If only BAe had kept a stake in the civil a/c market
They'd have gone bust, let's be honest they weren't great at making any money from it. Really.
BAe never designed an aircraft from scratch, the closest they got was the Jetsream 41 and er the ATP, both derivatives from HP and Avro. From nationalisation in 1977 the sum new aircraft was the HS146.
Embraer beat the Jetstream 41 to market by a decade with the Brasilia, the Fokker 50 wiped the floor with the ATP and the 146 had niche written all over it. We can build great aircraft but they tend not to be built for the mass market.
VC10, Trident and Concorde, indeed the only mass market success I think would be the Vscount, HS748 and possibly the BAC111.