Alternative single fighter for UK in 1960s

Unless Shorts negotiate a production licence. Then it becomes a British built aircraft designed in the US.

What's the point of that, its not as if the British can't design aircraft in 1960? In fact aircraft designed in Britain take into account British production techniques and capabilities, which are different from American ones.
 
The Spey Twosader would have been able to tap into the big US and small French Crusader support systems. The Crusader III would be a British only plane made in the USA, not ideal from the fleet ownership perspective.
The US/UK might team up to sell both the Short/Spey Crusader and Crusader III to 3d nations. Sales might be helped because you'd might have the UK and US governments pushing the sales. Certainly, the Crusader III wouldn't be any harder to sell than the EE Lightning.
 
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The design's already mostly done so it saves time and development costs. It just needs adapting to British needs.
"Just"

R&D for adapting Phantom to take the Spey engine was at least £75 million. That doesn't include for any of the other changes or the impact on manufacturing costs. For comparison a standard Phantom was estimated at £1.5 million to buy.

It will be cheaper to just design and build a UK design than attempt to adapt an existing one. It always is.
 

MatthewB

Banned
Licence-build the Grumman F-11F Tiger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F-11_Tiger.

Handicapped by its weak Wright J-65 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_J65 in version bought by the US Navy, Britain has the advantage of the vastly superior original version of the end the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Siddeley_Sapphire.

You then trade in 10500 lbs thrust for 12390 lbs thrust and likely Mach 2 performance.

Compact enough to fit on British carriers(might sell some to the French too) and useful to the RAF as well.
The F-11 Super Tiger is one of my favourite What'If carrier fighters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F11F-1F_Super_Tiger

Add radar and Sparrows and you've got a compact, supersonic fleet defence fighter.
 

Khanzeer

Banned
guys what about the F-101 voodoo ? it was a decent fighter/nuclear strike for the 60s and could be license produced in the UK
 
Can the RAF and FAA standardise on a single multi-role fighter-bomber in the early 1960s? Rather than Lightning, Javelins, Sea Vixen, Hunter, Scimitar, Swift etc.
Well the obvious choice would seem to be F-4 since it served with both of them and IIRC, excluding the Hunter in its training role, replaced most of them in their duties. That would of course do rather a number on the UK aviation industry's capabilities plus make something of a dent in the balance of payments even with licensed production.


P.1121 would have been a British F-4 in the right timeframe.
Several of the books I've read on it seemed to place it closer to the F-105 than the F-4.


The Avon should be an easy replacement for the J-57 (Avon has a marginally smaller diameter so you shouldn't have the problem you had with the Spey in the F-4).
Didn't Rolls-Royce have an unbuilt proposal for a turbofan Avon replacement, can't remember if it was a clean sheet development or evolution, that had roughly the same dimensions so that it could drop in? I'd have to dig up the specifications to see how it compares to the Avon and both of them to the Spey as when it comes to interceptors and carrier aircraft that's fairly vital.


However it is within the capability of the British aviation industry to build something akin to the Phantom in the 1960s...
I can remember seeing plans for a later development of the Scimitar which had twin seating that looked incredibly similar to the Phantom, not wholly surprising since physics operates the same in both sides of the Atlantic. I can't say whether it was a genuine Supermarine proposal of a modern aviation enthusiast one, and am currently posting via mobile do can't go searching.


Whatever for? It's not like the North Vietnamese MiGs weren't doing that on a daily basis.
Well the first A does stand for Aeronautics, it having previously been the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), so I'm guessing it was for research purposes.
 
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Well the first A does stand for Aeronautics, it having previously been the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), so I'm guessing it was for research purposes.
I was sarcastically asking why the USN had NASA stop their people bouncing them.
 
guys what about the F-101 voodoo ? it was a decent fighter/nuclear strike for the 60s and could be license produced in the UK

NO!!!

No agility, had a habit of getting into flat spins which were unrecoverable the pilot notes said to just eject if it happened, it had all sorts of maneuver restrictions which made actual dogfighting a bit of a nightmare, also not that fast and the only A/G armament was a nuke and 20mm cannon in the F101 A and C. The B had the appalling AIM4 Falcon which was barely worth the cost of the fuel to haul it to the intercept point where it would only likely hit the ground reliably.
 
Several of the books I've read on it seemed to place it closer to the F-105 than the F-4.

I strongly recommend "Hawker P.1103 & P.1121: Camm's Last Fighter Projects" by Paul Martell-Mead and Barrie Hygate. Blue Envoy Press ISBN 978-0-9561951-5-9. Most recent work on the type.
 
Getting a purely British universal fighter-bomber for the early to mid 60's requires the choice to be made to go that route prior to the 1957 white paper. If however it's made after that then all the likely British projects have been shut down and there will be no choice but to select a foreign design. In that case the best British manufacturers can hope for is to secure a licence agreement to build the selected aircraft in the UK.
 
I can remember seeing plans for a later development of the Scimitar which had twin seating that looked incredibly similar to the Phantom, not wholly surprising since physics operates the same in both sides of the Atlantic. I can't say whether it was a genuine Supermarine proposal of a modern aviation enthusiast one, and am currently posting via mobile do can't go searching.
You might be thinking of the Supermarine Type 556.

One aircraft (XH451) was ordered as a developed Scimitar to Naval Requirement/Aircraft N.A.38 from Vickers Ltd under contract 6/Air/11268/CB.5(b) dated 23rd September 1954. This was to have been a two-seat version FAW (Fighter All Weather) Type 556 fitted with Ferranti Air Pass radar and guided weapons. After a mock-up was made work was suspended on 24th April 1955, and it was officially cancelled on 25th July 1955, due to a production order for the two-seat D.H.110.

I think the above note came from the Putnams book on Supermarine aircraft.
 
That's interesting but not surprising, RAAF Mirages were built for the Avon and when they reverted to Atar nothing lined up leading to a lot of skinned knuckles. What about the wings, forward fuselage etc?

In any event the Phantom was a widely used aircraft with a huge global support network. The Spey Twosader would have been able to tap into the big US and small French Crusader support systems. The Crusader III would be a British only plane made in the USA, not ideal from the fleet ownership perspective.
Very little of the Spey Phantom could be supported by the Phantom support network. That was the problem with reengining it and the structural problems that entailed.
The Spey was too late for the Crusader. Avon would be a good fit for the basic Crusader, an Olympus for an advanced one based on the Crusader III. But the Spey came along when the Crusader was already on life support.
 
Licence-build the Grumman F-11F Tiger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F-11_Tiger.

Handicapped by its weak Wright J-65 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_J65 in version bought by the US Navy, Britain has the advantage of the vastly superior original version of the end the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Siddeley_Sapphire.

You then trade in 10500 lbs thrust for 12390 lbs thrust and likely Mach 2 performance.

Compact enough to fit on British carriers(might sell some to the French too) and useful to the RAF as well.
F11F was never an all weather fighter. It was a day fighter and not good as an attack plane so you don't even have that as a secondary mission. It was being replaced by the F-8 by the time this timeline is interested in. Seems to me that the Scimitar is closer to the F11F. Tiger was a little faster but it woould probably be faster and easier to tune the Scimitar than introduce a new type.
 

MatthewB

Banned
Can the RAf and FAA standardize on a single multirole fighter-bomber in the early 60s ?
Rather than lightning , javelins , sea vixen, hunter, scimitar, sup swift etc
Hawker P.1121. Once modified for the fleet ops, it can do both FAA and RAF roles.

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Hawker P.1121. Once modified for the fleet ops, it can do both FAA and RAF roles.

e0b6db9fbc02b0ee69c543caec8353a8.jpg
The P1121 was a single seat. I don't think we can realistically have a single seat all weather fighter in that era. That was the big complaint about the Crusader III, that the pilot workload was too heavy with the beam riding radar missiles of the time. The Javelin and the Sea Vixen were both two seat aircraft.
 
According to Wood in Project Cancelled £21 million was spent on the P.1154 between 1962 and 1965. I can't remember from where, but I have it in my head that the Spey Phantom cost £100 million to develop (of which half was the engines).

Would the combined total of £121 million have been enough to pay for clean sheet of paper twin-Spey CTOL fighter, that could enter service with the RAF and FAA in circa 1969?

If so could it have been given better STOL performance than the Spey-Phantom so that it could operate from ships that could operate the Buccaneer?
 
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