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Old 26th Oct 2018, 05:49
  #336 (permalink)  
FlightlessParrot
 
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TSR-2 With Hindsight is pretty damning, and I don't think it would be plausible to condemn all the contributors as socialist traitors. Wing Commander Beamont's testimony surely applies to the flight characteristics of the airframe, and is impressive, but that's only the start. Could one calculate the mean time between failures for electronics of that complexity using 1960s technology? It was scrapped by the Labour Government because their predecessors left it for them to do, confident that the UK aviation industry would be happy to pour all the opprobrium onto the Labour Party, and ignore the fact that Wedgwood Benn was an ardent supporter of Concorde (one of many things he got wrong). It's like suggesting that airships would have been viable if it hadn't been for the botching of R101.

Not that I'm a fan of the Wilson government, or of any aspect of the UK Labour Party after Gaitskell, but some failures are not caused by politics.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps TSR-2 would have been decisive in the Falklands?
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