landings through the various short and
vertical landings the Harrier was capable
of. Though any AV-8A veteran can attest
to how challenging vertical landings
could be, the fact that the Harrier was
aerodynamically optimized for them
meant conventional landings were
no cakewalk either. ‘The conventional
landings that we did were generally 30
per cent faster than in the F-4,’ Anderson
says. ‘We were up around 160kt. The AV-8A
was very unstable on the ground at high
speed. When we started out, we were all
qualiied to land conventionally, so that’s
what we did. But with that tiny little wing
on the AV-8A, landing conventionally
meant a pretty good airspeed.’
The marines sufered their irst
operational AV-8A fatality during a
conventional landing. Anderson says,
‘[Capt Roy] ‘Dufy’ Dougherty was our
irst fatality. That was a case, I believe, of
using the wrong kind of lubricant on the
outriggers. The outrigger didn’t castor
properly and it snapped. It looked like he
was going to be okay, then as he slowed,
the wingtip dragged on the runway and
he cartwheeled.
‘Once you mastered vertical and short
landings, going back to conventional
landings was more of an emergency than
anything else. I don’t know of anybody
who would do that except if they had a
nozzle or engine problem. Conventional
landings were not anything that anybody
looked forward to.’
With conventional landings sorted, new
AV-8A pilots progressed to the Harrier’s
stock-in-trade — V/STOL. Take-ofs
were often a matter of calculating the
appropriate nozzle angle for the aircraft’s
weight and the atmospheric conditions —
relatively forgiving on Cherry Point’s long
runways. The dangers facing new Harrier
pilots lurked between 90 and 60kt as they
transitioned from forward light to a slow
or vertical landing coniguration. ‘In that
transitional area where you’re developing
lift over the wings, you have neutral to
negative stability,’ says Anderson. ‘If you
don’t keep [the nose] pointed into the
wind, what happens is you tend to blank
out one wing. When you blank out one
wing and you dump lift on it, then it will
snap-roll, which immediately puts you out
of the ejection envelope. The departures
were very abrupt.’ While the AV-8A had
a wind vane on the nose to give pilots a
visual aid to help keep it pointed into the
wind, Stromberg insists that feel was justas important. ‘Below 90kt you ly it with
your ass. You’d better have some good
accelerometers in your ass, because if you
don’t pick up the fact that you’re getting a
momentum director — acceleration in the
wrong direction quickly — you can get
yourself in a serious situation...’Next month: ‘We could launch eight
airplanes in just about a hundred
seconds once we got it worked out, and
we could recover those eight airplanes
— from the time the irst one hit the
break until the last one hit the deck
— 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.’Above: A pilot with
VMA-231 checks
the mounting of a
Mk81 250lb bomb
during a pre-flight
inspection.
Smaller bombs
like the Mk81
allowed Harrier
pilots to engage
targets closer to
friendly forces
on the ground
than they could
with higher-yield
weapons. USMC
Left: VMA-542
‘Tigers’ converted
from the F-4 to
the AV-8A at
MCAS Beaufort in
South Carolina,
eventually
relocating to
MCAS Cherry
Point. There it
continues to fly
the Harrier to this
day, albeit in
AV-8B guise.
USMChttp://www.combataircraft.net // November 2018 65