By Des Brennan
When the Hawker Siddeley (from 1977 onwards British Aerospace or BAe) Harrier entered service in 1969 it looked very much like its avian namesake with its sharply pointed nose, shoulder mounted wings and rounded tail giving the appearance of a hunting bird of prey, although the twin seat version gave a rather different impression. In its T.4 form especially it looked more like a Weedy Sea Dragon with its extended tail and ventral strake, raised tail fin, more bulbous cockpit canopy, pair of 30mm ADEN cannon pods below the fuselage and Laser Rangefinder & Marked Target Seeker (LRMTS) nose. While the twin seat trainer variants of other contemporary fighters were often far sleeker than the single seaters, with the Harrier the opposite was the case, as the original leader of the design team, Sir Sydney Camm, did not hesitate to say.
Not unusually, provision of a twin seat dual control Harrier lagged behind that of the single seat fighter. The project itself dated back as far as 1957 and had progressed through the P.1127 and Kestrel programmes before the first Harrier GR.1 entered service in 1969. But a decision in 1966 to build a twin seat, dual control trainer meant that the first of these became operational only just over a year after the single seaters. Training of the first group of Harrier Instructors by the Harrier Conversion Team (HCT) involved a Hawker Hunter refresher course, flying the Westland Whirlwind helicopter to experience hover techniques and finally local familiarisation in a De Havilland Dove before their introduction to the single seat Harrier GR.1.