Why Britain Never Made Another Harrier Jump Jet | INTEL

this is the Harrier Jump Jet after the Spitfire is probably the Harrier that's the most iconic British fighter design it was one of the few aircraft sold to the US and numbers and even Arnold Schwarzenegger was using the Harrier in the movie True Lies you're fired Britain had invented and owned vertical takeoff and landing so why was it retired why do we not have a new Harrier the answer well it's complicated [Music] to understand the significance of the Harrier Jump Jet in the British psyche you need to go back to 1982 how ears became infamous during the Falklands War it was the first time the v/stol or vertical short takeoff and landing aircraft had seen action a total of 28 sea Harriers and 14 harrier GREs were deployed the see how our squadrons shot down 21 Argentine aircraft with no air-to-air losses I can remember seeing my hand go forwards and then back again and found myself flying at about 10 feet only and that was that's just ridiculously low but he just seemed safer down there somehow the sea harrier was dubbed la Muerta negra by argentine pilots meaning the black death the cameraman said get you get back in the cockpit and give us a thumbs-up all right sending the cockpit so it went like that which is one of the one of the first images that came back the Harriet returned from the Falklands as an icon cementing the reputation of British aircraft design second-generation how your toes went on to see action in Bosnia Iraq and Afghanistan it was a fighter that was proven in combat and if it needed to it could even land on a shipping container it could take off vertically take off on a short runway with with a high weapon load it was small agile and had tremendous acceleration and performance so all that combined gave you a really really useful operational flexibility clearly there was a project that should be extended or belt on so what would the next British fighter be as it turned out there wasn't going to be one throughout the 1950s and 60s a number of aircraft companies separately decided to investigate the viability of vertical or short takeoff and landing the concrete runways that jet aircraft required were vulnerable to attack and the solution was to make an aircraft that could take off virtually anywhere like we could in the Second World War [Music] v stall aircraft would be able to take off land and refuel anywhere jets would be able to hide in wood blocks and provides bases or even car parks without requiring large and vulnerable air bases for the Cold War that advantage could be huge if only they could get it to work making a jet hover turned out to be no easy task jets fly because of the air passing over their wings and with no forward momentum that doesn't work the solution is downward thrust enough thrust to lift the entire aircraft with nozzles to keep it stable and some way of then transitioning into normal flight that's what would make a v/stol aircraft is successful but engineers around the world were going about it in different ways as early as 1951 there were crazy designs that had aircraft taking off vertically like rockets from warships in the 60s the US was making failed v-star prototypes a bit of a bad habit there were swiveling engines on wingtips left fans separate left jet engines the ideas were modern and brave and of course few of them worked there was even a moment in history when companies were trying to make large cargo aircraft that could take off on short runways and land vertically even NASA had a vehicle taking off vertically the lunar landing research vehicle was built to simulate the moon landings and although it helped to put Neil Armstrong on the moon even it didn't go without an accident of the dozens of designs from the 50s to the 80s only the Harrier and the yak-38 forger reached operational status that last one you might not have heard of the yakovlev yak-38 was a soviet navy v/stol aircraft intended for use aboard their light carriers and 231 were built it was used on the Soviet Union's Kiev class carriers and was even tested in Afghanistan against the Mujahideen its approach was different to the Harrier it had two dedicated left jets located behind the pilots making its silhouette somewhat reminiscent of today's f-35b I'll come back to that while other countries are attempting to design their own unique v/stol aircraft Britain was quietly proceeding with its own developments first in 1953 with experimental machines like the rolls-royce thrust measuring reg known as the flying bedstead it became the first jet left aircraft to fly anywhere in the world and it led to the short sc1 designed to study vertical takeoff and landing and the transition to forward flight it was equipped with the first fly-by-wire control system for a v/stol aircraft and four years as tests provided data that led to the famous Pegasus engine and that engine is what would go on to power the Harrier it's this vectored thrust engine that allows the pilot to change the angle at which thrust is being projected allowing a fighter to take off vertically hover and land vertically for the first time ever the Pegasus uses jets of coal they are from rotatable nozzles along with a heart jet which was directed through a conventional central tail paper this engine was the first mobile engine and in the world and what it did is it enabled that transition from forward flight to vertical flight and the actual engine itself has an for exhaust so two exhausts on either side and these exhaust will rotate so if it's facing and backwards it will move forward and when it's rotating downwards it will lift impressively the concept for this was created in 1960 and this aircraft is still flying around today so they've developed a product which is very innovative but also able to adapt to new technologies but prioritizing the ability to hover meant that the Harrier had to sacrifice in other areas it couldn't fly at supersonic speeds and it couldn't carry as much fuel or munitions as other fighters in these hides and get to the targets in no time but a supersonic v/stol aircraft was being developed just not in the UK in the 80s the Soviet Union wanted to upgrade its V stock jets the result was the yak-141 capable of flying at Mach 1.7 it's similar to today's f-35b due to its rotating ria nozzle technology but it never went into production that's because its manufacturer yakovlev ran out of funds due to the Soviet collapse and it had to look elsewhere for investment Nicole ever entered discussions with several foreign partners but it was Lockheed for there reached an agreement with the same Lockheed who were about to start developing the f-35 the cove Lev announced a deal with Lockheed for funds of around 400 million dollars in return they'd produced three new prototypes and an additional static test aircraft it was a technology transfer this next phase of development in vertical jet aircraft brings us to the modern era so why don't we have a new Harrier today well in 1993 the US began developing its Joint Strike Fighter program it was looking for a new aircraft a fighter that could replace a wide range of existing aircraft the f16 a10 f-18 Hornets and av-8b Harrier two years later the UK became a formal partner signing up to buy the same aircraft for the UK it would replace the Harrier and tornado as it was replacing so much this new aircraft had to do a lot it would meet to fly at supersonic speeds with stealth and be capable of short takeoff and vertical landings a scaled-up pegasus engine couldn't reach supersonic speeds and its nozzles sticking out of the aircraft we're never going to do by having thrust forward so how do you get rust the Harrier concept didn't fit the bill and to put the nail in the coffin it seemed like Lockheed Martin skunkworks had already found and patented the perfect solution years earlier Lockheed's patented solution a left fan inside the fuselage just behind the pilot where the two left yet were on the yak-141 put a shaft on the engine put it at the back put a shaft on the engine drive the shaft through the fuselage and drive a lift fan at the front which provides the front post and that was the design that teams of engineers worked on for nearly 10 years to come up with now that was a bit of brilliant engineering design that was an innovation that you rarely come across it was like Harrier in its early days and we only patented it and we spotted the pound and of course when we saw him you know Eureka it had to be the best and so that won the competition and of course we in the UK said okay we'll join that program because the area where the Harrier has its rotating engine nozzles for downward thrust the f-35 uses a combination of its internal left fan and by rotating its main engine nozzle at the back so that it's pointing down together the fan and nozzle produced more than 40,000 pounds of thrust enough to lift the nearly 20 tonne aircraft this system is designed very differently from the Pegasus in that its main module is the lift fan which is to the front of the aircraft it has a counter rotating fan and it essentially pushes the air flow downwards and then you've got the drive shaft and the clutch and the roll posts and the roll posts I decide to help balance the aircraft and then you've got the three bearing swivel module at the back which is totally unique in its design it also directs air flow downwards but it can rotate around 95 degrees within around two and a half and seconds the entire capability lift system is around 40,000 pounds of thrust and to put that into perspective that's the equivalent of the launching tell an elephants to top of the Empire State Building and in seven seconds well it also yeah it's it's crazy the left fan devised by Lockheed and DARPA in the early 80s was the only workable solution that could give a plane vertical capability supersonic speed and radar evading stealth obviously Lockheed came out the winners in the procurement process and just like that Britain's next hovering fighter jet was going to be the f-35b we talked about Stovall a lot short takeoffs hovering vertical landings slow landings but they're just the smallest part of what we do with an f-35 and what was very difficult to do in the Harrier era is remarkably simple for an f-35 pilot to accomplish we do not need to be spending our time worrying about in taking off an f-35 we need to dedicate our time to employing what the aircraft is capable of doing and so we've made the Stovall functions so simple that every man and woman finds it remarkably easy to transition to looking at f-35 in the hover you could take your hands off because it's completely stable on its own it is remarkably simple to get into that that position and to put on the ground on purpose that it may sound simple but it took us years us a big team years to decide how the patrols should be harmonized how we could make an aircraft fly in that Stovall regime but then transition to the conventional flying aircraft that we needed it to be that's a product of the BOK Harrier research work that's a product of the ex35 team and that's a lot of understanding over the years of what the human we expected the human to do yeah the sitting in the hover is essentially hands-off tasks we're in the Harrier it was a non-stop effort to keep it stable in some ways modern hovering Jets have more in common with a Soviet aircraft than the Harrier but for UK manufacturing the f-35 project isn't doom and gloom BAE and rolls-royce are building parks all over the airframe success for Lockheed and the f-35 means financial success for British engineering but not necessarily success for British aircraft design if you do what you did before in a typhoon and tornado the Harrier into the f-35 and you are wasting the potential of what this aircrafts all about so I do think for all the Air Force's they realized there's not much of what I did before the transitions those newer wow that's a big big step for it so I think we've tried not to repeat from the older generation and that we've tried to buy into this is something complete not since the Harrier has the UK designed an entire military fighter jet those days of being at the forefront of aircraft design seem to have ended with the Harrier but fighter jets that can hover they didn't give this very well-liked for the puppet alone that is not easy

Channel: BFBS Creative

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Keywords: harrier, sea harrier, av8b, f35b, f35, harrier 2, bae, hawker, hawker siddeley, jump jet, vtol, vstol, stovl, aircraft, pegasus engine, rolls royce, harrier 2020, history, documentary, history of vstol, cold war, why we never got another harrier, why britain never made another harrier jump jet, bfbs, bfbs creative, intel, intel series, simon thornton, vertical takeoff, vertical landing plane, airplane, aviation, hovering jet, fighter jet, engineering, the engineering of the harrier

Id: T6aHyuuthns

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020