Originally Posted by
Peter-RB
one of the best A/C we Brits ever had, short sighted Politics and those who preach such sh 1 te got rid well before their sell by date.
I'll preface this by saying that I was a Harrier and SHAR man at Kingston/Dunsfold/Farnborough for 23 years, and the sight of one still swells my chest with pride, but we need to be realistic.
The SHAR in its FA2 guise had grown to a weight that was a serious operational limitation for maritime (vertical landing) operations. The only way this issue could be addressed was to fit the "big" 11-61 engine, and that entailed a leap into the unknown because it had never flown behind a Harrier-I intake. It also only had a single generator fit where blue-water operations demanded a twin-generator fit with consequent risk in unproven gearbox changes. All of this could be done, but the associated engineering and clearances came with a huge price tag.
At the same time it was becoming clear that to "play" in a NATO battlespace you needed SIFF, and as well as being an expensive upgrade in its own right, fitting SIFF to the SHAR needed the core computer upgrade (that was coming with the JTIDS integration, but was still expensive) and it also needed a colour main display in the cockpit. With the displays available at the time a colour display simply wouldn't fit without putting a bulge in the fuselage skin in front of the windscreen, and there were lots of reasons why this was likely to have serious side effects.
So to keep the SHAR in service at that particular time needed a large investment with a disproportionately high technical risk. So it was regrettably deemed unaffordable. It was a real shame, but a rational review would (I'm sure) still come to the same conclusions.
€0.03 supplied,
PDR