Give any British aircraft enthusiast enough lager and they’ll inevitably start rambling on about how Harold Wilson killed an awesome 1960s aircraft and destroyed Britain’s aircraft industry and they’ll probably bring up the CIA yada yada yada. To kind of understand what they’re talking about, we need to learn the history of the ill fated BAC TSR-2.
Throughout the Cold War, the consensus among military planners was that the most likely way World War 3 would start was with a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. This was confirmed in 2005 when the Polish Government declassified an operation called Seven Days to the River Rhine, which is exactly what it sounds like. It was believed that given the overwhelming number of Soviet tanks, the only way for NATO forces to fight back was with nuclear weapons (if this sounds familiar, it’s because an entire James Bond movie used it as its plot).
For a while, it seemed like Britain had the necessary planes to perform such a role. Stuff like the English Electric Canberra, and the V bombers would’ve been able to lob numerous nuclear strikes on advancing Communist forces if such a war broke out at any point in the 1950s. But there was a looming threat of Surface to Air Missiles which would be able to threaten any aircraft no matter how high or fast it flew, a point made clear with the U-2 incident. Now what was needed was to fly at very low altitudes to reduce radar detection thanks to clutter.
With all this in mind, in November 1956, the Royal Air Force issued GOR.339. It was a solicitation for a new tactical aircraft. The requirements were very ambitious. It called for:
-An ability to cruise at Mach 1.2 in low altitude flight, or Mach 2 in high altitude
-Capabilities for STOL (short takeoff and landing) as it was assumed that airfields would be destroyed in the opening days of World War 3 and therefore a wider variety of surfaces would be needed for takeoff.
As early as 1957, the project was in trouble. The Suez crisis the year before made clear that Britain was an empire with no clothes and would be forced to scale back her military. In November 1957, Defense Minister Duncan Sandys presented a white paper that called for enormous changes. Britain’s air force was to scaled back as missiles would replace planes. It also urged Britain’s aircraft industry to merge.
There was also the problem of inter-service rivalry. The Royal Navy was working on a new tactical aircraft called the Blackburn Buccanneer. Blackburn offered to build a version for the Air Force and the RN urged Whitehall to do just that and kill GOR.339.
However, the RAF won these two battles noting that missiles did not provide the mobility of planes and that the Buccanneer had a poor radius of action.
Many aircraft companies entered with their own proposals before the January 1958 deadline. Under Parliamentary pressure, the RAF worked to combine these many proposals together. The project became official in February 1959 as OR 343 with the contract being issued jointly to Vickers Armstrong and English Electric. This was a more specific specification than GOR.339, stating that “low level” meant 200 feet of altitude and that a high altitude speed of Mach 2 should’ve been possible. The plane was granted the name TSR-2 or Tactical Strike and Reconnaissance Mach 2.
In 1960, English Electric, Vickers Armstrong, along with Bristol and Hunting, were merged into the British Aircraft Corporation. This was supposed to cut costs and like some other government pushed mergers, did not work so well. But now the TSR-2 was being designed by one company and it looked like things were going well.
But soon the plane was subject to more hurdles. In July 1962, the Defense Ministry limited all of Britain’s tactical nuclear weapons to 10 kilotons. This meant the TSR-2 would need to carry 4 WE.177As bombs, 2 in the bomb bay and 2 on the wings. The aerodynamic heat from the extreme speed would damage the external bombs and be an engineering problem.
The TSR-2 was falling behind schedule and its costs were spiralling upwards. The Labour Party attacked the ruling Conservatives for what they considered to be a wasteful boondoggle. More problems came, in February 1964, a TSR-2 engine being tested in a Vulcan bomber blew up after its shaft fractured. In July, another engine blew up on a test stand. There were also troubles with the landing gear. They were desperate to get the plane flying before the election where Labour, led by Harold Wilson, was expected to win. On September 27, 1964:
And so on September 27, 1964, Beamont taxied the prototype out to Runway 24 at Boscombe Down. With explosion-prone engines, landing gear that wouldn’t properly retract, an inoperative automatic fuel balancing system, unusable wing fuel tanks, and only partially functioning air brakes—and without automatic flight control and auto-stabilization systems—Beamont took off. “I felt we could cope with anything,” he later wrote in Phoenix Into Ashes, “except perhaps a disintegrating LP shaft.”
Fortunately, the LP shafts held together for the required two minutes, and Beamont made two wide circuits of the field with gear down at 7,000 feet, pronouncing the handling qualities “marvelous.” But immediately upon touchdown, a jackhammer vibration in the landing gear so disoriented him that he nearly lost control. Luckily, after a few seconds the vibration stopped, allowing Beamont to pop the drag chute and bring the airplane to a safe stop. Total flight time: 14 minutes.
By this point though, Mr. Wilson had become Britain’s Prime Minister. He and his Defense Minister Denis Healy were very interested in purchasing the American F-111. Their reasons to doubt the TSR-2 were furthered on December 31, 1964 when, in flight testing, the plane vibrated so violently that its pilot had his vision blurred. The engine vibrations turned out to be a case of a faulty fuel pump, but they still couldn’t solve the landing gear problem.
In October 1964, the RAF commissioned a report critical of the TSR-2, noting its high costs and limited payload and range. The plane seemed doomed. On April 6, 1965, the day a plane was scheduled to fly, the TSR-2 was officially cancelled. The prototypes were all destroyed.
In 1967, RAF put in an order for 50 F-111K Aardvarks. But the Aardvark ran into its own problems (see Major Kong’s diary) and with the devaluation of the pound, it became too expensive. The order was cancelled in 1968.
The RAF eventually settled on 2 aircraft to do what the TSR-2 was supposed to do: the aforementioned Blackburn Buccaneer and the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom. They generally did well.
Back to the TSR-2. The destruction of the prototypes led to conspiracy theories that Wilson, in cahoots with the Americans, was purposely destroying Britain’s aircraft industry so it wouldn’t pose a threat to America’s. But the plane was fundamentally flawed from the start and would’ve been made obsolete by much more capable aircraft. And the cancellation eventually led to the Panavia Tornado, a plane that offered the TSR-2’s speed but was much more versatile. 992 have been built and served well with the German, Italian, and British Air Forces. The TSR-2 was a plane designed for an extremely specific role and wouldn’t have been very good in places like the Gulf War or the bombing of Serbia. But let’s not let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.