Originally Posted by
MrBernoulli
I'd be interested to know why MoD spent so much money on still using that "pressure shell". Why? It is a piece of ancient de Havilland history. Apart from the politics already mentioned here, is there any good reason why the MoD was still dicking about with a Comet fuselage? An inevitable waste of time and money, surely?
Leaving aside (for now) the issue as to whether or not it was a good idea to use a modified Nimrod design in the first place, the reason for using the 'old' fuselage pressure shell was an attempt to save money.
The techniques used to build it originally are no longer available. So you would have had to redesign the fuselage from scratch - it may externally resembled a Nimrod, but would have had 90s build technology and had to be built with 90s standards as well. And would you design a new aircraft to a 1950s design?
In terms of the cancellation, don't overlook the purely political element - if we are to beleive the press coverage, the decision to cancel we made by Cameron himself. He would have wanted to have a big ticket/cost item to cancel as an example of Labour/MOD waste - and found the carriers were too tightly contracted to do so (word was he would have cancelled CVF2 in a heartbeat).
So he could stand up in the House of Commons and say 'You wasted £XB on this - we're not going to waste a penny more.'