BAE Systems & MRA4
 

Thanks for f**king up the MRA4 Project for over 10 years. Must be a record.

The R Letter should never, NEVER have been needed if your "Project" Managers were what they were supposed to be.

Ever heard of a f**king GANTT Chart?

Be proud of the UK Defence Industry? Really? Not if you lot are the "advert".

Welcome to last October. While you're here I advise investing in gold, betting on a serious scrap starting in Libya soon and avoiding buying a furniture shop in Croydon.

Not just these redundancies though...saving the jobs at Warton has seen the RAF reduce from 98,500 in the late 80s to today's paultry 30-odd thousand. As the R&D was paid for and over priced equipment was bought from our Defence Budget the manpower had to reduce to "balance the books".

Time for t'Baron Waste O'Space to finish off the asset stripping of the once great British aircraft manufacturers and the raping of HMForces' critical manpower and in my best Lancashire accent "boooger orfff"...

The B Word

Looking North - living proof that hemorrhoids have reproductive abilities!

:)

how about a list of major projects that BAE Systems, or GEC prior to amalgamation f'd up?
ones that come to mind immediately

Nimrod AEW3
Nimrod MRA4
Upholder (couldn't launch torpedoes)
Foxhunter radar (years late - remember Blue Circle?)
Tigerfish (didn't work - or when it did, attacked the launching sub)
Type 45 Daring (missile didn't work for two years)
Typhoon (intended as a Jaguar replacemetn and had minimal attack capability)
must be loads more

If Nimrod 2000 entered service in the year 2000 then 14 good men would still be alive.

JD

...Tornado F2
Tornado F3 - great low level performance with a poor medium-high level performance for a fighter
Harrier GR5 without weapons clearances
Harrier GR5/7/9/a without a gun
Phoenix UAV - otherwise known as the "bugger off"
HERTi UAV - wasted valuable hangar/ramp space on an operational airfield over 3 months and flew about twice! (ask the Royal Artillery)
Typhoon years late and overbudget
DAS on a current aircraft that doesn't work (the only thing on it made by the company and it doesn't work!)
Hawk128 Tmk2 - with a smaller cockpit than the Tmk1 (as the human population gets larger!)
Astute late and over budget
CVF spiralling costs

:{

i was going to ask if BAe had ever produced anything that arrived on time, on budget and did what they said it was going to do from day 1.

but then i got distracted by a creasote bush tumbling past....

BAe did. The problem came - in the main - after the GEC amalgamation which created BAE Systems. The new company became led by people with the GEC business mind set, which was based more on asset stripping and cost reduction, rather than manufacturing and R&D

False Advertising
 

I saw the BAe advert in Wesminster tube station the other day 'Proud to support our Armed Forces'......can we sue them for false advertising?

Bear

JD

Incorrect

To blame BAE entirely for shortcomings in the MRA4 programme is blinkered in the extreme. Still, if it's what makes you happy, we'll not let the real story get in the way.:rolleyes:

. . . and you truly think the world's that simple?

Undeniably, BAE works with the speed of a striking slug, but there are two sides to projects such as these.

Often the blue suited (in this case) side is staffed by non-professional project managers that are often moved on to satisfy career-progression and the like.

There are also many instances of 'moved goal posts'. Moving them costs time and money.

Not to blame blame Bae entirely for MRA4 failing, but it does seem that whatever BAe touch seems to get f@$?Ed up. If only they stuck to UK programs, but unfortunately they seem to be involved in programs world wide. They have a relatively small involvement in a program I now work with, but they contribute major heartache with regard to the whole program.

Y_G

Yes I admit that I worked for them; mainly civil but with one short auspicious dabble in Nimrod 2000. I had a 6 months secondment as an advisor; not that it took 6 months to establish the appalling state of organisation and planning (operations / flight deck design), it took that long to find my replacement.
Yet BAe has delivered what has been asked of them; for the country - stable job opportunities, increased knowledge and technology, and foreign revenue (mainly oil). This was achieved under the auspices of a defence budget, providing the armed forces with tools of the trade, but perhaps with a belief (hope) that the expertise of these services would not be required. Unfortunately the political gambit, risk, bluff, etc, has been called, more by circumstance than by plan.
We did in fact get what we asked for, well being, employment, oil. Now we suffer the downside of the high life, and the reality of less than ideal military system. Hopefully there are still aspects of the original plan where the previously established solid foundations of our industry can be used to aid the recovery, but as with designing, testing and proving modern military systems this is not a quick process, and particularly as with military issues, the recovery will require a good management – Clausewitz, ‘The Principles of War’ comes to mind as good reading for the politicians, manderins, and military mangement.

Jimmy TAP & Dengue Fever

I assume that BAE knows it's customers?

And that therefore "bluesuits" moving on was known about?

And so you must have a BAE POC to maintain continuity?

And that therefore you have a Requirements Capture & Requirements Baseline & QA department all setup? Auditors? Ever heard of the word "no" to requests for changes post Requirements Capture has been agreed?

Or is greed a player.......

Anyway, what the h3ll. Keep doing a sterling job for Britain.

My father worked for Marconi then GEC just before the BAE Systems merger. He worked extensively on defence equipment there and at other companies.

The engineer's perspective of it is that the MoD is notorious for presenting poorly-written, ever-changing specifications, designing things already exist, ordering off the shelf then making so many mods that they may as well have made new, complaining when this behaviour extends deadlines and inflates costs, and generally behaving in a capricious, difficult and inefficient manner. This commonly has engineers (not necessarily management) bouncing their heads off the wall at the obviousness and the stupidity of it all.

From what I read on this forum this is a familiar situation (right down to the architectural/cranial percussion) to actual military users of this equipment too, which suggests to me that there is something hideously, enormously rotten with the thick layers of bureaucracy and management that exist between designer and end user.

I only know any of this secondhand, but the thing is that the engineer's end of this has apparently been the same since the 1950s when things were, according to old people, not so bad. Has something more subtle changed?

Hard to lay that one at BAe's door. I think BAe might have been quite happy with the GAU - though whether OR would have been happy with the weight of the GAU is another matter.

Cokecan

Your post No 8

I can only speak regarding the Aircraft that I flew in the RAF - but the BAe Jet Provost Mk5, the BAe 125's and the BAe 146's all worked perfectly well.

Maybe HM forces should ask for aircraft/equipment/manpower funding from the 'in the city' genii that have spunked away all our taxes.

Deciding on a spec and sticking to it would also go some way to speeding up procurement too.

Aircraft are made 'up north' for a reason, it's because southerners are too busy swinging to do any real engineering, FACT !!!