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Sure, the F-35 Lightning II program comes with a trillion-pound price tag. Sure, it’s been beset by numerous production delays, system bugs, and fleet groundings. But damn if its vertical night landings don’t put the Harrier to shame. [Image: Lockheed Martin / Flickr]
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What about that puts the harrier to shame? The fact you’ve never seen a blurry, noisy image of one hovering on a night vision camera? Sod off with your totally unjustified three line “article”, sir.
It does put the harrier to shame though, a lot more stable and it doesn’t have any of the weaknesses of the Harrier like it being slow and it is a stealth plane. The US set out to make an all in one plane at low low cost….
Only in reality we could probably afford to lose 4 harriers for every one of them lol.
I don’t think it’ll do what it set out to do and replace the Harrier though, I mean unless we’re going to War with another advanced military. I doubt any country we could possibly go to war with has the tech to even compete with the Harrier. We’d just bomb their airfields first and render what ever air force they have useless.
We dont have the Harrier anymore. Its been retired a while now. Most of the fleet was sold off to the Yanks for spares as well.
In the greater scheme of things it really doesn’t put the Harrier to shame.
It’s now managing to do what the Harrier has been doing for 30 years and doing well.
Given the original Harrier was not designed on computers or flown by them its yet more amazing that it has worked so well for so long. Sure it has its limitations by todays standards, but todays standards have yet to prove themselves.
The Harrier was designed to do a job and it did it well.
Wasn’t this the plane that was meant to be really cheap so they could create more of them than the over priced F22 which they couldn’t realistically afford to make lots of them, let alone lose them.
I could have sworn they wanted this to cost like 30 million per plane or something. However it doesn’t look like they ended up saving money…… which is worrying since the UK has bought into them lol.
Normally we’re smarter than that in the UK, surely we could have used our brains to update the Harrier?
The F-35 will be our first 5th generation jet. There is only 1 operational 5th gen fighter flying and that is the F-22, and even that has been plagued by issues. The F-35 is not a replacement for that aircraft it is designed for a completely different role as a carrier based aircraft.
The F-35 will be deployed on our new aircraft carrier the HMS Queen Elizabeth, when she launches.
yeah..what a surprise the harrier was first introduced in 1969…not that the image does what you say.
So Wrathful Gods of War are green and blurry?
you morons,there are no harriers left in world.
we sold them to canada and marines for less than the price of the spare engines that they got.
they dont call them harriers.av8b etc.
stuidest aircraft ever developed by us brits,was usless at everything,but the polos loved bullshiting about it for years,we would have been better off buying second hand phantoms and rebuilding them instead.
a stupid aircraft bred from the idiot labour polos in the 60′s.
with the cash that went into harrier prog and other white heap of crap,concord we could have finished dev work on tsr2,we would still be selling them world wide.
tsr2 was0 YEARS ahead of its time,look at latest future specs wishlist published by usaf big wigs and compare to tsr2, basicly one plane for most mission types,just change the container in the belly,quick simple and cheap and easy to update/upgrade payloads without having to redesign aircraft just to upgrade a cheap missile system that actualy involves half a billion on the planes themselves.
it works well in most other places and systems it been tried on.
your christmas just arrived from china in several thousand inter changable boxes. .
rant ended cos of crap 3g connection.
but will try to find usaf wishlist and post link.
So much certainty from someone so full of shit.
There are no Harriers in the world? Rubbish. America has a load. Spain and Italy too. Yes, the AV-8B is called Harrier. Still over 350 in service.
Stupidest aircraft ever built by us Brits? Did you ever hear about that conflict called the Falklands Islands War? Do a bit of research and find out what the military commanders and her pilots – and Argentina’s pilots – thought of her (here’s a clue: 20 air-to-air kills to no air combat losses). The US Marines love it too – why do you think they bought up our fleet when we stupidly scrapped it? They wanted to ensure they could keep it alive for as long as possible. It was a key weapon in Cold War planning; how many Phantoms would have taken off from small forest clearings in West Germany? What do you do with your conventional aircraft when the enemy puts a hole in your deck? How many Phantoms could have operated off the deck of cargo or auxiliary ships? (Harrier did both in the Falklands.)
The money saved on TSR2 (which was indeed a technological marvel) was not spent on Harrier. It was spent elsewhere. Cancelling Harrier would not have helped TSR2; the moron Labour government didn’t have confidence in our own abilities and instead wanted to suck up and buy American instead. Plus, as any idiot knows, they were aircraft built for two very different reasons. Good luck dogfighting enemy fighters with a massive nuclear bomber. And no, close-engagement missiles are not the only answer to that problem (unless you believe the movies).
I believe the big question at the time was wherever fighters would survive against missiles vs close combat Air to Air. The Harrier was meant to survive the scud onset against fixed airfields where after all the aircraft were grounded it was the last thing flying. The aircraft itself is not a match in air to air combat, most missiles would hit it from beyond visual range. Its real value is in close air support which is why heliocopters in the british army stagnated at the Lynx multi role, it did the job so much better than a dedicated type. In the Falklands it had the advantage of being near its airfield when the Argentine air force was at its operational limit, quite often laden with bombs and not missiles where the harrier had a pair of Sidewinder missiles with the newest sensors President Reagan could ship across. It was the Sidewinder missile not the Harrier that killed, the subsonic Harrier could never get close enough to engage with guns.
In the 60′s the UK was also operating Mach 3 interceptors, 2 Aircraft carriers, its own Nuclear deterrent, a Vulcan bomber fleet and was involved in several insurgent wars such as Kenyas, Cyprus and Malaya as well having a 50,000 man occupation force in Germany which needed to be top of the affordable range to match a Soviet Army. I guess a TSR2 bomber was one too many things to pay for. France did far worse with far better equipment at the time.
The Harrier was excellent in air-to-air combat. What is lacked in speed it made up for in brilliant manoeuvrability. Speak to one of her pilots. If all you need is Sidewinders you wouldn’t even need a plane.
It did not have the advantage of being near its airfield in the Falklands. Due to the Exocet threat, it’s bases (i.e. carriers) were kept well out of range a long distance from the islands. Yes, the Argentines had to fly their best jets (Mirages) from the mainland. Had they had something like a Harrier, they could have operated from virtually anywhere on the islands and would have won the war….
The TSR was affordable in the sense that anything is affordable if you want it. It’s replacement – though never actually delivered in the end – actually cost MORE money! No, it wasn’t about money; as Sir Syndey Camm said:
“All modern aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR2 simply got the first three right.”
The decision was influenced by an obsession with sucking up to the Americans and an entirely stupid and unsupportable belief that missiles could do everything and that the age of piloted planes would over in less than a decade. Dumb as fuckery thinking.
For TSR2 also read the UK’s ballistic missile and space programmes which, in the 50s, were well ahead of the American and Russian programmes. Unlike the French who invested and pressed ahead and now have a huge commercial space programme, all we can do is buy American or piggy back them. A triumph of backward decisions from (mostly) Labour politicians.
I would like to point out Stanley was only bombed once by Vulcans, and was effectively left undefended from the beginning with minor AAA. When the option came in the campaign to use their own carrier it was sailed into another port, the Mirage was also capable of rough field and road operations so could have been based on many locations on the islands. However all of them were left in mainland bases to counter a non existant Chilian threat to invade. Had 20 Mirages been based on the island with Radar Early Warning, those Harriers would not have survived – the first day.
The reason why Missiles were so effective at this time was because to evade and defeat missiles required a multi billion dollar programme over a decade usually creating an entirely new aircraft, but an existing missile could defeat a multimillion dollar aircraft with an upgrade costing several thousand dollars.
Until 1979 with the F117a that is simply the way it was.
I forgot to add that the only reason the Harrier was as effective as it was during the campaign was its addition of the upgraded Sidewinder missile to being all aspect, the basic unit of which was $56,000 and the most advanced(all aspect) $96,000 in 1999.
The Argentine Airforce received from France during the campagin along with Exocet missiles the Matra Magic R550 Magic 1 – an all aspect missile with a range of 8 miles at mach 2.7 + the carriers speed – i.e. a supersonic aircraft would be able to use afterburner, lock and shoot then scoot out of the effective range of the returning sidewinder from a Harrier, of which in a CAP there would be only 2 Chicks plus those scambled to intercept, a big disadvantage for a subsonic aircraft verses a supersonic one with extra fuel tanks. The fact that the Mirage 3 was not used in the air superiority role speaks volumes about a military more concerned with political power than its actual job.
Their is no arguement about the TSR2, but it was not a stealth aircraft and would have only served until the year 2000. We are in 2012. Its main service would have been in keeping the pounds spent on its purchase and development in the UK economy, when a pound is spent on goods originating in the UK the economy gets the pound and the goods, if we had bought an F111 instead we only get the goods, by collaborating with Europe we lost the ability to make the goods and our pounds and in the case of France with the Jaguar our partner sold mirage jets to the export customers.