Fastship - Airbus is another shining example of how we continually get sold out.
I would hate to see how much money the British government sank into joint projects, like Concorde for example, for a foreign company to walk away with all the manufacturing rights.

I'm afraid it started long before that though. Duncan Sandy's white paper did more damage to the British aircraft industries than the Luftwaffe. The only aircraft to survive his cuts was the English Electric Lightning, which was almost at production stage, everything else was cancelled.

Most controversially was TSR2, which was well into development and was under going air trails. Costs were well over budget, however initial signs were this was a world beating aircraft.
Unfortunately, the US also had an aircraft in the same category that they wanted to sell, so we scrapped ours - literally - and paid out millions for theirs that didn't turn up for years. (F-111).
So badly was it delayed, that the Buccaneer was developed and put into production as a stop gap.
If
Another fantastic decision by our elected leaders. I wonder how much was made by who on these matters, or am I just being too cynical?

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Nope, not you who's cynical. TSR2 was an American, criminal intervention (remember them, our “friends” as Obama likes to state) in our industry and led to a massive brain drain, mostly to the US and Canada. In Canada it happened again with the AVRO Arrow. Again that advanced project was abrublty cancelled for no good reason and led to the collapse of AVRO there and virtually destroyed their advanced aerospace industry. Much of the US civil aviation industry was populated with Brits after that, even now although the B737, a fifty year old design now was largely developed into a viable aircraft by the Germans at Lufty.


The Phantom F4 was another example of this. I read the late, great Eric Brown's biography recently. Probably the greatest ever test pilot Captain Brown was instrumental in the testing and selection of the F4 for the navy and pronounced it a great aircraft, an almost unique view even in America!

The long term upshot of all this can be seen in the JSF F35 for the two new carriers; Lockheed's programme is $200 billion over budget and it's still not performing to specs but the US has a monopoly now so what can we do? Just to reiterate, that's $200,000,000,000 over budget...and no aircraft are now made in the UK. None.


I can see parallels in the commercial world with Russia's excellent, new MS-21 and China's A-320 knock-off the C-919. Both will struggle to sell globally but not because of any technical deficiencies. It's all politics.


Getting back to the issue at hand, in a free trading nation such issues may not arise, we could import from whomever, tariff free and to whomever on whatever terms they wish to damage themselves upon.


You can only fight one battle at a time. Vote Leave.

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