Originally Posted by
Asturias56
"It is a sad indictment of the British aerospace industry - BAe - that they cannot design and build the new advanced jet trainer."
I'm sure they could - but who will buy it? The market already has a number of new-ish trainers and they're not exactly ovverun with orders. You'd spend a few Billion of tax payers money and buy a couple of squadrons for the RAF - doesn't make economic sense. Perhaps if they'd developed a Hawk replacement 15 years ago things might be different .
Quite.
And they've closed down Dunsfold and Brough as production facilities as well. I'm sure the MOD's laughable order numbers for T.2 showed BAe it simply wasn't worth it to design and build a replacement for it, given MOD would likely only order a handful (if they were lucky)
If Aeralis were so cock-sure about their idea, and numbers of sales (when M346 and T-50 are already flying and in service and T-7 is test flying) then having a test flying prototype at least might at least go some way to proving its a viable contender.
But no, they seem to want to keep saying, trust us, give us the money and we can design a new plane, build a new factory, train new workforce, pretty much do everything else from scratch and all chances and risks associated with that, and given the reducing timelines for RAF needs........you'd have to be certifiable to give them a contract on that criteria (of course given most politicians are close to certifiable, that's probably not a good analogy
)