The BAC TSR-2

"A decision motivated mostly by pressure from the US to not compete with their F-111 Aardvark in the global market" - proved to be irrelevant. Outside of the USA, only Australia took the F-111. Even UK backed out. Was anybody else ever interested in buying it? Not that I ever heard. I've always doubted that argument.

She was pretty, but she had high wing loading issues and consequently had high take off and landing speeds as well as low speed handling problems. The f-111 addressed this issue with the variable geometry wing.

This country can be years ahead of the competition but seems to have pressed the self destruct button when it comes to pride and the welfare of it`s indigenous population.

Beautifully put and oh so very true!

Thank you sir.

every time i admire the tsr2 at my local RAF museum. i gasp at just how amazing it still is, better than anything around today :D

what is the song?

mad world

In 1981, the government looked at reviving the TSR2 programme with retro fitted avionics, before the project was once again scrapped. As it turned out, the Tornado became more or less what the TSR.2 was to have been. It was still slightly less capable than the TSR.2 had been projected to be a full fifteen years earlier. That the TSR.2 was all-British and the Tornado required the cooperation of 3 countries says a great deal about just how good the British aircraft industry was, then.

The video features XR219 at the beggining, and XR220 at the end. XR220 is now at the RAF Museum Cosford, XR222 at the Imperial War Museum Duxford. XR219 was used for target practice and destroyed along with two un-finished airframes XR221 and XR223. All tooling, frames and photgraphs were destroyed, plans and records were "lost".