Alan Bristow's take on the WG30
I co-wrote Alan Bristow's autobiography with him, and he devotes some space to the WG30 in a chapter on his failed attempt to take over Westlands. The takeover foundered when he discovered a £41 million hole in Westlands' accounts - money which had been given by the UK government as launch aid for the WG30 but not declared in the accounts because it had never been decided whether it was a loan or a grant.
Quoting from the book:
"The WG30 was Westland’s attempt to make a civilian helicopter, but it was an utter disaster. It showed how far removed Westland was from the realities of the civil market. I was widely quoted at the time as saying that it was “the wrong helicopter, for the wrong market, at the wrong time,” and that pretty much summed it up. The WG30 was noisy, heavy, complicated and expensive. I had told Basil Blackwell it was a non-starter. The payload was limited, the speed was inferior to the competition, and in hot conditions it could hardly get off the ground. The engines were too maintenance-intensive for a civilian machine, and they could never deliver on time and on price. In 1983 Westland had backed an American company called Airspur to put four WG30s into service, and were rewarded with a lawsuit from injured passengers when a tail rotor failed and one of them crashed in Los Angeles. The FAA grounded the WG30 and Westland lost more than £5 million on the Airspur operation. They managed to persuade British Airways to put two of them on the Scilly Isles run for a while, but it was never a feasible civilian proposition. The government had offered India £65 million in aid on condition the money was used to buy 25 WG30s, but the Indians didn’t seem to want them, even for nothing. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had signed up for them but after she’d been assassinated her son Rajiv took over, and he was a pilot who was better able to assess their value. He wanted nothing to do with them.
Westland had 21 WG30s in production and components for another 20 lying around the factory in Yeovil, but no buyers. My first act had I taken over Westland would have been to kill the WG30, probably by the usual expedient of sending it to the RAF at Boscombe Down and having them test it and turn it down. But unknown to anyone outside Westland and the Department of Trade and Industry, Westland had gone to the government in February 1983 seeking a bailout of £41 million. This was described as ‘launch aid’ which would enable them to improve the WG30 to the point where it could find a market. Somehow they persuaded the Industry Secretary Patrick Jenkin to lend them the money."
And a little further on he writes:
"Towards the end of 1985 Westland’s results came out, and they’d lost £100 million. The Sikorsky team insisted that the £41 million ‘launch aid’ for the WG30 be written off, and Leon Brittan finally agreed to do so. Under pressure from Mrs Thatcher, and in return for £65 million in aid money, India finally took 21 of the 25 WG30s they’d signed up for. The deal was done by Don Berrington, a friend of mine at Westlands who gave me a copy of a letter in which the British government agreed to give India an extra £10 million so they could afford spare parts. It must be one of the most expensive face-saving exercises the taxpayer has ever had to fund. The Indians grounded the aircraft soon afterwards, and today, 25 years on, they’re still languishing in hangars in Bombay and Delhi, and India is still looking for a buyer. But the ‘sale’ produced a small wave of optimism that the WG30 had a future, and Mrs Thatcher went full ahead to close the Sikorsky deal. She demanded that all Cabinet ministers sign up to a version of events which in effect painted the Europeans as unreliable and their offer as an insubstantial spoiler. For Michael Heseltine, this meant publicly abrogating tomorrow everything he had said today – an impossible position to be in. On January 9th, 1986, he resigned."