Reply to: English Electric Lightning.

[TykeMerc]

http://www.yell.com/b/BAE+Systems-Ai...039/index.html

I know that place rather well, there's a Canberra sat to the right of the main gate and a Lightning on, for want of a better description, an Airfix model stand just inside the gate. There's another one near to the control tower at Warton in a similar position.

They're remarkably tiny aircraft, but they were designed to take off and get to altitude very fast, blow a bomber or two to bits then land, the use for pure interceptor type aircraft went away long ago.

TSR2 was groundbreaking in an awful lot of ways and one was inspected a few years ago for some design features that are now on some very modern airframes indeed. It's a shame that it was knobbled.

A BA I worked with was the son of an RAF pilot and he told me of an open day at an RAF station when he was 10 where a full flight of Lightnings took off simultaneously and went all but vertical, apparently the sound was astounding.

[Fred Bloggs]

It's not all bad - we still have a thriving motorsport technology industry (amongst others).

True, I'm struggling to think of much else, even the pharma industry is off shoring as fast as it can, Rolls Royce and others are off shoring as far as they reasonably can too by the look of it.

[BolshieBastard]

On wonders of the solar system now!

[minestrone]

Fantastic this, a bunch of airfix generals telling us how great decades of British engineering is when all we seemed to do successfully was drop some explosives from one airplane on one of our own airports overrun by a bunch of underarmed, malnutritioned soldiers from a third world country.

Keep it up chaps, Britain deserves what it gets

[RichardCranium]

And if we gave everyone in the Public Sector a rifle, we'd have one of the largest sitting on their arses holding meetings about the format of the form to use to for keeping minutes armies on the planet!!

FTFY

[stek]

They got the Fairey Battle! £7.99 tho - sure it used to be 85p.....

Ohhh, and a 1/24th scale Mosquito, how I am gonna get that past the girlfriend?

Watch the vid!

http://www.airfix.com/mossie/

[stek]

Treat yourselves

They got the Fairey Battle! £7.99 tho - sure it used to be 85p.....

[darmstadt]

Treat yourselves

[Peoplesoft bloke]

And if we gave everyone in the Public Sector a rifle, we'd have one of the largest standing armies on the planet!!

- or maybe you're right

[darmstadt]

And if you're in the region of Sinsheim or Speyer, these places have lots of aeroplanes which you can go in, including Concorde, Tupelov Tu144, Space Shuttle and Jumbo Jet (and submarines). Quite interesting driving down the motorway and seeing 2 supersonic jet planes in the distance

[shaunbhoy]

It's not all bad - we still have a thriving motorsport technology industry (amongst others).

And if we gave everyone in the Public Sector a rifle, we'd have one of the largest standing armies on the planet!!

[Peoplesoft bloke]

..... but it is a tragedy that the UK has lost all that technology.

(Exact same story for the civil nuclear industry too now........)

It's not all bad - we still have a thriving motorsport technology industry (amongst others).

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Seeing TSR2 almost brings a tear to my eye to be honest. Almost 50 years ago the UK was capable of stunning, world beating technology such as TSR2. TSR2 still looks modern all these years later. Where did we, as a country, go wrong? I really, truly do not know, but it is a tragedy that the UK has lost all that technology.

(Exact same story for the civil nuclear industry too now........)

At the risk of being called a Cretin again - we really did let the TSR2 go to the Americans - we made the error of thinking we were working together and that they really were interested in buying it rather than killing it. That (and our continuing struggles to fund it without any other foreign orders) killed it.

[stek]

And let's not forget the venerable Avro Lancaster, how the hell did they get it carry a 22,000lb bomb?

And the Dam Busters, nothing fills me with pride more than that, ingenuity, bravery, skill, drama, the fecking lot....

The Germans captured an unexploded 'Upkeep' from a crashed Lanc from the raid and developed their own bouncing mine from it, called 'Kurt' - gave it up as a bad job though, they never twigged you had to back spin it.....

[Fred Bloggs]

Seeing TSR2 almost brings a tear to my eye to be honest. Almost 50 years ago the UK was capable of stunning, world beating technology such as TSR2. TSR2 still looks modern all these years later. Where did we, as a country, go wrong? I really, truly do not know, but it is a tragedy that the UK has lost all that technology.

(Exact same story for the civil nuclear industry too now........)