Originally Posted by
tartare
Genuine question - what was so good about Blue Fox?
In my experience, pilots/aircrew tend to accept what they’re given. They adapt and crack on. The decision as to what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ manifests itself in the Constraints Document, which determines where money is spent. Aircrew have a direct input to that. Any Blue Fox Constraints or Limitations were leftovers from the early shutting down of development. After that, the Fire Control and Surveillance radar project team had very few problems. That’s how quality (fitness for purpose) was measured by a Service HQ.
Study each aspect of its specification, and it was beyond what would procurers call the ‘stretch’ target; defined as a target ‘which is currently out of reach, but not out of sight. Significantly more difficult than hard targets, they require breaking of previous boundaries and constraints’. (constraints with a small c). Blue Fox ate up stretch targets. There isn’t a term in the procurement handbook for what it achieved.
What do you want from kit? Availability, Reliability, Maintainability, at a fair and reasonable cost. Blue Fox had all of that. ILS is today an industry, but in a nutshell it is Ranging, Scaling, Documentation and Packaging. It's the first task you set, and everything else falls out of it. If you set up RSD&P correctly, you automatically establish through-life support correctly, right down to the safety case. Blue Fox got that right, but the HQ posts responsible for this were disbanded in 1988 without replacement. Explain a lot?
An anecdote. The Chief Designer was a wizard. When he took me round his lab in 1986, it was meant to be a sales pitch to upgrade Sea Spray. (360 degree scan, digital processor, etc, which was continually planned, agreed, and cancelled, throughout the 80s and 90s). But to him that (and Blue Fox) was old hat. I was shown Blue Vixen working, and how it should be adapted for (e.g.) AEW. (It later won the AEW Mk7 job hands down). Likewise, Blue Kestrel (Merlin) was ready for the 1989 ISD (!). ECR90 for EFA (Typhoon) was coming along nicely. But he asked me why ‘MoD’ had specified Blue Vixen to track (x) targets simultaneously, which he’d considered challenging but managed it; but later only asked for less than half that for EFA. Different Service, different expectation, never the two shall speak. Without saying anything, he’d set himself a target beyond Blue Vixen, and achieved it. The RAF came along later and asked if they could upgrade their EFA spec, and how much it would cost…..and still didn’t ask for what he’d designed until about the third change.
Blue Fox was only ever going to have a 10 year life, max. That made it unusual. Like I said, in many ways it was a technology demonstrator. There was a planned, funded and contracted upgrade path in the family of radars. That provided stability and encouraged innovation. Why was any Ferranti radar good? The design team. But also the superb radar scientists we had at RSRE Malvern, who contributed so much. Also worth mentioning is that in the 70s and early 80s many MoD(PE) project managers had been radar designers. The Fox & Vixen one was brilliant; so too the Kestrel one, who later did Apache. By end-90s, all that expertise was largely gone.
Am I a fan?