To be amid the Royal Navy is to be amongst the giants of history, famous and anonymous alike, some from centuries long past, some from the two world war, and some from more recent times.
One such recent great, a pioneer who contribute much to STOVL naval aviation, the inventor of the ski jump, has died.
Lieutenant-Commander Doug Taylor, naval engineer whose ‘ski jump’ take-off for fighter jets helped to win the Falklands War – obituary
Lieutenant-Commander Doug Taylor, who has died aged 89, saw the development of all the postwar innovations in the Royal Navy which made modern naval aviation possible, the steam catapult, the angled deck, the projector sight, high-energy arresting gear – and, the last of them, Taylor’s ski-jump.
In September 1964, on a day of almost unbearable tropical heat, Taylor was flight deck engineer officer of the carrier HMS Victorious which, under international law, was exercising her right of innocent passage through the Lombok Strait into the Java Sea.
Victorious was at action stations, ready to intervene on behalf of newly independent Malaysia in the confrontation with Indonesia, when Taylor’s sixth sense caused him to examine the steam catapults where Sea Vixen fighters and Buccaneer bombers were at standby. Shocked, he realised that the aircraft could not be launched because the deck had expanded so much in the heat that the catapults were jammed.
Summoned to the bridge to explain the problem, his captain laconically told him, “Bad luck, Doug. Fix it as soon as you can. Radar shows there’s a lot of enemy air activity”.
Taylor had already ordered the deck around the catapults to be cooled by hosing with seawater: the deck shrank and the catapults quickly returned to working order, but the 10 minutes which the incident lasted led to Taylor’s vision of “a runway in the sky” for the new generation of vertical take-off Sea Harrier fighters.
The postwar Fleet Air Arm had evolved, mostly unnoticed by the public, and despite government parsimony, into one of the most highly motivated and efficient air forces in the world, but Taylor thought that it had reached the limits of expansion. He worked on alternative forms of short take-off from ships as small as frigates, but his idea of a sausage-like, rapidly inflated catapult was derided as the “giant condom”.
However, over Christmas 1969 using a slide-rule, he began a series of laborious calculations concerning launches along a ramp which would impart ballistic energy to an aircraft.
This idea was slow to overcome the “risibility factor” until Rear-Admiral Edward Dyer-Smith, Director-General Aircraft (Naval) from 1970 until 1972, took an interest and, to give Taylor and his ideas academic credibility, arranged for him to read for an MPhil at Southampton University.
There, under Professor Ian Cheeseman, Taylor gained access to one of the university’s early computers, “about the size of a large garden shed”, and was able to prove his theory that an upward-curving ramp could impart significant vertical velocity to an aircraft at the end of a short, running take-off.
Established thinking by boffins and senior officers in the RN and the RAF was heavily prejudiced against Taylor’s ideas, but anger at their closed minds only made him more determined. He won round John Fozard, chief designer at Hawkers, the makers of the Harrier, and John Farley, the Chief Test Pilot, who became his advocates.
Fozard described the ski-jump – cheap, with no moving parts, and simple – as a rare “win-win”, and the trials which began in August 1977 were a total success.
Eventually HMS Invincible, lead ship of a new class of small carriers, was fitted with a 7-degree ramp and on October 30 1980, test pilot Lieutenant-Commander David Poole from Boscombe Down made the first Sea Harrier launch from a ski-jump at sea. Later, all three Invincible-class carriers were fitted with 12-degree ramps.
The ski-jump would change the shape of the Royal Navy’s carrier fleet and play a decisive role in winning the Falklands War. Later ski-jumps were to be fitted in many other navies’ carriers.