FEBA
Please do thank Harry. If anybody was Mr Nozzle Lever it was Harry. Of course some things (including the nozzle lever) were brilliant at the start, but 40 years on standards have moved ahead and we have to adjust the criteria we use to say things are OK today. I thought Ralph Hooper (who conceived the airframe in 1958) was God until 1979 when he started to argue against the use of fly-by-wire. Times had moved on in those 21 years (the F16 had been flying since 1971) and it was no longer right to say simplicity was everything. In 1979 it was smart to complicate and use FBW flaps to increase TO performance with the same thrust. Smart because the benefits outweighed the possible failure issues. In the early Harrier days bombs were dumb, pilots had skill limits and targets were missed. Today bombs are complicated, pilots need less (aiming) skill and targets are hit.
Airbedane
I understand your enthusiasm for putting the latest engine in the SHAR, but in reality the SHAR intake would have throttled this big donk something rotten. In the B and the 9 it has an intake designed for the extra mass flow. As it was, in 1982, it took 3 mods to the B intake (and several more to the compressor) during flight test before we got an intake/engine combination that could accept all the AOA that the big LERX airframe could offer without surge.
I hope nobody will ever doubt my appreciation of the Ralph Hooper’s and Gordon Lewis’s (Mr Pegasus) of this world. They had the simplicity/reliability/lean on the pilot compromise just right for the first 20 years. But that does not mean it is still the way to go today.
Regards
John