Reflections- Vickers Supermarine Scimitar

The Scimitar was incapable of manoeuvering to any degree above 30,000ft and when employed in the strike role it could only carry a maximum weapon load of 4,000\bs. To top it all off, if you fired all four 30mm Aden guns together, you would blow all the hydraulics in the nose.

Yet there was something about the Scimitar that pilots who flew it long enough came to appreciate; perhaps it was the sheer brute force of the beast. I must admit it was fun to go to 100% from about 300kts at low level and watch the two-handed ASI wind up in a matter of seconds to the maximum permissible speed of 580kts. This limit was set because of the onset of rudder buzz above that speed though it would run out to 640kts on the clock flat out.

The Scimitar had its genesis in the Attacker, which was the first jet fighter to enter service in the Royal Navy. Vickers Supermarine used the laminar flow wing of the Seafang to produce the Attacker which was fitted with a Rolls Royce Nene. The tail wheel Attacker was developed into the Swift which incorporated a nose wheel and was powered by a RR Avon.

At about this time, the Royal Navy was exploring the possible use of undercarriageless aircraft because of problems with the landing speeds of the new high performance jets. It should be borne in mind that the angle deck had not yet been conceived and there were real problems in getting a fast jet down safely in the space then available.

Vickers, having the lead in naval jet fighter design, then designed the type 505 to meet the Admiralty’s ideas for an undercarriageless aircraft; this was a twin jet with unswept wings and a butterfly tail. When the Admiralty finally dropped the idea of the flexible deck, Vickers turned the design into the type 508 with a retractable undercarriage (seen recently flying in formation with a Swift on the ABC series “Wings over the World”). This in turn lead to the type 525 with swept wings which was the immediate forebear of the Scimitar.

The type 525 was fitted with an all-flying tailplane with ten degrees of dihedral; in line with the overall design skill exercised in the whole Scimitar project, this ended up as 10 degrees of anhedral in the production aircraft to try to reduce “pitch up” at high mach numbers. Rumour had it at the time that all Vickers did was to turn the tailplane upside down and reverse the paint scheme!

The aircraft was fitted with leading edge flaps, trailing edge flaps and to top it off, fuselage flaps. The trailing edge flaps had in addition “flap blow” which was air bled from one of the engines. It was essential not to use flap blow if carrying out a single engine landing as it significantly reduced the power available for an overshoot. Fuel was carried in five bag tanks in the fuselage and four integral tanks in the wings with a fuel flow proportioner determining flow rate from the tanks to keep the aircraft in balance. The fuel gauges were set in a block and the system was functioning OK if the tank readings made a straight line. On the maintenance side the aircraft was a maintainer’s nightmare as it leaked fuel and hydraulic oil in almost equal proportions.

It was the first aircraft I flew that had an “attention getter” system installed to indicate a system failure. This consisted of flashing lights and a nerve wracking tone in your headset to draw your attention to a problem. I nearly leapt out of the aircraft the first time I experienced the effects of the system in anger when the generator of the windmilling engine dropped off line halfway down the glide slope on a single engine GCA.

The Scimitar was well and truly on the back end of the drag curve on the approach and one thing that was hammered into us on checking out in the monster was not to flare the aircraft; to do so would result in a very heavy landing indeed. The technique was just to hold the attitude until the wheels hit the runway. Also because of the power of the two Avans, throttle adjustments had to be made with care otherwise you would blast yourself out of the glideslope. This was particularly so when carrying out a flapless approach and landing. In an endeavour to overcome the sensitivity of the throttles when deck landing, one squadron adopted the technique of setting one throttle at 82% and adjusting power on the other engine. This worked fine until one Charlie forget to pick up the other throttle on a wave off and caused some excitement in Flyco. The technique was soon banned.

Asmight be expected, takeoff in the beast was fairly rapid and the climbing speed of 500 knots was achieved in a matter of seconds. It was the noisiest aircraft in the climb I’ve ever come across; it used to creak and groan and make other strange aerodynamic noises. Climbing speed was converted to mach . 9 on reaching that figure and 45,000ft took just under 7 minutes, the problem was that once you got there you couldn’t do anything! Despite this we pressed on (in vain) trying to develop high altitude fighter tactics.

Like all naval fighters of that era, the Scimitar had a depressed sight line to enable the pilot to sight and shoot down aircraft flying at nought feet over the sea. With a depressed sight line, the aircraft’s guns are rigged to fire below the fore and aft axis of the aircraft. The snag with this set up is that the gun sight suffers from what is known as pendulosity, put simply, if you are tracking an aircraft and have to increase bank to maintain tracking, the gunsight “pipper” will immediately fall behind the target. This means that you have to increase your turn rate to get back on the target; the end result with the Scimitar was that you would often end up in either a ‘g’ stall or a Mach pitch up depending on your altitude.

An all time classic of the Scimitar’s lack of turning performance at altitude was an occasion when I led two students on a “snake climb”. This was a technique for leading fighter aircraft through cloud with each aircraft taking off at a briefed interval from the aircraft ahead, usually ten seconds. As the leader called each turn, pilots would add the number of seconds they were behind the leader and turn accordingly.

On this occasion in CAVOK conditions, one of my students missed one of the turns and lost the formation. As soon as I twigged that I had lost him I asked him where he was and to stay there and we would join him. His reply was Inverness, which is just to the north on Loch Ness, so we headed to intercept. Now you might not believe this but having sighted him there was no way that we could join up, we simply could not turn sufficiently to close the gap. We were at 45,000ft at this stage and there was only one option and that was to descend which we duly did to 25,000ft where we joined up without any further hassles!

The aircraft would go supersonic in a shallow dive whereupon the stick moved back an inch or so (I never worked out the aerodynamics of that one) and it became quite maneouvable. Of course this type of supersonic performance wasn’t much good to you unless your target was obligingly also in a dive.

When I first checked out in the aircraft it was routine to shut an engine down and cruise on one. The reduction in performance wasn’t too bad and the saving in fuel was well worth it. However, after a number of fires in the speed brake wells on relighting, resulting from fuel pooling in the recess, the practise was banned.

Night flying could be interesting, particularly if you had to divert to an airfield without a mirror landing sight, as the approach path angle was fairly critical. Also because of vibration, some of the lesser instruments were a little hard to read. An interesting addition to the cockpit was a large white light to be switched on to protect your vision should the aircraft ever be called upon to carry out anuclear attack. After a spate of incidents with the light being accidently switched on at night, which could be very disconcerting indeed, I conceived what I thought was a brilliant idea (no pun intended) and had them all painted red. It then became a magnificent map reading light for night cross countries.

One particular night, two students and myself flew south to Yeovilton in England to act as targets for the Sea Vixen all Weather Fighters stationed there. We took of at midnight at one minute intervals and unknowingly ran into a flock of seagulls. I was unaware of having suffered a bird strike but noted that I had a miss match in the throttle positions to achieve the same rev setting on each engine. Normally the throttles were perfectly aligned but the difference in setting was not enough to cause concern.

I duly arrived at Yeovilton and as I stepped out of the aircraft there was an over powering smell of stale fish. Examination of the aircraft soon disclosed that I had indeed hit a bird and that half the inlet guide vanes on the starboard engine were stoved in. Evi dently the aircraft was whining like a Gannet on the appproach but it says a lot for the Avon that it could suffer such damage and still continue to run within limits.

A short while later I took another pair of students and an instructor down to Yeovilton for a week’s night flying with the intention of doing low level cross countries during the day. It was on one of these sorties that I had one of my lesser days. All went well as I thundered (the Scimitar was a very noisy beast) down to Cornwall and back. Just as I was about to go to the approach frequency at the end of the sortie, I was instructed to divert to Bascombe Down as a Sea Vixen had had an emergency and had pulled the wire on the arrestor system. Now I must admit that a diversion hadn’t been uppermost in my mind, I was low level, in typical UK visiblity and not that well off for fuel.

Mistake number one was that I had stapled my map up to the area I expected to use, but it didn’t take long to correct this as staples flew all over the cockpit. The next question was, where was Bascombe Down? Fortunately we had TACAN by this stage so with my fingers crossed I dialed in 111and followed the needle. Very shortly the range ran down to zero and there was that lovely wide runway. I landed without incident and unthinkingly said “fill her up” to the maintenance crew.

Now it was only five minutes back to Yeovilton so I didn’t really need a full load of 4,837Its of fuel. More to the point it would make for a very heavy aircraft and increase the landing speed by some ten knots. As soon as I touched down I realised I had a problem as the beast was most reluctant to slow down with normal braking. Here was were I made my third mistake as I was determined not to take the arrester wire; the shame of letting the night fighter world know that the senior instructor of the Scimitar training squadron had made a mess of it! With very heavy braking I stopped, but only just, and slowly taxied back to our dispersal, treating the brakes very carefully indeed on the way.

Of the 76 Scimitars built, 3 9 were lost in flying accidents despite their relatively brief operational life. One of the most tragic was the loss of the CO of the first front line squadron when the arrester wire he had caught, snapped as he landed onboard HMS Victorious. The cause was a valve in the arrester sytem not being properly closed and the result was that the aircraft toppled over the side. It was pretty distressing all round as the whole thing was filmed by newsreel cine cameramen who were onboard. The unsuccesful struggles of the pilot to release his canopy and the subsequent sinking of the aircraft were seen by a wide audience.

In later incidents, two aircraft were lost on successive days with both pilots ejecting. The first was as a result of a hook failure and insufficient fuel to divert ashore. It was a controlled ejection under ideal circumstances but for some unexplained reason, the pilot did not survive. The second, which I witnessed, was a diversion from the same carrier due to a fuel valve jamming open causing loss of fuel. The pilot attempted a single engine approach into Lassie but flamed out at a couple of hundred feet on finals. There was no way he could have landed it and in any case his controls were freezing as the remaining engine ran down. He grabbed for the blind and ejected only suffering a slightly sprained ankle. Such is fate!

In summary, although the Scimitar received more criticism than any other aircraft I’ve flown, in fairness it must be remembered that the aircraft entered service in 1958 having suffered a long development period. Moreover its wing was a compromise in design because of the requirement to get it down on a fairly small deck. You might well ask did the Scimitar have any uses? The answer is yes, it provided a transition vehicle to the later Phantoms and Buccaneers which equipped the RN until the demise of conventional fixed wing aircraft in the Fleet Air Arm.

On a lighter note, we found it an excellent machine for bouncing the other half of the squadron in their Seahawks doing battle drill! This was a standard exercise which we had previously done in a Seahawk but it was much more fun in a Scimitar.

Next issue it is that remarkable helicopter, the Bristol Sycamore.