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

Do we never learn? Following on from the 'Best Value' thread, this slightly more ignominious award seems to have more than a few likely candidates. Starting with..?

BBC News - Former BAE workers' call to save scrapped Nimrod planes

Plus ca change.

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

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


......combining a number of UK aviation companies into BWoS:ugh:

Unfortunately no one is listening, we are rapidly approaching a no return point.

PA5 (which has flown) has already suffered severe damage with some heavy handed rescuing of serviceable parts :{

:sad:

Believing a policitican.

Cancellation of TSR2?

Chiefy doing Slams on a Buccaneer outside the line shack..... and jumping the chocks ending up against the shack .. spoilng a good game of uckers,and a standeasy for the line crew :oh:

TSR-2
 

5 posts and that old chestnut is raised.....

Square windows?

I assume we are defining this thread as a blunder by UK manufacturing industry itself rather than politicians or the MoD or UK airlines? If so that will cut out quite a few options...and TSR2 was never a blunder...not by industry (excepting it was built at a factory where it could not be flight tested from!).....just political ineptitude, prejudice and cowardice.:ugh:

L J R...we've not all been around as long as you nor have the time to trawl through all the threads, so that "old chesnut" me old fruit, may well be a new one to many, and anyway, the point is totally in keeping with this thread.

Kindly remove oneself from one's high horse. :p

Tallsar, I assume differently! ;) Just remember what they say....

So was the supersonic Convair B58. First flight was strapped to the bottom of a B36.

A serious answer to this question?

For me, probably scaling down HS Trident 1 (DH 121) to meet the BEA requirement. Boeing were terrified of the original spec Trident 1, as it would've done very nasty things to the 727 (1831 built); instead, BEA insisted on a smaller, less capable aircraft and the result was Trident 1, 2, 3 - a total of 117 built.

S41

Fairey Battle, Blackburn Botha and Saro Lerwick, to name just a few....

But one of the very worst must have been the Percival P.74 helicopter - of which it was written "The first flight had to be aborted when the aircraft failed to fly".......:hmm:

TSR2 wasn't an industry blunder - it was killed by politicians and Lord Mountbottom.

The whole Comet debacle is, without doubt, our biggest boo boo to date.

I know it came at the wrong time but the time it took for us to investigate the cause of the two crashes and to do something about it, enabled the yanks to overtake us in the race for mass jet transport aircraft.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Britannia, too late,

Belfast, too slow,

Argosy, too heavy

Javelin, nine lives and still never supersonic

Andover, too clever

Nimwacs, just too . . .

or

Brabazon
Princess

LJR

The blunder is that we didn't do that much sooner after 1945 - we persevered too long with too many aviation companies, instead of consolidating the industry around two or three well-managed major organisations.

BEags

Aye to that

I suggest you all read a book called Empire of the Clouds ( When Britain's Aircraft ruled the World) A Litany of cockups, political ineptitude ( both Labour and Conservative in equal measure) and crass management. Aircraft put into service before they were ready etc etc

As regards the TSR2 John Farley said it would never have been any good as it didn't have enough wing Page 240

That and on the orders of the UK PLC HS travelling to the USA to Boeing in a technology sharing exercise and handing over the all the data on the Trident in what turned out to be a one sided technology sharing deal, this gave the USA the technology to build the curved intake duct for the rear engine that they had thought impossible.... and produce the 727 in the first place.

Handing over the moving tailplane concept data to the USA allowing the Bell X1 to crack the speed of sound, whilst scrapping the Miles M1 that would have and was later proved to have been capable of taking the record, long before the USA.

Nearly forgot......... The Bristol Brabazon.... still Filton got some decent hangars out of the project!

"That and on the orders of the UK PLC HS travelling to the USA to Boeing in a technology sharing exercise and handing over the all the data"

And add all the other technological knowledge we were obliged to share with the US as a result of the Lend Lease agreements we had entered into! To be fair though, the Cousins did give us their Polaris and Trident technology:O

Listening to BA on aeroplanes such as the Trident and the BAC-111

We were always going to be left behind by the Yanks on military hardware - it costs so much - but we stood a chance with commercial aircraft (see Embraer, Airbus and the Canucks for how to do it properly)

hmm the Yanks did give us the material which helped keep us fighting in 1940-41 tho'.............

And allowed that we could pay back what we already owed them!

Don't blame BA, blame BEA.

How about the Fairy Delta 2 or the Saunders Roe SR71 or the Bristol 188?

Cock ups, political will, or were they simple experimental machines? On the former Dassault managed to develop it did they not?

Or the Fairy Rotodyne.

B-58
 

Fareastdriver, IIRC the B-58 was built at General Dynamics Fort Worth, co-located with Carswell Air Force base- and had plenty of runway. The one hung beneath the B-36 was a static test airframe never intended to fly. Think it went to Wright Patterson AFB under the B-36 for destructive structural testing.

Tallsar
A better example is the Blackburn NA 39 Buccaneer. A supremely successful aircraft, built at Brough. However, they had to be transported by road to Holme-on-Spalding Moor for sufficient runway length.

No doubt the folding wings helped traverse the Yorkshire lanes.

It was not only the UK that built aircraft at airfields where they could not take off or land. The Russians built the Bison near Moscow; it could take-off but not land.

It was a simple matter for the Air Attache to count them all out . . .

@thegipsy
 

Was a bit surprised to see your quote of John Farley's opinion of the TSR2, as on page 240 of my copy of A View from the Hover he's talking about displaying the Harrier.

As far as major blunders go, how about the cancellation of the Miles M52 ?
Followed by the passing of its details to the cousins for their Bell X-1 ?

Not a problem for the Bucc - just road-dragged them from Brough to HOSM for flight testing!

Foldie:ok:

PS. Sorry, Neptunus Rex (that'll teach me to respond before reading all the thread)

@ Tailsar
 

Memories of Tim McLelland's excellent TSR2 book tell me that the reason TSR2 was built at Weybridge and transported to Boscombe was that Weybridge's "Toppish Neddies" were convinced they were the senior partner and weren't going to have "their" new aircraft flown from an upstart rival's airfield (I paraphrase, of course). Further, their first idea was to have it fly out of Wisley (!!!!), and Boscombe was a compromise, after they were brought to realise that Wisley wasn't on.

Jig Peter

I was referring to Page 240 of the book Empire of the Clouds where the author quotes rightly or wrongly John Farley's remarks regarding TSR2 not your book written by John Farley:hmm:

@thegipsy
 

Thanks for that - he certainly made his point* ! But I still badly wanted to fly (and by that I mean operate) it at the time - and I still think the Bulgemaster was one of the ugliest ... Though I know its crews liked it (apart from the instrument layout).
Cheers,
JP

* Mr Farley talks about trouble for the TSR2 if it had to mix it with MiGs, but as Mosquito-like operation at very high altitude plus near-sonic low level was the idea, I doubt if mixing it was really the idea ...
I know, I know - that "old chestnut" all over again, but for this (and no doubt many another) "Old Cold Warrior", the bruises still ache at times ...

To be fair,
some of the bad reputations reflect use beyond the shelf life - the Fairey Battle replaced the Hind and Hart biplanes, for example, and whilst the RAF found losses unexpectedly high flying the Battle in 1940, I suspect the crews were still better off than in a Hawker Hind. The B.E.2 (many variants) was probably a decent plane in 1912, but it was still in use years later when it was hopelessly outclassed.

So, I'm going to vote for the Meteor - which doesn't deserve it, really, probably - as so many pilots were killed by it.

Dave

I would also recommend Bill Waterton's 'The Quick and the Dead' - the 2 books together quite neatly outline the almost complete incompetence of British aviation manufacturing, airline/military management and that of their political masters post-WWII. C0ck-ups like the Miles M1, Brabazon, Saunders Roe flying boat V bomber thing, Duncan Sandys, Javelin, TSR2, Trident, VC-10(sidelining by BEA), Nimrod AEW and Haddon-Cave are just the punctuation marks in a seemingly unending story of self-serving porkers (both mil and civil) with their noses buried in the trough of taxpayers' money (ie yours and mine). A great pity.

The TSR2 - with hind sight, did we actually need it?

Could it have played a part in the Falklands war perhaps?

Would it still have been available for Iraq?

Comet windows - biggest blunder by designers, who probably then went on to be knighted and promoted and later to form "Waste-o-Space" as their first corporate conglomerate business model designers.

Waste-o-Space then went on to form Euro-Somethingorother and went Global, building vehicles, ships, subs, planes, software, munitions, guns, bombs, missiles, houses, potatoes and dolls - none of which seem to work as advertised.

Now, That's go to be the biggest blunder in UK aviation history!

Much of TSR2's design philosophy, background test data (eg TFR) and systems were carried forward to Tornado,and can still be found to some (maybe more minor) degree even in Typhoon and other modern platforms - TSR2 had a small wing deliberately to ensure a low response ride at low level...and the Jaguar benefited from this design approach subsequently - as a turning fighter ....that was never really going to be its forte!!

Thanks for the wider view as to why TSR2 ended up flying from Boscombe and not either Weybridge or (Warton)...but that in itself (with hindsight) was a blunder. It resulted in undue delay in the first flight and because there was insufficient resource at Boscombe (from BAC)..the flight test plan was slower than originally envisaged...which by default fed into the hands of the new Labour Government and gave them significant ammuntion to cancel it.

As for my vote for the biggest blunder...I would argue, in the light of the previous poor decisions re BAC 1-11, VC 10 etc etc...and even Concorde (despite its technological achievement and beauty) - we were on the verge of getting it right in the commercial field...the BAC 3-11 (airbus equivalent)...but we backed down and gave the lead tothe French and Airbus.....perhaps our biggest post war aerospace blunder of all given the size of the subsequent market....It would have kept UK aerospace in the
in the top league like Boeing
Cheers
:ugh::{

I see the UK's gift of fifty of Whittle's best to the Soviet Union as being a wee bit of a cockup!

not getting the martin baker MB5 into service.

way too late etc, but what a fantastic looking (and performing) ship.


i was of course going to mention TSR2, but having recently digested tim mclellend's exellent book, i've had a change of heart

Perhaps letting Rolls Royce supply 4 x RR Kestrel V12's to Messerschmitt to enable the prototype Me109 to be ready in time to compete in the new fighter competition for the Luftwaffe......which it subsequently won against the Arado Ar80, the Fw159 and the He112 :ugh:
I wonder how history may have been different had we not allowed RR to do that, and the Me109 hadn't been ready and the RLM had chosen a possibly inferior a/c as it's main fighter....????