John Farley And The AV-8B

In seeking not least to improve the Harrier’s payload/range, Hawker Siddeley at Kingston and McDonnell Douglas in St Louis, Missouri, began work on a much updated design, the AV-16, with a new wing and more powerful Pegasus engine. But the cost of this much-altered Pegasus 15 was considered by the US and UK governments to be prohibitive, so the firms embarked upon their own separate projects. When the British government elected not to fund the Hawker Siddeley (from 1977, British Aerospace) offering, there was no option but to join forces once more. McDonnell Douglas gave BAe a 40 per cent manufacturing share in the AV-8B, which would become the Harrier GR5 in RAF service. First flown as the YAV-8B prototype (an AV-8A fitted with the wing, engine air intakes and lift improvement changes of the AV-8B) at the McDonnell Douglas factory airfield on 9 November 1978, the new configuration was shown to produce the desired performance improvements. The Harrier II was a reality.
In 1982 I took part in the AV-8B test programme doing engine development trials. This required you to do significant flights, an hour and- a-quarter was a perfectly normal flight, and some of them were even a bit longer, building up hours in ordinary test flying, not V/STOL test flying. The aeroplane, which was the full-scale development Ship 2 (AV‑8B BuNo 161397), was specially equipped for engine trials - it had its own in-built oxygen system, unlike the ordinary aeroplanes on which, if the engine stopped, causing the OBOGS (on-board oxygen generating system) to become ineffective, you had to use the small bottle in the seat. That wasn’t going to be any good for engine trials involving flame-outs.

We didn’t want to do this sort of work in St Louis due to the limited runway length and other air traffic all over the place (McDonnell Douglas shared St Louis Lambert International Airport), so we went to Edwards AFB (Air Force Base) in the Mojave Desert which took all the ‘sting’ out of gliding around in a jet fighter, because even I could find the six to eight miles of lake bed. In the event I accumulated a little over two hours’ gliding in the course of the year, and we didn’t expect that to happen.
The programme that the managers had planned lasted six weeks, starting in April, and the idea was that we would take the aeroplane to Edwards, do this test, do that test, and they were all to be demonstrations of perfect engine behaviour. Well, of course, flight test programmes are not like that, and when the engine started misbehaving on the second flight it became obvious that we had got to make changes. Those changes had to be made to both engine and intake. We’d got through about five or six build standards on the engine and a couple on the intake before we got a combination that would happily fly round the envelope. This whole thing took a year, because politics got into it. The Americans felt that deliberately stopping the engine on a single engined jet fighter was a high-risk trial, and they had their own rules for doing that sort of thing which included having a chase aircraft. The other thing was that people needed to look at you and decide whether you, the pilot, was a suitable person to do this job. You’ve got to realise that I was a British civilian, on a US Navy programme for the US Marine Corps at the USAF Flight Test Center. So there were all sorts of bosses who felt they ought to have some say in how this was all done, and a lot of hoops to jump through before getting approval.
I was chief test pilot at Dunsfold at the time, so when the engine misbehaved I said, “I’m off on TWA - I’ll come back when you’ve got another engine”. “Oh, no, you mustn’t go away because we’ll not get anybody else approved”. In the end, apart from two or three trips back to the UK, I was out there for a year, and I thoroughly loved it. It was pure test flying heaven. I wasn’t involved with the politics once I had got approved. I was just able to go out in the morning, fly the aeroplane, go back in the evening and prepare for the next day without a concern in the world.