Originally Posted by
pr00ne
DHfan,
IF BEA had done as you suggested they would have been left with an aircraft and no launch customer. For all of the 'comparing the US designs to UK designs' it is often forgotten that the US launched all of their commercial airliners on a customer airline requirement with designs entirely customised around those airline requirements. So may be it WAS the fact that the UK state airlines were rubbish at traffic and market forecasting?
I appreciate that Boeing were making their B707's to customer specs., ie the 138 for Qantas, the 351 for Cathay and so on but the DC8 was being designed and built to take turbo-props and, not that I was aware of Douglas tailor designing to customer specs, had they been doing so then they could have at least built some with props, their change of plan was to compete with the B707 that Boeing were building at around the same time.
And if McD were designing and building to customer specs then just how many airlines did they discuss the MD80 series with!!!
But agreed that the British industry went down the pan due to lack of marketing and indeed a lack of interest once almalgamated in to the likes of HS, BA and BAe or whatever. What were the most recent British airliners, the 146 was De Havilland, the Jetstream was Handley Page then Scottish Aviation, the 748 was Avro, the 1-11 was BAC with the 2-11 & 3-11 projects scrapped due to lack of government interest, since the old independents became almagamated the industry has gone down the pan, BAe blamed 9/11 for scrappring the 146RJX development but rumour has it that it was scrapped because it wasn't working much alike the Nimrod MRA4 wasn't working either, besides stretching the 748 to make a 780, 146's and Jetstreams into larger variants whilst its perhaps best no to mention the ATP what have HS/BAe etc. done to continue any commercial airliner industry?
Long live the BN2 Islander!