Re: Why do we always re-engineer our aircraft??
Beagle,
What on earth makes you think that BAES converting a dozen A310s to tanker transports would have left them with the equipment or manpower to assemble narrow bodied airliners? Filton converted and overhauled dozens of A300s and A310s to freighters in an operation which lost money.
Webpilot,
I agree, the UK aerospace industry is very succesful and has sold lots of first class products around the world. It has and still does compete with the US very effectively. I just don’t believe the naive propaganda of the 50’s that told us we led the world-we didn’t. That position has always been occupied by the US. The Vulcan was a superb design for its day, no getting away from it, as an original conception it was brilliant, but there is far more to success than original design, there is ongoing development, at that we in the UK have been historically very bad indeed.
STANDTO,
What about Tucano? The spec was for an off the shelf turbo prop basic trainer, it was very much an employment issue and I honestly think that whoever had proposed to build it in Northern Ireland would have won. The RAF allegedly preferred the PC-9 put forward by BAe, the actual RAF Tucano bears very little resemblance engineering wise to the original Embraer aircraft, new engine, beefed up structure, new cockpit, new systems etc etc.
Very much a political employment aeroplane.
seand,
As I said, the UK provided the fuselage and the US the nose.
WorkingHard,
We are talking about Harrier 11, the GR5/7 in the UK and the AV-8B in the US. The original Harrier, GR1 through 3 was pure UK built, as was the US AV-8A.
If it wasn’t for offshore procurement and development funds the P1127 development programme that led to the Harrier would have died long before it entered production. In the 50s and 60s US offshore procurement funds bought 100s of Hunters and Javelins for the RAF and a lot of Hunters for NATO air forces.
The funding for Pegasus may well have been of US origin but the programme was all British, Bristol Siddeley and then Rolls- Royce.