Retired British Harriers
- Thread starter Jrf95
- Start date
It was a big gamble, counting on that they wouldn't need any fixed wing aircraft for a decade. It came down to a clear choice, cutting Tornado or cutting the Harrier, and they decided that the Tornado gave them more for their money and was just in general a more capable aircraft.Would anybody explain to me why the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force have retired their force of BAe Harriers, with such a colossal amount of time until the Lightning II's are put into into service?:flaming
I believe the savings from the early OSD were supposedly meant to mean that the UK could buy better aircraft for their eventual replacements than they could have otherwise if both Harrier and Tornado were in service.
IIRC the figure tossed around was that the MOD saved the UK overall £1bn.
Of course, that's all info drawn from my Mk1 noggin, so details could vary.
- Thread Starter Thread Starter
- #3
Yeah you are quite right that they will save money in the long run and that the Tornado does provide better air power than the Harrier, but only having helicopters to operate from our carriers has reduced our countries air power massively.
And I cannot say I agree with the idea of having one or two types of multi-role aircraft taking over all roles of aircraft. While yes it does save money, what if there was a fault with the aircraft? The whole fleet of aircraft would have to be grounded, virtually removing all air power for a country.
Hard choice for any government to make but the whole thing has been coming for years just Iraq and Afghanistan were delaying the predictable nobody saw all the capabilities been mothballed on the QT by the last government and all the salami slicing redundancies that were lost in the news of far away conflicts. As for gamble I done think it is that big he Falklands are garrisoned and most future conflicts will be in coalition with another partner or as part of NATO.
I never said it was a BIG gamble, but a gamble none-the-less.
With that style of thinking of we will ALWAYS be in a coalition you can - by the same logic - argue why we don't need various disciplines of the armed forces because someone else could do it for you.
May as well throw away our MBT fleet, if we get into a conflict where we need MBTs then the US would be involved so THEY could do all that heavy lifting for us, how about field artillery? The US has plenty of artilllery so we won't need to bother.
My point is, it's all well and good to say "Someone else can do it for us", but when the defecation meets the oscillation the UK needs to be able to say "No, we can do this on our own with our own material", not go cap in hand to NATO.
I wish we could but we cant I agree we need a certain amount of capability any government coming to power was going to hammer the MOD with the overspend it had I'd rather hold my nose and be part of alliances for a few years until we get ourselves back into a balanced positionand quite frankly NATO needs a good kick up the backside too much slacking and back sliding by certain members.
winnyfield
New Member
Budget cuts forced the RAF to sacrifice the MRA4 Nimrods and Harriers in favor of keeping GR4 Tornados, Typhoons and F35 around.Would anybody explain to me why the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force have retired their force of BAe Harriers, with such a colossal amount of time until the Lightning II's are put into into service?
The Harriers were mostly a ground attack aircraft towards the end. RAF has since introduced new targeting pods and new Paveways IVs (GPS/Laser) for Tornado and Typhoons.
One of the stranger things to emerge from that all was that the costs to do with early retirement, cancelling the ongoing JUMP program to upgrade them plus redundancy costs etc meant the savings were fairly small and we could have quite easily ran Harrier plus Ark on for the projected period.
Remember, the exercise in cost cutting ended with a 2bn surplus in the budget...
And of course,we'd not then be in the business of trying to regenerate experience with STOVL ops both in the air and on the deck.
:sigh:
Remember, the exercise in cost cutting ended with a 2bn surplus in the budget...
And of course,we'd not then be in the business of trying to regenerate experience with STOVL ops both in the air and on the deck.
:sigh:
I done think the experience would be lost so easy its not like the whole Harrier force was given their p.45s when it closed down an RAF SNCO can serve till their 55 and many pilots who have stayed in the RAF will have just been moved onto different types plus all the technical knowledge is locked into manuals that can be reopened at any time.