Alternative single fighter for UK in 1960s

"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.
Sorry! I didn't see your post until after I had written mine.
 
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.
Yeah, I have that one on the bookshelf. Aside from the book itself what they've posted over at the Secret Projects forums to accompany it are fascinating. It's been a while since I read it but IIRC it was one of the books that said more Thud than Phantom.


You might be thinking of the Supermarine Type 556.
Had a chance to check and it looks like it might have actually been the Type 576 I was thinking of, although the jury is still out on the provenance of the images I was remembering as I can't find them.
 

Khanzeer

Banned
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.
Why did the Canadians buy it then? They could have opted for the F106
 
Sorry! I didn't see your post until after I had written mine.
I pulled the £75 million from a 1968 Parliamentary question;

What was total research development and engineering costs hitherto of fitting the Spey Engine into British Phantom aircraft;

About £75 million. This includes the cost of developing the Phantom Spey engine and also of the necessary modifications to the Phantom airframe.


As there was a lot of other alteration work put in, contemporary reports claim British equipment made up 43% of the total by value, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the total figure easily topped £100million.
 
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.

Iiuc forward fuselage, wings and tail are common to or closely related to other phantoms, the changes were in the main fuselage.

The Spey Twosader was proposed when the Crusader was on life support, in about 1963 or so. The Avon at the time was producing about 16,000lbs thrust compared to 18,000 of the J57 and 20,500 of the 1967 Spey. The Spey was needed in the Twosader to make up for the loss of fuel capacity and maintain already sub-mach 2 performance.
 
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?

The buccaneer wasn't a STOL plane, far from it, but the boundary layer control system gave it the low speed handling of a plane with much bigger wings.

The Buccaneer and Phantom had boundary layer control, high speed air blasted out of slots at the front of the wing to energise the air over the top and create much more lift than the size of the wing would suggest, as well as blown flaps. RN F4Ks had increased power to their blown flaps compared to USN Phantoms, it was this bleed air that also drove the requirement for the Spey engine and allowed RN Phantoms to use the short 151' BS5 catapult in the right wind conditions and bring back in-used bombs.

440px-Buccanneer_blown_wings_diagram_%281%29.svg.png

image310_4.jpg

the-coanda-effect-and-lift-21-638.jpg
 
The Buccaneer wasn't a STOL plane, far from it, but the boundary layer control system gave it the low speed handling of a plane with much bigger wings.
Point taken.

I also thought that a clean sheet of paper aircraft could be designed to fold into a smaller package than the Phantom.
 
I think so too, and done instead of the P1154, its supporting AW681 and Phantom.
On the subject of the AW.681 BAC Filton's proposed a licence built Hercules with Tyne engines to Operational Requirement 351 and Specification C.241. Would that have been cheaper to develop and build than the AW.681?
 

Khanzeer

Banned
The F101B was basically wired and designed for NORAD and they wanted a twin engine fighter to replace the twin engined CF100 with a similar range to the in a NORAD environment.
Were they equipped for performing long range escort missions as well ?
 
Were they equipped for performing long range escort missions as well ?

They were never intended for escort, they were pretty much built and equipped for bomber interception over North America and Canada. As I said they carried AIM4 Falcon, an overly complicated piece of junk.

They made an occasional appearance at NATO exercises in Europe but were mainly used as Red Force targets iirc. They camouflaged them by applying water soluble green poster paint over the normal mainly Blue high viz paint scheme.
 
On the subject of the AW.681 BAC Filton's proposed a licence built Hercules with Tyne engines to Operational Requirement 351 and Specification C.241. Would that have been cheaper to develop and build than the AW.681?

Define cheaper. Yes, you're basically taking someone else's design, giving it new engines and building it yourself, keeping the manufacturing capability but lose the design capacity at the same time. Designing, developing and building in house is more expensive, yes, but you keep your designers and engineers in work and paying taxes, keeping your design and manufacturing skills honed. Why do you think US industry aggressively markets abroad? Every single nation that's gone down the route of buying in rather than building in house has had their aircraft industry wiped out. I know which I'd prefer and it isn't sucking US corporate cock to save a measly few quid, because in the long term you're fucked.
 
Since people mentioned the Supermarine Scimitar earlier how much of an embuggerance was converting the original undercarriage-less design to a standard one? I was more wondering if it had continuing knock-on effects or if once the changes had been made that was it. It got me wondering how much sooner you might be able to see the Scimitar or a similar aircraft enter into service if the powers that be hadn't been messing around with rubber decks.


On the subject of the AW.681 BAC Filton's proposed a licence built Hercules with Tyne engines to Operational Requirement 351 and Specification C.241. Would that have been cheaper to develop and build than the AW.681?
When you write 'than the AW.681' do you mean to completion and introduction into service or until cancellation as in our timeline? I'm assuming the former rather than the latter but it pays to double-check. :)
 
The requirement for the AW681 was based on the demands of the P1154/Mirage IIIV dispersed VOTL operations. If you RAF doesn't go down that stupid route then there is no need for a VTOL transport to support it, the British can buy a mix of Belfast and C160 or G222.
 

SsgtC

Banned
The requirement for the AW681 was based on the demands of the P1154/Mirage IIIV dispersed VOTL operations. If you RAF doesn't go down that stupid route then there is no need for a VTOL transport to support it, the British can buy a mix of Belfast and C160 or G222.
The Hawker P.193B could work for an AEW aircraft for both the RN and the RAF
 
Were they equipped for performing long range escort missions as well ?
The F-101A was designed to be a long range escort fighter with 4 20mm cannon but that mission disappeared almost as soon as the plane was designed. In the RCAF I believe it was only used as an area defense fighter. The B model was equipped with the AIM-4 as a secondary weapon and the AIR2 Genie nuclear rocket as the primary weapon. I never saw them at Red Flag but did see them regularly at Langley as they stopped on the way to Tyndall AFB FL to do weapons training. We would usually see 4 at a time on a weekend with another 4 stopping a couple hours later, I believe headed in the other direction. there were still a few ANG/AFRes units equipped with them in the mid 70s and we would have them show up at Langley occasionally (Including one time a reserve colonel flew in for a conference at TAC HQ and had his golf clubs and luggage in the Weapons bay. Somehow the door jammed and would not open. It took all night for our technicians to figure out how to open it!)
 
The Hawker P.193B could work for an AEW aircraft for both the RN and the RAF

Unfortunately no important part of that aircraft worked. The FMICW radar was taken up by the Nimrod and found to be no good and replaced by doppler radar. The FASS was also tried with the Nimrod and they could never get it to sychronise, they kept losing tracks etc.
 
Top