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As soon as we were clear of the formation Jenx passed control back to me and in a steady descent we crossed back over the beach and dropped down to 250ft AGL with the speed steady at 420 knots for the low-level part of the sortie. With a ground speed of seven nautical miles a minute I have to admit that I was very quickly totally lost as we trailed our thunderous wake across the Yorkshire Moors. With the calm confidence that comes with being a fast jet attack pilot for 20 years, Jenx gently talked me through this, and indeed every portion of the flight. Even when I did a rather clumsy 'yank and bank' instead of the tight turn that I intended, his demeanour remained unperturbed. Unlike mine! As if in admonishment, the G-suit gave me a powerful squeeze as the 'G' came on, but I doubt if Jenx even blinked. But then, as all turns are flown at four G his tolerance to G is undoubtedly much higher than mine! Zipping along a few hundred feet above the ground at seven miles a minute great fun! So what's next?
"Let's ease up to ten K or so for a few aeros," said Jenx. Obediently I drew the stick back towards me, the nose slanted upwards to 30š and the ground simply fell away as the Harrier rocketed skyward at 5,000ft a minute. Upon levelling out at 10,000 feet, the first item on the agenda was a few rolls.

It never ceases to amaze me how easy rolls are in fast jets, particularly when compared to relatively low-powered propeller-driven aircraft. Simply sweep the stick over to the left and whooosh, round you go. A roll to the right was just as easy (no torque or precession to worry about with a jet). With my confidence building by the minute, I swept the Harrier up and around in a giant loop which like the two rolls I was more than happy with. Emboldened by much success thus far, I then elected to try a half-Cuban. Initially all went well, until as I rolled inverted, Jenx called "pitch"... I was instantly confused. Did he mean 'push' or 'pull'? My confusion and subsequent hesitation meant that this ended up being a far from tidy manoeuvre! Two aviators confused by a common language! (Back on the ground I learnt that 'pitch' for Jenx is 'pull' for me). All the while, the fuel totaliser had continued its ceaseless and relentless march towards 1,000lb, which was the amount that we were supposed to have left when we landed. As much as I was enjoying the aeros and the low-level flying, I was really keen to try my hand at hovering the beast and hopefully flying a few circuits as well. When Jenx asked what I wanted to do next, he already knew my answer.

With such a phenomenal speed at our disposal we were soon racing back towards the circuit at Wittering. As we slipped into the circuit at 1,000 feet, Jenx extended the undercarriage and flaps and took control of the throttle and nozzles while leaving the stick and rudder with me. With the airspeed numbers in the HUD steady at 170 knots on the downwind leg, I tried to keep about eight degrees of alpha while bringing the Harrier around in the same type of curving approach that I'd use in a sailplane and aimed the jet towards the runway numbers. Obviously, as the Harrier transitions from purely wing-borne flight, airspeed becomes less important than the throttle and nozzle settings. Consequently, the approach is flown by holding between eight and ten degrees of alpha while keeping the 'velocity vector' (a symbol in the HUD which shows where the aircraft will actually go) on the runway numbers.

As the ground rushed up to meet us, I instinctively started to ease the stick back to 'sweeten' our arrival, but was dissuaded by Jenx's firm voice over the intercom. "Don't try and hold off Dave, just present the undercarriage to the ground!" "Oh well" I thought to myself, "best do as I'm told!" On Jenx's prompting I raised the nose slightly at the last second, but the landing was still very much 'flown on' in the style of landing on a conventional aircraft carrier. (During the de-brief Jenx explained that a smooth landing is actually undesirable. If the main undercarriage strut is not compressed at touchdown the outriggers are not touching the ground. Consequently the jet can teeter from side-to-side like a bicycle on training wheels.)

With a thump and a squeal (from the tyres, not me) we arrived on the runway just past the numbers at 120 knots. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the nozzle lever flick forward, closely followed by the throttle lever. The engine roared and the G pushed me back in the seat as we raced back down the runway and up into the air, before swinging around and back onto the downwind leg. "OK Dave," came Jenx's confident, mildly amused voice over the intercom, "this time you can try your hand at hovering". Great!

The start of the circuit was pretty standard, but as we swept around the curving base leg, the airspeed numbers in the HUD continued their inexorable descent towards zero as Jenx gradually rotated the nozzles down to the 'hover' setting of 81š, while simultaneously adding power. On the left-hand side of the HUD, the rpm reached 100% and the first side of a hex-sided- geometric shape appeared. This shows the pilot that the engine is now putting out almost all its available power, 107% being the absolute maximum. This can also be augmented by water injection, as the Harrier carries a 50-gallon water tank enough for 90 seconds.

As we approached the specially marked landing pad, and slowed to the hover, lurid memories of the grotesque gyrations that accompanied my previous attempts at hovering a flying machine (see TP Jan 2001) were not far from my mind. Having done my homework before the flight, I was also very aware that the Harrier has divergent directional stability if an intake is blanked by yaw while in the hover, and also in the low speed range when transitioning to and from wing-borne flight. In fact, this situation is so serious (it's a sort of aerial ground loop that almost always ends with a fatal accident) that the aircraft is fitted with a device that senses if yaw is starting to develop and shakes the relevant rudder pedal as a cue for the pilot.

With this in mind, I looked well ahead as we came to a dead stop in the air and concentrated on keeping the nose of the jet aligned with a tree in the far distance. The yaw vane mounted in front of the cockpit twitched once or twice but otherwise all seemed surprisingly steady as our jet fighter stood still in the sky, somewhat improbably poised on four columns of screeching, scorching air. Compared with the extremely twitchy Robinson R22, I felt that we were rock steady. "Lorraine (my helicopter instructor) would be proud of me," I thought to myself. Jenx, however, was not so impressed. "Well don't just sit there," he said, "do something with it!" Extremely tentatively, I eased the stick over to the left, and the Harrier obediently drifted to port.

"Wow!" I exclaimed, "this is going to be a lot easier than the helicopter." Stick to the right and the Harrier hovered gently to starboard as the reaction jets in the nose, wingtips and tail obeyed the commands of the computer buried deep somewhere inside the jet. A touch of right pedal and the nose swung co-operatively to the right. "So far so good" I mused to myself. "I wonder if I can make it go backwards?" Stick ever so gently back and umpteen thousands of pounds of jet fighter obligingly reversed. A sense of tremendous elation suddenly filled me. BLOODY HELL! I'M HOVERING A HARRIER! (Afterwards of course, I realised that some very clever people at BAe and Rolls-Royce had already done all the hard work for me. Indeed, hovering the early Harriers required a very high degree of skill.)

"OK Dave," said Jenx, "time to go home." I felt the throttle lever move backwards under my hand and the rpm numbers started to drop as we slowly sank towards the ground. Jenx increased power as we neared the ground, both to reduce our rate of descent and to compensate for the small reduction in power caused by the Pegasus re-ingesting its own gases. A slight jolt as we thumped onto the ground Jenx flicked the nozzle lever forward to avoid burning the tarmac and shut the throttle as the fuel totaliser clicked over to 1,000lbs remaining. How precise can you get?

As we trundled back towards the parking ramp, with Jenx quietly singing to himself, I reviewed the previous 70 minutes. I genuinely felt that, overall, I hadn't done too badly. However, actually flying the Harrier is a relatively small part of a Harrier pilot's task. He must also operate a multitude of systems while navigating at high speed and low level, shoot while being shoot at and keep track of his jet's voracious thirst for fuel. In fact, flying the aircraft is probably the easiest bit although, to be truthful, I still found it pretty hard!

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