PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Where to find the truth about the TSR-2?
View Single Post
Old 19th Sep 2010, 13:46
  #2 (permalink)  
rodthesod
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Southern Turkey
Age: 82
Posts: 171
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
I'm nearly 70 but not a lord. I don't think you're likely to find the whole truth anywhere and certainly not on this forum - it's been done to death here if you care to browse for snippets. Roly Beamont (TSR2 test pilot) wrote a good book about TSR2 (Phoenix to Ashes) - a good start. Chapman Pincher was a good and pretty reliable investigative journalist of the time and he had some interesting things to say about the skullduggery within Harold Wilson's Labour Party with regard to TSR2. I remember CP reporting that the Labour minister (name I forget) being told by Dennis Healey (Defence Sec) just before a major speech on the future of TSR2 that 'its wings had just fallen off at Farnborough'. He deliberately didn't mention that they'd stayed on twice as long as expected - design factor x 2.
There's a lot of other evidence to suggest that Wilson and Healey were secret 'commies' who systematically destroyed Britain's aircraft industry and screwed the economy but that's outside the scope of your book. I mention that only because I believe that alleged conspiracies should be properly investigated. It seems that the moment anyone mentions 'conspiracy' they're branded a lunatic and discredited - sometimes they just disappear. How strange, maybe that's how the conspirators, with their unlimited resources and total lack of ethics, get away with it.
Good luck with your research - as one of the pilots of the era who joined the RAF hoping to fly TSR2, I'd like to know the real truth.
rodthesod is offline