AEROPLANE JULY 2018 http://www.aeroplanemonthly.com 63SHOWS OF FORCE
Farnborough became known for
the spectacle of massed formations
supplied by the RAF or the Royal
Navy — all in British-built aircraft,
of course. In 1955, to underline the
build-up of RAF Fighter Command
squadrons on the Hawker Hunter, a
fl ypast was staged of 64 Hunters of
various marks and several different
squadrons. Not to be outdone,
Bomber Command appeared with
12 Vickers Valiants, which fl ew
through in pairs.
The 1958 show saw the
RAF putting up 45 Javelins to
overfl y Farnborough, but it was
overshadowed by perhaps the best-
remembered Farnborough moment,
when No 111 Squadron’s Black
Arrows looped 22 Hunters — not
all theirs and not all painted in the
team’s trademark gloss black scheme
— in formation.
During 2011, Air Cdre Roger
Topp — who in 1958 was a
squadron leader, CO of ‘Treble
One’ and leader of the Black
Arrows — told the editor about
fl ying aerobatics with such a large
formation. “When we had the 22 I
would climb up, get the aircraft more
or less horizontal upside-down on
the top and ease off all back pressure,
maintaining just
about zero g all
the way round to
let the other guys
come up behind,
so I didn’t rush
off down the hill
while they were
slowing down
going up the hill.
When I could
see most of the
aircraft popping
up behind me
in my rear-view
mirror, then I
let my nose drop. That was how
we coped with the bumps and the
weather and whatever else.
“So I could make 22, and it would
be repeatable fairly consistently.
Having come in, I thought that at
least we could take the thing round
twice before breaking it up. The
second loop was going to be tighter
and lower, therefore, than the fi rst
because you just carry on the g all
the way round. We started the fi rst
one just as we crossed the runway
boundary running in, and it meant
we could exit the second loop just
past the far end of the runway.“We also found that if we took
the 16 and put them into diamond,
which you could do pretty easily by
just chucking off the extremities, you
had a very good-looking formation.
It looked good in a loop and also
very impressive in roll. It takes a
long time as you’ve got to do a hell
of a barrel, otherwise you lose your
outside men — they just can’t cope.
We did loops and rolls with the
16 after the 22, then down to our
standard nine and then fi ve.
“All that was done in seven
minutes, because the C-in-C was
absolutely rightly adamant that
displays like that, no matter how
good they are, shouldn’t go on too
long. It’s still true, because the Red
Arrows go on for ages, and people
start wandering off and looking at
their ice creams and so forth. No
matter how exciting it is, people stop
being excited after a certain length of
time, and the C-in-C reckoned that
seven minutes was about the limit.
Everybody there would be saying
‘Have they fi nished? What a pity’.
That’s the way to leave a show.”
The Royal Navy made a highly
impressive appearance ‘from the
Laffan’s Plain end’ for the 1968
show with six Sea Vixen FAW2s of
892 Squadron’s
Simon’s Sircus
team, fi ve
Buccaneer
S2s from 809
Squadron and,
at the rear
of ‘Anchor
formation’,
four of the new
Phantom FG1s
from 700P, the
Intensive Flying
Trials Unit. The
Phantom was,
of course, built
at St Louis by McDonnell Douglas,
but its appearance at Farnborough
was made possible by the SBAC’s
1966 decision to allow aircraft
with ‘signifi cant British content’
(engines, equipment) to take part in
the fl ying display. The Royal Navy’s
Spey Phantom — always a political
aeroplane — was planned to be ’50
per cent British by value’, so easily
satisfi ed the then-current rules.
Such restrictions were progressively
removed to allow the 1972 show to
be styled ‘Farnborough Europe’ and
for 1974 to be declared truly open
to all.I could make
22, and it would
be repeatable fairly
consistently. Having
come in, I thought
that at least we could
take the thing round
twice
FARLEY AND THE HARRIER
The Hawker Siddeley Harrier had a long and close association
with Farnborough. Equally, the Farnborough show had a great
infl uence on the Harrier programme. It was in September 1968
that two US Marine Corps pilots, Col Tom Miller and Lt
Col ‘Bud’ Baker, walked into the Hawker Siddeley chalet and
announced, in as many words, ‘We want to fl y the Harrier’. This
led to a formal USMC evaluation and resulted in its adoption
and a production run of 110 examples, plus a follow-on order
for several hundred of the later AV-8B. It is rare to be able to
attribute an aircraft order directly to a company’s presence at
Farnborough (or, indeed, at any other airshow), but this time it
was demonstrably the case.
Over the years, the Harrier provided some of the most exciting
fl ight demonstrations ever seen at Farnborough. Who can forget
John Farley — who became chief test pilot at Dunsfold in
1978 — doing his ‘Farley climb’ in the company’s two-seat T52
demonstrator G-VTOL/ZA250, which wowed the crowds at the
1974 show and became a Harrier trademark? He would take off
vertically, raise the nose and climb out in a near-vertical attitude
at very low forward air speed under the power of the vectored-
thrust Pegasus turbofan, a graphic demonstration of what you
can achieve with the Harrier’s innovative reaction control system
and a better than 1:1 thrust-to-weight ratio. This manoeuvre
seemed to defy the laws of fl ight. Farley made it look easy but
it was not, and RAF squadron pilots were very strongly advised,
‘don’t try this at home.’
In 2009 Farley told the editor, “If you watch a helicopter take
off vertically and then accelerate to whatever its cruising speed is,
you’re used to seeing the nose drop, and off it goes. That was how
the Hawker pilots used to fl y the aeroplane before I joined the
company — they fl ew it like a helicopter. In other words, they
would lower the nose from the hover by 5 or 10°, which would
tilt the jets aft a little, and off they would go. I always thought
that looked a bit naff, to be pointing down at the ground while
you were trying to actually go up and away, and so I felt it would
be better to maintain attitude and move the nozzles a little to get
the same effect. An extension of that was to have the nose higher,
and it seemed to me, just as an airshow manoeuvre, that it was
useful to take off vertically and then rotate the aeroplane around
the nozzles as you went up. But, like all airshow manoeuvres, it
had a serious point behind it, and that was that one was trying to
show the service operators, many of whom were under-confi dent
in the aeroplane, what an enormous margin of stability and
control surrounded the normal way they fl ew it.”
A nice piece of TV — as well as good company PR — resulted
from Hawker Siddeley’s agreement to fl y Raymond Baxter,
the BBC reporter, in the rear cockpit of G-VTOL at the 1978
event. The fl ight started with a ski-jump take-off and Baxter
used a voice recorder to tape his running commentary, as well as
pilot Farley’s voice over the intercom and the inevitable heavy
breathing captured by the oxygen mask microphones, that would
be used in the BBC’s TV broadcast from the show.The start of a
trademark ‘Farley
climb’ in Harrier
G-VTOL at the
1974 show.
DENIS J. C ALVERT54-56,61-66_AM_Farnborough_July18_cc C.indd 63 04/06/2018 13:50