Books: Empire of the Clouds

[major_clanger]

Empire of the Clouds: When Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World


I have a confession to make: it seems that I have something in common with Margaret Thatcher. She apparently chose Telstar as one of her Desert Island Discs, and whatever else I might not agree with the Iron Lady on, I'd back her on that. But for me it is, despite its self-consciously futuristic mood, an incredibly nostalgic piece. Rather oddly so, because what it makes me nostalgic for is an era that was over nearly half a decade before I was born. You see, I cannot hear Telstar without it conjuring up black-and-white newsreel images of 1950s British aircraft displaying at Farnborough, of RAF Lightnings and Vulcans streaking overhead, and of Blue Streak thundering into the sky over Woomera. Yes, my nostalgia is for the glory days of post-War British aviation, despite being born a generation too late to have experienced it. How must it have felt to have been a young aviation enthusiast at the time?

Well, we don't need to wonder, because James Hamilton-Paterson was one, and describes the era in intense, almost poetic detail in Empire of the Clouds. (This was the first I'd heard of him, but on digging a little it turns out that he is a well-regarded if reclusive novelist; on the strength of his writing in this, I may have to search out some of his fiction.) As a book about the sheer joy and excitement of aviation it is a delight, but as well as the author's recollections of his obsession with the aircraft and test pilots of the 1950s - household names of the day - it is also an excellent at at times very critical history of how the British aviation industry went from a world leader in the 1940s into a shrunken vestige of itself by the 1960s.

Among aviation geeks - a tribe I count myself as a member of - there's a popular myth of how an innovative and dynamic British aircraft industry was mismanaged to ruin by short-sighted, technically ignorant mandarins and self-serving politicians. Exhibit A in this story is always the TSR.2, cancelled by the incoming Labour Government in 1964 at the behest of the Treasury / the Navy / the Americans (pick your villain) when it could have been a world-beating strike aircraft. But Hamilton-Paterson, whilst pulling no punches on the almost vindictive manner of the TSR.2's cancellation (with plans being burned and production jigs wrecked, so as to preclude any risk of the project being restarted) is also frank about the aircraft's problems. It was late to first flight because of chronic mismanagement arising from little more than personal grudges between heads of the still-fragmented aircraft industry, and was not, he suggests, quite the wonder plane it's usually made out to be. Its small wing, intended to allow fast, low-level flight, actually gave even the lightweight prototypes a poor takeoff performance; Hamilton-Paterson points out that pictures of the TSR.2 taking off look very dynamic, but the very nose-high flight angle was due to the poor lift offered by the limited wing. A fully-operational version, he suggests, might have had dismal takeoff performance and been rather hairy to land.

(When I was in the RAF a colleague recounted a conversation from way back with an engineer who'd been involved with TSR.2, and had reckoned that it's incredibly complex but pre-solid-state avionics would in practice have been a maintenance nightmare, and that it might never have entered reliable service, at least without a major update. Putting that together with Hamilton-Paterson's comments it is hard to avoid the feeling that some of the contemporary criticisms of the TSR.2 may have been well-founded).

But similar problems are noted for other aircraft. In the early 1950s in particular many aircraft were rushed into production when really little more than prototypes, and whilst this may have been forgiveable in wartime (the Gloster Meteor was a deathtrap for years, and was never entirely purged of its vices) it was less so for aircraft such as the Javelin (unstable), Lightning (unreliable, underarmed and fuel-thirsty), the Hunter (very pretty but would suffer engine flameout if it fired its guns in early versions) and of course the Comet airliner, which had to crash several times before its design faults were noted.

In large part, Hamilton-Paterson puts this down to the refusal of governments to force the industry to rationalise. The merger of classic names such as Avro, Handley Page and so on into BAC and eventually British Aerospace is often decried, but Hamilton-Paterson argues it came too late, so that the 1950s was full of half-finished prototypes put together by design teams that often lacked the breadth of skill to tackle the barely-understood complexities of supersonic aircraft design. (As another author commented on the Victor / Valiant / Vulcan V-Bomber force, it seemed as if the Air Ministry forgot that the original plan had been to pick just one.)

Empire of the Clouds is at times anecdotal, and although each chapter is heavily referenced I couldn't help but note that some of the more spectacular stories are conspicuously devoid of acknowledgement - meaning, I suspect, that they owe more to the Officers' Mess Bar than they do to flight logbooks. But this isn't a technical history; it's a social one, reminding me of nothing so much as Francis Spufford's Backroom Boys, or Harry Pearson's hilarious memoir of wargaming Achtung Schweinehund. For anyone fascinated by the shiny silver aerial exotica of the 1950s, this book is a must.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

TSR.2's electronics (by count of active devices) were largely solid state (the new complex stuff anyway) and were a really innovative hybrid developed by Elliott. I've got a chunk of it somewhere - and I do literally mean "chunk". Radios and the square plumbing were still valve, just because that's what the standard boxes were.

Also Blue Steel didn't fly over Woomera until '64 - I'm (just) older than it.

Ordered, as I loved Spufford (looking forward to Red Plenty), but it's going to be a paperback unless someone wants to buy me one for Crimble.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

In terms of dates, yes, I'm generalising a bit. In particular, for space and missiles it was perhaps a decade or so later overall than from aircraft - from the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, rather than 1945-1964. I used 1964 as an endpoint because of the huge spending review that cut so many major projects at the time, but when you look at them most were ripe for the chop:

P.1154 - Mach 2 VTOL multi-role fighter literally decades ahead of its time (it's proving enough fun making the F-35 work now). It could never have worked and the decision to convert the subsonic technology demonstrator P.1127 into the Harrier was very much a better option.

HS.681 - V/STOL tactical airlifter? As Hamilton-Paterson notes, someone had been watching too much Gerry Anderson (although again the dates are wrong; perhaps someone had been reading too much Dan Dare). 46 years later and the V-22 is the closest we're likely to get to this, and that's had the development history from Hell.

As for the TSR.2's avionics, yes, they used discrete component solid-state components, but in comparison with later IC-based systems they would have required a lot of maintenance. Indeed the RAF expected this, and the technical training system set up in the early 1960s anticipated the sheer complexity of the TSR.2. One of my instructors when I did my RAF engineer officer course had himself been an apprentice then, and had done a five year apprenticeship from which he'd graduated as an instant sergeant; this was apparently a special elite scheme set up expressly with the intent of providing crew chiefs to coordinate the vast amount of in-depth maintenance that the TSR.2 was expected to require. As it happened by the time such sophisticated avionics did enter service, on the Jaguar and then Tornado, it used modularised line-replaceable units, with much squadron-based maintenance consisting of box-swapping. Indeed, not long before I left the RAF it abolished the rank of junior technician, on the basis that there was no justification for having a specialist technical rank at that level any more.

[zotz]

Did you ever read The Baroque Arsenal? There only seems to have been one edition, in 1980, so it's a bit long in the tooth now, but it had a lot to say about complexity and reliability in military systems.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Have you read Nevil Shute's fiction? I feel that same love of aircraft radiating from his books.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

No Highway a good while back. Hamilton-Paterson refers to it, commenting on how prescient Shute was; it came out about four years before the Comet crashes (although metal fatigue doesn't work quite the way Shute depicts it).

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Did anyone else catch No Highway in two weekend slots on Radio 4 recently?

I'm a big fan of Shute. Not the greatest or most flexible of novelists, but he's like reading Tom Rolt with a storyline.

[cobrabay.livejournal.com]

This sounds like my kind of book, thanks for the review.

[hano.livejournal.com]

You can trace the demise of TSR2 back to the Whitehall civil war being waged between the Navy and RAF over the period. There already was an aircraft fulfilled 90% of the requirement filled by TSR2, the Blackburn Buccaneer. Thing is, seeing as it was a Navy plane, the RAF wouldn't touch it. Or as Adm Hill-Norton put it:

"we said to the RAF 'Why don't you have the Buccaneer'. 'oh well we couldn't have a dark blue aeroplane, the service would go raving mad.' of course in the end they had to take it and it was five years too late. If they'd taken it (then) and modified it for land operations they'd... have been in a very strong position to have a new aeroplane about ten years later, the early seventies. Relations were so bad they wouldn't take it for one reason and that was because it was painted dark blue.
At the time of course they were still smarting because they hadn't got Polaris. So they were damned if they were going to have it (Buccaneer) and the fucking Navy could go to Hell."*

In other words, TSR2 should never really have got off the starting blocks in the first place. That, and by early 65, costs per unit had risen such that they could only afford around 50 aircraft making it virtually too expensive to deploy in an actual war, which does rather defeat the ultimate purpose of a combat aircraft.
I'm guessing that not all the advanced research into avionics etc was junked and was recycled into other projects. For example, didn't a lot of the electronics know how,not necessarily the hardware, for TSR2, especially things around terrain following radars and such like, end up in the Tornado?

Regarding the V-Bombers and the procurement of all three types, wasn't that because they wanted to keep all three manufacturers in business? It's an interesting 'What if?'. Suppose the Air Ministry decide to procure just one of the three which would they have chosen? I'm guessing they'd have gone for the Victors given its more sophisticated design and larger bomb load. Which would have made sense in the late 50s but caused a lot of problems when they switch to low level bombing profiles around 196t8, iirc the Vulcan was much better suited to the role, hence the Vulcans switched and the Victors were converted to tankers. Still its an intriguing possibility though. Imagine that rather than buying over 300 hundred assorted V-Bombers, they instead buy 300 Victors**. Certainly sorts out any tanker issues till the 90s. Given that some were converted for long range maritime reconnaissance and strike, would a the availability of large numbers of Victor airframes suitable for conversion obviate the need for the Nimrod procurement of the early 70s?


*Edward Pearce - Denis Healey - A Life In Our Times - Little, Brown 2002, p267-268. Adm Peter Hill Norton, interviewed by author c.2000

** Of course buying 300 doesn't mean 300 in front line operational service. A number would be used for training, aircraft development and weapons testing, and a number would be in storage as an attrition reserve. Quite what the actual numbers break down as i couldn't tell you, can anyone shed light on that?

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Does anyone think there would still have been three V bombers if they'd been ordered a fewe years later, and into the BAC period?

My best read lately was an old find of Gunston's "Attack Aircraft of the West". A chapter each on the usual suspects (Yanks too), up to the MRCA (published '74). Even for Gunston this was particularly good stuff. Rather than the usual techie analysis, it's more about the politics behind each project. I particularly enjoyed the AFVG, as there's so little otherwise discussed on that.

TSR.2 vs. Bucc is a non-starter. First of all, the Australian mission requirements were always a huge driver for the TSR.2 and it had range that a Bucc could never dream of. Mostly though, which Bucc are we talking about? The Gyron Junior was a slimline version that was barely capable of doing the Bucc's role (and we were well rid of it), we just can't compare the '60s TSR.2 to what the Speyed Bucc finally achieved in the early '90s.

[non-trivial.livejournal.com]

3-and-a-half V-bombers if you count the Sperrin...

It made sense to order the Valiant as a back-up (and indeed it was in service a couple of years before the other types), but the decision to order both Victor and Vulcan seems a little extravagant in hindsight. I've not read enough of the literature on post-war procurement, but from what I've seen Korea and the consequent hotting up of the cold war led to a big expansion of (or rather the retention and re-commissioning of) UK military-industrial capacity, even though the country couldn't really afford it. Ordering 3 V-bombers was perhaps related to a retention of industrial capacity along the lines of the interwar Air Ministry 'ring' procurement system.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

The Buccaneer didn't do what the RAF wanted, i.e. meet GOR.339. But was GOR.339 what the RAF needed? Although this wasn't one of those procurements where the Air Ministry wrote the spec around a favoured prototype, I rather suspect that GOR.339 was written on the basis of what was fashionable in the late 1950s, e.g. specifying an aircraft with less that Mach 2 performance was unthinkable.

With hindsight (a wonderful thing) a dedicated RAF 'Super Bucc' with reheated Speys, better avionics and a thinner wing would have given the RAF the capability it needed - as distinct from dreamed of - and might well have stayed in service even longer than the Buccaneer S.2 did.

As for V-bombers, it's possible that the Valiant B.2 might have fulfilled the entire requirement. Certainly, when the V-force shifted to low-level tactics it would have been in its element.

[non-trivial.livejournal.com]

I heard an interview with the author on Radio 4 a while back and immediately put the book on my wish-list; I may now have to move it up in priority...

Have you read any of (Imperial historian of technology) David Edgerton's stuff? His _England and the Aeroplane_ is available online (he released it for free after it went out of print) and his _Warfare State_ is good on the wider context of lavish military support for R&D up until the late 70s.