Originally Posted by
Icare9
... allowed the Americans (who we'd given the green light for transport aircraft development) to come up with the 707. We were still producing beautiful looking but totally unsuitable aircraft such as the Brabazon and could have competed fairly with Viscount and developments (not necessarily Vanguard) Britannia Trident and VC10.
I'm not au fait with why some say it was an economic disaster, but overlong development times meant that the conditions an aircraft was designed for no longer applied by the time it entered service.
And I guess that takes us back to the OP question - aircraft foisted when the requirement no longer existed.
But isn't that what the military always complain of, being given equipment designed to win the PREVIOUS War, not the CURRENT one?
The people in Britain who made the decisions were blinkered enough to only permit the manufacture of designs to meet the existing requirement (or market), whereas the Americans (possibly) had the foresight to see that the right designs would generate their own markets.