Interview, Falkland Harrier Pilots

AA: Regarding the feeling amongst the Sea Harrier crews at that time, I think we were all caught up in the speed with which events were happening. For instance, I was called at four o’clock in the morning, Friday the 2nd of April, and requested to bring the Squadron to immediate readiness to embark and we were due to go on Easter leave at midday that day, so events really happened very quickly and it didn’t give us very much time to think about what was coming up in the future. We were very much occupied with getting our own belongings together and organising ourselves ready to go away for an extended period. So we didn’t really have very much time to think about anything other than that, getting ourselves embarked safely. Few additional preparations were taken, because we didn’t really have any time to organise additional training. We had to go in the state that we were at the time, which I think was pretty good, because in fact as part of our routine peacetime training, we had just finished a work-up phase flying dissimilar air combat against Hunter aircraft, a low wing loaded aircraft, which was very useful. We were particularly well prepared I think in air combat and so the additional preparations, additional ACM, weren’t required. Perhaps what was required was when we looked at the threat that we were likely to face down in the Argentines, we realised it was totally unlike the NATO scenario that we normally are involved in and that we would be involved in support of ground troops and overland attack on airfields, for example. Unlike our NATO role which is air interception, reconnaissance and maritime attack against ships.

JT: You scored two kills while in the Falklands region, can you describe the two incidents more fully?

AA: Yes, they happened on May 24th, it was in fact one incident. Both the kills were achieved in one sortie, and I was operating from H. M. S. Hermes to the east of the Falkland Islands. We arrived over the Falklands and we had just established ourselves on combat air patrol when my wingman and I were vectored towards an incoming Argentine raid. The ship controlling us directed us onto the aircraft and it was excellent weather conditions. We sighted four attacking Mirages and we had to manoeuvre very hard to achieve the kill. Typically the manoeuvring was in the first five hundred feet of airspace at speeds of up to five hundred and fifty knots.

JT: What altitude was that?

AA: We were down at two hundred feet, at five hundred and fifty knots. I fired two missiles in very quick succession against two targets. The missiles guided and I , was trying for a gun kill on the third while all the Mirage aircraft had, of course, jettisoned their fuel tanks and bombs and were in a hard turn while I was trying for a gun kill on the third, when my wingman fired over my shoulder and his missile scored. He achieved a kill on the third man. The fourth man managed to escape back toward the mainland.

JT: What do you think of the overall quality of the Argentine pilots you fought against?

AA: It’s difficult to say. We believe them to have been very brave, but I’m not sure how you measure bravery. It really depends on how well they were briefed, what their intelligence was, whether they really knew what they were going against, and if they were well briefed, had good intelligence and knew what the odds were, they were certainly brave. I’m not sure that they really knew what the capability of Sea Harrier was.

JT: How many of their aircraft do you think would have had to ditch on the return journey to Argentina owing to fuel starvation or battle damage?

AA: It’s very difficult to say. Certainly when a supersonic aircraft such as the Mirage engages afterburner, it eats into its fuel sometimes to the order of five or six hundred pounds per minute. They perhaps engaged afterburner for thirty seconds, one minute, during the combat. Whether that was a significant amount of fuel I don’t know, and we should probably leave that up to our intelligence sources. I certainly don’t know.

JT: It would seem likely though that quite a few aircraft wouldn’t have made it.

AA: I believe so.

JT: But you were operating a long way from base anyway.

AA: I’m not sure that’s relative to the question. We were operating in the order of 200 miles to the east of the Islands with the Argentines operating from 400 to the Falklands, so while it wasn’t an equal disadvantage, we were both at some form of disadvantage in the distances we had to travel to the operating area.

JT: If you had been an Argentine Air Force commander, would you have had your pilots flying their operations differently, and what do you think of the tactics used by the Argentine pilots?

AA: I’m not sure that I want to become an intelligence officer for any Argentinian. But I think most Air Forces operating strikes would give some consideration, certainly when they began to take losses, could give some consideration to flying escorts with the strike so the escort would be able to engage the fighters, the enemy fighters, while the strike was allowed to progress unimpeded towards, to progress towards the target. I would certainly have considered that, and I don’t there there was very much else they could have done. I’m not sure there’s very much else anyone could have done. Or perhaps alternatively, thinking about it a little bit more is to use high-speed singletons at a very low level. Then you run into a coordination problem over the target. You have a single large target with lots of singletons arriving over the target as a problem of coordinating.

JT: It’s been generally seen that the Mirages gave away their speed advantage to engage the Sea Harrier.

AA: Well, my knowledge of Mirage aerodynamics isn’t all that good, but I think that most aircraft are limited aerodynamically at very low levels. I think most aircraft are limited. When you put fuel tanks and bombs onto the aircraft and then attempt to go hard at the maximum low level most aircraft come up against a wall. I think it’s a subsonic wall. So to say that they were limited, perhaps it’s not quite accurate. It might bear a bit more investigation.

JT: The AIM-9L Sidewinder has come out of both the Falklands and Lebanese conflicts as a superb air-to-air weapon. Is it really that good?

AA: Yes, I believe it is. Certainly, we had an enormous amount of success with it, all of the missiles that we used were successful and at very low levels and against targets that were manoeuvring very hard. It’s difficult to say the amount of G but all of the engagements took place in the first hundred feet of air space.

JT: Would you say the advent of the AIM-9L, being an all-aspect missile would be one of the most significant air-to-air developments of the last fifteen years or so?

AA: It certainly affects air combat. I think there are many I know who practice this philosophy, but I think most other air forces and air arms do as well. So if you have a missile such as AIM-9L with a really good low level capability, you have got it made. Most of the combats in the Falklands were over very quickly indeed. And you didn’t get into or get involved in dog fights. It’s just a matter of locking on and firing

JT: Would a beyond-visual-range missile such as Sky Flash, Sparrow or the projected Amraam combined with a longer-range radar for Sea Harrier have been a major advantage during the war?

AA: I think the answer to that question could only be yes. If you have a radar that’s capable of seeing, let’s say 25 miles and a missile that has a head-on capability- let’s say a 4 or 5 miles head-on capability – then you’ve obviously got a gap where you can see the target on the radar but you can’t bring any weapons to bear. So any weapon that comes into that sort of medium range has to be an advantage and it would certainly have increased our kill ratio.

JT: Only about ten per cent of Harrier kills were attributed to the twin 30 mm cannon. Have close-in all-aspect missiles such as the AIM-9L and projected Amraam effectively made the gun obsolete?

AA: I think I’m on record on Australian television as saying that the day of the dogfight is over. It really depends on the circumstances. I think that if you have a missile to the capability of Sidewinder then most combats are going to be over very quickly, particularly if your tactics are good and you have manoeuvred yourself into position to get away the first shot. If the missile was then one hundred per cent reliable the combat is over within seconds. If however, something goes wrong and probably badly wrong, the enemy sees you, the missile doesn’t work, whatever, and you then have to engage in air-to-air combat in dogfighting, then it’s not the place you really want to be but if you are involved in close-in manoeuvring then the gun has a place.

JT: The Harriers were flying an average of nine hours per day with average mission lengths of ninety minutes. I believe you used the helipad-equipped escorts as hot refuellers at times to extend loiter time. Is this so?

AA: Yes. It’s only part of what happened down there. Two aircraft landed on the ships Fearless and Intrepid and this was, I believe, the first time that any Harriers had landed on board those particular ships. The reason they had to go there was that the aluminium matting of the forward operating base had become temporarily unserviceable. The forward operating base was an 850-foot aluminium strip. It had been erected by the Royal Engineers shortly after the landings had taken place. And the Harriers were operating from there within three or four days. The routine was to launch from the Hermes and fly the combat air patrols over the island and the aircraft remaining serviceable and weapons not being used recovered back into the strip. There you would refuel and either await further tasking, hold yourself at cockpit alert or launch again immediately for another airborne patrol. We put only six men into the strip for refuelling purposes, using it much like a petrol station.

JT: I believe the overall Sea Harrier serviceability rate was in the order of eighty per cent. Is this so and can you describe more fully the climatic environment you generally flew in?

AA: I think eighty per cent you will probably find is a conservative figure. Hermes had of the order of fourteen aircraft, I think overall. We were able to put twelve on the line each morning and hold twelve serviceable throughout the day. What that works out to in percentages I’m not exactly sure. The climatic conditions we encountered down there: were fairly heavy sea states and when we weren’t occupied with heavy sea states there was a bit of fog around. But having said that my recollection is that during the spell of the actual landings at the beach head, the weather was excellent. So you have it all. Sea states varied from flat for short periods to Force Eight winds. It was very cold, always around the freezing mark. Never much below, generally just about freezing, but of course the very strong wind and subsequent chill factor made operations for the flight deck crews very unpleasant indeed. Of course in fog, we maintained alerts throughout. We just had the capability of getting back, using the Blue Fox radar. But I don’t think anybody looked forward particularly much to operating in fog. We were operating in conditions down to two hundred feet and half a nautical mile visibility and on occasions sometimes less than half a nautical mile. It was very difficult to forecast with the weather sweeping up from the Antarctic.

JT: What were the weather conditions around the peak period, May 24 to 28?

AA: That was excellent, and of course, it helped the Argentines just as much as it helped us out.

JT: Something that I can never understand is why the Argentinians did not use their two months settling-in period to extend the Port Stanley airstrip and base Mirage and Skyhawk aircraft there. Surely if they had done this the British Task Force would have had great difficulty in remaining in the area. Have you any ideas on why they did not do this?

AA: I think probably a sensible answer to that question centres on the type of land that at present the airfield is built on. It is certainly very sandy, not terribly solid ground underneath at all. You need a great amount of rubble on which to build either your sealed strip or place steel or aluminium plating. I’m sorry, I’m not a construction expert, I can’t give you a better answer than that. Certainly, if the Argentinians had placed A-4s or Mirages at Port Stanley airfield, it would have made the job a lot more difficult. I think that is a bit of a hypothetical question to take it on beyond that.

JT: There was much speculation on where the Western-West-German built Argentine submarines were throughout the battle. Was it actually revealed where they were?

AA: No, not to us.

JT: There is nothing like a real war to discover if peacetime thinking is on the right track regarding the employment of modern weapon systems. What do you think were the primary lessons learned by both the British and Argentine points of view?

AA: Well, I think the primary lesson learned as far as Sea Harrier operations were concerned was that we do need some form of airborne early warning and that is an area of course that the Royal Navy has always been aware of. It wasn’t a lesson learned, it was possibly relearned. It has been taken care of already in that two helicopters are now with an airborne early warning capability in H. M. S. 11/usurious on South Atlantic deployment. I don’t believe we’ve learned many more lessons from the air combat tactics point of view. Our training seems to have been very much along the right lines and we did nothing new, we didn’t have to learn any new tricks. The training, the tactics, the way we operated the aircraft were very much as we had always thought we would. From the Argentinian point of view, I should think they have to completely rewrite their air combat tactical and ground attack manuals.

JT: They wouldn’t have a real lot left actually, would they?

AA: I don’t believe they have. The number of kills still has to be confirmed but certainly, the way they operated their aircraft was not the way that we would have, had we had to go about the same type of mission.

JT: What lessons do you think were of primary relevance to Australia?

AA: It’s very difficult to say. I don’t think I would want to hypothesise on the lessons learned for another nation. I’m a professional naval aviator, and so we had ships and we had aircraft which allowed us to win that particular conflict and without the Sea Harrier I don’t believe that we could have gone down to the Falklands and have done what we did. Whether Australia can draw any lessons from that I don’t know.

JT: Ted, you are in the R. A. F. but you are flying as an exchange officer aboard Hermes with the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm. You embarked aboard Hermes for the Falklands. How many of the R. A. F. Harriers tanked all the way from the U. K. to Ascension Island, and how many tanked from Ascension all the way into the Falklands?

TB: Yes – six R. A. F. Harriers came down on the Atlantic Conveyor along with some additional Royal Navy Sea Harriers, where they transferred to the carriers, all the R. A. F. Harriers going to H. M. S. Hermes and the Sea Harriers being split between the two carriers. In addition to that, four R. A. F. Harriers tanked down in two waves of two to the task force directly from Ascension, using Victor tankers. On one occasion the pair of them arrived, the second pair it was, during an air raid on the task force itself, which were interesting circumstances in which to arrive for your first time aboard a ship.

JT: With these R. A. F. pilots, had they had much experience in landing aboard carriers?

TB: No, they hadn’t done it at all, they had a very short time training in the U. K. A quick go on a ski jump at Yeovilton in the West Country, and then they flew straight down to Ascension from St Mawgan using Victor tankers.

JT: They wouldn’t know what weather awaited them in the Falklands area either, would they?

TB: No, they wouldn’t. It was always intended that we arrange good weather, as much as we could predict good weather. Thinking about it you have got to give the go-ahead, and you are probably talking about twelve hours ahead, predicting what the weather is going to be like. And that was very difficult. In fact again on this second group that arrived during the air raid, we were actually in very low stratus fog conditions and both aircraft had to use the ship’s radar. One of them went in on his own and the other one I flew with in formation, approached the ship. I dropped him off at the boat and then went around to land myself.

JT: The R. A. F. Harriers were based on the Falkland Islands after the invasion. Were they primarily used in ground attack roles or were they performing air to-air combat?

TB: Yes, during the conflict they were used entirely in ground attack and associated roles, and reconnaissance as well. However, later on they were always capable of carrying missiles, so we were trained in that particular role of the conflict. And they remain there today, at Port Stanley.

JT: The airfield through August and September was being extensively renovated.

TB: I believe it is. I don’t know the details of what they are doing, but the R. A. F. Harriers are capable of operating from the four thousand-foot runway there. And indeed, the forward operating base and on other grass airfields as well.

Lt Cmdr Andy Auld was born in Scotland in 1945. He joined the RN in 1963 and spent several years training in minesweepers and the cruiser HMS Lion. Transferring to the Fleet Air Arm he became operational aboard HMS Ark Royal flying Phantoms. In 1980, Lt Cdr Auld was appointed to the Naval Staff with responsibility for introducing the Sea Harrier into RN service, a position he held until February 1982 when he took up his appointment as Commanding Officer, BOO Naval Air Squadron embarked aboard HMS Hermes. During the Falklands conflict, he was able to contribute to the planning of both air defence and attack operations; he completed 62 operational missions and is credited with two confirmed Mirage kills in air-to-air combat.

Flt Lt Ted Ball was born in 1952 in Kent. He joined the RAF in 1970 after obtaining his private pilot’s licence the previous year. A graduate of Bristol University where he studied aeronautical engineering Flt Lt Ball was assigned in 1975 to No. 4 Squadron, one of three front-line squadrons based in Germany operating Harrier GR. 3s in support of NATO forces. In 1977, with a detachment from No. 4 Squadron, he deployed to Belize, Central America as part of the UK’s deterrent force. Recently he completed a 30-month exchange tour with the Royal Navy flying Sea Harriers from HMS Invincible and HMS Hermes. On April 2, 1982 he embarked in HMS Hermes with BOO Naval Air Squadron. During the Falklands conflict, he completed 68 Harrier operational sorties before returning to the UK on July 21. In September 1982, Flt Lt Ball joined the world’s premier aerobatic team ‘The Red Arrows’ flying BAe Hawk jet trainers.