British 🇬🇧 Aircraft Corporation TSR-2

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RatherGoodDog@reddit

A nice aircraft, but I wouldn't describe it as weird. There's nothing particularly unusual about it in mission, configuration, or appearance.

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Rooilia@reddit

Stubby wings with downward ends are unusual.

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AP2112@reddit

The SEPECAT Jaguar took on a lot of TSR-2 DNA while developing into the strike role, landing gear, high mounted short wings etc.

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

Mods ain't said nothing so I thing it's all good 👍🏾 bruh

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Hattix@reddit

“All aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR2 simply got the first three right”
- Sir Sydney Camm, Hawker

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Development wasn't without issues. It is doubtful TSR2 would have become what they aimed for. Especially the computer set didn't work out at all. The core abilities were not available by the time it was canceled.

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horace_bagpole@reddit

Yep it was never going to meet the specification required with the technology available at the time. It wouldn't have taken 15 years or so to get it in an operational state and by then you've got aircraft like the F-15 flying which are a generation ahead. The costs required would have been ridiculous as well. Cancelling the programme was the right decision regardless of politics.

There's a lot of rose tinted nonsense about this aircraft, most of it based on what it might have achieved in some magical world where all the problems with it didn't exist, and almost none of it based on reality.

Even the stories you read about the flights it did make are ridiculously embellished. Stuff like it out accelerating a Lighting with only one engine in reheat - yes it might have, that is until the Lightning opened the throttle a bit.

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LightningGeek@reddit

Even the stories you read about the flights it did make are ridiculously embellished. Stuff like it out accelerating a Lighting with only one engine in reheat - yes it might have, that is until the Lightning opened the throttle a bit.

I don't think this is actually that unbelievable.

Each Olympus had 22,000lbf of thrust dry, and 30,610lbf in reheat. The Lightning T.4 (XM968 seems to be the only confirmed Lightning chase plane) used the Avon 210R engine that produced 14,430lbf each in full reheat. If TSR.2 was going full chat on one engine and full reheat in the other, then it would be accelerating with 52,610lbf, versus 28,860lbf from the Lightning on full reheat with both engines.

It's definitely plausible that the TSR.2 could outrun the chase Lightning, especially one based off of the earlier Lightning variants. Then again, the Lightning is another aircraft that has some rather tall tails about it as well!

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horace_bagpole@reddit

It’s a much larger aircraft than a Lightning, with much higher drag. Despite all that extra power it had a top speed of M1.7 whereas the Lightning could do M2+.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the people who were involved and ‘know’ about the TSR2 weren’t actually that well informed about the programme as a whole, so you get a mix of mix-remembered ‘facts’ and rose-tinted nostalgia. I’ll have to dig out Damien Burke’s book and have another read, but he goes into a lot these old myths and debunks them using written records.

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LightningGeek@reddit

Drag reducing the ultimate top speed doesn't correlate to reducing acceleration. You can reduce your aerodynamic effectiveness and your top speed, but still massively increase your acceleration by adding bigger engines. The British Phantom's are a perfect example of this. The Spey powered FGR.1 and 2, produced around 40,100lbf of thrust, compared to the 35,700lbf from the J79 powered F-4J it was based on. The Spey powered variants could take off in a shorter distance, and would out accelerate their J79 powered counterparts, but they had a much slower top speed because of the intake and rear fuselage changes that had to be made to accommodate the wider Spey engine.

That is a fair point, however, as the story seems to originate from two of the most respected British test pilots of the era, Roland Beamont, who was flying the TSR.2, and Jimmy Dell, who was flying the chase Lightning, I think calling it plausible is fairer than saying "ridiculously embellished".

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Rooilia@reddit

The reheat part of all was the problem why the engines selfcombusted. It wasn't solved till the next generation of engines arrived. Funny how mythcrafting makes it the best part here.

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Balmung60@reddit

Do British eyes work different or something? They keep acting like this thing is beautiful and it's one of the ugliest jets I've ever seen, and not even in the good way like the English Electric Lightning, which is ugly in a "looks like it means business" kind of way.

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orlock@reddit

You are, of course, objectively wrong. But that's OK. All the more for the rest of us.

Well, it would be if people didn't try to remove it from history. As it is, we have to make do.

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Balmung60@reddit

Feel free to explain why I'm wrong about the appearance. To me, the fuselage is too tall and is badly exacerbated by how flat the sides of the fuselage are, the gradual taper towards the cockpit feels odd, and the entire category of stubby-winged attacker/bomber aircraft feels off to begin with. The "span, length, and height" all look off to me.

And it's baffling to me that people gush over this as a crowning achievement of aviation aesthetics when the British already designed what might actually be the most beautiful bomber aircraft in history roughly a decade prior.

I feel like it gets a lot of bonus points from people for never coming to fruition, not unlike the Arrow.

Besides which, I don't know who's trying to "remove it from history". I think it's quite earned a place in history, just not the one a lot of others seem to.

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orlock@reddit

Like a joke, explaining beauty is likely to end up with the patient dead on the operating table.

Its sleek, looks like it's going places, has cute wings with downturned tips and, when it lands, an adorable gangly undercarriage that makes it look like a baby stork. These are, of course, the official standards of aircraft beauty as laid out in ISO 413.

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tfrules@reddit

I can't imagine what it must be like to pursue life with such little taste

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

Lool

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TigerIll6480@reddit

The Avro Canada Arrow beat it in all four categories.

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WarthogOsl@reddit

I'd say it tied it in the last one.

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Sivalon@reddit

Vastly different missions.

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

I'm a Brit so I have to back the TRS-2 😂 so pls chill out. The AVRO Canada 🇨🇦 Arrow was amazing aircraft but pls remember both countries are losers in this situation.

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

He was not wrong 😑

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

A cool aircraft and a cool image.

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Longjumping-Dog9476@reddit

So English, so ugly <3

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

The Upvotes 🗳️will disagree with you

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Longjumping-Dog9476@reddit

4 chure 8)

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TigerIll6480@reddit

Built as a replacement for the English Electric Canberra - like the B-52, C-130, and DC-3, on the list of Aircraft That Just Won’t Die. (The last British Canberras were retired in 2006, but three Martin B-57s are still in service in the U.S.)

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ctesibius@reddit

Gloster Meteor is still flying with Martin-Baker.

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TigerIll6480@reddit

Good call on that one. There are a few other good examples, like the TU-95 and the 707.

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ctesibius@reddit

AN-2 as well.

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Southern-Bandicoot@reddit

Ahem... 2 plus a recently crashed third. Landing gear wasn't lowered as the plane came in to land.

Let's see if NASA chooses to repair this or use it as a spares donor for the other two.

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TigerIll6480@reddit

I hadn’t heard about the wheels-up landing. Still…one of those planes that won’t die.

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Sivalon@reddit

I’d heard it was getting rebuilt. It’s going to take a long time though.

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Agreeable_Mud_8338@reddit

havent seen this photo before! cheers! the argument that cancelling the plane would have saved money was bullshit....it had already been designed/manufactured and flown sucessfully....so everything extra spent would have been a slight difference,offset by the sales/foreign sales

.instead they destroyed everything in a jerk knee decision,haunting the british aerospace industry for fucking ever......

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FlufyBacon@reddit

A prototype that lacked the avionics required for its mission flew, yes. The avionics were the difficult and expensive bit.

Yknow how the F-111, which was procured around the same time as the TSR-2, cost about twice as much as the F-105 despite having similar performance? Yeah, that's the avionics. Inventing terrain-following radar and automating pilot workload to get the aircraft to a 50-foot radar altitude and stay there in the late 60s is really hard. The F-111 almost wound up in development hell too; the USAF just had more money to fix the problems.

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richdrich@reddit

Well yeah, with handwound core memory and NAND gates an inch square, you're trying to run terrain following on an Arduino-scale machine the size of a photocopier.

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ShermanMcTank@reddit

Yknow how the F-111, which was procured around the same time as the TSR-2, cost about twice as much as the F-105 despite having similar performance?

Not to detract from the argument that avionics are very expensive, but The F-111 had much better performance than the F-105. It could fly faster, higher, and further than the F-105 with twice the payload. Not to mention the better overall subsonic performance thanks to the swing wings, which also had a big impact on cost.

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captainfactoid386@reddit

Except the whole avionics thing wasn’t really working. And avionics were starting to become the lion’s share of aircraft cost

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Affentitten@reddit

That's oversimplifying things a bit.

One prototype had been flown, demonstrating a lot of issues with vibration. This had led to design changes that put the plane below its original spec requirements. They actually altered the requirements post-factually to allow the TSR-2 to meet them. It was also a very short production run (about 30) and failed to attract any foreign orders. So quite an expensive tool-up per unit, especially considering it was getting continually more expensive to produce an aircraft with diminishing performance.

Politics, economy, diplomacy and inter-service rivalry did the rest.

It's more of a symptom of the declining post-war British aerospace industry than a cause.

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bouncypete@reddit

I'll add to this that ultimately, the government had to choose between defending the country using nuclear submarines, or aircraft. They couldn't afford both.

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Affentitten@reddit

Or afford to have different service arms designing and maintaining completely different aircraft.

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

Hmmm 🧐 as a Brit i definitely agree, makes me sad NGL We created some truly amazing aircraft Spitfire, Meteor, Harrier jump jet, just to name a few. But we defo also made some defo poor and terrible ones also

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

We British fumbled it fully as the yanks SAU

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rattybag247@reddit

XR220. My dad rebuilt most of this at Cosford in the late 1970s to early 80s. The airframe was just a shell when it arrived. After stripping out what he could a visit to the storage hanger on the south of the Airfield yielded alot of treasure. Many crates stamped TSR2, all containing avionics spares as they left the factory, enabling a nearly complete cosmetic rebuild.

After the project was cancelled alot of the design staff nicked as much as they could before everything was burned. For years afterwards people would turn up at Cosford and drop off envelopes full of documents , drawings etc. We had the incomplete technical manual in our house for years...

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AP2112@reddit

It certainly shows, XR220 at Cosford, though not in great nick these days, is much more complete than XR222 at Duxford.

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rattybag247@reddit

Yeah , it is much more complete , although only really cosmeticaly.

In the middle to late 90s me and another guy dropped the large unit ( possibly full of instruments for data collection ) out of the bomb bay , mainly for cleaning and mould / damp removal ( the dayglo orange cover has foam under it ) . Found some old graffiti and didnt think to record it . Around the same time the RAF museum decide to coat everything on every exhibit in a wax to help preserve them , but it just went really sticky and trapped dust. Every exhibit looked like it had spent 20 years in a smokers lounge.

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Foreign_Athlete_7693@reddit

i remember back when they had those on sale......mustve all long gone tho, it's been almost a decade and not seen them since.....

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾

Awesome 🤩 salute

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Zircez@reddit

The best thing is is that I can 'smell' this aircraft - anyone who's been in a RAF jet of any type from this era will know what I mean.

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AP2112@reddit

Equal parts avgas, oil and dust. Leave to rest for several decades and there you have it.

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Foreign_Athlete_7693@reddit

i need to go to my local museum again to get a lungful of that glorious smell......

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AnarchistAz@reddit

Got some stories on this one from an air traffic controller at Bosomebe Down where it was tested from. Apparently when it 1st turned up after being hauled across the country on a flat bed, It took it's final turn around the end of the runway before heading to the hanger for preparation and the whole flat bed turned sideways as the driver went around the embankment and the wing crashed into the ground and needed to be fully repaired on site before testing could commence.

Another one was that as news was coming down that the project was due to be scrapped by Parliament, the flight test lead, possibly Roland Beaumont, scrambled out to the jet and got it in the air ASAP to give it a final flight and prove its capabilitys in a hope that the project would be extended or not scrapped all together. Unfortunately all in vain. Did get a very low, high speed pass over the runway though to test it's terrain following capabilities and was a sight to see!

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cvnh@reddit

Was it hauled on a flatbed? That plane is huge although the wingspan is rather short. Looks much more mighty in person than in pictures!

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AP2112@reddit

Worth noting XR220 pictured above was allegedly damaged while being unloaded from the flatbed ahead of it's fiest flight, postponing the flight by several weeks while it was repaired. It was then due to fly again, only this was the day the programme was cancelled, so while it was good-to-go, it never flew...

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aleopardstail@reddit

must have been a manual flight as IIRC the terrain following stuff was never installed as it wasn't then ready

no reason it couldn't have been flown like that manually though

beautiful aircraft

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

He is a legend for that salute the flight test lead 🫡

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

FFS 🤦🏾

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zippytiff@reddit

I think history shows it wasn’t a mistake to have cancelled these projects and as a result we got things like the tornado etc

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

That's true but I can still dream a "What if" history.

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zippytiff@reddit

Oh yes, totally agree. The biggest ‘what if’ I enjoy at the moment is For all Mankind on Apple. Wow what if…. I was a space 1999 generation

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HKTLE@reddit (OP)

Facts and one of my fav shows "FAM" For All Mankind

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UnarmedTwo@reddit

My beloved...

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WotTheFook@reddit

In Canada, The Avro (Canada) CF-105 Arrow suffered a similar fate due to politics and a change of Government. It wasn't a good time for aviation innovation.

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Rooilia@reddit

It wasn't a good program either. It would have been outdated when introduced. Other planes already surpassed it in nearly any metric except speed. And the the soviets build missles instead of a bomber fleet. Completely nullifying the programs aim.

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