The Rocket Planes War | Genius, Politics, And Corruption | Upscaled Vintage Footage

[Music] thank you [Music] during the Cold War classified Nazi knowledge found its way to Britain where it was employed to construct an advanced rocket plane meticulously designed to soar the edge of space seeking to intercept high-flying Russian bombers you could flight refuel it so you could keep it up there and then you had a rocket motor waiting to fire when you had a real genuine Target to go for it so the the interception capability would have been fantastic however the groundbreaking project was destined to be undermined by a competitor in the aviation industry it transpired that Lockheed had indeed over the years been offering bribes to local politicians in Europe and in Japan to buy their aircraft this is the story of the sunders row sr177 the last rocket fighter in the 1950s NATO had a big problem no feasible method existed to intercept the nuclear-laden Russian bombers soaring at high altitudes one of the major needs for fighter aircraft in the 1950s was to get up to altitude as fast as possible its requirement would eventually become the complete re-equipment of NATO's European Air Forces a substantial Fortune awaited those who could develop a design to swiftly intercept Russian bombers within mere seconds using a solitary type of SuperSonic fighter the British and the Europeans were very interested in using rocket power to get up to altitude could that give you a big boost very very quickly jet engines sometimes take a while to get up to speed so the Europeans went for Rockets well I don't think there was any option if you wanted to achieve the interception Target of a standing start to sixty thousand feet in two or three minutes there was no other way to go because the air breathing engine would be running out of performance fast the British revived Nazi technology that was born from the need to destroy Allied bombers The Way Forward came from Alexander lippish and his Comet rocket fighter Alexander lipisch is the genius behind the comet he fought for this concept of a rocket part fighter but above all he fought for the concept of of the swept back Wing that would give it the aerodynamics it would actually make it Fly perfectly at high speed born in Munich in 1894 Alexander lippish developed a keen interest in an aircraft design following his Service as an aerial photographer during the first World War however due to Germany's default and subsequent ban on building military planes lippish redirected his expertise towards becoming a glider designer specialist as a result he began to experiment with strange swept and delta wing shapes in World War II he put these ideas into action and successfully constructed a groundbreaking new fighter known as the rocket-powered comet it was the first operational aircraft in Germany with swept wings and secondly it was till this in its layout in the sense that it had no horizontal elevators but it had a vertical tail thirdly of course and most unusually it had a rocket engine Miami 163 Comet had to be as light as possible and this meant it had the jettison its wheels on takeoff and then land on a metal skin although the rocket gave a fantastic climb read the fuel could be very dangerous for the pilot when the skid collapse of 138 and two things happened when it collapsed the aircraft toppled over on the left wing started reeling off to the left and the skid minskid came straight up through the cockpit caught my legs and took them up I was very fortunate if I had just gone on with them I think I'd have lost my legs but I was jammed solid I forgot to stay on the side of the other instrument panel couldn't move there was no fire we didn't have any fuel aboard um but it took about an hour and a half to cut me out the problems with the 163 were mainly associated with it having two very volatile fuels which if brought together caused an instant explosion if they leaked onto a person they could actually cause melting of the human frame at times comets returning from their flights would experience explosions as the fumes from the depleted fuel tank spontaneously ignited despite these dangers the me-163 was the fastest aircraft of World War II its lightning speed hit and run attacks on bombers were devastating fortunately for the Allies a lucky bomb strike on the comet's sole fuel Factory rendered it inoperable for the remainder of the war the Japanese were so impressed they built a copy of the Comet it was called the shusui fortunately the war ended before a more advanced rocket plane was available to combat the high-flying usb-29 bombers following the German defeat in 1945 the Allies embarked on a mission to search the land for hidden Nazi technology and scientists Alexander lippisch went to Britain after the war uh lippish found himself out of a job and originally he gravitated to England to work in Wimbledon but the English read didn't know what to do with the the German Aviation designers and lippich was quickly snapped up by the Americans and in 1946 went off to work for the conveyor company in America I never met lippish in Germany at the end of War but I met him later in America and it was obvious he was a man who believed in his own gifts in this area and indeed he was gifted because there's no doubt about it the 163 apart from its revolutionary aspects was a delight for her plan to fly the appeal of the me-163 Comet extended Beyond its flying capabilities its design in particular would prove crucial for the British to achieve unprecedented Heights and speeds in their own aircraft in the early post-war years the British were more concerned with jets than Rockets to help they recruited another German aircraft designer Hans voltop hence motho is an unsung Genius of German aircraft design in World War II he was perhaps one of the most advanced designers of jet aircraft he built something called the ta-183 and the Americans the British were not able to use anything as advanced for maybe another 10 years after World War II moltop was the chief aerodynamicist with Curt tank and the wolf concerned at Bremen and tank who himself was a gifted designer thought very very highly on Multi and when we captured him we offered him employment at the re and because he loved his profession he took that on and we had him there for a year in 1946 moltap was brought to the principal British aircraft research base the Royal aircraft establishment at farnborough at this point he embarked on the design of the world's inaugurable supersonic Jet Plane while the supersonic aircraft being designed by multap had some quite unusual features apart from Justice kid it was going to be a prone position aircraft pilot lying in his stomach and in consequences of course gives you much more streamlined body shape because you get rid of the canopy the cockpit canopy thanks to his exceptional skills and expertise multap had established the groundwork for the aircraft that both he and the British aspired to be the first to break the sound barrier however post-war British policy meant that this was not to be the tragedy of morethop's SuperSonic design which could have been the first aircraft to go through the sound barrier was that it was never built the reason it was never built was that as soon as the plans were ready the British declared it a secret project now because we'll thought was a former enemy he couldn't work on secret projects so he had to be fired from being chief designer of his own invention feeling disillusioned Molotov later joined lippich in the United States where he began working with the Martin company he played a crucial role in designing the early versions of the Space Shuttle 1940s Britain kept searching for the answer to develop its advanced jet aircraft program the solution came from Nazi Germany's rocket-powered me-163 comet I think when we talk about the 16th Street one of the difficulties faced with the pilots in this time flying an aircraft of this caliber was it was taking them into a region an almost unknown region of transonic flight the British utilized the wings of the Comet and affixed them to the body of one of their existing jet fighters the de Havilland vampire this new aircraft was called the swallow the swallow was an experimental airport it wasn't a fighter aircraft it was experimental aircraft designed to try and breach the sunburn deprived of lippich's comprehensive knowledge on flying with the new swept Wings the British faced disastrous consequences it was atatia craft I believed it was a potentially little aircraft in September 1946 while attempting a near supersonic test dive low over the Estuary of the River Thames the first swallow broke up midair it was being flown by the legendary test pilot Jeffrey de Havilland he was killed instantly he was at 7 000 feet doing a Mach number of 0.875 when aircraft suddenly disintegrated subsequently a second high speed 108 was built Eric Brown was sent up in the second swallow to repeat the havaland's Fatal flight the swallow's poor flying characteristics had been cured well I started this excellent investigation trying to simulate the same conditions when suddenly without any warning I had what is called a runaway Divergent longitudinal oscillation now what this means is that the aircraft has taken over control of itself and is oscillating violently if you try and chase this motion all you will do is aggravate it so you just have to hope that you're doing the right thing and it stopped as suddenly as it had begun but very frightening we had a camera in the cockpit photographing my head and once head is being thrown forward so your chin is stuck in your chest and then thrown back violently against the headrest and um we think this is explained how Jeffrey was killed I'm not very tall whereas he was well over six feet and we think his head stuck the canopy and probably broke his neck the swallow turned out to be a disaster a flying coffin and it was down to the fact that the British really didn't know how to use swept back Wings they're taking lippich's idea but they hadn't taken lippish as a result the aircraft they designed was very hard to control and most of them crashed and killed their pilots Britain had lost the supersonic race October 14 1947 marked a historic Milestone as the American Aviator Chuck Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier flying a rocket-powered bell X1 launched in midair from a B-29 bomber the four Rocket Motors of the X1 were developments of the rocket engines in the original me-163 comet they're very upsetting you know about the fact that we did not reach supersonic speed first was the fact that we had it in our grasp and we gave it away but the British hadn't finished with the legacy of the Messerschmitt Comet as the Korean War erupted in the 1950s the British and Europeans once again turned their attention to the challenge of high-speed interception of Russian bombers one of the problems of early jet engines was that you could not accelerate quickly it took a long while to build up speed this was largely because the materials the jet engines were originally built for just couldn't take the hot gases so we'd very gently work up speed which is no good if you're an Interceptor fighter and want to get into battle quickly the rocket still seemed a better alternative for fast high altitude flight because of the speed limitations and acceleration limitations and energy engines there was a feeling particularly amongst British Engineers that there was still a space for the pure rocket engine which didn't have some of these drawbacks that if you use Rockets you could get the kind of speed and altitude that the jet engine at that period wasn't able to achieve when the Korean War started in the 1950 the British royal Air Force was still equipped with obsolete World War II Fighters and slow Jets it now demanded a pure rocket airplane Interceptor to kill the Russian bombers a fighter like the original me-163 but was substantially more fuel we realized that the comet was in its own way way ahead of its time in the end of War and um although its application was limited that was due to the fact that the rocket fuel was used so quickly but its flying characteristics had tremendous potential rocket-powered aircraft have two fundamental problems the first is you need an awful lot of fuel Rocket Motors gobble up fuel is a huge rate just think of a Saturn rocket flying to the moon it's just one giant giant fuel tank so it's often very difficult to build an aircraft that could carry enough fuel that would make a rocket work for a proper length of time the other difficulty of course is Rocket Fuel is very dangerous so there are hazards for the pilot but the first design suffered from the same defect as the original Comet the rocket motor would burn up fuel too fast every possible corner of the aircraft would be filled with volatile rocket fuel despite their efforts calculations revealed that the range would remain insufficient and Pilots showed little enthusiasm for the notion of gliding back home similar to the old me163 while handling a plane filled with explosive fumes this problem of how to get the optimum performance from a very limited load of Rocket Fuel and then fly safely with the powered Landing was a major stumbling block of the British designers but in the early 1950s a breakthrough was made the solution was simple but it was ingenious we talked about an airplane that had a rocket motor only and came back what we call Dead stick as a glider and I think all the interested parties realize that this was not the way to go in what might be a long peacetime situation we've all said we must put an additional power unit on board not only to bring it back home but to drive the Hydraulics and the electrics and keep the weapon systems alive and so the mix power aircraft was born flying with a jet for takeoff and a rocket motor for Speed the mixed power solution solves the problem for a 1940s 1950s designer of the drawbacks of the Jet Engine and the rocket engine you have the jet engine which though slow enables you to land and take off safely you have the rocket engine its problem was a lack of fuel but you where you use up most of the fuel is take off and Landing so you're doing that with with with the Jet and you can conserve your rocket fuel for combat the British now opted for a mixed power in their new fighter the company chosen to build the aircraft was called Saunders row they were based on the English Channel Coast near Southampton where the winner of the pre-war Schneider trophy had been built this was a supermarine S6 Forerunner of the famous Spitfire fighter Saunders Rowe specialized in aircraft that could take off and land on water this included the incredible princess flying boat powered by 10 engines I was the chief flight engineer on the princess responsible for all the Machinery on board and in particular for the fuel systems the 10 engines the 10 protease engines it was very smooth indeed I mean the engines were way down the wing and they were propeller turbine so most of the cockpit noise in those days came from avionic systems all of which had rotary converters in them long before solid state so the the cockpit noise which was a bit unpleasant at times was specially generated by air conditioning and avionic systems Sanders will got into the the fighter business in a fascinating way the end of World War II Japan is still to be defeated Japan is still holding out on a whole series of Pacific Islands British design the British decided that if if they built a jet fighter they could operate off the water then they could use it to capture these islands and use these islands for bases so the British conceived this idea of a jet powered fighter flying boat and since Saunders role were good at building flying boats that's got a job it was called the sra1 or the squirt it was big for a fighter but it had um good performance it had two axial flow engines and um well-armed maneuverable it had everything in fact that you would could expect from such a design the war ended before the squirt was ready despite its ugly shape the squirt could reach high speeds of Mach 9.8 the SRA one was on its test program that's out of cars Harbor when I joined the company but it was being handled by a small Team all on its own their leader was an aeronautical design genius by the name of Morris Brennan I worked for Maurice Brennan on the design side he was the chief designer and he was a a young youngest gentleman with a lot of brains he was sometimes fairly hard work to work with but they never really meant any harm and he certainly took decisions smartly and effectively and told us what we were supposed to be doing and I think he was outstanding in his way at that time there's nobody quite like him Brennan now turned his attention to the task of building a fighter powered by a combination of rocket and Jet Motors the new Saunders row project was called the sr53 the sr53 was essentially a prototype for an effective mixed power plant Jet and Rocket fighter so the brief was can we find a a small enough jet engine that will do the job of landing and takeoff without burdening the plane when it's in rocket powered combat can we find an effective rocket motor that will work under combat conditions can we find a way of wrapping this in a a missile platform that can carry missiles that can take down the bombers so it was a test bed for an actual combat fighter the sr-53 carried two engines above was a tiny jet engine called the Viper below was a liquid-fueled rocket motor the de Havilland Specter this was the main combat power plant but the British had made a breakthrough with Specter solving the dangerous fuel problems that made the Messerschmitt Comet dangerous to fly the Specter when a rocket motor had catalysts packs in it made up of Gauls which had been silver plated and the silver turned the peroxide instantly into superheated steam and oxygen now the Germans had used the liquid Catalyst and if they had an accent of any kind and the two fluids hdp in their liquid Catalyst got together they blew the airplane up so we had a dormant catalyst system inside the engine itself and it was much safer that way than the way the Germans had done it the sr-53 had another revolutionary feature the tail surface was a Delta shape mounted high on the tail fin rather than on the sides of the aircraft I think other people were beginning to copy it as a as an invention and certainly we simply adopted it as the best technique for our airplane and went ahead with it the sr-53 weighed nearly 7 000 kilos and the tiny wings spend 8 meters it was armed only with missiles two to have a land fire streak infrared guided air-to-air missiles on the wingtips the sr53 was one of the first of the 50s and 60s generation of aircraft that dispensed with guns it was all misalarmed the Prototype sr-53 serial number xd-145 was first flown on the 16th of May 1957. we were all getting ready to go to the Farber show in 57 I think it was and we obviously had a lot of pressure on us politically to get something done so we produce the airplane fairly quickly with only two tanks of HTP and um John Booth was the test part of the day and he made a very very successful first flight out of boscom down he was Landing back on um using the Viper of course for the approach and Landing and so everything functions superbly on day one but events in Russia were now to play a part by the mid-1950s Western intelligence was reporting that the Soviets were working on a new generation of high-flying SuperSonic bombers aircraft that could reach an altitude of 16 kilometers or twice the height of Mount Everest and Crews at Mach 1.3 or 1 600 kilometers an hour aircraft like the mighty miasis Chev M50 NATO code name founder the existing Allied fighter projects were not capable of dealing with this development not even the sr-53 which lacked AI or interception radar to find the Russian planes the sr-53 had to sacrifice weight in order to get its phenomenal rate of climb the solution to this dilemma would become known as the sr-177 rocket fighter at the height of the cold war with Russian bombers cruising the stratosphere only the British knew how they could be shot from the skies by using the sr-177 rocket fighter well I think the sr177 was a product of Maurice Brennan's thinking because we all knew that without AI radar in the front of the airplane you couldn't hope to find the Russian sixty thousand feet so something had to be done to make the rocket powered Interceptor into a proper interceptor the sr-53 program was to continue but as a test bed for the sr-177 the new design combined the basic wing and tail designs of its lightweight predecessor with a bigger fuselage and engines the turbo jet was called the gerund Junior optimized for supersonic speeds with the reheat you had a tremendous climb performance and you could put your airplane up at 30 or 40 000 feet in its own right you could flight refuel it so you could keep it up there and then you had a rocket motor waiting to fire when you had a real genuine Target to go for so the the interception capability would have been fantastic the wings were substantially larger and Incorporated special flaps for maneuverability in combat but Saunders Rose stuck with the same Specter rocket used in the sr-53 a bigger rocket would have needed more dangerous and volatile fuels the sr-177 was commissioned essentially as a bigger sr53 an aircraft that had all the control abilities and speed of the sr-53 but could carry enough fuel to make it a serious Contender when it came to combat it had a jet engine but uh by this time the late 50s it was it was a quite a powerful jet engine to allow it to take off and land conventionally and it also had the big rocket motor they would allow it to zoom to altitude very quickly main thing was that it had full radar interception capability it had flight refueling for the kerosene system and was therefore capable of being put up and kept up until it was wanted so it had vastly more flexibility and interception capability in West Germany the newly reconstituted luftwaffe whose officers and leaders had fought against the RAF and allies in World War II now had other priorities how to meet and counter the threat of Soviet bombers and fighter bases that were only a few minutes away in East Germany interceptors taking off would only have seconds to shoot down the attacking Soviet aircraft so the decision was taken West Germany would buy the SR 177 rocket fighter the Germans certainly were very interested in it and a very senior member of their German air force came to Boston down and actually sat in the sr-53 in the hangar and I was explaining to him how it worked and we pointed out to him that he was sitting in an airplane which at that time was ready to fly because it was full of peroxide Germany began negotiations to build its own version of the sr-177 the German company chosen to manufacture it was heinkel manufacturer of the World War II he-111 bomber but the heinkel company had also built the world's first rocket-powered aircraft the he-176 in 1939 with the prospect that the sr-177 could equip much of NATO the United States backed the development of the program with funding there was a thing called the mutual weapons development program mwdp and unknown to most of us the Americans were putting quite a lot of money into British airplanes and it was on it was not unusual for them to be asked to put some money into something as advanced as the 177. by 1957 70 of the production tooling was in place to manufacture the first sr-177 the Prototype of the sr177 was actually being constructed at cars and we already had a full-scale mock-up of the airplane so we were fairly well committed to proceeding with the design the first flight was planned for the spring of 1958. the production version would be 16 meters long maximum speeds would be Mach 2.35 and it was planned to put the sr-177 into service in 1960. meanwhile the sr-53 program continued as a way of gathering experience in rocket fighter combat but storm clouds were gathering over the British rocket fighter suddenly Britain was about to discover she was no longer a major power in 1956 Britain along with France and Israel invaded Suez in an attempt to recapture the canal from the Egyptians the result was a diplomatic disaster Soviet Premier Khrushchev made veiled threats of nuclear war while America's president Eisenhower Britain's old wartime Ally made moves to cut off economic and military aid the debacle had a dire effect on the sr-177 program in the Suez Crisis aftermath Britain's defense secretary Duncan Sands had tough choices to make as he plans Britain's new defense strategy the country was broke and could not afford its military upkeep let alone expensive and exotic new warplanes after the 1957 launch of Sputnik the world was now under possible threat from nuclear missiles the result was a 1957 white paper garrisons would be closed around the world in battleships scrapped as Britain based its defense on nuclear weapons also pilots and planes would be replaced by surface-to-air missiles such as the Bloodhound with a sense policy I think had the inevitable reaction of lowering them allow off the pilots operational Pilots considerably what I've seen a missiles there that reliability um particularly in the time scale we're talking of left quite a bit to be desired and uh that certainly worried me about the whole thing I thought really this is um this is no way to replace the Pilot's BrainPOP with a computer guided mission in 1957 it seemed as though the sr-177 rocket fighter would never fly however the British royal Navy now came to its defense to protect its new carriers well the Navy took an interest in Rocking power and not so much as a pure rocket airplane in the sense that the me163 was but if if you like as a combat booster power booster to give you the extra speed when you need it the order for the naval version of the sr-177 was renewed and 18 prototypes were ordered and there were other possible markets the sr-77 was still ideal for fledging luftwaffe in Germany they were very interested I think they were a surprise that we had got so far as we had and they were obviously presumably involved with the NATO concept of the Russians so we all needed the same sort of interception performance to keep the Russians out of the ACT the British now approached the US government for special need of cash to develop the aircraft and build the first prototypes the sr-177 might still fly but now the sr-177 faced a new phone it was an American aircraft called the missile with a man in it and it would be a duel to the death the competition was heating up and things were getting more and more uncertain for the sr-177 at stake was the chance to replace the huge numbers of Aging saber and thunderstreak aircraft whoever got this job would make a killing but who would win this lucrative prize Saunders row or the latecomer Lockheed the principal competitor to any European aircraft fulfilling the rule as NATO's main Interceptor fighter was the Lockheed f-104 Starfighter the Starfighter had its origin in a November 1952 unsolicited proposal by lockheed's Clarence l Kelly Johnson for a lightweight and relatively unsophisticated air superiority fighter but the Lockheed Starfighter was not really well suited to the needs of the U.S Air Force it had a short range and its stubby Wings could carry little in the way of bombs and missiles in addition the Starfighter lacked true all-weather capability which made it incapable of operating in conjunction with America's defensive radar system one of the great Curiosities of the whole Starfighter story is that the United States Air Force didn't want it they didn't like it because it it ridden for the ability didn't have range it didn't carry enough almond it didn't uh it didn't carry the radar they wanted so Lockheed suddenly found itself a product they couldn't sell in America the American Air Force preferred the Delta winged convair f-102 and f-106 Fighters designed with the help from none other than Dr Alexander lippish inventor of the me163 comet by the late 1950s the Lockheed Starfighter seemed doomed to be only a relatively minor footnote in the history of military Aviation A desperate Lockheed now offered the Starfighter to West Germany and nato in competition with the sr-177 this was a paper project called the f-104g G standing for Germany but to suit the Germans longeed were forced to promise to radically modify the f-104 it ought to make the Starfighter suitable for European conditions Lockheed had to do lots of things that actually detracted from all the original advantages the aircraft had they had to put more fuel in which made it heavier uh which made it more difficult to control they had to put in a very complex all-weather radar so they could see where it was going in the end the thing becomes heavy complicated and that makes it dangerous to fly it had very high wing loadings and consequently they had very high stalling speeds and other problems but it wasn't in the same league table as a rocket powered airplane when it came to a high altitude interceptions the first sign that the Americans were going to play hardball over the orders for the new NATO joint Fighters was when they refused the British request for funds to build the sr-177 prototypes they wanted to get rid of any competitors for the Starfighter with the loss of American Funding the British now canceled the vital orders for the sr-177 for the Royal Navy but Saunders row struggled to keep their rocket fighter idea alive on the 15th of May 1958 in sr-53 went supersonic for the first time proving the bigger sr-177 was still a contender for the deal of the century we used to go supersonic out of boscom down in the direction of Bournemouth lime Bay and we were usually Supersonic in the climb all the way up and I seem to remember a figure of rate of climb of 45 000 feet a minute yet five months later on November 6th 1958 came a shock the Lockheed Starfighter was declared the winner of the NATO contest the announcement was made by the German Federal defense minister Franz Joseph Strauss in on even in Germany experts were surprised I was trading the German Naval Air arm in Germany at the time when they decided they needed a change of aircraft and the aircraft chosen by the luftwaffe was the f-104 and for the state sake of standardization it was imposed on the 70 Valero I certainly did not believe that was the right aircraft for them despite this Germany ordered 66 f-104s from Lockheed and made plans to build 210 more in Germany itself other NATO Nations followed to eventually produce 1 700 starfighters Lockheed had made a fortune the details of which would not come out for another 20 years after the Watergate scandal of the 1970s and the downfall of Richard Nixon there were major Congressional investigations into illegal campaign funds to Nixon and at that point it transpired that Lockheed had indeed over the years been offering bribes to local politicians in Europe and in Japan to buy their aircraft so I think the inference must be that the Starfighter ended up as the major NATO Fighter for reasons other than its technical capabilities Lockheed admitted that over time it had paid out some 22 million US dollars in sales commissions to bribe foreign government officials to buy its aircraft this included bribes paid out to officials in West Germany the resulting Fallout led to President Jimmy Carter passing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on December the 19th 1977. but the consequences were not limited to Mere politics in the uncertain days of the Cold War the unlikely winner in the competition to re-arm NATO's Air Forces was the Lockheed f-104 Starfighter aside from future allegations and admissions of bribery and Corruption the decision to buy the f-104 was marred by real human tragedy resulting in disaster 270 Luft Buffet planes lost in 110 Pilots killed it proved to be an extraordinarily difficult aircraft to fly and literally the majority of aircraft the Germans bought literally the majority of f-104s crashed in service because the young pilot simply found them too difficult to fly with the unbearable numbers of young luftwaffe Pilots dying in starfighters the Germans government's decision to buy the f-104 was called into question however criticisms were not tolerated and to silence opponents dissenting voices were removed from office it is not an easy airplane for an experienced pilot in bad weather and it's even more of a handful if you have an emergency and you have bad weather and everything combined it can be a real handful a big workload and of course the inevitable happen there is one last secret about the German rocket fighter having canceled the sr-177 and bought all the Jetstar Fighter the lift buffet was still worried about the possible vulnerability to its airfields to warsaw-packed attacks in a contract from the Luft buffer Lockheed was instructed to carry out secret tests with the Starfighter launched by a rocket booster Starfighter was modified for a series of launch tests in 1963 at Edwards Air Force Base in California with the end of the dream of the SR 177 the British made one last effort to keep their rocket blame program alive in America the rocket-powered Bell X-15 was now flying to the very edge of space the X-15 a linear descendant of Jaeger's X1 that first broke the sound barrier in 1947 and further back to the me-163 comet was to become the fastest aircraft that at the time had ever flown in Britain it was decided to keep the sr-53 flying and to use it for high altitude space research a British X-15 well I know that the chief designer in those days Maurice Brennan was Keen to pile on the sr-53 off the back of a valiant bomber and to launch it into space and I remember him saying that it would be the Bottom Rung of the British space program but the British space program never materialized so of course any attempts to do high altitude research with what was left of the sr-53 program never happened now a fatal tragedy was to strike what was left of the British rocket plane project John Booth was flying xd-151 on the short Runway at boscom down when for whatever reason he wanted to abandon the takeoff now the takeoff speed of the 53 was about 175 knots and in those days there was no arrest again either barriers or any other form of rest again at boss come down so the airplane went off the end of the runway and down the slope he spoke quite casually over the radio that he wanted to abandon and would be extend the tractor down to collect him but of course it would prove to be fatal the sr-53 hit a row of telegraph poles killing Booth instantly after the crash the sr-53 test program was shut down the rocket fighter had flown for the last time the sr-177 was a good aircraft for its time and place had it been built and flown I think it would have done well but of course history moved on Audra jet engines in the 1960s and 1970s became much more efficient and eventually replaced the rocket engine but at the time I think it could have done well I don't think there will ever be another rocket fighter the last remaining sr53 testimony of a lost dream lies in the museum of British royal Air Force in cosford England its Big Brother the sr-177 has been forgotten by history [Music] if you enjoyed this video please remember to like And subscribe and as always thank you for watching [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

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Keywords: saunders roe sr 177, SR.177, alexander lippisch, Sr.53, me 163 komet, me 163 footage, f-104 starfighter, aviation, Rocket Engine, me 163 flying, de havilland swallow, Eric Brown, saunders roe sr 53, Kelly Johnson, Hans Multhopp, eric winkle brown, airplanes, saunders roe princess flying boat, aircraft, air force, history, documentary, documentary channel, corruption, dronescapes, Skunk Works, Lippisch, alexander lippisch secrets of flight, saunders roe princess, adKey:3-Xg6wP8wBnrop

Id: hy7yQv7Owgg

Length: 44min 52sec (2692 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023