Jump Jet: The Secret History of the Harrier

Mike Pryce

Mike Pryce

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A thread to keep folks updated of my forthcoming book with Penguin Michael Joseph.

www.penguin.co.uk

Jump Jet

www.penguin.co.uk www.penguin.co.uk

Pre-orders now open, publication date currently July 2026.

The entire manuscript has been written, sent to my editor at Penguin (Rowland White), comments have come back and editing is being done. Currently 98,000 words but I aim to cut some.

Picture selection is in progress. Should be 24 'plates', out of many possible.

The book is a look at how Ralph Hooper created the Harrier and P1216, and just how hard any useful jump jet is to make.

It also features Ivan Yates in a parallel story, from using Alan Turing's first computer design to turn a Nazi concept into the English Electric Lightning, up to his data-driven approach to jump jet design that clashed with Ralph Hooper. The Eurofighter Typhoon was the result.

The story runs from 1944 to 2008, ending with the F-35B. Lots of little side stories too - rockets, nukes (not just Sandys), plus the important role of one of Elon Musk's SpaceX factories.

Tens of millions of words, in thousands of archive files, plus interviews with all the main characters, and supporting ones like Michael Heseltine, have led to a wholly new view of just what jump jets are. Short version: digital tech is not enough.

I will update things here as it progresses, and hope to publish a few offcuts in the meantime. First up is something about a fighter based on Concorde, hopefully around Xmas.

In the meantime, editing!

Mike
 
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The politics around the P1127RAF seem to have become as tortuous as the P1154 saga. Neither Denis Healey nor the RAF wanted it and it could easily have perished in the Whitehall jungle. With no UK vstol aircraft in service would the US Marines still have picked it?
A Harrierless world was a very real possibility.
 
A fighter based on a scaled down Concorde shape ? pretty exciting.
-Concorde was 185 tons with four turbojets.
-AFAIK the largest twin jet supersonic aircraft is the Tu-22M backfire at 120 mt.
- SR-71 was a bit less than 80 mt. Wikipedia tells me the fighter variant called YF-12 had a MTOW of 63 mt.
-Mirage IVB with a pair of J75 was to be 60 mt. The scaled-down, familiar Mirage IVA ended at 32 mt.
-FB-111A had a maximum takeoff weight of 54 mt. Never realized it was so much heavier than vanilla F-111s.
-The Tu-128 was 44 mt, the heaviest operational fighter ever.

Bottom line : a pair of massively powerful Olympus 593 could support a plane as heavy as 120 mt.
 
martinbayer said:
Fun exercise for the student: Take the silhouettes of the Vulcan and the Concorde, stretch the Vulcan silhouette lengthwise without changing the wingspan by the factor of its maximum speed/mach number in comparison to the Concorde, and then match, compare and contrast both...
Click to expand...
Why not kind of do the same to an Avro 707?
 
There were calls at the time to turn the Avro 707 into an interceptor after the prototyping had finnished. By putting in more powerful Olympus engines and radar in the nose plus associated missiles I would have thought that it could have worked Rattlesnek but as history has shown they did not go down that route sadly.
 
Archibald said:
A fighter based on a scaled down Concorde shape ? pretty exciting.
-Concorde was 185 tons with four turbojets.
-AFAIK the largest twin jet supersonic aircraft is the Tu-22M backfire at 120 mt.
- SR-71 was a bit less than 80 mt. Wikipedia tells me the fighter variant called YF-12 had a MTOW of 63 mt.
-Mirage IVB with a pair of J75 was to be 60 mt. The scaled-down, familiar Mirage IVA ended at 32 mt.
-FB-111A had a maximum takeoff weight of 54 mt. Never realized it was so much heavier than vanilla F-111s.
-The Tu-128 was 44 mt, the heaviest operational fighter ever.

Bottom line : a pair of massively powerful Olympus 593 could support a plane as heavy as 120 mt.
Click to expand...

red admiral said:
Maybe the subtitle for this one needs to be "Optimism bias is real"
Click to expand...
Wait and see! It's an offcut from the book. Maybe I should have added it as an appendix.
 
uk 75 said:
The politics around the P1127RAF seem to have become as tortuous as the P1154 saga. Neither Denis Healey nor the RAF wanted it and it could easily have perished in the Whitehall jungle. With no UK vstol aircraft in service would the US Marines still have picked it?
A Harrierless world was a very real possibility.
Click to expand...
In Healey's biography he took credit for the Harrier. In reality he tried to kill it.

The real surprise was the 1966 Harrier with PCB proposal. The NGTE did tests that found some of the issues with PCB. Pegasus 11 was the answer.

Both were a response to the need for a bit more 'oomph' to justify sparing the axe.
 
A fighter based on a scaled down Concorde shape? Something like the Soviet Union developing an operational fighter from the A-144-2 "Analog"? Possibly combining the wing with a Ye-8 fuselage?
 
The Harrier family is 65 today!

Retirement might loom, but it will also be a good chance to tell the story behind its creation.

This morning I was editing the book intro.
 

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Sixty five years young for the Harrier family Mike? Doesn't time fly and the last USMC Harrier squadron has just retired their's, I am really sad to see the Harrier go but that is progress I suppose.
 
FighterJock said:
Sixty five years young for the Harrier family Mike? Doesn't time fly and the last USMC Harrier squadron has just retired their's, I am really sad to see the Harrier go but that is progress I suppose.
Click to expand...
Final USMC retirement has not happened yet. I think the recent news was about the experimental unit standing down.

www.flightglobal.com

Final US AV-8B Harriers to retire from service in 2027

The latest aviation strategy from the US Marine Corps calls for half of the service's vertical/short take-off and landing AV-8B Harrier jump jets to be retired by 2026, with the remaining aircraft mothballed in 2027.
www.flightglobal.com www.flightglobal.com

Still, it'll be a sad day when it comes, but 2/3 of a century isn't bad!
 
Mike Pryce said:
A thread to keep folks updated of my forthcoming book with Penguin Michael Joseph.

www.penguin.co.uk

Jump Jet

www.penguin.co.uk www.penguin.co.uk

Pre-orders now open, publication date currently July 2026.

The entire manuscript has been written, sent to my editor at Penguin (Rowland White), comments have come back and editing is being done. Currently 98,000 words but I aim to cut some.

Picture selection is in progress. Should be 24 'plates', out of many possible.

The book is a look at how Ralph Hooper created the Harrier and P1216, and just how hard any useful jump jet is to make.

It also features Ivan Yates in a parallel story, from using Alan Turing's first computer design to turn a Nazi concept into the English Electric Lightning, up to his data-driven approach to jump jet design that clashed with Ralph Hooper. The Eurofighter Typhoon was the result.

The story runs from 1944 to 2008, ending with the F-35B. Lots of little side stories too - rockets, nukes (not just Sandys), plus the important role of one of Elon Musk's SpaceX factories.

Tens of millions of words, in thousands of archive files, plus interviews with all the main characters, and supporting ones like Michael Heseltine, have led to a wholly new view of just what jump jets are. Short version: digital tech is not enough.

I will update things here as it progresses, and hope to publish a few offcuts in the meantime. First up is something about a fighter based on Concorde, hopefully around Xmas.

In the meantime, editing!

Mike
Click to expand...
Anything about how the entire ASTOVL program wasn't a real program at all, but a cover for secretly-funded work by DARPA to Lockheed to develop technologies that became LiftFan? And the secret underpinnings of SSF and CALF as well? Because that's what predetermined the winner of JAST and ultimately JSF, rigging the F-35 contract award for Lockheed. The whole story was on the old jast.mil site for years, then jsf.mil before it became old news and got erased. Luckily it's still accessible at Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20061112005516/https://www.jsf.mil/history/his_prejast.htm
 
stever_sl said:
Anything about how the entire ASTOVL program wasn't a real program at all, but a cover for secretly-funded work by DARPA to Lockheed to develop technologies that became LiftFan? And the secret underpinnings of SSF and CALF as well? Because that's what predetermined the winner of JAST and ultimately JSF, rigging the F-35 contract award for Lockheed. The whole story was on the old jast.mil site for years, then jsf.mil before it became old news and got erased. Luckily it's still accessible at Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20061112005516/https://www.jsf.mil/history/his_prejast.htm
Click to expand...
There's a fair bit on ASTOVL/SSF/CALF/JAST/JSF, some of it straight from the horses mouth, and some entirely new.

The 'handbrake turn' after DARPA got involved in ASTOVL features, partly from those trying to figure out 'what the hell just happened?.

There's a dose of pre-ASTOVL St Louis stuff too.
 
FighterJock said:
Sixty five years young for the Harrier family Mike? Doesn't time fly and the last USMC Harrier squadron has just retired their's, I am really sad to see the Harrier go but that is progress I suppose.
Click to expand...
Both Italy and Spain still used AV-8 in their navies. As such, the service life of Harrier (at least in AV-8 version) continues, isn't it?
 
Spain may be the last user of the Harrier Silencer1, because of the problems that Spain has with the F-35B but I think that the Italian navy Harriers may be on their way out because of the F-35B purchase.
 
Especially since we do not know what route Spain will take with replacing its carriers when they eventually do away with the Harriers another small carrier or a larger carrier like France's PANG but being non nuclear.
 
Mike Pryce said:
There's a fair bit on ASTOVL/SSF/CALF/JAST/JSF, some of it straight from the horses mouth, and some entirely new.

The 'handbrake turn' after DARPA got involved in ASTOVL features, partly from those trying to figure out 'what the hell just happened?.

There's a dose of pre-ASTOVL St Louis stuff too.
Click to expand...
Definitely buying a copy! I was on the St Louis teams for AV-8B, Advanced AV-8 and V/STOL, ASTOVL, did a tiny bit for SSF, then full time on JAST and finishing up on JSF. Once the inevitable (we know now) loss happened, I went to the Canard Rotor Wing program but that was pretty much doomed from the outset "for reasons." And after that there weren't any more STOVL things to do. So anything about tactical jet STOVL is going to find an honored place on my book shelves!
 
I've been told that the only reason McDD lost the JSF was that they went with a separate lift engine after the gas-driven lift fan didn't work, thus violating the single-engined requirement. The folks at Fort Worth considered their design a strong competitor than Boeing's/

Mike, is it possible to obtain a copy of that poster, I would really, really like to get one.
 
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