If we're talking about "greatest ever blunders" I'd like to nominate the decision to take the Fairey Battle of its day, the Tornado, and turn it into an air defence aircraft. The second biggest blunder was committed by the highly-paid light blue help who accepted the wretched thing into service - OBEs and Knighthoods all round, hoorah!
And before anyone gets out the PPRuNe flamethrower, this is NOT a dig at all the fine people who operated, maintained, supplied etc the GR1, GR4, F-3 etc over the years.
What's truly scary is that from the time the F-4 was finally clapped-out and obsolete, say 1985-ish, (I did 2 tours on them so I do know what I'm talking about) to the F-3 eventually becoming a halfway decent platform, the UK effectively took a major air defence capability holiday. Guess we were lucky nobody called our bluff.
Last edited by Ali Qadoo; 14th Jan 2011 at 15:21.
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