Our lectures at the time pointed to Sunny Jim being threatened by the US government not to make this aircraft and buy one of theirs of the shelf I think I remember the F4 or F1-11 , no doubt some body will correct my old political lessons.
F-111
and McNamarra - that's who! And the F-111 was still just a set of draft blueprints (or daft blueprints)
FliegenMog... Rubbish man!
Obviously you know nothing about aircraft, let alone aerodynamics.. And neither do some of the other 'armchair experts'...
Just the mere supposition that you can
judge an aircraft by looking at it shows that, let alone some of that daft suggestions in your diatribe...
So all that effort was spent by the World's most advanced aircaft industy at the time, and Mr
FliegenMog knows better after 2 minutes looking at it
Funny then that many of it's designers managed to make the EE Lightning a remarkable interceptor, notice any similarity in lines?
Small wings, yes! For gust alleviation, but with the most powerfull blown flap system ever put on aircraft for short field take-off!
Slab-sided fuselage (he doesn't say what's wrong with that)... nothing, High bending stiffness and lots of fuel capacity, as well as room for a long u/c
Complicated undercarriage? Yes, and precisely 4 test flights to get it working Ok, not bad eh (the rushed political climate probably being the main problem, n'est pas?)
Range? Find it strange then that the Olympus went on to become the only supersonic - supercruise engine (in Concorde) that could make the Atlantic run... ring a bell?
Maneouvre someone said... what the dickens for.
And on and on... I have read some tripe before, but have not come across the suggestion elsewhere that 'technically' this was looking like a problem plane... why here, where peeps should know better.
And the 'total' project budget was £750m, not current spend to the day it was cancelled.. putting a very different perspactive on what that cancellation actually cost, with F-111 cancellation fees - and all for no gain to the RAF's capability for many years to come. £750m, £1bn, a bargain by any standards... badly let down by Mountbatten as well as the Aussies short sight (which they paid for later in spades, and years and years and years waiting for an F-111 that actually worked)
As for 'complicated', I seem to remember that the Spitfire and Supermarines had to endure that insult quite a bit during its pre-production era.. being compared to the Hurricane simplicity (the Spitfire's wing was a marvel, right through to the final variant). Fortunately we had one or two men of wisdom around then, to save the day and get that wing into production.
Had our ministers any cojones they would have called McNamarra's bluff (as well as Mountbatten's), told them their F-111 was a load of tosh,
far too complicated with swing-wings and all that (required a TOTAL re-design before a few years were out, due fatigue) and sold the TSR2 to them...
The story is simple, not complicated... US war debts used to blackmail a weak Wislon govt. (despite giving them our gas turbines even before getting them airborne, the cavity magnetron*, all our Tube Investments research, the list goes on). Hell, they even broke agreement after agreement post war on atomic research, even tried to patent gas turbine fuel management parts that they'd been given British blueprints of...
Heh, hee, not that I've anything against any Americans mind you, just their country's continued devious business practices (entrepreneurial free trade paradise? yeh, right. one-way free-trade!!)
PS We love you really
*
An early 6 kW version, built in England by the GEC Research Laboratories, Wembley, London, was given to the US government in September 1940. It was later described as "the most valuable cargo ever brought to US shores" (see Tizard Mission). At the time the most powerful equivalent microwave producer available in the US (a klystron) had a power of only ten watts. The cavity magnetron was widely used during World War II in microwave radar equipment and is often credited with giving Allied radar a considerable performance advantage over German and Japanese radars, thus directly influencing the outcome of the war.