detonate.net - Harrier Expose At LATimes.com Oh My...

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Far From Battlefield, Marines Lose One-Third of Harrier Fleet...

The corps, persuing its long-held dream of a unique flying force, pays a heavy price: 45 of its elite officers killed...

oh wow!

By Alan C. Miller and Kevin Sack, Times Staff Writers.

YUMA, Ariz. -- Though many had died flying the Harrier, Marine Corps pilot Peter E. Yount never thought it would let him down.

He knew the attack jet well and was devoted to it. In the entire U.S. arsenal, only the compact, muscular-looking Harrier could lift straight up off a runway, hover like a hummingbird, then blast off in search of targets.

"Difficult but honest" is how Yount described it.

But on a clear spring day in 1998, the Harrier would betray him. At 14,500 feet over the Southern California desert, the plane's engine quit. Yount twice tried to restart it. No response.

The Harrier's accidents cannot be traced to any single problem, but rather to an array of them.

In the last 12 years alone, the Marines have grounded parts of the Harrier fleet 31 times for periods ranging from days to months.

Failures of the cantankerous Rolls-Royce engine have been chronic, causing more than two dozen major accidents.

The Marines and the Naval Air Systems Command knew for nearly eight years that the wing flaps were prone to locking up, but it took three crashes, two of them fatal, before they decided to redesign the problem part.

The accident that killed Lt. Col. Yount highlights just how risky the Harrier can be.

Yount grew up close enough to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to watch rocket launches from his porch. A former test pilot venerated for his skill in the cockpit and his leadership in the ready room, he aspired to become a general. He had been selected to command a Harrier squadron at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma.

Janet Yount never fretted much about her husband's safety. "When I'm in the plane, you don't have to worry," he had assured her. "I'm in control."

But he once confided that he never wanted to rely on the Harrier's ejection system. "That thing's dangerous," his mother, Bettye Yount, recalled him saying.

The accident inquiry concluded that a circlip, a semicircular fastener, was incorrectly installed by mechanics on the gas turbine starter, setting off a chain reaction that led to the engine failure.

Then, when Yount ejected, he was killed by the very system that pilots depend on when they run into trouble.

He became the third Harrier pilot since 1990 to die during an "in-the-envelope" ejection -- meaning the circumstances were such that survival would be expected -- according to the Harrier Review Panel.

A subsequent Navy examination cataloged other serious Harrier ejection injuries, including five previous "major neck injuries" sustained during otherwise normal ejections.

Nevertheless, the Marines say they had no reason to believe the ejection system was flawed before Yount's accident. In its aftermath, they made safety improvements to better protect against serious injuries.

Yount's death unnerved many in the Marine Corps because he seemed to have made no mistakes.

"Here was a guy who did every single thing correctly and still the airplane ended up letting him down," said retired Lt. Gen. Fred McCorkle, head of Marine aviation at the time.

The Marines acknowledge they have had a rough ride with the Harrier. But eight current and former Marine commandants and top aviation officers told The Times in interviews that it has been worth it.

Retired Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., who stepped down as commander of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing in August, said the Marines "don't stop flying airplanes because we have accidents."

He added: "We try to find out what the problem was and then we fix it. And we tried to do that with the Harrier."

McCorkle, who retired from the Marines last year after 35 years in the service, said, "I've heard a lot of people who were very, very attuned to caring for their troops say that's the cost of doing business."

Retired Commandant Charles C. Krulak, who convened the Harrier Review Panel, which generated a six-year infusion of funds for the program, said the Marines have made many efforts to improve the plane's safety.

All military pilots accept a certain level of risk. And Harrier pilots in particular have been willing to commit themselves to a plane they know is perilous, out of devotion to the Marines.

Many adore the plane because it handles like a hot rod. They express confidence in their ability to fly it despite the ominous nicknames it has earned, including "the Scarier" and "the lawn dart."

Like Capt. Richard F. Davis, who got a pilot's license before he could drive, many had wanted to fly since childhood. And like Capt. Manuel Rivera Jr., who challenged friends to play handball while he hopped on one foot, they were fit, disciplined and brimming with bravado.

Davis, 27, died when his AV-8A rolled over during a vertical takeoff in 1975. Rivera, 31, died when his AV-8B smashed into the Omani coastline during a Gulf War training mission in 1991.

For the pilots, it is a measure of their intense loyalty to the plane and to the corps that even those who have suffered incalculably from its crashes tend to remain unflinching advocates.

Retired Gen. Richard. D. Hearney, a member of the first Harrier squadron, was the head of Marine aviation in 1994 when his second son, Brenden K. Hearney, 29, flew a British Harrier into the ground while on an exchange program with the RAF in England.

"I've got my lifeblood tied up in the program, literally," Hearney said in an interview. Did his son's death change his commitment to the Harrier? "Not a bit," he said.

In 1993, John O'Brien, a 28-year-old Marine pilot with only 152 hours in the Harrier, smashed his plane into a grove of trees during a tricky "rolling vertical landing."

Pinned inside the flaming wreckage, he suffered burns over more than a third of his body and ultimately lost part of an arm and a leg.

Without a trace of bitterness, O'Brien said the Marines need the combat flexibility the Harrier provides.

"Advancements in technology don't come without sacrifice," O'Brien said, surrounded at his Pennsylvania home by his wife and three young daughters. "Advancements in technology are sometimes written in blood."

Combat Record

It would be one thing if the Harrier's unique design had produced unique results. But in two wars and a number of lesser conflicts, the plane has not made a distinctive mark.

It is telling that Marine leaders, when defending the Harrier's record, tend to point back two decades to another nation's conflict.

In Britain's Falkland Islands War with Argentina, Royal Navy Sea Harriers won a nation's reverence by defending the short-deck ships on which they were based. Armed with cannons and heat-seeking missiles, they proved too much for Argentina's Mirage fighters and other jets in air-to-air combat.

The Marine Corps' Harriers have never faced a similar mission and are not outfitted to do so. The Marines obtained the plane primarily to support troops on the ground. As a result, the corps accepted many trade-offs for an aircraft that relies on powerful blasts of hot air to propel it into the sky.

The superheated column of thrust can liquefy asphalt, while its huge intakes can ingest pebbles and other engine-shredding debris.

The Harrier has to be light enough for the engine's thrust to lift it straight off the ground, so it carries a relatively small amount of fuel, which limits both its range and payload. Its maximum external load, including bombs and fuel, is 9,000 pounds.

By contrast, the Marines' own F/A-18 can handle 15,500 pounds and the Air Force's A-10 up to 16,000 pounds, according to Jane's All the World's Aircraft.

To keep its weight down, the Harrier has no protective armor. It carries no flame-retardant foam in its fuel tanks because the foam displaces fuel. The fuel tanks are not equipped with self-sealing membranes to plug bullet or shrapnel holes.

The Marine Corps spent a lot of money to test such survivability systems in the late 1990s but ultimately rejected them because of their weight, said the Naval Air Systems Command, which oversees Marine aircraft safety.

Moreover, the plane's single engine gives it little margin for error. It is neither supersonic nor stealthy, which means it cannot fly especially fast or easily elude enemy radar.

And the hottest of its thrust-producing nozzles are in the middle of the fuselage, a design anomaly required to balance the Harrier for vertical flight. In other aircraft, the hot spot is near the tail, where a hit by a heat-seeking missile is less likely to be fatal.

Until recently, the Harrier's vulnerability was magnified because it was intended to fly close to the ground as it swooped down on enemy troops.

In its first significant U.S. combat role, during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, it paid a heavy price.

On the war's final day, Capt. Reginald C. Underwood and other Harrier pilots were flying below the cloud cover at about 8,000 feet so they could see their target, a convoy of Iraqi military vehicles.

"We were flying way too low," said his squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Fitzgerald. An Iraqi missile went straight up the left hot nozzle of Underwood's jet. "He never saw it coming," Fitzgerald said.

Underwood was killed, one of two Harrier pilots to die in Gulf War combat. Five of the seven Harriers that took enemy fire were destroyed. Two ejecting pilots were captured by the Iraqis.

The Harrier's attrition rate of 1.5 planes for every 1,000 sorties flown contrasted with a rate of 0.5 for the A-10, a sturdy and inexpensive attack jet that flew many dangerous missions. The F-16 had an even lower rate, 0.2, and the Marine Corps' F/A-18 suffered no losses.

Postwar Praise

The Marines nevertheless point to the Gulf War as the Harrier's proving ground. The corps' commandant at the time, Alfred M. Gray Jr., told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 1991 that its support for the AV-8B "paid off in spades" in the Gulf.

Marine officials and other Harrier proponents note that Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the Gulf, cited the Harrier in a postwar report as one of several weapons that gave "standout performances."

The Harrier did fly early and often. But it required an enormous transport and supply operation to keep it provisioned with bombs, fuel, parts and distilled water for cooling the engine, a far cry from its originally stated mission of operating from remote locations.

It took about 2,000 Marines to support an air group based at King Abdul Aziz Air Base near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that included 66 Harriers and 20 OV-10 Bronco observation planes, said retired Col. John R. Bioty Jr., who commanded the group.

During the last 10 days of the war, some planes also operated from a short runway at Tanajib, a rearming and refueling base about 35 miles south of the Kuwaiti border that put them closer to the enemy than any other airplane.

The Harriers bombed Iraqi artillery, armored vehicles, troops and air defense units, Bioty said. And while other planes flew far more sorties, the smaller Harrier fleet flew a substantial number: 3,349.

"Because the aircraft was able to base closer to the forward edge of the battle area, it could respond quicker and didn't require air refueling," Bioty said. "It can do things other airplanes can't do and can go places other airplanes can't go."

In the end, retired Air Force Gen. Charles A. Horner, the U.S. air commander in the Gulf, said the decision to stack aircraft over the battlefield "negated the need for quick response" from AV-8Bs.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, omitted the plane from its 1997 report on the Gulf air war, pointing to its "relatively few strikes against strategic targets."

Though the Harrier proved effective at what it did, "trying to justify it based on the Gulf War is tenuous at best," Horner said. "In terms of payload, range and suitability for close air support," he added, "the A-10 is a much better platform." <>BR>
Even some Marine generals agreed. Given the loss of five planes, the Harrier in the Gulf "wasn't a failure, but it wasn't a great success," said retired Lt. Gen. Charles H. Pitman, chief of Marine aviation from 1988 to 1990. "I don't think they did anything spectacular."

The Marines say they have since reduced the Harrier's vulnerability by tripling the number of flares and other decoys that the plane can fire to divert missiles.

But the primary reason the plane is safer in war today is that the advancing technology of laser-guided missiles and bombs has allowed all combat planes to fly at higher altitudes. In the process, the Harrier has become less relevant.

"You can find missions the Harrier can perform," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, "but I question whether any of them are missions only the Harrier can perform."

In future conflicts, unmanned drones like the one that killed suspected Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen last month are expected to fly missions that had been the exclusive province of combat planes like the Harrier.

And American commanders now routinely assign various aircraft to essentially loiter over the battlefield, reducing the value of basing planes up front near the troops.

Some critics even argue it is unwise to put planes so close to the enemy because it leaves them vulnerable to attack.

All of those factors conspired to make the Harrier a marginal player last year in Afghanistan, where highflying bombers and fighter planes inflicted considerable damage before the Harriers were even called into action.

"Close air support in Marine terms was not what was happening there," said Col. Thomas D. Waldhauser, commanding officer of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which included the Harrier squadron aboard the Peleliu. "Close air support in Afghanistan was a B-52 dropping bombs from 30,000 feet."

The six planes on the Peleliu were sent into combat only after their frustrated pilots complained to Commandant Jones about their idleness.

When the war began, the Harriers in the region lacked a laser targeting system. Lt. Gen. Michael A. Hough, chief of Marine aviation, said Harriers were cleared to join the war only after military leaders agreed that other aircraft with laser systems could pinpoint targets for the AV-8Bs. (The laser systems are now being installed in 98 Harriers at a cost of nearly $1.7 million each.)

"This is the sort of conflict in which Harrier proponents typically would expect to see the Harrier prominently used, especially early on," said Christopher Bolkcom, a military aviation analyst for the Congressional Research Service. "I don't think it's lost on many people that the Harriers were not the first airplanes used in that war."

By the time the Harriers entered the fray, targets were scarce. In November and December, the busiest months for the Harrier, the aircraft dropped only 161 bombs during 342 sorties. The 400 allied aircraft in Afghanistan never included more than 12 Harriers. Until Dec. 31, the Harriers flew exclusively from ships, just like safer and more effective Navy and Marine planes.

On that day, after the fall of Kandahar, the Marines dispatched two Harriers to a partly destroyed airstrip there. Marine leaders touted this as evidence that the planes were operating where others could not.

But the two planes stayed only one night, flying four sorties and dropping no bombs, according to the Marines.

Capt. Chris Raible, who piloted Harriers in Afghanistan, said the flights "were like photo ops."

When medals were awarded for Operation Anaconda, the major battle in eastern Afghanistan in March, the honors went to the Marine helicopter pilots who provided low-level fire for ground troops while the Harriers circled above.

Harriers have been operating alongside A-10s at a high-altitude air base at Bagram since October, where the Marines say they have provided "essential support to ground units." But the thin air and a torn-up runway have restricted vertical flight.

In two important respects, the Harrier performed impressively: reliability and bombing accuracy. Pilots said the plane held up remarkably during extended sorties and that their bombs almost always hit their mark.

Gen. Jones said the Harriers "acquitted themselves quite well" in Afghanistan. "They've proven themselves to be very worthy contributors."

But a number of military officials and analysts question the value of the Harrier's contribution.

"I think the reason the AV-8s were used at all in Afghanistan was a tendency by the U.S. military to give everybody their turn, whether you needed them or not," said Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The AV-8B simply wasn't competitive in terms of range, payload, survivability, target acquisition [or] communications capability."

The Marines acquired the Harrier for a different type of war than is fought today, said Daniel Goure, a former director of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Competitiveness and now vice president of the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va.

"For that reason, they took all the attendant risk of mishap rates and all the rest," he said. "In hindsight, I suspect they would have come up with a different answer."

About This Series

In reporting this series, The Times analyzed 87 judge advocate general investigation reports of individual Harrier accidents between 1971 and 2001, most of which were obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The JAG office, a unit of the Navy, which oversees Marine Corps aviation, withheld portions of some reports, citing privacy and national security concerns.

The Times also based its findings on information from the Naval Safety Center's aviation database, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as well. The database includes voluminous records on Navy and Marine aircraft and crewmen involved in accidents from 1980 through mid-2002.

The Marine Corps provided information on Harrier safety, maintenance and combat records, including a breakdown of Harrier accidents and fatalities.

Comparative statistics about accident rates were provided by the Naval Safety Center and Air Force Safety Center. Harrier cost data came from the Naval Air Systems Command and the Navy Center for Cost Analysis.

The Marines did not provide the identity of pilots killed in crashes. The names and backgrounds of pilots who died in the Harrier were compiled through searches of the Marine Corps Historical Center, National Archives, news clippings and online databases, as well as interviews with other fliers and family members. The Times interviewed at least one relative of each of the 45 Marines killed in Harrier accidents.

The Times also interviewed scores of Harrier pilots, mechanics and commanders, as well as a dozen current and former Marine Corps generals, Pentagon officials and military analysts. Marine Commandant James L. Jones answered questions about the Harrier posed by a Times reporter earlier this year but declined to be interviewed for this series.

"The Widow-Maker": Deaths in training, disappointment in combat.