I had the privilege to go to a talk the other day by Dick Stratton, who ran the flight testing of the SR53 and also I think was on that programme you watched. Dick didn't go into the internals much on the SR53, but the impression I got was that the two chemicals were fed through a catalyst grille which ensured a controlled reaction at the right mixing level rather than using direct combustion.
Secondly - why was the British government so keen to destroy it's own industry? Well, frankly it still is - so far as I can tell it's some combination of:-
- Heavy pressure from the Americans who are far better at protectionism than we are (hence the cancellation of the TSR-2 to buy the F111, and then we didn't!)
- Alternating governments who either believed utterly in workers rights, or utterly in accountancy - whilst neither appreciated that neither has any hope if you don't have the national technological base to work from.
- A British political establishment that rarely includes anybody technically trained. To the best of my knowledge there hasn't in my lifetime ever been a British science minister with a science degree ! (We had one a few years ago with a history degree, who proudly claimed that he had at university done a study of the history of science in the middle ages.)
That said the SR53 was a victim of a particular piece of UK government stupidity, which was a 1957 defence "white paper". This did some good (?) things such as reducing the size of standing army and ending national service - so that many people were able to return to work in industry. Unfortunately Duncan Sandys, the British defence minister of the time had been persuaded that the future lay in guided missiles - the paper confirmed that the RAF would never need a new fighter after the "Supersonic P1" (Lightning) - and thus cancelled everything else.
To this day, I believe that young British aerospace engineers when they set out on their careers are often given a wax model of Duncan Sandys and a pack of pins.
G
Genghis the increasingly political.