Juvat wrote:

After an exhausting session with Victoria's Secret Police, Frank May
confessed:

VIFF = Vectoring In Forward Flight. I've read that Sea Harriers in The
Falklands used VIFFing in combat with Argentine Mirages/Daggers.
Especially effective when one was on a Harrier's tail.

Respectfully, "Sharkey" Ward's book failed to mention VIFFing, and he
was very happy to detail Sea Harrier success versus Alconbury's
527th Agressors; plus none of the contemporaneous tactical discussions
from the mentioned it.

He does mention it in the book, indeed he describes letting the F-5s try
and take a missile shot by letting them start on the perch and then viffing
to deny it, rolling out behind them as they inevitably blew by. It wasn't
used in the Falklands, because as Tom said there was never a need. It
mostly tends to be used defensively, and the SHARs were never defensive.

[At the time I was posted on Phantoms in Germany and never saw the RAF
Harriers from Gutersloh use VIFFing.

Probably because they weren't using it. It was largely a USMC/FAA thing at
the time. The RAF Harriers were tasked and trained for attack, the FAA and
to a lesser extent the USMC were more A/A oriented.

But I saw the Harriers quite
often. I never saw any "eye watering" turn rates or radii when I
briefly had trapped one at my 12 o'clock. However I was impressed when
I first saw F-16s square the corner.]

And...this is probably the contentious point, I was under the
impression that USMC pilots were the originators of VIFFing. I can't
recall the source, but believe it came from a poster on this forum.

The Brits had done some tentative early testing, but the USMC did the
majority of the development. Harry Blot, then a Major or Col., later a Lt.
Gen. IIRR, and now (again IIRR) head of the JSF program for Lockheed, was
the project pilot. He supposedly decided that he might as well go for the
max., so got an AV-8A up to 500 knots or so and then slammed the nozzles
down to full braking stop. As he has told the story (perhaps improved in
the telling), the a/c started decelerating at a very high rate, the
magnitude of which he was unable to judge as he'd been thrown forward in
his straps and was desperately holding on to the seat with one hand, trying
to avoid smashing his face into the gunsight.

Guy