The Swiss Army Knife of the sky: how the Sea Harrier won the Falklands War

On October 17 1982, a pair of Sea Harriers from 809 Naval Air Squadron roared off the pitching flight deck of HMS Illustrious, in the South Atlantic Ocean, and accelerated away from the carrier. Armed with heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles, they climbed to the north to intercept an incoming radar contact.

Since August, the eight-strong squadron, under the command of Lt Cdr Tim Gedge, had been responsible for the air defence of the Falkland Islands. Prior to that, Gedge’s squadron had fought in the campaign to recapture the islands from their Argentinian occupiers.

Outnumbered 10 to one, the 28-strong force of Sea Harriers had defied the odds to prevail against a skilled and courageous enemy. When the war was won in June after six weeks of fighting, the Fleet Air Arm’s jets had 23 kills to their credit, while not a single one had been lost in air combat.

Now, as Gedge and his wingman flew north over the vast expanse of ocean, he knew his tour of duty was coming to an end. Their job today was not to repel an Argentinian attack, but to welcome the first of their replacements and escort them into Port Stanley airfield. With the islands’ sole runway now repaired and extended, the carrier-based 809 jump-jets could finally pass the baton to the land-based F-4 Phantoms of the Royal Air Force. Over seven months on from the invasion, it would be a well-earned respite for the victorious pilots.

In April that year, when the British Task Force sailed south following Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands, many had dismissed their chances of success. The British faced the onset of formidable winter conditions – “the ice, the snow, the 60-foot seas, the constant Antarctic gales and the vulnerabilities of an 8,000-mile supply line,” as one sceptical American State Department official wrote in his diary. Not for the first time, however, the Harrier – the machine upon which British hopes of success were pinned – had been underestimated.

The Hawker Harrier was the world’s only successful vertical take-off and landing jet fighter. It was, in essence, the smallest possible aeroplane that could be built around its unique engine: the Rolls-Royce Pegasus. Unlike conventional jet engines, the thrust of the Pegasus was directed through four swivelling nozzles controlled by a lever in the cockpit. If the pilot wanted to rise or descend on a column of thrust, the nozzles were rotated so that the thrust was pointing down. By rotating them through 90 degrees to point backwards, the Pegasus then pushed the Harrier forwards in the same way as any other jet engine.

It was an elegantly simple engineering solution to the challenge of building a fighter plane that could take off and land like a helicopter. The Soviet Union was the only other country that had managed to put a jump jet into service, but theirs wasn’t up to much. When India enquired about the possibility of buying some, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, the head of the Soviet Navy, told them: “If I were you I’d buy the Sea Harrier.”

By the spring of 1982, the Harrier had been in service with the RAF for over a decade and, in the form of the Sea Harrier, with the Navy for a little over two years. During that time, displays of hovering, pirouetting and bowing that combined the precision of dressage with ear-splitting jet noise had established it as a firm favourite of air-show crowds. The charismatic little jump-jet’s unique abilities were a source of great pride, and an apparently reassuring indication that great British engineering was still alive and well.

But all aircraft design is an exercise in compromise, and the Harrier paid a price for being able to take off and land without a runway. For all that it was regarded with affection, as a warplane it was derided by critics, who appeared – on paper – to have a point. The Harrier was subsonic, lightly armed and relatively short-ranged.

Either way, when Argentina invaded the Falklands, the Fleet Air Arm Sea Harriers and RAF Harriers, flying from the decks of two small aircraft carriers, would be the only fast jet combat aircraft available to the British. Without access to a runway any closer than Ascension Island, 4,000 miles to the north, the RAF’s squadrons of Phantoms, Buccaneers and Jaguars were all out of range. The Sea Harrier would have to be, in the words of the captain of the Task Force flagship, HMS Hermes, a “Swiss Army knife” of an aeroplane.

Britain was one of only two nations on earth that had the capability to stage a complex military operation of this scale on the other side of the world, but unless the thin grey line of Sea Harriers could beat off the Argentine Air Force, it was certain to end in ignominious failure. One Admiralty report estimated that, after a week of fighting, the Sea Harrier force might be reduced to just 10 jets.

There was an urgent need for reinforcement, and this came in the shape of Tim Gedge’s 809 squadron. Reformed a week after the invasion, Gedge’s unit had a Dirty Dozen feel to it. He pulled mothballed Sea Harriers out of storage, from test squadrons and off the British Aerospace production line – anywhere he could find them.

Radars were appropriated from jets earmarked for the Indian Navy. Weapons pylons were filed down in a DIY modification that allowed them to carry the latest Sidewinder missiles. Pilots were recalled from exchange postings in Arizona, California and Australia. Two were borrowed from an RAF Harrier squadron in Germany. The only thing they were missing, joked one aviator, was “someone sprung from jail”.

Over the next three weeks, the pilots were given bare-bones training in flying and fighting the Sea Harrier. And then they were sent to war. Some of Gedge’s pilots had fewer than 10 hours in the cockpit of a Sea Harrier – far less than was given to Spitfire and Hurricane pilots during the desperate days of the Battle of Britain.

809 Squadron’s pilots fought with distinction, but on occasions their lack of experience in the cockpit of the Sea Harrier was in evidence. Amphibious landings early on May 21 saw British troops put ashore for the first time. In the skies above them raged the heaviest aerial battle of the whole campaign.

At one point, diving through a gap in the clouds and onto the tails of a formation of Argentine Skyhawks, Flt Lt John Leeming, one of 809’s two RAF pilots, had the perfect shot. The angry electronic growl in his ears told him that his Sidewinder missile was locked on. He flipped the safety catch on the control column and thumbed the fire button. Nothing happened. The missile stayed put.

Seeing the prospect of a kill slipping away, he switched to guns. Closing to barely 150 yards behind the Skyhawk, he pulled the trigger. His 30mm shells ripped into the Argentine jet with devastating effect. Too late to avoid the fireball, Leeming shrank into his ejection seat and closed his eyes. But his jet somehow survived its flight through the debris cloud, and returned him safely to the carrier.

Only later, after talking to a more seasoned Sea Harrier pilot, did Leeming realise that his unfamiliarity with the weapons system meant he had missed a vital step in the sequence required to arm the missile. And yet a pilot who, a week earlier, had never flown from the deck of an aircraft carrier, flying a fighter that he’d barely been trained to operate, had nonetheless shot down an enemy aircraft.  It simply wouldn’t have been possible in any other aeroplane but a Harrier.

Success in the Falklands War completely changed the way the jump-jet was perceived. Having earned its spurs in difficult circumstances, it had earned the right to be taken seriously – no longer dismissed as an airshow novelty, but respected as a warplane.

Reliability and flexibility were virtues that scored less highly in a game of Top Trumps than than speed, range and weaponry, but winning a war beat them all, sealing a reputation that would endure.

“Without the Harriers,” Margaret Thatcher acknowledged, “we could not have retaken the Falklands.”

Harrier 809: Britain’s Legendary Jump Jet and the Untold Story of the Falklands War by Rowland White is published by Bantam Press on October 15