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Letting off steam. You don't have to like it or agree with it, it is written for my benefit and no one else's. Feel free to add comments if you choose. There will be no moderation. If you choose to post personal attacks, I may well leave them there, so that the bile can fester in the sunshine of my approval, as I regard it from the vantage point of the moral highground.
10 comments:
Yes, very impressive, especially when you consider there are no flight control systems flying the thing.
Just think, they were building the Vulcan less than a decade after the Lancaster: if only we had been able to carry on building aircraft instead of being stifled by the Government at the time, who knows what would be flying now.
Yeah, it's astounding, the EE Lightning was on the drawing board in 1947 and so was this! Over 60 years ago. Fucking politicians, oxygen thieves the lot of them.
I saw one of these at RAF Coningsby in the late 70s. It took off almost vertically and looped the loop before going on its merry way. At the top of the loop, the engine noise just disappeared...scared the shit out of me.
Wonderful aircraft.
It was the Yanks who made the government of the day destroy our aircraft industry.
I have, somewhere in my collection, a video I took during its 1993 "farewell flight", never expecting to see it airborne again. I rarely give to charity, but this organisation has received a donation from me this year. Money well spent.
“It was the Yanks who made the government of the day destroy our aircraft industry.”
I really can’t agree with that statement the fact is that by the mid 1960’s Britain was a total economic basket case in steep decline and in the final process of Colonial withdrawal. These aircraft development programs required millions of pounds worth of investment that a small and declining European country with a failing economy simply couldn’t afford. Yes we undoubtedly had some of the best aviation engineers in the business and it was a tragedy that these programs were cancelled but the British Government was confronting repeated balance of payment and currency crises and had simply run out of money. The similar sized West Germany had by 1970 an economy with twice the GDP of the United Kingdom. Many of these BAC engineers joined the brain drain and left for the US aircraft industry in California getting jobs at Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas where they never looked back. They all went to jobs with a better salary, much bigger development budget and nicer weather.
The sixties and Seventies contained a severe lack of stratiegic thinking in politics.
We were at the top of our game in aviation, then the Government decided guided missiles were the future.
We invested in rocket technology and had some of the lowest cost, most reliable systems in the world and the finance was pulled just before the satellite revolution took place, needing... you guessed it, low cost, highly reliable delivery systems.
Never rely on a politician to predict the future, thats for sure.
The americans shafted us in the late 40's and 50's. By the 60's it was too late. Give us your know how or you can forget any marshall aid. Cunts.
Yeah, America shafted us after the warm then Europe started doing it in the Seventies and is still at it.
We don't half pick our "partners" don't we?
Maybe our politicians love abusive relationships? Must be all of that corporal punishment when they were kids....
I remember going to a 'Navy Day' on Portland, during a family holiday to Weymouth in 1981, and one of these was part of the air display.
Awesome aircraft, really quite breathtaking to behold - like a huge bat.
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