The first sortie was going to be just a taxi session. Having taxied around, got confident in it, got used to the nosewheel steering, the brakes and so on, the next thing was to line up, rush down the runway with the nozzles aft, accelerating like they were going to do an ordinary take-off until they got to 60kt, then check the throttle, put the brakes on and stop. They came back, we talked about it, and then they went and did a vertical take-off on the next sortie. That was just a simple ‘press-up’; as soon as they cleared the ground, they came back down again. After that it was a case of debriefing them; maybe they had let the Harrier creep forward, or they’d raised the nose, and making them go and repeat it, whatever ‘it’ was, until they got it right.

After four or five goes they were ready for the next thing; go up, come to the hover, hold the height for 15 or 20 seconds, and come back down. If they got that right they went again, this time with a bit of bank to the side of the runway. It was a very progressive thing, and it worked fine. In this way the pilots built up to transitions, short take-offs and landings and so on. Operating out of Dunsfold both pilots made ten flights in the aircraft between 24 September and 3 October 1968, using Pegasus Mk101-powered Harrier GR1 XV742. A precautionary engine change caused very little disruption to the programme and did nothing to put the Marine Corps aviators off. They went back to the States and they sold the aeroplane to the Americans. We didn’t; they bought it thanks to Tom Miller and ‘Bud’ Baker…
    In January the next year, the US Navy, which is responsible for procuring Marine Corps aeroplanes, sent over a proper NPE (Navy Preliminary Evaluation) team to look at the aircraft; several test pilots, several flight test engineers, and the CO. I got the job of converting the pilots. I thought about this and I decided that I would play it by putting them in an office and just briefing them for two days on everything that we thought was wrong with the aeroplane. I could see when I did this that they were looking at each other, thinking, ‘What’s he on about?’ I did not understand at the time that the Americans had something called the ‘lying, cheating contractor’, and they never expected to be told the truth; they always assumed that a contractor was trying to pull a fast one.
    My thinking was that these pilots would have got some sort of pre-conceived idea of the tests that they wanted to carry out. They would have come having done their homework. I wanted to make sure that, in setting about trying to do what they wanted to do, they never came across an unexpected problem, because the first thing you do when you come across an unexpected problem is to tear up your test cards and write a lot of new ones based on the problem you’ve uncovered. I suppose I was just lucky in that I came up with what some people would have thought was a very naïve approach but which turned out to be perfect for the job. They just went through every one of their cards without ever having to stop, because whenever they experienced something they didn’t like, they already knew about it.
    The three pilots this time were Lt Tom Casey and Maj William Scheuren from the US Naval Air Test Center at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, and Capt Mike Ripley of the USMC. Harrier GR1 XV741 was at their disposal, together with the sixth development batch aircraft XV281. All went home more than satisfied with the outcome of their ten flights, but their favorable reports back to those in higher authority would not in themselves guarantee procurement.
    Further action was needed by us. I recognised an opportunity that presented itself on the back of the May 1969 Daily Mail Trans-Atlantic Air Race. The fastest time from the top of the Post Office Tower in central London to the Empire State Building in New York, six hours 11 minutes, was set by Boscombe Down-based Harrier test pilot Sqn Ldr Tom Lecky-Thomson. At the end of the race there were two Harriers in the USA; the one Tom had won the race with and a spare for the west-to-east race which Sqn Ldr Graham Williams did. I suggested to the company that we do a demonstration tour to support the efforts being made to finalise the contract with the Americans, and that’s what happened. Tom and I did demonstrations in Washington for a week and then down at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia.
    When we got to Norfolk I was asked to do a demonstration at the airfield, but I said I wanted to do it from the hard standing next to a wall at the naval dockyard where aircraft carriers and destroyers were tied up. It was a strip wide enough to take aircraft like F-4s; they would be towed from the airfield and then craned on to the ships. I knew our host, Bob Thomas, commander of the NPE, so he trusted me and he gave us permission to use the strip. We were just talking about doing the demonstration when I looked out into the bay and off-shore was a brand new-looking ship with a helicopter platform on the back. ‘What’s that?’, I asked. ‘Oh, that’s the USS La Salle’. I said I’d like to land on it in the demo but was told I couldn’t, because the ship didn’t have all the support kit on it. I said, ‘Well, I don’t need anything’.
    To cut a long story short, I did one sortie out to La Salle, then in use as an amphibious transport dock vessel, landed on it and shut the aeroplane down. The ground crew, who had some drop tanks and rocket pods that we’d choppered out to the ship, slapped those on. I started up, took off again and landed back alongside the aircraft carrier with the VIPs all on the deck watching this operation. We were trying to put across the fact that the Harrier was totally independent of ground facilities. That was the first time I’d landed on a ship but a vertical landing is a vertical landing is a vertical landing, and it’s a lot easier to do than the traditional way of going aboard a ship with a hook at high speed and smashing on to the deck.
    A year later the USMC ordered an initial dozen AV-8As in Fiscal Year 1970. It eventually took 110, including eight two-seat TAV-8A trainers. To reduce costs and hasten availability, all were built by Hawker Siddeley in the UK and air-freighted across the Atlantic, even though the British manufacturer had signed a licence production agreement with McDonnell Douglas. This deal would come into its own, however, when the time came to develop the second generation Harrier.