I can't imagine why Rolls concluded that wouldn't be a success. :O

Er, no they don't. The Chinese have owned Continental for several years:

Teledyne's Continental Motors Unit Sold to Chinese Company

I suspect you are thinking of the arrangement that Rolls-Royce had with Continental to licence-build some of their engine models in the 1960s/70s to power Reims-built Cessnas, including no doubt the one that you saw.

Ooops! Ta. Yes, it was a Reims Aerobat.

A Q400 / ATR-72 sized aircraft a few years before the above were launched? Could work, offer a freight version and you've got a next-gen Electra / Merchantman replacement.

took years before anyone made any money building Q400/ATR's........

RR where concentrating on big engines- they never even tried to break into the 737 market for example

It took years, indeed decades, before anybody built a Q400!

I had the joys of being on the BA acceptance team for one of the early ones as a young Eng grad along with Chief Eng & Chief Pilot ATP from GLA at the time (can't remember the names ...Davy C ? and Lloyd G ?)...... they were both characters, think the CP went onto a decent role at LHR on Big Jet fleet....
The acceptance was a bit of a joke and the Woodford team were fairly amateurish. We ended up with a WX radar shadowing problem which they couldn't fix despite LRU and radome changes. They wanted us to accept it and they'd fix it later on the line at GLA. We politely declined their kind offer on the basis that if they couldn't solve it at the factory they were unlikely to do so on the line and accepting an aircraft with a ops limiting ADD wouldn't be the best PR for them. We all went home and it took them a couple of weeks to remedy it. The aircraft got a knickname as the reg carried the initials of the CSM delivering it (TP) with the addition of F for "fault"

I remember the PWC rep being astonished at some of the manufacturing practices on display compared to other OEM's he'd worked at. I also had reason not to thank him when after the first acceptance flight he informed be they'd been experiencing turbine lock when practising OEI's meaning they had to fly around on one until the turbine and case returned to low temps....

Before I did that acceptance I was briefly in Fleet Procurement and we had no plans to take the ATP on. However BAe were so desperate to shift them they gave us an offer we absolutely couldn't refuse so we went from no-interest to instant fleet in a matter of weeks. To be fair, despite the problems they did stay on far longer that anyone expected so they must have eventually had some merits and GLA was a close-knit team.

Lloyd Griffiths - now Lloyd Cromwell Griffiths

What was the ATP's parentage ... i.e. what was the name of the Chief Designer ?
Or was it just a bastard ?

Harsh but true.....By the 80's nothing could be attributed to a single scapegoat :ok:

Yes the days of the charismatic Chief Designer were long gone by then, even in the design offices that could be traced back to the original pre-amalgamation companies.

Though the breed still survived in a certain UK commuter aircraft manufacturer into the late 1980s and beyond ...

I remember Tom in a meeting waxing lyrical over a sketch he had made (literally on the back of an envelope) while he had been waiting for a flight and idly admiring the design of the DC-8's horizontal stabilizer.

Almost....
2063 was the Woodfor built ATP.
2064 was the first Prestwick built Jetstream 61, painted as a demonstrator for Farnborough 1994.
2065 was completed but may or may not have flown.
2066 and 2068 end up as fuselages dumped at PIK, one is still there I think.

No PIK built ATPs ever went into commercial service.

What changes were planned for the J61? Was it just a name change, or was more planned?

I was one of the three BMA route proving pilots and wrote an article, at the company's behest, in an Air Traffic Control Magazine.

I could nothing complimentary to say then and I can't think of anything now. It was the worst aeroplane I've ever flown or operated.

All my views are in previous posts on this thread so I won't bore you all.

MP

Supposition only, but I have always thought that the J61 was seen as a different aircraft to the ATP with a different type certificate, not taken through to completion after the build programme was abandoned, which would explain why the two aircraft actually flown were never sold but scrapped just a couple of years after first flight. There would otherwise surely have been at least some residual value to one of the existing operators in taking them.

It was never registered, but flew in Class B marks as G-11-065 on 26th July 1995 for the first (and possibly the last) time.

No, it was just a marketing name.

Certificating it as a new type would have been the height of folly, but the hope was presumably that the market would be fooled into believing that it was one. Needless to say, that failed, as it usually does.

Nope, listed in my license as "BAe ATP/J61". Hence my question as to how much change (if any) there was between the two? I was told on the type course at Woodford that the two "are different, we put together a differences course but because they never sold (any J61s) we binned it"

You jest ... The Harrier (aircraft carrier) ski jump was apparently designed by a sergeant on the back of a fag packet ... They'd be buggered now we're not allowed to smoke anymore :)

From some of the comments from people who flew the ATP most of them I see are quite underwhelmed. From a maintenance point of view I can only pick out a few words a previous poster used to describe it. I think he wrote that it is a heap of junk. I think he summed it up very accurately. Most aircraft have some parts that maintenance engineers do not like, but the ATP beats them all hands down. It is a truly awful awful aeroplane to maintain. I think the designers must have looked at all the developments in aviation over the previous decades, and decided to ignore them. There is a well known phrase amongst maintenance engineers which is, " it's not broke, it's British". That about sums up the ATP.