Hawker Siddeley Harrier Harrier T.8

The T.8 was the two-seat trainer in service with the Fleet Air Arm, the air branch of the Royal Navy. Like the rest of the family it kept the stretched fuselage and tandem cockpits of the original two-seater, and it is a rare aircraft today: the best documented survivors are collector or museum pieces.

ZD993 sums up the double life of these airframes: it served with both the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm, and still wears the striking all-gloss-black scheme of its days with the Royal Navy's 899 Squadron, based at RNAS Yeovilton, the home of British naval aviation. After a negotiation lasting nearly three years, the American company Nalls Aviation acquired it in the United Kingdom to make it the first civilian-owned and operated Harrier trainer. Its owner, a former US Marine Corps aviator, already flew a single-seat Sea Harrier FA2 — until then the only privately operated Harrier in the world — whose cockpit is nearly identical to the two-seater's front office, so the new airframe opened the way to training civilian pilots on the type. The aircraft was in such good condition that a ferry flight across the Atlantic was considered, but it was finally disassembled and shipped by sea.

Another T.8 went to the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton, which holds what is probably the world's largest collection of V/STOL aircraft and related exhibits: the Hawker P.1127 prototype, two Sea Harriers (FRS1 and FA2) and a Harrier GR9, among them veterans of the 1982 Falklands War and of Afghanistan in 2010. The museum also displays the Pegasus and the rare Bristol Siddeley 100 'Super Harrier' engine, which never entered service.