BRITISH AIRCRAFT AN UNHAPPY BUILDING TRADITION LIVES ON

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30741, 4 May 1965, Page 16

BRITISH AIRCRAFT AN UNHAPPY BUILDING TRADITION LIVES ON

<By

"Lynceus"

of the ''Economist ")

(From the ''Economist” Intelhacnce Unit.)

The British aircraft industry has taken a beating in the last few months. Its VC-10 civil airliner has sold badly—even the State-owned airlines have tried to switch to American jets; the joint Anglo-French supersonic airliner, Concord, teetered on the edge for quite a while before being rescued by a somewhat reluctant and tentative “go-ahead”; now the TSR-2 tactical fighter-bomber has been aborted, to the accompaniment of loud weeping and wailing from the aircraft industry, the aircraft workers and the Conservative Opposition in Parliament.

This upheaval in the industry is not the first, and it is unlikely to be the last. The Government can perhaps be blamed for ordering the wrong aircraft at the wrong time on too many occasions. But the industry has only itself to blame for its excessive size. Golden Age Its golden age was the early 19505, when other countries were busily re-equipping their air forces. These forces are now up to strength and other countries have had time to rebuild their aircraft industries. The British industry has thus become increasingly dependent upon the British military and the airlines for its sales. It was this dependence that enabled Mr Duncan Sandys to force through his mergers in 1960. leading to the absorption of De Havilland and other comoanies by Hawker Siddeley and the formation of the British Aircraft Corporation out of the aircraft interests of its present three shareholders. But the main purpose of the mergers—to produce a contraction in the industry with the minimum of pain—has still not been achieved. The industry still employs as many men, 265,000, as in 1959. The fall off in military orders has gone hand in hand with the transformation of the prospects for civil aircraft—a transformation that has bedevilled aircraft manufacturing companies the world over. The aircraft are simply getting bigger and bigger and lasting longer. The capacity of the world's airlines has quadrupled in 10 years. But the number of aircraft in service has increased only from 3500 to 5400 —of which 3600 are piston-engined. Performance And Cost In the military field there has been an analogous and equally discomforting process at work: the armed services’ greed for “performance” at any price has caused expenditure and research and development to rocket to a level where the cost of each technological step forward is much more expensive than the last. As advanced military aircraft have become more and more expensive, the services have had to take fewer and fewer of them. The success of the American F-lll—lately known as TFX—owes a' good deal to the fact that it has been the first deliberate attempt to reverse this lunatic trend. It was built to a price rather than to some ideal (and probably, by the time production commenced, obsolete) performance level. The TSR was the apotheo-

sis of the other extreme: an investment of some £3OO million in research alone produced a design of undoubtedly high performance: it can be reasonably argued that in performance terms it is a far better plane than the F-11l (though the shooting-down of advanced American fighters by technologically ancient MiG’s in Vietnam raises questions about the value in combat of even moderately advanced designs). But even leaving aside its staggering price (when Australia opted out on TSR-2 the British industry must have seen the writing on the wall), it was obsolete before it was built, and not all the attempts to find another use for it could save it. Only pressure from the plane-makers has held up the necessary act of mercykilling; TSR-2 was in the unhappy tradition of the Bri-

tish aircraft Industry from Brabazon to VC-10 (the Vickers Viscount and the De Havilland Dove being conspicous exceptions). It was the plane the industry wanted to build—not the plane the customers wanted. Concord Conflict It would be nice to think that the lesson has been learned. Unfortunately, all the signs are that the greatest aircraft row of all lies ahead. The Concord is the supreme example of an aircraft being built because the builders (British and French) wanted to build it. And because of the political ramifications if for no other reason, cancellation if it ultimately proves necessary (and the odds are that it will be) will be all the more difficult —and all the more costly.