British Aircraft Manufacturing Industry.

[om15]

There are a couple of interesting off topic posts in the BAC 1-11 thread, and I don't wish to lead that thread astray, however I would like to invite opinions on the following question,
" What factors contributed to the demise of the aircraft manufacturing industry, and more recently the aircraft maintenance industry in the United Kingdom?"

Best regards,
om15.

[HEATHROW DIRECTOR]

Politicians.

[dakkg651]

Especially that idiot Duncan Sandys.

He did for our aircraft industry what Beacham did for our railways.

[WHBM]

Actually if you go back to the "golden period" of UK aircraft manufacturing and then look at their contemporary overseas competition, they haven't fared too well either.

Douglas effectively went bust in 1968 and had to be taken over by McDonnell, the whole outfit then finally petering out in the late 1990s and the residue passing to Boeing, having produced paltry numbers of two lemons (the MD-11 and the MD-90) for some years.

Lockheed got out of civil aircraft altogether, the Tristar programme having racked up the most enormous losses.

Boeing, who had produced just a handful of civil aircraft before the jet era, came from behind to push these other two players out and dominate the world. But it was a corporate and management example of success, not just "because they are American".

And the other winner is of course Sud Aviation, who for years had produced a string of useless prop aircraft, then had the success of the Caravelle, but then knew how to handle the politicians, pretend to be pan-European, renamed themselves Airbus, and swept the world.

So we now have Airbus producing enormous numbers of airframes per year compared to the penny numbers the British industry once did. But look behind the scenes at the British contribution. With Broughton doing the wings and Rolls Royce the engines the UK probably does more of the value on these aircraft than the French or the Germans. The contribution that Broughton and Derby make nowadays is way ahead of the old days with the little sheds up and down the country. Airbus turn out more A320s per year than BAC did with 20 years of One Eleven production, and the wings and engines on the A320 are probably are worth more than the complete One Eleven was in comparative terms. What has been a real skill, of course, is to get the same output of something with 10% of the workforce.

[tornadoken]

(My tuppence on build is on the 1-11 thread). On maintenance, it hasn't "demised", au contraire. Yes, Singapore Technologies has lost patience with BASCO/Hurn, BAM/Gatwick is not what it was, but nor are the Dans/BUAs that put up hangars for in-house use, not intended as businesses. BAMC was put to the S.Wales subsidy folk as to be part-3rd.Party, but is full up with BA/Allies. FRAL built the BASCO hangar at BAe (=our) expense to do the refurb. element of Nimrod 2000 before Woodford clawed that. No sane user would put his airframe into an OEM's hangar to be repaired by replacement (the exhaust you pay for comes from Quik-Fit, and then only after they try speed tape), so BAe.'s efforts on A300B/146 have come unravelled, but Inflite, Flybe &tc &tc serve 146 handily. Marshall's will offer you a broad support service on almost anything if you need the intellectual stuff: it's grime that we don't do so well.


UK's first civil 3rd party hangar-business in the jet era was ATEL on 707: after Aer Lingus, Qualitair, FFV, FLS, (Lovaux at Hurn), and Swiss Technics ownership that is now Dubai-owned, not bought to be shut down: Hurn/LGW/MAN sheds now empty or modest, but STN is full up with overnight LO-CO and is a business channeling parts, schemes and services across numerous sites. They will make more money from that than from soaking a jumbo with touch labour - that has gone East young man.


If you imply: where are the SALCheck Canadian lines, the Airwork/Hurn and (Field) Hunting/EMA exoticas, some parents have died, and others are gone to their husbands everyone - full on captive work. Even Ryan and Virgin now have in-house competence, no longer relying on external suppliers, home or away. UK carriers now fly less labour-intensive airframes - 737NG, not 737/200, but many more of them. The emptiness of RAF MUs/RNARYs is a combination of fewer airframes, and redefinition of Servicing schedules to bring more work down to Unit level - no Major on Harrier, Tornado work at Marham.


Yes, we send work to assorted GAMCOs: that began with BA putting Jumbo/Timmy Heavy work into HKG,1980s, not to unemploy Brits but to lop peaks, for which it makes no sense to add to your permanent payroll. I would assert that UK today employs no fewer bodies on civil/military maintenance, airframe, engine, component, than was the case, say in the mid-1980s. Don't overlook the entry of engine & component repair/management players, like AAR, the various GE-funded entities, and RR's discovery of the aftermarket.

[Cpt_Pugwash]

Dak,

I think the rot set in before Duncan Sandys. Check out

Sir Ben Lockspeiser (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Lockspeiser) and the Miles M.52 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_M.52) ........:*

PW

[om15]

Gents,
Thanks for that, yes political decisions resulted in part of the problem, as noted in the brain drain of ideas to the US at the end of the war.

The reason for the question is that one comment on the 1-11 thread referred to all British aircraft as "lemons", I don't think that, however it has to be said that 50 years ago we had a huge aircraft building industry producing fighters, bombers, passenger and light sport aircraft, now the only complete aircraft we build is the BN Islander, 4 a year, I think that's correct.
As to Maintenance, yes I do agree that there is still a great deal of small overhaul and design organisations doing well, and certain aircraft maintenance niche markets are flourishing, ( biz jets for example) but I don't think that the heavy maintenance on large aircraft industry is doing well.

I spent a 5 year period "repping" Boeing and Airbus HMCs in the UK and Europe with all the main MROs, and slowly the work moved East to GAMCO, Turkey, Romania for the high manhour checks, the obvious reason being low man hour rates, but I think that there is more to it than just that.

Tornadoken descibes the HP production line at Radlet, that seemed a familiar picture to me in any UK maintenance hangar up to the 1990s.

I think that the industry has suffered from bad management, bad training, bad commercial practices and in engineering poor recuitment, but not convinced that the products were bad, we still did build aircraft that, at the time, were suitable for the job.

Best regards,
om15

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

Arguably, in the '50s we had an Industry at war capacity with a shrunken market. Look at our manufacturing base; AVRO, de Havilland, Gloster, Armstrong Whitworth, Boulton Paul, Parnall, Hunting Percival, Handley Page, Vickers, English Electric, Short Bros and Harland, Supermarine, Saunders Roe, Fairey, Blackburn and General, Bristol, Auster, Airspeed, Miles, Scottish Aviation, Aviation Traders, Hawker, Folland, Armstrong Siddeley, Rolls Royce, Napier, Alvis with support from Marshalls, Air Work, Flight Refuelling, Fields, Smiths, Kelvin Hughes, Negretti and Zambra, Lucas, Dowty, Rotax and so on. Add to that the range of the products and Types, some in competition with each other; Swift - Hunter, Javelin - DH110, Britannia - Comet, Valiant - Vulcan - Victor.

Much of that duplication of effort was alleviated by "rationalisation", or as Sir Fred H-P called it, nationalisation by another means. Thus was formed Hawker Siddeley Aviation and the British Aircraft Corporation; to in turn be swallowed by British Aerospace upon true Nationalisation.

The range of Types from individual manufacturers was in itself phenomenal. Just taking the work in the AVRO Drawing Office; Anson mods and support, Lancaster mods and support, Lincoln development, Tudor series and development, York mods and Support, Shackleton development, Ashton, Athena development, Vulcan and development, 707s of various shapes (and colours) and design work on the 748 (and arguably the 720 and 730).

The other overhead was allowing the Flag Airlines to, effectively, issue airliner specifications as if they were the MoS. As a consequence, we were designing new large prop Types when jets were a matter of a few years away. A further tendency was to underestimate required capacity, thus leading to aircraft that were too small by the time they should have been entering service. The market was largely domestic and foreign airlines were supposed to be impressed and attracted by what BEA and BOAC (and BSAA, I suppose) were getting. We had overseas successes but were swamped by the production capacity across the Atlantic and, as I see it, American manufacturers effectively saying, that might be all you want but we could give you this.

Arguably, this was all too ambitious and too loosely co-ordinated. Duncan-Sandys was probably the proverbial straw on the camel. Add to this a risk averse Government and the Treasury with its congenital aversion to all matters aviation, other than extracting the maximum of money from its successes. Nobody tended the crop and it withered in the field. We now concentrate on the big and expensive stuff and happy to buy in the smaller stuff from Brazil, Indonesia and the like. Once we lose the Capacity we have we will be very hard pressed to get it back. We really will become a nation of shop keepers; and mainly corner ones at that!

OM 15

Ah yes, I'd forgotten the brain drain period.

[dakkg651]

PW

You're quite correct. I'm not going to mention TSR2 either.

I wonder what would have happened if we hadn't been so generous to Uncle Sam and Uncle Stalin with our jet engine technology?

[Kieron Kirk]

Well, what did "Beacham" do for the railways?

I thought he was a conductor of classical music! (Sorry Beecham).

Beeching!!!!!!!

Kieron.

[tornadoken]

Pugwash. Wiki's piece is unduly conspiratorial: HMG has not "revealed" the truth because there's not much to tell. MAP Cripps gave Miles the job of producing an FTB for Whittle's W.2/700 because they had spare design capacity for a one-off. Their pre-War role was as trainer-maker:“very good at biffing out small cardboard aeroplanes (but) hadn’t really produced (subsonic) let alone supersonic ones” M.Morgan, DCARD/MoS, R.Turnill/A.Reed, Farnborough,Story of RAE, Hale,1980,P108. (Miles’ 1st. metal type, begun in 1943, was Monitor T.T.I, abandoned in Peace). Bell, P-39 widow-maker, was chosen for X-1, an FTB for German rocketry, for the same reason - available without pain, to explore a device with no military role.


In February,1946 the King had no enemies; UK was broke - we were about to put bread and spuds on the ration where they had not been throughout the War. We had not yet been saved by the US/Canadian Loan that we have just retired. M.52 was drifting vaguely; RAE/NGTE Pyestock gave low priority to a plenum-chamber-burning turbofan, because the industry that would build it couldn't then make axial stovepipes work. MoS' Sir Ben Lockspeiser tried to divert Cabinet Minister Cripps' ire by stressing pilot safety, and has been traduced ever since. Neither Bell nor US DoD reneged on anything, but it sells articles and books to assert they did.


Brain Drain to US: W2/700 had a "compressor rotor from (US) GE in the first reverse flow of gas-turbine technology" B.Gunston, Aero-Engines,PSL,1986,P.108. W.Penney and K.Fuchs stole Fat Man and turned it into Blue Danube; RR "drew upon" Curtiss D-12 for (to be) Merlin; Boeing survived the 1920s on USN O2BD, which was a metal reworked DH-4M-1. Where do you want to go with this? UK/US work a 2-way street to great mutual benefit.

[jabberwok]

And to all the above we could add the practise of designing aircraft specifically to a single airline's requirement rather than for a broader market. The Trident was the perfect example, built for BEA and otherwise an unmarketable product.

[barit1]

I attended a Boeing presentation some years ago in which they attributed their success against the British & French to a willingness to make significant design mods (fuselage cross-section & length, wing size, powerplants) when required to match a variety of international customers. The Comet, VC-10 etc were designed around a UK domestic market, with much less adaption allowed for overseas customers.
He made a pretty cogent point, but I've never heard much of a rebuttal. Comments welcome! :8

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

Wish I'd said that in Srl 8.

[cvt person]

For a cogent synopsis of the reason behind the decline of aircraft manufacture in the Uk I would recommend ' The BAC Three Eleven' by Grazianno Frecchi.

[Tempsford]

BOAC and BEA

[Albert Driver]

Further to Barit's point, Boeing would traditionally start with a mediocre design but make constant improvements and eventually deliver a very effective aircraft many years or decades of development later. The British would traditionally start with a brilliant design but only develop it slowly, if at all, often preferring to start again with a new design when technology moved on.

Think of the potentially world-beating British "Mark Twos" that were lost or terminally delayed through grossly extended flight-testing, lack of investment and political interference: Comet 2, Britannia 300, Trident, VC10/Superb, BAC 311, Concorde 2....

Every time you start with a clean sheet of paper you start with a disadvantage, a high risk and a delay of several years. That does not happen if you modify an existing design. This is what both Boeing and Airbus do so well. They only take risks with a new design when the existing ones are exhausted.

You may think the British aircraft industry got a raw deal but really its demise was inevitable. We got the Aeronautics right but the Business wrong. Simple as that and no-one else to blame (not even the USA or BEA/BOAC, sadly).

[om15]

Interesting views in thoughtful posts, WHBM and GBZ are right in that the post war situation had to evolve, and it can't be denied that our contribution to Airbus is big industry with good employment.
However, in the 1960s our airports were full of Heralds, Viscounts, 748s, now if we look at Regional Airport ramps we see ATR, EMB, Dash, SAAB aircraft, this particular piece of the market has gone.
France, Spain, Sweden and Germany build turbo prop/small jet aircraft and we do not, is this because a decision to concentrate on large aircraft components was made? or as Albert Driver has just pointed out, we simply could not compete.
The other point made by Albert Driver is very valid regarding the US ability to progress on good designs and improve products for the market place, think of the Canberra, Harrier and the HS125, now, we could have done that.
If we wish to depress ourselves further we can reflect on the possible sale of our stake in Airbus to the Chinese, but we still have our military industry and overseas markets there.
Best regards,
om15

[Albert Driver]

If turboprops are your thing, om15, let's look at them.

When the Vanguard was new I took part in a small design project to see what could be done with Half-a-Vanguard i.e. two Tynes. Everything pointed towards a Really Useful, and efficient, aeroplane. But there was no interest in it at all. It had those propeller-things and therefore had no future, you see. On top of that everything had to be bigger, faster, shinier than what had gone before. The idea of making something just better or more efficient had no appeal in the industry. As for our suggestion of a smaller version......!

I took the hint and went flying instead - much more fun. Eventually the industry began half-heartedly to reconsider its attitude to small turbo-props but by then it was too late, again. How big is the market now?

We can't blame anyone else for the lack of vision. We had the opportunities.

[virgo]

Several years ago there was a TV series on the Rise and Fall of British Industries............Shipbuilding, Coal, Steel and among several others, Aviation.
A lot of it was the familiar stuff of bad planning, political interference, inadequately researched markets etc, etc but there were several gems, including the alleged discussion between the Chairmen of BOAC and the Bristol Aviation Company about the Britannia.
Mr BOAC asked how many passengers the aircraft would carry and was told 54. (V.early design proposal) He then surprisingly asked if that could be reduced to 36.
When asked 'why' he replied that the BOAC buses that took the passengers from the terminal to the aircraft only had 36 seats and if 54 seater aircraft were regularly full, BOAC would have to buy a lot more buses. They had Government approval to spend several hundred thousand pounds on new aeroplanes but they'd NEVER be authorised the money to buy more buses!

But that was the good old days when nobody was expected to make a profit - least of all, BOAC, whose purpose in life was to fly extemely wealthy and influential people around the world in a genteel and relaxed atmosphere.
Ahhh, happy days................

[WHBM]

France, Spain, Sweden and Germany build turbo prop/small jet aircraft and we do not
Not quite. For Spain guess you are thinking about the various Casa turboprops (212, 235, 295). All commercial failures for airlines. Sweden ? Saab 340 and 2000, big new manufacturing facility built for them, all now closed down and Saab out of the airliner business. Germany ? This would be Dornier with their Do328 and 328Jet. Dornier bankrupt and lots of the almost-finished aircraft left laying around since that time.
Another mention above is of Fokker. They are now bankrupt too.
There are really only two turboprop lines in serious business nowadays, ATR in Toulouse and Bombardier in Toronto. You could make a case for BAe's foresight in getting out before the worst hit them.
I attended a Boeing presentation some years ago in which they attributed their success against the British & French to a willingness to make significant design mods (fuselage cross-section & length, wing size, powerplants)
This is incorrect (as are a number of other fundamental statements made by supposedly-knowledgeable Boeing staff about the rest of the industry that I have attended). Boeing have never, ever modified a cross-section on any of their aircraft. The basic narrowbody 737/757 is still exactly the same one that came with the 707 in 1958; they possibly still uses the same tools. Regarding fuselage stretches, Boeing have had a lot of failures with this in recent years. The 737-900, 757-300 and 767-400 were all stretches the market didn't care for and probably never even covered their R&D costs.
The British would traditionally start with a brilliant design but only develop it slowly, if at all, often preferring to start again with a new design when technology moved on.
This is an interesting comment for I have encountered this in various other business areas even nowadays, the desire to constantly redesign things, which often work satisfactorily, from scratch. The British railway rolling stock business has suffered from it considerably in recent years and has ended up with a large amount of non-compatible vehicles inferior to what went before. It seems a combination of too-large design teams with nothing else to do, "Not Invented Here" syndrome, and the fact that designing something new is more exciting than taking existing things that work, is responsible. And yes, the British seem worse at this than most.

[barit1]

This is incorrect (as are a number of other fundamental statements made by supposedly-knowledgeable Boeing staff about the rest of the industry that I have attended). Boeing have never, ever modified a cross-section on any of their aircraft. The basic narrowbody 737/757 is still exactly the same one that came with the 707 in 1958; they possibly still uses the same tools...
Check out the C-135 cross-section; it's smaller than the 707/727/757.
Check out the 737 LOWER LOBE (baggage bin); it's smaller than the 707/727/757.
Check out the 707-320 wing; bigger than earlier models.
707 was delivered with JT3C, JT4A, JT3D, & Conway donks.
:rolleyes:

[WHBM]

Check out the C-135 cross-section; it's smaller than the 707/727/757.
Check out the 737 LOWER LOBE (baggage bin); it's smaller than the 707/727/757.
Check out the 707-320 wing; bigger than earlier models.
707 was delivered with JT3C, JT4A, JT3D, & Conway donks.
Yes, but .....

The KC-135 is an early 1950s military design and predates the 707. Every commercial aircraft (being discussed here) from Boeing has the same cross-section.

Sure Boeing had a range of engine and wing variations. So did most other aircraft manufacturers. Look at the Caravelle if you want variety of these !

[cvt person]

Didn't Boeing orginally intend the 707 to have the same fusalage cross section as the KC135 but changed their mind as a result of airline response (particularly Pan Am) to the wider fusalage on offer from Douglas for the DC8

[WHBM]

I think another part of the industry we are neglecting here, beyond the airframe manufacturers, is the success of Rolls Royce. From Pratt & Whitney's 80% plus dominance of commercial jet engines, and the Rolls financial difficulties of the 1970s, they have by strenuous efforts maintained a No 2 position, nowadays to GE, and driven Pratts down into third place. Rolls have become the launch engine on several major types, not least the A380, and their share of the IAE V2500 gives them work on medium-sized aircraft far beyond what the Spey managed to achieve. All done by huge hard graft on both the technical and commercial fronts.

[barit1]

I attended a symposium thirty years ago, in which it was asserted that if P&W didn't sell another new commercial engine for a decade, their spare parts business would still be bigger than GE's total commercial volume. (Ditto R-R, I'm sure.)

The wheel has rotated. :cool:

[Albert Driver]

"I think another part of the industry we are neglecting here, beyond the airframe manufacturers, is the success of Rolls Royce."

Rolls Royce was the one company which managed to successfully escape from the traditional British practice of frequent total redesign which it followed, along with the rest of the industry, in the Fifties and Sixties. Perhaps it was the RB211 crisis that forced it to commit to the full development of what it already had in production. Whether by luck or by judgement (I suspect the former) it was propelled towards the Airbus/Boeing philosophy - with the results we all know.

[om15]

Sure, Rolls Royce is sucess, not only with the big fan jets, but since the purchase of Allison, also tubo prop with the AE2100, and the AE3007 medium jet for the corporate and regional airframes. These engines are built at the big plant in Indianapolis, so not sure if we can claim these as British.

I take the point about the commercial problems with the European turbo prop manufactures, but I don't think that it can be said that BAe made the decision to retire from this market early, they did try to compete with the 146, quite sucessful and the ATP, not so sucessful before bowing out. So it may be as Albert Driver mentioned earlier, they just couldn't do the business effectivly.

As far as BAe and the maintenance goes, in my experience of the BAe Aviation Services facility that carried out A300B4 checks, they were very good, the work was carried out to a high standard, the aircraft went out on time at a reasonable price, this from the Operators perspective. I'm not claiming that BAe made a profit in this, only that they were proficient at what they did, however this was another section of the market place that they withdrew from in the end.

Best regards,
om15

[Argonautical]

On the military side, I would say the Industry's unique ability to design combat aircraft with around 20,000 lbs of thrust and still keep them subsonic.