Salute!
@ mod censors, this is about Harriers and other attack jets per thread title - delete if you wish
I never heard the story about a GR3 making an "show of force" pass. Good stuff, and we saw a few examples in that stoopid war I flew in when the earth was still cooling. In fact, a young Captain in our wing was rescued within 100 meters or so of the Vee when his mates used drop tanks and low passes to buy time ( F-100D from 3rd TFW at Bien Hoa). They had run outta 20mm. He was retrieved by a Army Cobra and in the 1990's became the USAF Chief of Staff. Flew with him during our time together at Hill when in Vipers.
Harrier fuel vs Stubbie fuel: [entry to satisfy mod censors about thread] Fuel to "hang around" is really nice to have. And our Sluf had it. I shall stick to my opinion that the F-35 can fly further and hang longer than any Harrier ever built, even if it carries extra gas in high-RCS external tanks. So when we showed up the grunts were happy. We could hit what we aimed at and we had hang time. The Double Ugly ( aka F-4 variants) would show up and scoot back to a nearby tanker, and we had plenty (tankers) because of them. You will not be able to do that in a less-then-permissible environment, meaning zilch long-range SAM's or enema interceptors. So better have your gas and plenty of it.
RE flak up North. Yep, it was really intense, and the Vee up there had plenty of practice. They also had better radar tracking then Reich air defense, from the central control down to the embedded radar. I only saw that for the few missions I flew Downtown, and first time was a 85mm site and had maybe 6 or 7 tubs firing in a coordinated "round-the-clock" sequence, with each tube firing maybe a tenth of a second apart. Looked like a canister CBU impact. The manual aimed guns were countless. In fact, after a few minutes of when a raid began there were layers of light gray, like clouds, from the self-destruct features going off. 23mm low, then 37mm, then 57mm and finally the 85's airbursting at 20,000 to 25,000 feet. As with the Falklands, more attack plnes were shot down by flak than missiles. I think the first time we saw a significant SAM shootdown ratio was the Yom Kippur episode. My Israeli students in the Viper said the best way to counter the SA-6 was to have tank taxi up and used its big gun, heh heh.
Gums sends...