Originally Posted by
Ninthace
I will leave a Harrier pilot to comment on your land/hover theory but I think it unlikely. You have also compounded the issue by throwing a USMC Harrier into the mix. Where would that have come from? Why would they want to land or hover - what could two Harrier pilots do? As to the idea it was what was to hand - an RAF Harrier and a US Harrier? Does that sound plausible? Where were Harriers from 2 nations operating together in 1990? Solve that and you may get closer to an answer.
Hello.
Believe you me, I would be the first to admit there are many holes in all this, and what's left is itself contradictory! With the physical evidence destroyed or missing, we're really seeking personal testimonies from involved parties.
I have admittedly never flown anything, so I am more than happy to accept Mogwi's point re: Harriers not being able to land on anything other than a man-made surface. Thanks for that.
In fairness, I am only repeating, to the extent I'm able, what we've been told by a very senior former military source who volunteered the information to us unprompted. Admittedly, he could be deliberately misleading us. He could even be unintentionally misleading us (telling us what he thinks is true but he has himself been misled). Once one starts to go down that route, though, one seems to lose sense of what's up and what's down, so when people who we don't yet have reason to doubt tell us something, we have tried to treat them as if they were straight shooters.
Where were Harriers from 2 nations operating together in 1990? [I would be
extremely grateful for an answer to this question if anyone knows. Or even if anyone knows where just US Harriers were in Scotland in 1990, other than Machrihanish.
Originally Posted by
Ninthace
The other issue you need to address is why a late August Saturday afternoon? Trials are normally conducted weekdays unless it wasn't "one of ours". If it wasn't ours, surely it would be a QRA job, not a Harrier, especially as there is no evidence that any Harriers were airborne anywhere in the UK that day.
I'm not trying to split hairs, but according to the file, it was closer to 9pm. Again, though, we don't (yet) know. We don't know if it was a trial per se or whether it was some kind of semi-abort during a pre-Gulf War mission. If it was American, as suggested to us, we assume it would have been a fully functional craft on its way to a target or destination. A source has indicated that the diamond was on its way to the Gulf, but that's yet another as yet uncorroborated (if potentially logical) piece of the puzzle.
We also understood QRA to be a matter of pilots being on duty at immediate readiness for foreign incursions, such as when the Russians muck about off the top of Scotland. I would be happy to stand corrected on this, but if a US craft suddenly needed assistance and sought to enter UK airspace, (a) how difficult would it be and/or (b) how quickly could it be done, for those in the know to call up RAF ATC and say, "If you see a blip or 3 near Calvine, just ignore them, OK? Don't launch QRA."
Fleetingly, we toyed with the idea of the AV-8B having been from a ship such as an amphibious assault ship, but we couldn't locate a suitable candidate in Atlantic waters in August 1990. [Again, we're happy to be told otherwise.] There was a NATO training exercise in the North Sea and Norway in September 1990 (TEAMWORK 90), so we had wondered if the plane had been on a ship that had come over early, but so far we don't have any evidence for that theory.
Thanks