(Mythical) aviation history repeats itself

[major_clanger]

Having just read Damien Burke's superb new book on the TSR2, which comprehensively debunks the pervasive myth that the partly-completed airframes were dragged out and trashed as soon as possible, it's ironic to find that exactly that fate is befalling the recently-cancelled Nimrod MRA4s:

BBC: Nimrod aircraft scrapped at Stockport BAE factory

Comments

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

I hear someone or other has been pontificating that the 2012 Olympics were doomed, I tell you, doomed, because without Nimrods in the air the games would be utterly unprotected.

Sounds like a missed opportunity for the IOC to have offered to buy its own Nimrod and hire it out as security for other events such as the World Cup.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Does it by any chance shed light on the "air-launched stand-off Blue Water" 'theory' that was in the Wood book?

I was hacking the wiki article on Blue Water recently and there's some right old tosh being talked...

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

In considerable detail (pp303-308); apparently the proposal started off as a concept proposal but with no real requirement, went away (during which time Blue Water was cancelled) and then came back as a possible substitute for Skybolt. This time there was a requirement, but by now the project had been too long cancelled to restart easily.

There were two suggested carry options: semi-recessed in the bomb bay with underwing tanks, and one under each wing with the large ventral tank. Range would have been only about 100 miles, but that would probably have allowed attack from outside close defences.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

The trouble with it is that Blue Water just wasn't (in 1962) an air-launched missile.

The motor was designed with an initial high boost phase to get it off the launcher against gravity - that's a fairly easy re-design.

More seriously, the inertial guidance system was unusable for air launching. It required to be aligned when stationary, programmed for range, pointed in almost exactly the right direction (no programmability for track, just crude heading keeping), then the range control in flight was based (unlike Sergeant) on a fixed thrust with a varied trajectory to control the range. This just doesn't work for launching horizontally at altitude. Although you can make anything work if you throw enough spanners at it, Blue Water's guidance couldn't be, without turning it into a system two or three times as complex which would no longer be "Blue Water's guidance". They'd be as well starting with one of the other missiles instead - maybe the Eliott system from Blue Steel, but not Blue Water's "squaddieproof" ultra-simple system.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

This is indeed acknowledged. The earlier proposal apparently arm-waved a lot of this and so wasn't taken very seriously; also, there was no requirement for an air-launched missile because we were going to get Skybolt. The later proposal was rather more coherent but still suffered from the technical issues you mention. As Burke notes, the CEP of air-launched Blue Water was several km, which even with the largest warhead that could realistically be crammed into it - say 1 megaton - meant that it couldn't be relied on to destroy a hardened target.

[j-lj.livejournal.com]

Are any of the Nimrods being donated to a museum?

[quercus.livejournal.com]

A Nimrod is already a museum.

[non-trivial.livejournal.com]

I suspect not; even Duxford or Cosford would have real trouble storing one.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

It seems like wasteful madness to me, but then so is much defence procurement.

[non-trivial.livejournal.com]

What's Burke's take on the TSR2 itself? World-beater, over-ambitious white elephant, or somthing in-bewteen?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I'll do a more detailed review later, but in short: staggering technical achievement hobbled by crippling development problems and built to a ludicrously ambitious spec that, by the end, even the RAF didn't really feel appropriate. It was a year late and getting later, and its cost had gone through the roof just as a new government discovered that it had inherited a financial deficit from hell.

My impression is that if GOR.339 had been a little less extravagant (no Mach 2 requirement; accept external fuel carriage) the RAF might have ended up with something like the afterburning-Spey Buccaneer, or the strike variant of the P.1121 (although that would have required the 1957 Sandys defence review to have been less predicated on abolishing manned aircraft.) In fact, what the RAF really needed was something similar to the F-105, and it's very interesting to see how Vickers' 571 (light) proposal for GOR.339 bears a remarkable resemblance in appearance and specifications to the Thud.