Hawker Siddeley Harrier
Hawker Siddeley Aviation · United Kingdom · first flew 1967 · fighter
The Hawker Siddeley Harrier is the first operational vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) jet, using a single vectored-thrust Pegasus turbofan to hover and fly conventionally.
Recognition (WEFT)
| W — Wings | High-mounted, swept |
|---|---|
| E — Engines | 1 × turbofan, fuselage-mounted |
| F — Fuselage | Four vectoring nozzles on fuselage sides |
| T — Tail | Conventional |
WEFT is AircraftIQ's four-point recognition method — how it works.
Spot it by:
- Four vectoring nozzles on fuselage sides
- Anhedral shoulder wing
- Outrigger wheels under wingtips
Spot the four prominent thrust nozzles on the fuselage flanks, the drooping anhedral shoulder wing, the tandem bicycle main gear and the outrigger wheels at the wingtips.
Specifications
- The Hawker Siddeley Harrier has a length of 13.87 m (46 ft).
- It has a wingspan of 7.7 m (25 ft).
- Its maximum speed is 1176 km/h (731 mph).
- Typical crew: 1.
Figures are for the representative variant described above; marks differ. See how AircraftIQ sources figures.
History
Developed from the experimental P.1127 and Kestrel, the Harrier GR1 first flew in December 1967 and entered RAF service in 1969. The Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine's four rotating nozzles gave the aircraft its unique jet-borne lift, making it the only truly successful V/STOL fighter of its generation.
Variants
The RAF flew the GR1, GR3 and later the much-improved GR5/GR7/GR9. The naval Sea Harrier developed into a dedicated fleet air defence fighter, while the American AV-8 family was developed jointly with McDonnell Douglas.
Where you'll see it
Harriers served the RAF from forward sites in Germany and from RAF Wittering, and the Sea Harrier proved decisive in the 1982 Falklands War. UK Harrier operations ended in 2010; preserved aircraft are held at RAF Cosford, the Fleet Air Arm Museum and Duxford, with the type a perennial RIAT favourite during its career.
In depth
The design story of the Harrier begins not with Hawker Siddeley but with a French engineer, Michel Wibault, who proposed a vectored-thrust strike aircraft concept to NATO in the late 1950s. Wibault's original idea was cumbersome, but it caught the attention of Bristol's Stanley Hooker, who saw how a single shaft could drive four rotatable nozzles and began developing what became the Pegasus engine. Hawker's Ralph Hooper and Sydney Camm then built an airframe around the engine rather than fitting an engine to an existing design — a crucial inversion of the usual process. The resulting P.1127 research aircraft hovered for the first time in November 1960, tethered above a concrete pad at Dunsfold.
The Pegasus engine's key insight is that the two front nozzles exhaust cold fan air and the two rear nozzles exhaust hot jet efflux, separated so that the cold air prevents the hot gas from heating the airframe to a structurally damaging degree. The four nozzles are mechanically linked so they always rotate to the same angle, driven by a single air motor. At zero to fifteen degrees they produce forward thrust; at ninety degrees they produce vertical lift; and at angles greater than ninety degrees (so-called 'reverse vectoring') they produce braking thrust that dramatically shortens the landing roll. This last capability, almost never used operationally, gives the aircraft a stopping distance on a normal runway shorter than almost any other combat aircraft in existence.
The Falklands War combat record was the Harrier's defining validation. The Sea Harrier FRS1, deployed on HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, flew 1,190 operational sorties between 1 May and 14 June 1982 and destroyed 28 Argentine aircraft in air combat without a single air-combat loss. The missiles of choice were the AIM-9L Sidewinder, an all-aspect acquisition version that could attack from any angle; this was the first war in which all-aspect IR missiles were used in significant numbers. Argentine pilots flying Mirages and A-4 Skyhawks had been trained to defeat rear-quarter missile shots and were unprepared for all-aspect attacks. Lieutenant Commander 'Sharkey' Ward, commanding 801 Naval Air Squadron, was among the top scorers with three kills.
The Harrier's greatest rivals were conceptual as much as operational. The Soviet Yak-38 'Forger' was the only other jet V/STOL aircraft to reach operational service; it used a lift-jet approach with separate vertically-mounted engines for the hover phase and a vectored main engine for forward flight. The Yak-38 could not carry meaningful weapons when operating in the vertical mode at typical temperatures and required a much longer runway than the Harrier for any practical load. It was retired in the early 1990s having never seen combat. The F-35B represents the modern solution to the same problem, using a lift fan driven from the main engine rather than the Pegasus's four-nozzle arrangement, but it carries substantially greater radar cross-section management in exchange for less dramatic short-take-off performance.
Short take-off rather than vertical take-off was the practical mode for nearly all operational Harrier sorties. A rolling take-off at even 100 metres dramatically reduced fuel consumption and increased payload. The ski-jump ramp fitted to British carriers, invented by Commander Doug Taylor RN, further improved the rolling departure by redirecting the momentum vector upward; the aircraft leaves the ski jump in a ballistic arc while the engine accelerates it to flying speed. This technique was adopted by Indian, Russian, Italian, and Spanish carriers and remains in use on modern carriers operating the F-35B.
For spotters today, the Harrier GR9 is preserved at the RAF Museum at Cosford, the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton (where the Sea Harrier is also represented), IWM Duxford, the Newark Air Museum, and several smaller collections. The US Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier II continues in service until around 2029 before replacement by the F-35B and visits RIAT Fairford occasionally. A reliable recognition trivia point: the outrigger undercarriage wheels are so small and the fuselage so wide relative to them that the aircraft looks faintly precarious on the ground — the main legs retract into the fuselage alongside each other on the centreline, and without the outriggers the aircraft would simply tip over.
Related aircraft
AircraftIQ — the aircraft field guide: 4,893 recognition guides, live overhead identification, works offline.