BAC TSR2 | The British Cold War strike and reconnaissance aircraft that was cancelled | Upscaled

uh on the 17th of august 1966 the only prototype to have flown of britain's most advanced aircraft project was towed down this road it flew just 24 times and the 200 million pounds that have been spent on its research and development was eventually to be reduced to just 50 000 pounds worth of scrap this is an aircraft graveyard at shubery ness in essex where once proud aeroplanes are used as targets to test the effects of gunfire and shrapnel such was the fate of tsr-2 what remains today at the tsr-2 project can only be found in museums standing as testimony to the decisions that sealed its fate [Music] conceived in the 1950s designed and flown in the early 60s the story of tsr-2 is one of technological triumph and human endeavor [Music] it was an aircraft years ahead of its time the years 1950 to would be described as the post-war golden age of the british aircraft industry [Music] shop floors were full of priority orders resulting from the korean war panic design officers were working flat out on a whole series of advanced operational requirements for the aria and the navy the farnborough air shows revealed the procession of advanced prototypes and piloted scale models of shapes to come then in 1957 the secretary of state for defense duncan sands presented his defense white paper to parliament which called for the elimination of manned aircraft in favor of missile systems this left britain's aircraft industry and the royal air force with just one key project to pursue the replacement of the highly successful and widely exported canberra bomber on the sort of aircraft we were looking at we'd already looked at the idea of a specialized low-level bomber and that was cancelled in early 56 i think for quite good reasons as it was such a narrow role for an aircraft and we felt we still should go for low level because we saw it as the only means of penetrating soviet air defenses but equally we wanted it to be able to put on a reasonable performance doubt shoot and i'm talking anyway between 40 and 60 000 feet um i say that because we visualize air um operated engines ordinary uh turbo jets in other words we won't think of things like ram jets or anything and we we called it a tactical strike reconnaissance aircraft hoping that that would convey the idea of our operational technique [Music] meanwhile the royal navy had not been idle in identifying its requirement for a low-flying strike aircraft in 1955 blackburn aircraft won the contract to develop the na-39 buccaneer a twin-seat carrier-borne strike aircraft capable of flying under the enemy's surface vessel radar screen the navy had a powerful ally in lord louis mountbatten who is chief of the defense staff and a lifelong naval officer tried to persuade the raf to opt for a modified version of the buccaneer as the canberra replacement whilst this would have helped to reduce the costs for the navy and ultimately the air force the raf felt that the buccaneer would not fulfill their requirements now the buccaneer was an extraordinary successful airplane it was built for mainly for low-level work and but the point was that the iaf didn't think it was at that stage was fast enough or good enough high up there's nothing wrong with it and contrary to the popular belief and you may be very interested to hear this that in 1956 i asked barry late who was then the chief designer of black bones um if he would very kindly produce a busher for me on the na39 the royal air force and he did that and we did consider it it was very seriously considered uh mountbatten used to rather lie about that and say we never took the interests but it was bases and considered by the airports now i think the real tragedy is that the tories should have had the sense to develop the buccaneer into a strike reconnaissance aircraft for the air force but the air force wouldn't agree to that and vanil berg later told me that he thought that the decision to go to the tsr-2 was in a sense compensation to the air force for the government's decision to give the nuclear deterrent to the navy and berlbeg was head of the navy by march 1957 the raf began to circulate its basic requirement under the title general operational requirement 339 the industry were to report back with designs and comments by january 1958 but in september 1957 the government dropped another bombshell on the industry at chelmec's house the permanent secretary of the ministry of supply called a meeting of the heads of all the major aircraft companies and told them that following the 57 defense white paper there was no certainty of further aircraft projects except gor-339 he also told them that proposals would only be accepted from those firms who were prepared to collaborate together on the project the government had effectively aimed a pistol at the industry's head the message was amalgamate or die the companies spent hundreds of thousands of manners developing their concepts amongst them vickers armstrong who came up with a single and twin-engined version of their type 571 which was to be based on the new concept of a fully integrated airframe engine equipment and weapon system english electric was the only british company to have built an operational supersonic aircraft in the lightning they proposed their p17 provided with a vtol capability by the p17d from shorts who'd been gaining valuable experience in vertical takeoff with their sc1 the p17 com concept was a very very good one and if you look at the um uh the general arrangement drawings of it um superimposed on a picture of the tsr-2 you'll find that outwardly there's very little difference the p-17 was to ride piggyback on the p-17d to give it a full vertical take-off capability the p-17d which was powered by no fewer than 70 engines was to enable the p17 to take off and land back on the platform in the air english electric had got the measure of the supersonic bomber aspect absolutely right but the their solution to providing the short field takeoff and landing capability with this lifting platform um i think would have been immensely difficult to do very costly and i had some doubts as to its practicability i i didn't think it would work the p17d was dropped after the raf redefined their requirement as or343 based solely on the vickers english electric submissions initially the enforced amalgamation of the two companies was not welcomed well frankly we thought it was absolutely wrong we thought it was um a misjudgment which would lead to cost overrun delays unnecessarily complications in working out the this very dis complex design um which could much easily easily have been done much more easily have been done by one firm as a main contractor and if it did if that one firm didn't have the the total manufacturing capacity to cope with the whole program then they should have subcontracted it out to the other parts of the industry that could take it take it on english electric had already 10 years experience in building supersonic military aircraft no other firm in this country had they had the canberra behind them and they had a design known as the p17 [Music] which was very close indeed to the specification which was put down subsequently for tsr-2 and nevertheless the prime contract was given to to vickers it's true to say that they their experience lay in subsonic aircraft and in civil era the only military plane i think that they built was the valiant bomb which had um uh manifest structural uh thoughts in design and was in fact withdrawn after five years so you could say it was failure and yet in spite of the contrast between the two firms experience and capability uh they were told to amalgamate and the prime contract was given to because i think it was mistaken uh english electric uh were regarded by the rest of the industry as newcomers the great names hawkers de havillands vicars bristols have been companies existing to way back to world war one and even earlier english electric the name english electric only came into the the the general public view after world war ii um they had built very successfully a range of hamden and halifax bombers under license from andy page during the war and then on the basis of that a new design team was formed in 1945 specifically to design and build for the raf its first jet bomb of the canberra we were english electric were regarded as newcomers by the rest of industry and i think slightly resented for that by any standards at that time tsr-2 was to be the most advanced aircraft in the world it was to be capable of around mach 1.1 at 200 feet and mach 2 at medium and high altitudes with a radius of action of 000 nautical miles the aircraft would need a completely new fully automatic radar system more advanced than anything else in existence including terrain following and sideways looking radar with automatic updating of data it was to be capable of taking a full reconnaissance fit operate from short strips in all weather and provide everything from long-range nuclear strike to battlefield support no self-defense weapons were initially proposed although there was a provision to carry four air-to-surface rockets the government's choice of the bristol sydney olympus engine was a controversial decision and was to lead to delays and massive cost overruns we were strongly in favor of a rolls royce engine um not least because we did we considered that the bristol olympus development wasn't far ahead uh and that we would end up with a in the classic situation which should be avoided in aircraft development that's a new a new design of airplane with a new design of engine right from flight one that complicates the issues wherever you can you should combine a new airplane with a um a well-proven engine rolls-royce that day they didn't want all these aircraft succeed with pistol engines and this is before those who always bought up pistol the tsr-2 was going to have the best olympus the 1154 was going to have a form of the bristol pegasus and this really didn't suit girl's voice at all at the time undoubtedly the development costs of the olympus were a big factor in the escalating costs of the program but much worse than that in my view was was the unreliability of the engine we we did actually as a to use the phrase i have just used arrive at a classic situation where we had a brand new untried airplane with an engine which was not only unproven it hadn't passed its um air worthiness type tests but it actually had a known catastrophic failure on it which put put the tsr-2 prototype at risk when we started flying problems with the engine would prove difficult to resolve and were not identified until after the first flight the vulcan olympus flying test bed would later blow up whilst taxiing [Music] the government placed the contract for nine pre-production aircraft with the vickers english electric consortium in october 1960 more than 18 months after the contract had first been announced [Music] in spite of mounting opposition from the navy and the treasury britain's most ambitious aircraft project yet devised had been given the go-ahead [Music] vickers under sir george edwards was to be the prime contractor and responsible for the front fuselage section which included the cockpit weapon systems and budget control english electric led by its chief designer freddie page was to concentrate on the aerodynamics wings tail and rear fuselage [Music] from an early stage the consortium responded to the project's critics in whitehall by illustrating their design philosophy as seen in this film extract presented by their chief project engineer raleigh heath with a tail plane so designed as to release the whole of the wing for flat blowing the provision of adequate thrust to weight ratio secured by powerful olympus 22r engines giving a thrust-to-weight ratio of 0.6 the requirement for rudimentary operation rudimentary field operation by large wheels which despite the requirements for low cross-sectional area are stowed within the airplane without drag penalty the crosswind requirements met by the large parachute which of course also confers the short landing the facility the advanced technology of the aircraft was mirrored in the complexity of the manufacturing which was to employ new working practices and advanced materials other problems relating to project management control would lead to delays one of the most delaying aspects of the program was that many of the subcontractors were working directly with the ministry uh are not not under the control of of the central uh management organization that's bac and this this led to complications misunderstandings and inevitable delays i remember one famous occasion when i one of the committees that i attended of industry and the ministry of officials and civil servants from the establishments and elsewhere the the chairman took a look around the room when we started in singals court long room full of cigarette smoke and battered cups of tea and um he took a look around the room he said i want a container and there was a headcount taken at this meeting and uh there were 58 people in the room and the chairman quite recently said this is quite ridiculous that nobody could control a program with meetings this size i want you all to go away and we're the next meeting is convened for such a certain date and i want to see a significant reduction in the numbers at that meeting and do of course we all came back to the reconfigured meeting and there were 61 in the room the ministry for instance annexed control of the cockpit layout i think arbitrarily at some point um and there was a civil servant in the ministry who was in charge and i quote as far as the government was concerned but a lot more to it than that i think the the contractor had a seat on his committee but um that didn't represent control either in my own experience we had cockpit committee meetings which spent days not only just trying to decide where one particular switch would go but what the caption should be under the switch and then they just they decided against the advice of the operators in that case me um to put a caption under a vital switch which made no sense to the air crew at all and eventually before we flew it had to be changed and this is the typical example of the very simple silly delays that occurred in the program in the united states the advanced technology and potential of tsr-2 had been a source of concern and progress of the project had been closely monitored they sent a a team over from the pentagon in 1960 under um an official called courtland perkins and they expressed they went all over the tsr2 building they expressed enormous enthusiasm they let the british aircraft corporation they left them to one and let them understand that they would be interested in purchasing they were nothing of the kind they were interested in finding out what was going on in order to adapt it into their own version which came much later and much less successfully the f-111 now i don't blame the americans well i think it's been it's become very clear since those days uh that the americans were primarily very worried about the emergence of tsr-2 because they saw it as a direct challenge uh to the military air supremacy that they were aiming to establish with their f-111 swing wing low-level attack airplane which was designed for a very similar role to tsr-2 early in 1960 american industry was asked what the time seemed impossible it was asked to design an airplane that would fly faster at any altitude than any existing fighter it was behind it in time it ran into enormous technical problems and it overrun uh overran its cost uh predictions very very greatly but we know that the americans thought that the tsr-2 was a threat that if we had been as successful with tsr-2 as we had been with its predecessor the canberra which was so good if you remember that the americans themselves bought the canberra i think they saw the tsr as a threat to their potential worldwide interest in exporting military airplanes and they were very anxious to get rid of it the australians who had also purchased the canberra bomber found themselves in a similar position to the raf in looking for a suitable replacement i think the australians needed to replace their canvas and therefore as they used they looked a bit and said what are you doing you must be replacing yours i made two visits to canberra with teams from british aerospace to make presentations on the tsr-2 program during which we understand that they were planning to acquire 30 30 airframes royal air force was planning to have 150 and this 30 would have made a nice addition to and made the production run really stable during the early part of 1964 was the year in which the airplane first flew we understood that the australian government had virtually signed up for a contract tsr2 [Music] after more than five years work the first prototype xr219 was transported in sections to the aircraft and armament experimental establishment at boscom down in wiltshire where it would take three months to assemble the choice of boscom down as the site of the flight test program was a compromise solution english electric space at wharton in lancashire would have been an ideal support and maintenance base vickers had wanted the first flight to take place from their airfield at wesley roland beamont argued that the wisley runway was too short working from boscom down would create more problems nobody really wanted us there or they did their very best to help us i must say we didn't want to be there we had the worst of both communication worlds we were 150 miles from morton and 60 miles from wave bridge where we ought to have been doing all that work on one base with all the experts just around the block the sum total of delays and resultant cost increases that were plaguing the project meant the planned in-service date had to be put back this news poured further fuel on the fire of mounting opposition from the project's critics mountbatten perhaps tsr-2's most determined critic was still pushing hard for the buccaneer he visited australia and met their defense minister sir frederick scherger he said that it would he went around the place saying that it was absolutely what the air force wanted and everybody knew this and he used to go around with a briefcase with model with with one model of the tsr-2 and five of the buccaneers and put them on the table in front of people like shurka in australia and say you can have five of these for one of those so why do you bother now but best of my knowledge told them they wouldn't be coming into service or certainly poured cold water on it the australians listened to this and by the time we started flying in august uh we had been given to understand that the the australians were almost certainly shifting and going for the f-111 i'm sure they would have bought the tsr-2 they had gone ahead [Music] [Music] the newly assembled and freshly painted tsr-2 was wheeled out in september 1964 to commence its engine runs and taxi trials [Music] roland beamont and other members of his flight test team still had nagging concerns about the unresolved engine and undercarriage problems [Music] the continuing build-up of political pressure and adverse media criticism was heightened by the looming general election with the ruling conservative government looking set to lose [Music] meanwhile a meeting was convened at bos gamdao in view of the october election and the labour party's uncertain support for the project the question on everybody's lips was when could tsr-2 make its first flight a successful flight before the election might prove critical to the project's survival the chief project test pilot was faced with a very difficult decision he was well aware of the dangers of an engine failure and of the consequences of cancellation don bowen my observer backseater and i were the people on whom the total responsibility of this enormous pyramidal organization were going to fall on flight one but it wasn't a sudden precipice to go over we'd been doing taxi trials of the airplane testing all its systems out on the ground we taxied it up to take off speed tested the parachute and brakes and all the rest of it by the time we were ready to fly on that day i had any doubts about the the the capability of the airplane had long since gone i was very confident that it was going to fly well so [Applause] with the an extraordinarily good moment when you turn onto the runway you call for clearance to go you get clearance from the tower five four three two one breaks off you light the reheat and go and from then on you know exactly what it's supposed to do and your task is just to be totally alert to see if it doesn't do what it's supposed to do um it's a fascinating moment it's professionally enormously satisfying and then when you become airborne and you'll find this new device actually performs as well as predicted or even in the case of tsr2 better we scheduled to fly the tsr-2 first flight for 30 minutes we in fact flew for 27 minutes halfway through that at the end of the first circuit around boston i had performed with the opinion that this was far more than a questionable airplane this was a brilliant first attempt of getting this complex airplane right it was so good and so right on flight one after 10 minutes that i was enjoying the sensation of just relaxing and feeling this is a marvelous airplane i thought i'd been there before [Music] [Music] the first flight had demonstrated the potential of the aircraft but for technical reasons it was not to fly again until the very last day of the year in the meantime there'd been a change of government [Music] on the 16th of october the results of the polls confirmed the predicted labour win outweight the tories and with them went government backing for tsr-2 the fate of tsr-2 was now in the hands of the new labour administration i'm certain they were evasive and i looked at the labour party manifesto see whether it said anything about it just the other day and it's pretty uninformative [Music] protect the government of course for the way in which the aviation industry been handled in the previous 10-13 years that standard stuff but he didn't contain any real commitment to the psr2 in particular and i think in preston there was some promise put about in the campaign that the so2 would be safe under labor but i don't think it was any other indication that they were committed to it and they and they were as i say i think pretty evasive [Music] yes well we ran into a number of unexpected problems of boston down first of all it was planned that i should fly it for the first four or five flights until i was satisfied with its handling qualities because uh you you have continuity of experience the more you fly a new type of airplane obviously the safer the flying becomes because you're on a learning curve on flight 2 we had a very severe vibration problem we had it again on flight three these were engine associated problem or engine system associated problem um and then on flight five we had a major out undercarriage malfunction which could have lost us the prototype it was actually an abandoned aircraft case had we chosen to take that road but in consultation with uh don bone in the back i said okay don this is your opportunity to try out martin baker that was the ejection scene and he said what are you going to do bean i said i think i'm going to try and let it and he was a long pause from the back and he said you're not going to get rid of me that easily i'm staying and so we but we landed it with the undercarriage of the wrong place um there were a number of problems with the undercarriage the first one we encountered was sequencing the undercarriage was not carrying out the correct sequencing in lower in raising and lowering and that took some time to get right the next one was that it was a long bolt was known as a long stroke undercarriage to absorb this great shock this in fact um resulted in it being quite flexible for and off and went from the first landing onwards we found when we touched down with this airplane the undercarriage literally twanged it swung back as we as we touched the ground it caused vibrations to run right through the airframe and to reach the crew the crew area the cockpit in the nose of the airplane as a very powerful lateral lateral oscillation um you had an oscillation which was about the same rate as the natural frequency of the human eyeball so that the moment you touched i do stop being able to see the runway for for a fraction of a second the very nature of test flying will invariably throw up the occasional dramatic moment that was a one-off it was a pilot on his first flight on the airplane he hadn't quite understood the dynamics of the airplane um and he got his approach slightly wrong and he touched down at a very high rate of descent when we got to flight 20 i think it was up at wharton we were clear of all the minor snags on the airplane and we thought now is the time to get on to curing this or investigating this undercarriage problem the first thing to do was to measure the difference between touching down on a dry runway and touching down on a very reduced coefficient of friction number no mule that was obtained by getting the fire brigade to spread foam on the runway and jimmy down they'll touch down on the firm with the on on board vibration sensors measuring the vibration set up at that point and they were then directly compared with the similar vibrations caused on slightly down on a dry runway that was all part of the research to get that one right it became apparent that the next and vital stage of the flight development of the airplane was going to need expertise knowledge and facilities which didn't exist at the weighbridge end of the consortium they existed in large measure of water and this type of airplane was right within wharton's expertise so it gradually became apparent in the management of the program that thinking changed towards moving the first prototype and the subsequent flight development which was going to be at least three years and 3 500 hours of testing in total up to wharton under the charge of freddie page who was the chief designer flight 14 was not simply a return home roland beamont having satisfied himself that the aircraft was performing as planned took tsr-2 supersonic for the first and only time engaging reheat on just one engine the acceleration was such that he left jimmy dell behind even though he had engaged full reheat on both even engines of his lightning [Music] this new aeroplane was despite its difficulties despite its management problems despite the rather unpleasant and hazardous thoughts that had occurred in some of the first few flights it was now showing itself to be a tremendous thoroughbred it was going to be a wonderful airplane it was always already extraordinarily satisfying to fly as a professional and i had been looking forward enormously to shaking the dust of boston off my feet figuratively and flying this airplane back to my own base where even the voice of the air traffic controllers were my friend and we we flew back into that environment we brought it home and now we were going to get on with it and no holds barred very good feeling [Music] seventeen aircraft that formed the development batch were in varying states of readiness at the factories the second prototype xr220 was at boscom down and programmed for its first flight on the 6th of april 1965 but the gathering momentum of opinion against the project had become unstoppable i can't be sure when the decision was taken in cabinet but the decision was taken in the relevant cabinet committee on the same occasion as we decided to cancel the p1154 and the transport aircraft but wilson was very frightened because there's much more public interest in the tsr-2 than the other aircraft to put it in the same package so he asked us to delay it until the budget in april and that's when the formal decision was taken and announced he called the contractors at midday to the ministry on the day in which cancellation was to be announced in the budget debate and he told them that it was going to be cancelled so immediately they did what any reasonable person would they requested permission to ring up their workforce to bring up their factories and to warn everybody themselves rather than allow them to learn about this frightful blow in their lives over the radio or the and newspaper jenkins refused he said it was a budget secret [Music] quite extraordinary and we never got a satisfactory explanation of why it was done that way and uh i i still don't understand why it was done that way because it would have been it was it was an insult to the house to make an announcement in that particular form where there was no possibility of questioning at all so it was just a feeling of inevitability we've been struggling we'd put every possible effort uh and what i say we i mean the whole workforce the all the engineers the grand staff the air crew of course flight developers the air worthiness to people administrators backing it all up had been working on an all hours basis there was no knock off time you worked on through the night leave was cancelled family arrangements were disrupted tensions developed in families because husbands were overworked overstressed this had been going on for years i think there was a tremendous feeling of letdown initially you know it was a terrible disappointment to a lot of people who were thoroughly committed to the project which was just beginning to fly and and you know taking literally taking off everybody who was concerned with the efficiency of the air force thought that the tsr-2 would be too late in service to meet the air force's needs that was the first thing secondly its cost had tripled in the four years before i got in its time of delivery had extended by three years and there was no guarantee they'd have kept to the cost and timing as i was given it well i think the nail in the coffin the sort of trigger reason was when the australians refused to buy it and opted for the american plane at the beginning of 1964. in order not to waste all the knowledge and the potential uh knowledge to be gained from these things and also of course with an eye on trying to keep people in employment not only in our factories but in the component factors and suppliers we put forward a program to the ministry within two weeks of cancellation proposing that the two prototypes should be kept on i think a 100r test and development program um uh for research into the future concord test program because they're very similar types of airplane um much valuable information could be gained and i think we put it forward on the basis of a fixed price contract we were asking for one and a half million pounds to do 100 hours of detailed concentrated research roy jenkins said uh that means it must cost at least two million and in my experience you've got to double that and that means four million and that's too much so there was a complete a complete shock [Music] following the cancellation came one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of british aviation for some it appeared that the cancellation of tsr-2 was not enough orders were given to destroy everything [Music] the massive publicity was given obviously with official blessing to operatives in our factories who had actually built these airframes dragging them out onto the tarmac uh shoving oily rags in them and setting fire particularly to the magnesium areas which burnt like a holocaust [Music] i think it's the most shameful aspect of this sad story there is no sort of reason whatsoever except her what you could really describe as a selfish determination to ensure that that airplane would never be built under any other circumstances or in the future i never heard anybody connected with this project who was other than shocked by this decision i can't tell you who took it but uh it it the finger must point at the government in some in in one department or other well it wasn't ordered by me i can tell you that absolutely not and i don't think it was ordered by roy jenkins who was the only other minister who would have had to say i know that i just had the immense um dramatic task of inviting some hundreds of my staff to consider the fact that they were going to be made redundant and all these dedicated people with high skills were just shown that shown their cards and many of them went to america in america in 1964 the f-111 was taking shape following meetings with defense secretary robert mcnamara dennis healey had become convinced that the f-111 would fulfill the raf's requirements whilst being cheaper and in service earlier than tsr-2 events would prove him wrong as this project also ran into problems of delay and spiraling costs a fact that the australians would later come to pay dearly for whilst dennis healey was talking to mcnamara prime minister wilson was meeting president johnson to discuss a number of areas of mutual interest wilson wanted u.s backing for the pending loan from the imf the thinking back in britain was that the americans had extracted a heavy price for their support by demanding the cancellation of tsr-2 i don't think international diplomacy operates quite so crudely as that um we wanted good relations with the americans but there was never any suggestion in my mind that a condition for having imf support the americans wanted a variety of things they they wanted they wanted to sustain sterling as a sort of auxiliary currency to the dollar the imf had already decided a week earlier to give us the loan we needed and we got the necessary loan from other governments as well so that didn't enter into the discussions in any way they wanted us to maintain east of sewage well as it were to share a world well with us and they were quite keen to um not specifically that we should cancel the tsr-2 but they would like us to buy the f-111 for exactly the same reason that we would like the australians to buy the tsr-2 britain did order the f-111 but ironically the deal would later fall victim to exactly the same problems that played tsr-2 in the interim the raf found themselves having to deal with the gap that tsr-2's cancellation had caused what we had to do when it was removed from the program was to start um innovating improvising um and making good the shortfall and that's something which the royal air force historically has always been extremely good at and of course what we did was to um uh re-uh plan and reprogram and retrain the v-force uh so that it could go low-level part of its attacks with one of the moves that we uh uh put on the board in order to make good the deficiency of the tsr2 well i think tsr2 is probably an example and it's it's wrong to lay down the law on the matter when you you know when you don't know all the facts and haven't got access to all the books and records but i think it is an example and we've seen far too many of them um before and since and even to this day are british governments not seeming to value the uh importance of a thriving aerospace industry i think what was the case um was that um um that i and maybe and some other people too um chancellor jim callahan george brown who was first april of state thought and i think thought some justification that the aircraft industry was consuming too large a proportion of our research and development resources and also that it was it was too keen for understandable reasons not unworthy reasons it was too keen on sort of breaching the frontiers of knowledge on aircraft design rather than concentrating on making and selling planes which it could make and so well nobody in it's 30 years now and nobody has ever in that time given me a clear and reasonable explanation of why it was cancelled i called my book the murder of tsr2 and that i believe is exactly what happened though to put your finger precisely on the murderer is less easy with a good many it was august 17th 1966 when the fuselage arrived previously to that two or three days before that we'd had a couple of tsr wings uh arrived here at schubert nest white city they all came in bit by bit and we've then proceeded to build it up until the state that it is on that picture behind me on our apron it was quite a showpiece it was a beautiful aircraft it was way ahead of its time so we was informed and i personally think it was a criminal actor get rid of it actually as it was done but it was our job in them days to destruct the test the vulnerability of fuselages systems wings anything like that that is our job unfortunately the tsr was one of them and when she finally met her death here there were several of us that was very very sad and we remember very well to this day we have got one or two little bits and pieces of her still remaining but nothing of any size or bulk the only one that flew she was destroyed which i feel very sad in the end tsr-2 fell victim to the many factors that conspired against it politics both national and international inter-service rivalry and an unwieldy management structure all ensured that delays and escalating costs became inevitable if the cancellation of the project was the result of a callous political decision then tsr-2 was also a victim of its own ambition i think it was a bridge too far i think it was a very ambitious expensive and at the same time extremely capable military airplane which was perhaps too far advanced for our air force uh and our ministry of procurement um to cope with the concept was probably too great for them they hadn't grown up they should have done you know it's all been done since and and we've gone a long way to doing it then but this was actually fundamentally lack of faith in the ability of our aircraft industry to produce those sort of goods we were in fact leading the world at the time but the actions of the politicians made sure we would never do it again [Music] [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: bac tsr-2, british aircraft corporation, bac tsr-2 (aircraft model), TSR2, TSR-2, supersonic, aviation documentary, tsr2 flight, tsr2 documentary, tsr2 take off, supersonic jet, tsr2 plane, tsr2 aircraft, bac tsr 2, aviation history, aviation history documentary, cancelled aircraft, cancelled aircraft projects, air force cancelled, short documentary history, reconnaissance aircraft, AdKey:3-Xg6wP8wBnrop, cancelled projects, Planes that never flew, BAC TSR2, BACTSR2

Id: eitUCcDgr0c

Length: 56min 55sec (3415 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022