Harrier by Glancey Jonathan;

Author:Glancey, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

CHAPTER 5

FOREIGN LEGIONS

Even after David Cameron’s government had axed it in late 2010, the Harrier would always have Paris – and the US Marine Corps. It was in Paris, more than half a century earlier, that USAF Colonel John Driscoll, head of NATO’s Washington-funded Mutual Weapon Development Project (MWDP), had met Michel Wibault and introduced him to Stanley Hooker in Bristol; it was in Paris that USAF Colonel Bill Chapman, Driscoll’s successor, had agreed to the MWDP funding 75 per cent of the development costs of the Pegasus, the heart of the P.1127 and every last Harrier built. And without the involvement of the US Marines and their enduring enthusiasm for the aircraft, the Harrier would never have flown, nor fought for as long as it has; it was the Marines who had ensured that a second generation of the jump jet from Kingston upon Thames became a reality; and once again, it was the British who were the beneficiaries of American largesse, as they had been before, especially from the moment when, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the US government, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was able to lend an enormous helping hand to its old English-speaking cousin on the other side of the Atlantic.

The American love affair with the Harrier was tested from early on. The first US pilot to be killed flying the aircraft was Major ‘Chuck’ Rosburg at Dunsfold on 27 January 1969. A U-2 pilot posted to Britain to evaluate the GR.1, Rosburg had landed on what was intended to be his last Harrier flight before packing up and going home. For whatever reason, he told Dunsfold Control, ‘There’s something not quite right. I’m going to take it up again.’ He did, vertically; but as Rosburg made the tricky transition with XV743 to forward flight, he lost lateral control and side-slipped at a 90-degree angle towards the ground. He ejected, sideways, and hit the deck.

Neville Duke, Hawker’s former chief test pilot, who lived in a house in the grounds of Dunsfold, was among the first on the scene with his wife, Gwen, nursing the stricken pilot as best they could until an ambulance arrived; but Rosburg was dead. Thirty-five years old, he was a father of four children; at home in the States, his wife Shirley was expecting a fifth. Duke, a charming and modest man, was, along with Johnnie Johnson, one of Britain’s most successful Second World War fighter pilots; he shot down twenty-seven German aircraft, and probably three more, flying American Curtiss Tomahawks and later Spitfires. Not a man to talk about warfare or ‘heroics’, Duke told me that Rosburg’s death had made him think of how much his generation owed the Americans, and how lucky he was to be alive after his worst accident, when in June 1944, as the commanding officer of 145 Squadron in Italy, the engine of his Spitfire Mk VIII was holed by flak. When he tried to bail out, the harness of his parachute caught in the canopy.

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