With further reading into the Flight manual it is absolutely clear that the harriers are underperforming in game in almost all aspects including time to climb, top speed, and turn rate and overload. I now believe fundamentally this is due to the way Gaijin has implemented the Harriers thrust and drag values (the harrier has around 1.5 times the drag value as it would in the real world.) This will obvious lead to lots of inaccuracies in the FM and they are not minor at this point now. I believe the best way gaijin can fix this is to divide the Harriers engine into 2 thrust thresholds, jet-born flight (nozzles 20 degrees or more) and conventional flight (20 degrees until fully aft) with the aft nozzles having the Max continuous and Max trust values from the manual being 58.7Kn and 73.2Kn but the Max rating was limited to 15 minutes and would become the WEP throttle value. The jet-bourn profile would include its dry and wet lift capabilities for its hover ability with water being a fuel added to the game that goes down when using the wet thrust input. Here is a link to a previous post with more details about turn performance. Harrier write up regarding turn performance
What this leads to:
The harriers drag model would need to be reworked reducing the harriers drag value until it can comfortably reach .915 Mach with its 58.7Kn rating. In the game currently it needs a whole 32Kn more to reach the same speed. The harriers turn performance needs a reasonable buff as I have posted about already and have all the relevant Data and tests to prove my theory. Along with this I added more information from the manual into my bug report that is linked here. 1st Gen harriers FM is incorrect // Gaijin.net // Issues
Summary:
The Harrier jets, in this case only really the generation 1 harriers to I have the data for, all need to have there drag multiplier reduced significantly as well as a rework and reduction in thrust. This would also likely fix the issues with its AOA and turn rate.