It would take a dissertation to explore all the different possibilities and permutations, but a brief summary will suffice for our purposes. There are only 90 seconds worth of water in the Harrier. This is both to cool the engine and to improve the aircraft’s performance in a hover, as it creates heavier air for the jet to produce upward thrust. Given the conditions, like increased weight due to ordnance (or children hanging from the nose), and warmer temperatures like you’d expect in Miami, the engine likely wouldn’t have the performance numbers to maintain a hover much longer than that 90-second window.

Then there’s the issue of fuel consumption. The Harrier consumes about 160-170 pounds of fuel per minute while in a hover. Once again accounting for conditions, our pilot says that “best-case scenario” is that Harry’s Harrier (hey, do you think they did that on purpose?) could only have had about 1,200 pounds of fuel remaining in order to be able to take off vertically. It is roughly a 100-mile flight from the end of Seven Mile Bridge to downtown Miami. Considering that time was of the essence in this situation, we can safely assume Harry was at full power and guzzling fuel along the way. Then he is in a hover for five to six minutes during the downtown battle, and all of this coming after a takeoff that is very demanding in itself. The numbers add up to Harry hitting “E” sometime before he safely lands on the street below.

Misunderstandings of the Harrier’s durability

Surprisingly, I’ll start with an instance of the movie actually underestimating the Harrier. The windscreen and canopy of Harry’s aircraft have the structural integrity of a lightbulb when they take a few rounds from an AK-47 (2:08:40), but there are plenty of videos online that show how bulletproof glass will stand up to that. It wouldn’t be in particularly good shape, and you wouldn’t be able to see much through it, but it would still be there.

That is where the slights of the Harrier ended, though. The average viewer of the movie snickers during Harry’s “rusty” take-off where he very likely would have obliterated his nose landing gear, bouncing it off the road and then running over a police car (2:02:25). Every Harrier maintainer, on the other hand, just grimaced and had flashbacks to conditional/hard landing inspections.

 

That being said, damage to the nose landing gear wouldn’t have jeopardized Harry’s impromptu mission. After all, Captain William Mahoney landed his Harrier on the USS Bataan in June 2014 without the use of his nose landing gear at all. Catastrophic damage to flight controls, on the other hand, would have given the movie a very different ending.

While Harry puts up his heroic fight to maintain control of the jet, the aircraft backs into another skyscraper, sending the entire aft portion of the aircraft crashing into a high-rise office (2:10:50). Skyscrapers, it turns out, are made of quality steel and glass, not paper mache. Harry pulls the jet back out of the wreckage and it’s no worse for the wear, while Harrier mechs everywhere threw up their hands and said “Oh, c’mon!”

In the aviation community, Harriers or otherwise, we were taught that pebbles and screws can take down an entire aircraft by getting into the intake or jamming up flight controls. It’s called FOD (foreign object debris), and we walk shoulder to shoulder across the flight line at least twice a day hunting for it like a reverse easter egg hunt (because you hope you don’t find anything).

So seeing no noticeable decline in performance after a significant impact with a sturdy building that surely would have caused severe damage to the vertical stablilzer, rudder, and rear RCS (at the very least), is a tough pill to swallow for anyone that got yelled at for forgetting their pen on the flight line.

More fun with weapons

There are a few other minor gripes with the movie’s depiction of the Harrier’s weapons that can’t really be proven or disproven, but still cause raised eyebrows for anyone who can’t just watch the damn movie and enjoy it. One thing my overthinking brain had to challenge was a Cherry Point, NC-based Harrier squadron “on maneuvers” out of Naval Air Station (NAS) Key West, as Gibb informs Harry (1:51:50). This part is rare, but not impossible. The two jets armed to the teeth with Mavericks, rockets, Sidewinders and gun pod for a training sortie? Now that’s where I draw the line, and my pilot source confirms:

“Carrying actual AIM-9 (Sidewinders) is super rare. I don’t know any Harrier pilot who has shot a live one… LMAVs are super expensive and rare to shoot as well. For training we typically get maybe one live one a year, if that. If it was a dedicated air to surface sortie, a more plausible loadout would be gun and 2x Mk-82 or GBU-12.”

Fast-forward again to when Harry is about to put an end to the terrorist threat for good. Right before he sends Crimson Jihad’s leader screaming through the air on a missile towards his comrades in the helicopter, he flicks the “Master Arm” switch on. This is a little strange considering he has fired the gun twice in the last few minutes, but maybe he’s just cautious and responsible, and flicked it off after both bursts. If Harry had a motto, it would be “safety first,” right? In fairness, this is the aviation equivalent of every movie bad guy chambering a round in their pistol because it’s cool and intimidating, even though they’d just eject a perfectly good round. Once again, “True Lies” is not the only guilty party on this one.

And finally, there is Salim being attached to the Sidewinder missile itself. The Sidewinder weighs about 190 pounds, and its propulsion system is designed for… 190 pounds. I am not aware of any tests where one was fired with roughly 200 pounds of dead weight attached to it, but it’s at least worth asking how much doubling up its weight and killing its aerodynamics would have on its performance. Where are the Mythbusters these days? I’ve got a job for them.

It’s all in fun

All of this being said, I’ll be the first to recognize some of these criticisms fall into “splitting hairs” territory. The movie is obviously very entertaining, and we Harrier folks still appreciate our fifteen minutes of movie fame from “True Lies” after being overshadowed by F-14s. And yes, veterans are sure to jump all over errors or omissions in military-themed movies, but we’ll also give credit where it’s due. We’re just here to keep you honest, Hollywood. You’re welcome.

This article was first published by Sandboxx.

Image: Creative Commons