COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

CHAPTER THIRTEEN FRONTIERS OF WHAT?
"Safety height!"
They all pulled up, and the others returned to base, but Johnny
Baldwin was never seen again.
We flew back to a country which was about to put a Labour
Government into power, with disastrous consequences for the RAF
and the aircraft industry. By the turn of the year the Hawker 1154 and
681 VSTOL freighter had gone. The latter to be replaced by the
American C130 Hercules. The RAF and Royal Navy were to have
Phantoms. Only the Harrier and TSR2 remained. And the TSR2 - well
on the way to production - would be cancelled too in a matter of
weeks.
And this was the Government which, in its own words, would
work in partnership with industry, and help to generate the white heat
of technological change. At first sight, perhaps, that was why Harold
Wilson and his merry axemen - unable to see the wood for the trees -
continued with Concorde, that most profligate of all white elephants.
But the truth is that the Labour Government did try to axe it. The
French went to the International Court at the Hague, armed with the
treaty, and proved that to do so was illegal. Concorde was saved.
The tragedy was much worse than it seemed at the time. Hidden
behind all the visible politics a violent battle had raged within the
Ministry before the project got under way. Headquarters wanted the
available resources to be concentrated on the development of a big
subsonic twin. RAE, mesmerised by the 'frontiers of technology' stuff,
wanted Concorde. And it was the RAE that won.
Back in 1961, at the Cranfield Society Annual Symposium, Tony
Lucking presented a paper on the Supersonic Transport. Consultant
from my Hunting days, and a founder member of the Air Transport
Users Association - Tony painted an unmistakable picture of the
fallacies of Concorde. Based on the resources needed on earlier
projects he showed that an SST would drain the industry of all its civil
aircraft design and engineering capacity.
So we lost an all British Airbus, which could have been around
years earlier and - apart from the BAe 146 and some major
subcontract work for Airbus Industrie, for which the Government can
take no credit at all - virtually abdicated from the civil scene.
Yet, in spite of all the evidence, I remain ambivalent about
Concorde. To the market orientated General Manager it remains a
disaster. But the pilot romantic in me is deeply moved by its elegance
and the level of aeronautical achievement which it represents. And,
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