Greatest ever blunder in the history of the UK aircraft industry?

[Pontius Navigator]

Samuel, Hawk was memory fade. I meant the Jet Provost/Strikemaster.

Accepting that the airliners worked, just too late and non-commercial, ie overspeced for a limited market, the Belslow and the Dragmaster had to be blunders.

[John Farley]

The Goshawk is surely a very different aircraft to the Hawk it came from?

Good job too, I would not fancy sitting in a Hawk towed off the cat by its nose leg or doing a no flare arrival into the No3 wire with a Hawk main gear and no hook.

[Whenurhappy]

Yes - the Andover was a much-loved aircraft in the RNZAF and the STOL characteristics were widely used around the Pacific - landing on beaches and rough strips. It also proved to be a good way to gather your mates up for 21st, engagement and wedding parties, on 'weekend crew trainers'. One was laso barrel-rolled, resulting in a GCM.

BAC/BAe did propose a Maritime version of the veritable Andover; indeed the Kiwi ones did have a secondary SAR role, increadulously using the E-190 as a search radar. I recall bobbing around in the Waitemata Harbour , waiting for the 3-cannister Lindholme gear to be dropped up-wind. It was dropped about 200 yards down wind...

But the military BAe 146 could not be taken seriously; it could not self-deploy (because of the need for an external side ramp) and it is utterly unbeleivable that such projects were allowed to run (presumably with tax-payers money) in the 1980s. But there was also the Nimrod AEW project running...nobody's mentioned that yet?

[Samuel]

It's amazing how clever some people were in persuading those holding the purse-strings to part with money on projects which Blind Freddy himself could see would be doomed. Just imagine if all that ingenuity had been directed to actually giving the air force what it wanted.

I only ever saw one Belfast, and it was at Auckland for some reason...and parked next to a USAF C133.......like an ad for Jenny Craig.

[Jig Peter]

In defence of Belfast

People sneer at the Belfast(slow), but should remember that its original purpose was to ferry components of the Blue Streak rocket to Woomera - in the far-off days when Britain had a space programme - and the rocket's diameter defined the fuselage diameter. This didn't really need "speed" as such, and an economical way of getting the aircraft relatively quickly lay in using the Britannia wing attached to the "fat" body. Short's in Belfast (town) being as always in need of work, the aircraft seemed "right" politically as well as in the rocket programme's timeline, though why 10 were ordered is a bit odd ...
That the aircraft programme was left hanging when the Blue Streak programme was crushed (an aerospace blunder) isn't a surprise, and cancelling that as well wouldn't have gone down well, now would it?
Belfast thus was inherited by the RAF, rather than specified by MoDAir, and so might well have been looked down on by Their Airships (pure speculation on my part, of course).
Surely it wasn't a bad, or even poor, aircraft in itself, just misused. That others were better adapted to Air Force needs is by the way ...

PS. Never even seen one myself, so no axe to grind. Now the lineal descendant of the Hamilcar glider inherited by Blackburn from General Aircraft's a whole other can of worms ... But wasn't that a Brown Job thing ?

[TorqueOfTheDevil]

the Me109 [sic] hadn't been ready and the RLM had chosen a possibly inferior a/c as it's main fighter....????

The Germans had other comparable fighters on the go at the same time with no help from Rolls Royce (Heinkel alone had two, the He 100 and the He 112) - these aircraft got nowhere because the Bf 109 was so good, but could have been brought on had the Bf 109 not worked out so well.

sale (not gift) of Nene and Derwent was to our valiant Ally

Ally my @rse! The Soviets were never allies, any more than Israel and the Arab countries were allies during GW1, they just happened to have the same enemy. Even a cursory study of the relationship between the USSR and the (Western) Allies shows how one-sided the relationship was!

The B29 was a wartime development for one theatre and its contemporary was the Lancaster

Strictly speaking this is true, in the same way that the AEW Shackleton was a contemporary of the E-3 because we had one at the same time as the US had the other - but to suggest that these British aircraft were anything like as advanced or capable as the US equivalent is, to me, unsupportable.

[Pontius Navigator]

Originally Posted by TorqueOfTheDevil

Strictly speaking this is true, in the same way that the AEW Shackleton was a contemporary of the E-3 because we had one at the same time as the US had the other - but to suggest that these British aircraft were anything like as advanced or capable as the US equivalent is, to me, unsupportable.

The Lancaster was a contemporary of the B17. The B29 could be developed as the US had both need and capacity.

To compare Shackleton and E3 is a nonsense except so far so you might call it a blunder to even consider not getting the E3.

The Shack was, in its AEW guise, a development from the Sky Raider/Gannet, and as an airframe certainly contemporaneous.

From the 60s the UK produced too little, too late, and too costly.

[Pontius Navigator]

Jig, it was the Belslow not because it was spectacularly slow but because it was spectaculary badly designed at the back end and had to be much modified to allow it any range and speed.

Belslow therefore had multiple meanings.

[Jig Peter]

@Pontius Navigator

Thanks for that, PN - I remember in my days driving "non-prop" (and faster) aeroplanes wondering at the problems so many military freighters (not all British) showed evidence of airflow problems "down at 't back end" during development - though Lockheed got it right first time, and it seems as though the "Bearbus" has too.
Thinking about back end problems reminds me of the "converted de Havilland from Woodford", but I won't go there ...
Tks again ...

[Samuel]

The Javelin! Was it the only RAF fighter ever to be banned from some aerobatic manoeuvres?

I believe , and I may have read it here somewhere, that a USAF exchange pilot flying Javelins commented "it was the only aircraft he'd ever flown where the amount of power available perfectly matched the drag".

[Jetex_Jim]

Being slow to catch on

Hansard shows. Sir William Robson Brown (Conservative) in the parliamentary debate on the 1966 Plowden report on the British aircraft industry made the following statement:
“Production costs in the (British aircraft) industry are something which I cannot comprehend. With wage costs 40 to 50 per cent. lower than they are in the United States, our manpower production costs are 2˝ times higher.”

The introduction of multinational projects finally forced the UK aircraft industry to stop relying on craftsmen to fill the gaps left by lack of tooling and incomplete engineering drawings. Other nations had learned this decades earlier.

The German Messerschmidt 109 took about 4,000 man hours to manufacture compared to 14,000 man hours for a Spitfire.

Eli Wallace had come up with the concept of interchangeable part in 1798, the manufacturers of the Comet had yet to catch on nearly 200 years later. Or that much we learn from the Nimrod MRA4 saga.

[TorqueOfTheDevil]

The Lancaster was a contemporary of the B17.

Indeed, although designed for different tasks. But in your previous post, you stated that the Lanc and B-29 were contemporaries, which is somewhat misleading!

The B29 could be developed as the US had both need and capacity.

We certainly had the need for an advanced aircraft design, and the capacity to build them! What we lacked though was the technical skill. Had we been able to develop an aircraft as modern as the B-29, Bomber Command's losses would have been significantly lower. Instead the brave men of Bomber Command had to make do with decidedly 'old tech' aircraft like the Lanc and Halifax, and paid dearly for it.

[GeeRam]

Originally Posted by Jetex_Jim

The introduction of multinational projects finally forced the UK aircraft industry to stop relying on craftsmen to fill the gaps left by lack of tooling and incomplete engineering drawings. Other nations had learned this decades earlier.

Quote:
The German Messerschmidt 109 took about 4,000 man hours to manufacture compared to 14,000 man hours for a Spitfire.

That’s quite an unfair comparison really as….

At the more for the time, traditional construction of the Hurricane only took about 5,000 man hours to build, and the Spit was the first stressed skin monoque fighter UK industry had designed for production – and Mitchell was more used to designing flying boats and hand built racing seaplanes rather than fighters for mass production.

And the 4,000 hrs build (closer to 5-6,000 really from what I've read) for the 109 came at a very high cost to it’s pilots due to it’s very narrow track undercarriage which was a direct result of the design compromise Willy Messerschmitt took to get that light weight/low cost and low man hours build figure per airframe as he put the main u/c attachment points on the fuselage to simplify construction, assembly and wing structure. The result was a very narrow wheelbase and rather weird angles on the wheels themselves which was certainley one the big factors in it's reputation for being a pig to take-off/land and ground handle.

[twochai]

I would be very suspicious of any quoted manhour figures.

There are fabrication hours, there are subcontract fab hours, component assembly hours (in house/outsource) and final assembly hours. It gets even more complicated when some functions are are carried out in different factories. And where do you measure, at which point on the learning curve are you talking about?

The net result: unless a very careful, objective, comprehensive comparative study is undertaken by a knowledgeable person or organisation, with unfettered access to all the records, I would assume any quoted manhours to be purely speculative or, at best, slightly educated guesses.

oh, yes, I forgot... and, believe it or not, there are many reasons in many organizations to not tell the truth!

[Jetex_Jim]

oh, yes, I forgot... and, believe it or not, there are many reasons in many organizations to not tell the truth!

Too true. However, the Hansard quote, if that is to be believed, suggests that high number of manhours per airframe was something not just confined to the Spitfire/109 case.

Quote:
Hansard shows. Sir William Robson Brown (Conservative) in the parliamentary debate on the 1966 Plowden report on the British aircraft industry made the following statement:
“Production costs in the (British aircraft) industry are something which I cannot comprehend. With wage costs 40 to 50 per cent. lower than they are in the United States, our manpower production costs are 2˝ times higher"

It is also worth noting that the much vaunted Canberra, when manufactured in the States, had to be completely redrawn by the Martin company from a pattern aircraft. The British, highly labour intensive, specifications and processes were just not compatible with American methods. Likewise the RR Merlin when it was manufactured by Packard.

British aircraft engineering was more like low volume luxury car manufacture than the volume methods that were used by Germany and the USA. Which is to say very labour intensive but having the sole advantage of not requiring much capital investment on the part of the manufacturing company. And then wonderfully profitable when 'cost plus' military contracts were available.

[Ali Qadoo]

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.

[Dr Jekyll]

Slightly OT, but what alternative to F3 would you advocate? F15 and I believe F14 were considered.

[Ali Qadoo]

Dr J,

In answer to your question, IMHO the F-15 would seem to have been the logical choice, provided of course it could've been adapted to take a refuelling probe....and the engines changed to Speys! Probably would've needed a Martin-Baker seat too but I'm sure that wouldn't have been beyond the wit of man to sort out.

A Q

[Jig Peter]

Working practices

To continue the comparisons of British working practices with others, in the 1970s I was working in the Ruhr on a multinational project to supply gas pumping staions to the pipeline from Siberia to West Germany. Major suppliers were in the USA, Norway, The Netherlands, France and Scotland as well as W. Germany itself. The power to drive the pumps and associated electriocal and hydraulic systems was provided by US-designed industrial gas turbines.
Not long after my arrival, I was asked to see if I could find out why the turnover of workers from Scotland was much higher than from other countries. Talking to them I was told that what they found intolerable was being classified as "inefficient and bad workers" by German supervisors, for consistently taking longer to complete a task than others. What the Scottish lads were used to was "fettling to fit", while the standard practice at the Ruhr factory was to reject any part that needed such "fettling" and get a replacement, while also reporting the discrepancy for corrective action further up the supply chain. This, to the canny Scots, was a "shocking waste", which added to the resentment at being classified as, basically, unskilled by a shift supervisor under pressure to deliver.
Explanations of the different attitudes to parts arriving for assembly calmed the situation somewhat, but within a year all the Scots had gone back home with their craftsmans' attitudes unchanged and a poor opionion of German working practices.
However, the tight schedules set by the customer in Moscow were met, which was the main thing as far as we were concerned.
That what we delivered then sat in the snowy wastes far from Moscow for months because the customer's teams could not meet the schedules imposed by "the men from the Ministry" was another matter entirely ...

[Al R]

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!

Ali,

Out of interest, hindsight etc blah, but was that believed to be the case at the time? If there was a messageboard like this around then, I wonder what it would have said.