TIM GEDGE SAT down in his office with his new Senior Pilot and Air Warfare Instructor the morning after their arrival from the States. He asked Dave Braithwaite to try to tailor a programme for 809’s pilots that somehow condensed a nine-month operational training course into three weeks. Again, Gedge asked, What do we need? What should we be asking for?
Freshly minted as a Marine Corps WTI, Bill Covington was eager to bring to bear all he’d learned. But before he even got into more careful consideration of weapons and tactics, it was immediately obvious to him that the squadron’s aircraft could do with looking a little more suited to the theatre they were deploying to. Four jets had now arrived from St Athan in various states of repair, but all shared the gloss dark sea grey and gleaming white undersides that was the standard livery for the Navy’s Sea Harriers. Camouflage it was not. Gedge talked to DNAW to see what could be done.
They were already on the case.
Lieutenant Commander Leo Gallagher, a former F-4 Phantom Observer, had already visited the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and been promised a report by their resident expert, Mr Philip J. Barley of the RAE’s Defensive Weapons Department. That had yet to materialize, though. And so it was time to drag Mr Barley back from his Easter holidays.
Before he’d stepped into the cockpit of a Sea Harrier Bill Covington was on his way to Farnborough, the home of British aeronautical research and development.
Housed in an unprepossessing prefab, Mr Barley’s workshop was pure Caractacus Potts. A collision of specialist scientific apparatus, optical equipment, tripods, mounts and model aeroplanes in all shapes, sizes and colours. Barley had been a student of the history of aircraft camouflage since the seventies, when the MoD ran trials using a pair of Hawker Hunters. Finances no longer allowed for that. Instead, Barley had Bert, the model-maker from the RAE’s 40 Department, to build lots of Airfix kits. As the only contemporary RAF jet available in 1:24 scale, Bert’s models were all, conveniently enough, of Hawker Harriers. And so Barley dug out his 1980 technical report evaluating the effect of different paint schemes on detection of the Harrier from the ground. Without access to real, airborne Hunters he’d set up his equipment on the flat roof of the Portakabin belonging to the RAE’s Institute of Aviation Medicine to ensure that he could take his photometric measurements against an unbroken background of sky.
Covington listened carefully as Barley explained the principles of his work. Two things were key: reducing the contrast against the sky, and creating an element of uncertainty about which way an aeroplane was facing. Beyond a distance of a couple of miles it made no difference at all, but if in a dogfight an opponent thought up was down, and back was front, even momentarily, it was a valuable marginal advantage.
Fighter pilot and scientist discussed the priorities. What were the prevailing conditions like? The expected operational tactics? Based on what he imagined 809 would face, Covington explained that two main scenarios needed to be addressed: high-altitude interception and reducing the visibility of the jet as seen from below.
Drawing on lessons learned in the 1980 trial Barley began to consider the possibilities, thinking a five-colour scheme might work, with different shades of grey applied to either convex or concave parts of the airframe. The lightest shade would be used to reduce the distance from which dark shadows beneath the wings or the Harrier’s big black elephant’s-ear engine air intakes would give it away. Matt paint would be a must to reduce the possibility of sunlight glinting off the aircraft. The national markings would be toned down into pastel shades of powder blue and salmon pink. Perhaps even a false cockpit painted on the underside.
‘How many aircraft do you have to paint?’ Barley asked.
‘Eight,’ Covington replied.
‘When?’
‘Soon as you can.’
The Royal Navy was not alone in choosing to paint their peacetime jets in a handsome gloss grey and white scheme. The French thought it suited the Super Etendard too. And that was the colour, with the addition of the pale blue and white of the national flag to the rudder, that adorned the five jets belonging to the Armada Nacional Argentina. But while useless open-source information like that was relatively easy to come by, hard intelligence about the combat readiness and capability of the Argentine SuEs and Mirages was tougher to unearth. Tim Gedge wanted to know about the nature and quality of the threat, not orders of battle and notional top speeds. Judging by the content of the briefing documents he was being sent by the MoD, Jane’s, the publisher of great breezeblock reference books on defence, was having a bumper month. Everyone seemed to have been stocking up with the latest edition. But if he was going into combat with aircraft designed and built on the other side of the Channel, it didn’t seem unreasonable to want to know more than that. Even better, he wanted 809 to train against them in the air.
As boss of 800, Gedge had enjoyed warm relations with the Commanding Officer of one of the Aéronavale’s two Super Etendard squadrons based at Landivisiau in Brittany. It was barely a fortnight since his successor, Andy Auld, had played host to a flight of four SuEs during which the SHARs appeared to have come out on top. But the SuE was never intended to be a dogfighter. It was an attack jet, and now Gedge needed to interrogate that capability a little more thoroughly. It was time to extend another invitation to his French counterpart. Gedge phoned him, but, it turned out, the situation was now very different. The CO of the Aéronavale squadron was very sorry but his hands were tied. He’d have been only too willing to come over to Yeovilton, but he’d been told no. From above.
Instead of insights into the SuE, DNAW produced a report on the birdstrike hazard to fast jets in the South Atlantic drafted by the Aviation Bird Unit at Worplesdon in Surrey. Gedge learned that ‘unlike the birds encountered around the British Isles many of those in the South Atlantic are very large’. The report included a map of albatross distribution in South Georgia, and while it acknowledged that the Falkland Islands’ largest bird, the gentoo penguin, ‘was incapable of flight’ it warned that they could jump a bit, albeit not ‘very far off the ground’.
Also from Surrey came a Senior Scientist from the Defence Operational Analysis Establishment at West Byfleet. Gedge’s formal request for a comprehensive brief on the Argentine capability appeared to have borne fruit. Before the squadron briefing, Gedge invited his visitor into his office for coffee to hear a little more about what he planned to say. The DOAE were proud of having been able to tweak an existing computer program to model and predict the course of the Operation CORPORATE air war. Prior to getting into the detail of that, the civil servant once more ran through the kind of numbers-of-aircraft information anyone could glean from Jane’s. So far it hardly seemed worth gathering his pilots. Then the analyst told the 809 Squadron boss that their modelling predicted that most of the Sea Harriers were going to be shot down by the end of day two.
‘Thank you very much for the briefing,’ Gedge managed equably. ‘I’ll see you out.’
‘But,’ began the shocked scientist, ‘I want to brief your people.’
‘No,’ Gedge told him politely, but unequivocally, ‘you’re not going to if that’s what you’re going to say.’
The scientist wasn’t having it. He’d come all the way to deliver his pearls of wisdom and wasn’t going back until he’d done so. Eventually Gedge called up the Master at Arms to have him escorted out. As the insults hurled at him by the apoplectic civil servant receded into the distance, Gedge called Captain Peter Williams, Yeovilton’s Commanding Officer, to explain what had happened; that he wasn’t prepared to have his pilots exposed to such ill-informed and entirely counter-productive guff.
‘You might well have some sort of complaint about it in due course,’ Gedge told him, then heard a commotion down the line from the Captain’s office.
‘Tim, I think it’s just arrived …’
There was better news from Dave Ramsay at Valley. When Gedge phoned to find out how the trials were going, he was told the trials team had packed up and gone home. His initial reaction was irritation. He’d given Ramsay clear instructions not to return to Yeovilton until they were complete. But when he finally caught up with the Australian pilot, Ramsay explained that he’d been trying to reach Gedge on the phone. They were done. Six shots, six hits. One hundred per cent.
It was cause for encouragement, but the analysts at DOAE weren’t the only ones who had concerns about the levels of Sea Harrier attrition that Task Force commanders should prepare for. And one of them was Gedge’s boss at Fort Southwick, Rear Admiral Derek Reffell, who, prior to the launch of Operation CORPORATE, had enjoyed responsibility for the Navy’s carriers and amphibious ships. Reffell had produced a graph suggesting that, through a combination of combat losses and unserviceability, just ten Sea Harriers would be operational by the end of the first week of the war. He predicted that on each day that the Sea Harriers faced determined resistance from the enemy it was likely one or two would be lost. ‘And this,’ he concluded, ‘may well be an optimistic estimate.’
Director of Naval Air Warfare Ben Bathurst was asked to sense-check the Admiral’s assumptions and deductions. Without actually contradicting him, Bathurst presented an interpretation that sounded a good deal less categorical than the dismal picture painted by Reffell. All the same, he acknowledged the need to bolster the small Sea Harrier force – but, he pointed out, he was trying to do just that. ‘It is intended,’ he reassured them, ‘to give this the highest priority with 809 NAS.’
Yet while the Navy’s Sea Harriers may have been a desperately finite resource, they were not the only fast jets in the British arsenal that were capable of operating from the deck of an aircraft carrier.