Originally Posted by
surely not
There is an excellent review on line by a wide selection of those involved in the TSR2 project, which also includes excerpts from Government papers about the project.
The overall conclusion is that it was a badly managed project which didn't/couldn't meet the unrealistic performance targets.
TSR2 project review
According to the excellent "Project Cancelled" by Derek Wood* The TRS2 programme was cancelled because its technical objectives were unachievable with the technology of the day. Not the airframe performance (which was within reasonable distance of the requirement) but the extremely ambitious fully-integrated nav-attack system on which the mission performance was based. At the time the available systems engineering science simply wasn't up to predicting the on-board processing workload and the data exchange capacity needed. Having looked at the requirement I would suggest we could do it these days, but it's still a non-trivial requirement that would take sevral years and a few million lines of code to implement. I agree with Derek's view that it was well beyond the available technology at the time.
The invisibility of the problem was compounded by the way that the customer (the government) insisted on splitting the work between a large number of main contractors (I think Derek counts 17) to spread the benefit across the largest possible number of constituencies with very vague lines of technical authority and decision-making. Again, at the time the project management techniques and processes to manage and monitor the performance of such an artificially- diversified project just didn't exist. And again, these days those techniques probably DO exist, but we would still regard it as a very silly (aka "risky") way to structure a capital project.
Without the integrated nav-attack system the TSR2 was unable to perform its required mission, and it was to unmanoeuverable (and butt-ugly) to be an airshow-queen, so they cancelled the whole thing.
The RAF F-111K programme was cancelled because the costs had spiralled (exaccerbated by unfavourable exchange rate changes) and because they had seen a decidedly troubled development programme of the Australian version which was delaying the RAF in-service date to the extent that the RAF had needed to lease a couple of dozen additional F4s to cover the shortfall. Then throw in the detail that the planned mission requirement had changed when the UK decided to withdraw forces from east of Suez bases and the whole programme essentially no longer met the need.
AIUI the F-111k had a range of around 1,600 miles (without A-A refuelling) which would leave it well over 1,000 miles short for a return trip to Moscow from the UK, compared to around 3,000 miles for the TSR2 (which wouldn't), so I don't think the reported conversation with the RAF pilots sounds that reasonable to me.
PDR
* A really good, well researched and authoritative read by the same guy who produced the definitive history of the Battle of Britain in the book "Narrow Margin"