HAWKER HARRIER
Just what does it take to restore one?
A 1970s high-performance machine, state of the art back then, later fading into memory and the bottom of the value curve. And now a resurgence of interest, with examples being restored and prices shooting upwards. That’s a fair description of where it’s currently at for classic cars of that era. Ah yes, you might be saying, but on the pages before me there appears to be an aeroplane. That’s true enough, but exactly the same market view applies. And 1970s aircraft don’t get much more supercar-equivalent than this 1976 Hawker Siddeley Harrier GR3, tail number XZ130, restored to a degree that has been visited upon no other Harrier and, yes, now for sale. Gosh. Another example won the Transatlantic Air Race to New York in 1969, in which participants had to start at London’s Post Office Tower, by the simple expedient of being able to take off vertically from the coal yard at nearby King’s Cross station while rival crews had to get to an airfield or airport.
Commuting misery solved at a stroke, then, if you bought the Harrier. Except you might fall foul of the low-emission zone rules. And you’d need to be well trained in the Harrier’s very particular requirements for flying skills. So, what could you do with it?
Site clearance, perhaps. ‘It blew the fence down when we got the engine started,’ says Jet Art Aviation owner and Harrier restorer/seller Chris Wilson. ‘There was a lot of smoke, too, from the oil used to preserve the engine. We got into a bit of trouble.’ How he got there, and beyond, is quite a tale.
I’m wandering around the sheds, barns and open yards of Jet Art Aviation’s operation near Selby, Yorkshire, where aircraft abound but the lack of a runway doesn’t matter because none of them can fly. Actually the Harrier probably would, and maybe, one day in new hands in a country less strict than ours for flying aged aircraft, it will.
Incomplete Tornado F3s are a theme, along with a couple of Jaguars. Here’s the tailfin tip from a Gloster Meteor. There are some Tornado swing-wing shafts. Under here is a Bristol Olympus 320 engine from the axed TSR2 project, the only one left. And here is the giant front fan from a Rolls-Royce RB211 engine as fitted to Boeing 747s and the like, one of its titanium blades chipped. Aero bits are everywhere. Why?
Because people want to buy them. And to satisfy their desires, Chris and his wife Mel started the business in 2005. Chris had left the RAF, was fitting out kitchens and bathrooms, didn’t enjoy it and started selling small aircraft collectables on eBay. ‘I realised there was quite a market,’ he recalls, ‘and within a year we had to move house.’ It was trying to store a Canberra air intake behind a shed that precipitated a move from Leeds to Bradford, where cockpit sections, engines and more came and went.
‘Then in 2007 I saw a Harrier for sale. “Mel,” I said, “we need to go for this. Let’s buy a Harrier.” So I wrote a cheque, brought it home in kit form, built it up and it sold relatively quickly. We’ve had 11 Harriers now, including this one, but all the others were incomplete. This is the first one that works. To our knowledge, no-one has sold a working Harrier GR3 jump jet before.’
According to its MoD F700 logbook, XZ130 was last flown on 31 August 1990 by a US Air Force exchange pilot, Captain LY Ching. It reached a final tally of 3336 flying hours. (The US Marine Corps still uses its own version of the Harrier II, built in conjunction with McDonnell Douglas, featuring part-carbonfibre construction and known as the AV-8B.) It began service life at RAF Gütersloh in Germany on the Cold War front line, and was involved in the Falklands conflict in 1982. It has served in all the RAF Harrier squadrons. As provenance goes, things can get no better.
After retirement, XZ130 became an ‘instructional airframe’ at RAF Cosford in Shropshire where, serendipitously, it taught Chris Wilson his Harrier knowledge. It left Cosford the same year as Chris left the RAF, and went to an RAF Air Cadets squadron in Surbiton, where it sat outside as a gate guardian. This did it no good at all, although fortunately the engine and auxiliary power unit had been treated with corrosion-inhibiting oil and covers had been fitted over the intakes. ‘Aircraft parked outside die,’ observes Chris.
In 2014, the MOD decided that XZ130 had to go. Tenders were invited, potential buyers came to view. But there was a problem. Between 2005 and 2014 several new buildings had been erected around the Surbiton site. It had been brought in by large crane, but now there was no way of getting a similar crane in to lift it out again. The MOD therefore favoured those bidders who had a workable extraction plan, with the proviso that the Harrier had to be removed during just two days.
Chris won the bidding. Along with his Jet Art Aviation colleagues, a very long low-loader with a small crane on its tail and a very skilled driver, he set about removing the Harrier’s wings, nose cone and tail sections. With the
brakes freed off and the tyres inflated, it could be towed to the low-loader and lifted on. Then came the very tight squeeze through the gate, reversing out into a residential street, and XZ130’s next chapter could begin.
‘It’s taken us 2500 hours to restore,’ says Chris proudly. The first job was to see what it had, the second to find the missing parts. Mostly they were pipes, clamps and seals, and the control rods that had been removed to stop cadets’ fingers getting trapped. ‘I had to buy another wing to get those,’ Chris recounts, ‘and I bought another fuselage, which is now in Australia.’ There were a few missing gauges to replace, which had been used as spares for Sea Harriers that stayed in service until 2006, and seemingly endless telephone calls, legwork and web-trawling to chase down myriad small parts. A new-old-stock canopy was found in a barn.
The weathered paint was sanded back to the zinc oxide primer beneath, and the repaint was done in gloss rather than matt: ‘It looks better and is more durable,’ Chris says. The livery and hand-painted signwriting is that of XZ130’s final stint back at Gütersloh – as flown by Captain Ching, who is keeping up with his old aircraft’s progress – and the tailfin colours coincidentally mimic those of the German flag. But before these cosmetic niceties finished the job, there was the engine to prepare and fire up.
On 8 March 2016, Jet Art Aviation entrusted XZ130 to some friends who had worked on Harriers in service. They knew how to make the Rolls-Royce Pegasus turbofan go, and what to expect when a potential maximum static thrust of 21,500lb is ready to be uncorked.
‘We had the nose in the barn,’ recalls Chris, ‘so the intakes were just inside and wouldn’t swallow foreign objects. The book said we needed 100ft behind it, but we had 80. We ran it up as much as we dared, up to 35%. There was a dirty great cloud of smoke, we blew the fence down and it used 300 litres of fuel in four minutes. So no, we won’t be starting it today.’
But I do get to climb up high into the cockpit and sit in the Martin-Baker Mk9A Rocket Assisted Ejector Seat. The cockpit is unrestored and in ‘as flown’ condition, with all of the missing parts now replaced. Dangerous-sounding systems abound. There’s a laser rangefinder for when I want to drop laser-guided bombs. There’s the vital lever for angling – via chains driven by high-pressure-bleed air motors – the jet nozzles for vertical take-off, horizontal flight (‘Vector Forward Thrust’) and all stages in between. A control marked ‘Clear A/C’ is not air-conditioning but a way of jettisoning everything to help make a speedy, lightened getaway if disaster threatens.
Then there’s the critical Jet Pipe Temperature gauge, its limit analagous to a car engine’s red line. The engine has to run at maximum revs when hovering, so water is injected to stop the turbine blades getting too hot. ‘Once the water’s gone you have to go, otherwise it falls out of the sky and you’re flying a brick,’ observes Chris.
What else, among the forest of switches, levers and dials? All the usual aircraft stuff and more, including a moving map display under a large central projector lens, a sort of primordial Tom-Tom. Via switches on the stick I can fire missiles and take photographs with the camera mounted within the left side of the nose, banking over to the left to get the best view. And with a whirr and a whine of electric inverters, all the instruments light up. Yes, XZ130 is definitely alive.
Wouldn’t it be fabulous to fire up that monstrous engine, shoot vertically out of the Jet Art yard to the likely detriment of the recently repaired fence, and hurtle to – I don’t know, anywhere – at 700mph or more (the sea-level max is 737mph)?
Then, suddenly I’m back at Brands Hatch and the British Grand Prix, probably 1970. After colouring the sky with Red Arrows, the RAF was showing off its new Harrier. Having shot past us at little more than grandstand-roof height, it was now landing and taking off again in the infield next to the pits. Race programmes and picnic detritus were flying around, people were hiding under their jackets, dust and grit was everywhere. But it was fine, because Health and Safety hadn’t been invented.
So, if you fancy a Harrier, now’s your chance. ‘We’ve done all we can,’ explains Chris, ‘and now we need someone to take it to the next level.’ Literally.
‘DANGEROUS-SOUNDING SYSTEMS ABOUND. THERE’S A LASER RANGE-FINDER FOR WHEN I WANT TO DROP LASER-GUIDED BOMBS’