It is surprising what you can find on YouTube. In a previous post, buried deep in this thread, I made reference to an old BBC documentary that was made for the
Horizon series that looked at the lessons of the ship/air engagements during the Falklands campaign.
In The Wake of HMS Sheffield -
first part.
The following five parts are linked in the normal YouTube way. Parts 2 and 4 are of particular interest with respect to the Sea Harrier, although all six parts cover related topics. In part 2 Sharkey Ward mentions the limitations of the Blue Fox radar and the issue of looking down onto small targets over the sea, I believe it was this problem that led to the development of Blue Vixen for what would become the Sea Harrier FA2. According to Nozzles in one of his posts, after 1982 the Navy wanted a more radical upgrade to the Sea Harrier than it got, including a new wing. I think he used the term "mini Tomcat".
The Sea Harrier gets mentioned again in part 4, in particular the Argentine tactic of avoiding enagagements with it. I suspect this is the reason a USAF study credited the Sea Harrier with stopping over 450 Argentine sorties. On the subject of evading Sea Harriers, the Argentine Super Étendards were able to use the technique of lobe pecking to avoid detection by ships' radars, which meant they must have had a radar warning receiver. If the RWR could detect ships' radar, it could have detected Sea Harrier radar. The Argentines were keen not to waste their few Super Étendards and Exocets, so if one detected a Blue Fox transmission abandoning the sortie would have been a wise option. Even if it jettisoned the Exocet the Super Étendard was no fighter, since carrying Exocet meant carrying no AAMs and the aircraft lacked agility or an air to air radar. It would have been easy meat for the Sea Harrier - and a prized kill.
On the subject of deterrence, I think people often focus too much on actual engagements and ignore the deterrent and other effects - some might describe that as a
ludic fallacy.
In April 06, nearly a fortnight after the retirement of the Shars of 801 NAS, during which time a few loose ends were tied up, I started the
Future Carrier thread as I felt a new thread was needed to discuss CVF and related issues, looking to the future. I think the decision was right. At the time the Sea Jet thread had achieved over 133 000 views. This week it exceeded 203 000 views, 70 000 more (give or take a few hundred) since the new thread was started and took over as a place for discussing naval aviation issues. Of course, this thread has been bumped many times since then, but many thousands of views have occurred whilst the thread has been off the PPRuNe radar. Many of these views have come from guests to PPRuNe, following links from other forums or sites, or had posted directly to them, and some may have found this site and this thread via Google or another search engine.
It is good to see that so much interest is still being taken.