot would act as a landing site

supervisor. Outlining how these

operations worked, Spicer told Combat

Aircraft, ‘You’d ind the hole in the trees

they wanted you to land in and set up

your own deceleration, but we’d put

a guy down there on the ground, a

landing site supervisor, and he could

tell you ‘OK, you’re over the center of

the pad now. Stabilize your hover, hold

what you’ve got. You’re clear to land.’

They didn’t have to be an LSO, you

could just designate someone.’

The priority placed on maintaining a
ready deck, coupled with the Harrier’s
reduced dependence on wind direction,
meant the ‘Harrier carrier’ could reach
launch and recovery cycle rates a big-deck
conventional carrier would be hard-
pressed to match. Spicer told Combat
Aircraft, ‘Starting at the 300ft line, every
50ft we’d have a Harrier. So we could
launch eight airplanes in just about 100
seconds once we got it worked out. We
could recover those eight airplanes, from
the time the irst one hit the break until
the last one hit the deck, in somewhere
between two and four minutes. So we had
a rate of strike that a big-deck just couldn’t
have. I mean, there was no way.’
During the Nassau’s ‘Harrier carrier’ cruise
in the Mediterranean, VMA-231 and 542’s
AV-8As conducted surge operations to
prove the type’s maritime rate of strike.
‘There was a bombing range there [in
Tunisia] and we lew a ton of sorties out
there just to see how many we could
do over a three-day period,’ recalls Joe
Anderson. ‘It was just a phenomenal
amount of sorties. We kept it going;
everything was either in the air or being
refueled. It was really interesting.’ During
this period, Nassau’s Harriers proved

the type was capable of an average rate

of strike of 60 sorties within an eight-

hour period. While the AV-8A never saw

action, the marines took the lessons of

the deployment to war with the AV-8B,

employing LHAs as ‘Harrier carriers’ in the

Persian Gulf during Operations ‘Desert

Storm’ and ‘Iraqi Freedom’.

Perspectives from the

air and ground

Despite the hazards inherent in landing

the AV-8A, the type was highly regarded

by those who lew it. ‘It wasn’t like you

went out to the airplane to go ly it,’

recalled Spicer. ‘You went out and you put

it on. It became an extension of yourself.

When you cranked that beauty up, you

had an 11,000lb airplane with a 21,000lb-

thrust engine. The damned dashboard

would vibrate so much at idle that you’d

look at it and say, ‘Yeah, that looks like

it’s about 38 per cent’. With the smaller

gauges, it was shaking so much you really

couldn’t read them. It all smoothed out

once you got airborne, but on the ground

you knew there was a great big growly

thing right in the middle of your back.’

Spicer is still impressed with how

rugged the AV-8A was. ‘The AV-8A was

kind of like a bayonet. It might have had

moving parts, but not much went wrong

with it. It was really rugged. You could

beat it up, you could land it kind of hard,

and sometimes you did because we

were landing at weird places. It was just a

tough airplane.’

Col (ret’d) Russ Stromberg, who lew

the A-4 briely before converting to the

AV-8A compared the two types. ‘I would

argue that the AV-8A, above 200kt, was

more forgiving than an A-4. You can’t spin

a Harrier. You can lose an A-4 in a spin

— you can screw it in. The AV-8A is the

most honest airplane I’ve ever lown in

conventional light.’

For all the accolades heaped on the

AV-8A by those who lew it, the true

measure of any aircraft’s worth in the

Marine Corps comes not from aviators, but

Left top to bottom:

An AV-8A being

guided into

position on the

deck of the USS

Nassau.

A mix of VMA-231

and VMA-542

Harriers line

up at the stern

of the Nassau

during the 1982

‘Harrier carrier’

cruise in the

Mediterranean.

US Navy

An AV-8A of

VMA-231 aboard

the Nassau

during the

successful 1982

Mediterranean

cruise.

Below right:

A deck handler

holds up a board

showing the

aircraft’s weight,

its designated

position to begin

its take-off

roll, and the

recommended

nozzle position to

ensure a positive

rate of climb. LSOs

were critical in

calculating this

data for every

aircraft during at-

sea operations.

http://www.combataircraft.net // December 2018 73