and the small and agile Skyhawk light bombers. Theoretically, the Harriers didn’t stand a chance: they should have been overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. But they weren’t. In a short and bitter campaign, the Sea Harriers shot down twenty Argentine jet aircraft, and several other types, for no air combat losses whatsoever. The reliability and survivability of the type – not to mention its capability – were proved at a stroke.
In the Falklands, the Navy had used the AIM-9L Sidewinder air-to-air missile, but the current variant is the AIM-9M. The newer weapon offers one vitally important advantage – it can lock on to a target from any direction, not just from behind like the 9L, allowing head-on engagements. However, as every fighter pilot knows, the best possible place to engage an enemy is from behind, where you can see him but he can’t see you, so air combat tactics have changed little with the introduction of this new weapon.
In its original form, the FRS1 Sea Harrier had usually carried four Sidewinder missiles on under-wing pylons, and a pair of Aden cannon beneath the fuselage. The FA2, the ‘Fighter Attack’ variant, which entered service in the mid 1990s, added the highly capable AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, which, when matched with the excellent Ferranti Blue Vixen coherent pulse-Doppler radar, offered multiple target acquisition, long engage range and a fire-and-forget capability.
The only problem with the AMRAAM is that it’s larger and heavier than the ’winder, and to enable the aircraft to carry more than two of them, the Aden cannon pods were removed, allowing a maximum armament of four AMRAAMs. But the Sidewinder is still an option, and a mix of two AMRAAMs and four ’winders is considered by many Harrier pilots to be the optimum air-combat load.
For exercises, the Royal Navy had decided that AMRAAMs made things just too easy, so most aircraft employed on CAP sorties still used Sidewinders only. The weapon has a maximum engage range of only five miles, and to obtain a kill against another Sea Harrier, with identical performance and armament, is a true test of flying skill and combat ability.
‘Bogeys one seven five at thirty. Still low. Vector one nine zero.’
‘One nine zero, Tiger One.’
The two fighters were heading directly towards the two inbound aircraft – another pair of 800 Squadron Sea Harriers playing at being bad guys – with a combined closing speed of well over one thousand miles an hour. The Sea King observer, known somewhat unflatteringly as a ‘bagman’ after the shape of the inflatable fabric dome covering the Sea King’s modified Searchwater radar that dangled from the side of the aircraft like a large grey pustule, was vectoring the CAP aircraft to a location above and behind the two targets.
‘Tigers, fence out.’
Richter clicked his transmit button once to acknowledge, and immediately began preparing his aircraft for combat. On a pylon beneath the starboard wing of his Sea Harrier was slung a dummy Sidewinder missile pod. Externally almost indistinguishable from a genuine ’winder, the pod contains an infra-red seeker head identical to that in the live missile, but lacks the rocket motor and explosive warhead.
Richter enabled coolant flow through the infra-red head, which would allow it to detect the heat signature of the target aircraft. He switched on the Guardian radar warning receiver, which would tell him if the attacking aircraft had obtained a missile lock on him, then pre-set the Blue Vixen radar to Air Combat mode. The agreed EMCON – emission control – tactics for the sortie required both Tigers to remain radar silent until almost within missile acquisition range of their targets.
The two last preparations were probably the most important. When engaged in high-energy manoeuvring, the airflow through the huge inlets of the Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine can get badly disrupted, and in some cases the compressor may stall or surge and effectively stop. The Harrier glides like the proverbial brick – pretty much straight down – so Richter selected the ‘combat switch’ to engage the short-duration high-power setting.
Finally, he checked his anti-g suit. In hard turns pilots’ bodies are subjected to very high stresses, and if their anti-g suits don’t function properly they can black out, with predictably unfortunate – and sometimes fatal – results.
‘Bogeys one seven five at fifteen. Low. Standby hard port turn.’
‘Roger.’
‘Tigers, turn now, now, now. Roll-out heading zero one zero.’
Richter grunted with the increasing g-force as he hauled the Sea Harrier around in a tight left-hand diving turn. He felt the bladder in the waist section of his ‘speed jeans’ – the anti-g trousers – inflate rapidly as the g- force increased. It felt like a slow but powerful kick in the stomach, but prevented the blood in his head and torso from plummeting down to his feet and causing a blackout or g-loc.
‘Tigers steady on zero one zero, passing twelve for five in the drop.’
‘Roger, Tigers. Bogeys zero one five at eight.’
‘Tigers, radiate.’
Richter reached down, switched on the Blue Vixen and scanned the display in front of him. ‘Tiger Two. Judy, Judy,’ he called immediately, the code word signifying that he had acquired the two targets on radar.
‘Roger that. Leader’s taking west, Tiger Two take east.’
Richter’s target – the easterly of the two contacts – was still over six miles in front of him, just outside the Sidewinder’s kill envelope. The missile’s infra-red seeker head is slaved to the radar antenna: in other words, wherever the radar looks, that’s where the missile looks. Already he could hear the faint growl in his headset that told him the ’winder had detected the target Harrier, but he was still too far out of range to engage it.
Richter watched the contacts on radar. As he expected, as soon as the pilots of the ‘attacking’ Sea Harriers detected the Blue Vixen radar transmissions on their Guardian sets, they split, breaking left and right and climbing. In air combat, height and speed are vital: an aircraft caught at low level is denied freedom of movement and is often an easy target.
‘Bogeys splitting. Independent pursuit.’
Richter pulled the Harrier hard round to starboard in a 5g turn. His opponent was passing his level in a steep climb – the Sea Harrier FA2 climbs at fifty thousand feet a minute – and turning rapidly, just under six miles in front of him. The advantage Richter had was that he was still behind his assigned target, which was where he intended to stay until he could engage it with the Sidewinder.
But the other Harrier pilot was having none of it. Realizing that a CAP aircraft was on his tail, he jinked to the left and started a tight diving turn that could bring him up behind and below Richter’s aircraft.
Richter saw the manoeuvre, stopped his turn, reversed direction and hauled the Harrier into an even tighter turn to port, following his target, then rolled inverted and powered downwards towards the sea eight thousand feet below. At four thousand feet he forced the Harrier back into a climb. Despite the anti-g suit, Richter felt the blackness of g-loc creeping up on him as he pulled over 6g. The g-force diminished rapidly as the Harrier climbed. Adrenalin pumping, Richter scanned the Blue Vixen scope.
Intellectually, he knew that it was all a game, a kind of maritime
‘Got you, you bastard,’ Richter muttered as he closed with the bogey. The growl in his earphones increased markedly. He checked the head-up display, looking at the voltmeter to confirm the Sidewinder really had locked on to the other Sea Harrier’s exhaust and not the other obvious heat source – the sun – and waited for the diamond symbol to appear in the display.
The target aircraft started a tight right-hand turn, but by then it didn’t matter. A final check that the bogey was within the missile’s minimum and maximum engage ranges, and release. ‘Tiger Two, Fox Two,’ Richter called. A Sidewinder kill.
‘Tiger Two, good kill. Tigers, terminate, terminate,’ the Sea King bagman called. ‘Pigeons for Mother three five zero at sixty-two. Listen out for Snakes this frequency.’
‘Alpha Sierra, roger. Break, break. Tiger Two, Leader. Roll out north at thirty.’
Richter clicked his transmit button to acknowledge, then steadied the Harrier on north, continued the climb and levelled at thirty thousand feet. He scanned his radar, checking for both Tiger One and the other two Harriers. As soon as he identified the Senior Pilot’s aircraft, he took up station in battle formation again.
‘Tiger Two, Snake One.’
‘Tiger Two.’
