Whatever happened to…

‘Bump’ Anyone out there? Anyone at all…?

I’m back! Does PCB have any practical application for today’s fighters?
And here’s another question, is the BAe P.1214-3 a sound design. The reason i’m asking is that i’m going to use it in a book i’m writing. I’d like to know if the aircraft would’ve (no pun intended) got off the ground.

There is nothing novel in the theory of PCB – see Whittle’s W2/700, 1943 and its Miles M.52 Flying Test Bed. Space-saving idea to wrap reheat inside the core engine…if the airframe design has no long jetpipe. But you need more heat-resistent titanium, beryllium, which are exotic, expensive. P.1154, 1963, was designed around it because its Joint RN/RAF Requirement included supersonic dash. RN escaped this complex beast (Chief Defence Scientific Advisor Zuckermann: “a technological & economic impossibility”, Memoirs/II,P383) for F-4K, leaving it solely as RAF’s Hunter FGA.9/FR.10 replacement. Minister Healey asked MoD: which RAFG sortie requires V/STOL+supersonic. There is none, so dry P.1127 was bought, plus F-4M.

We’re now doing supersonic V/STOL again, 40 years on, in F-35, where other means of thrust augmentation have been preferred.

Depending on who you talk to, either there were severe technical issues that were either unsolvable or only solvable with several more years and much, much more money… or it was all working rather well and would have flown on schedule with no significant problems cropping up.

Over the years, I have seen several people on both sides of the debate come up with apparently reliable period sources to support both these scenarios.

I suspect the truth is somewhere between… but the truth seems to have taken a permanent leave of absence, and cannot be located.

Cancelled alongside the TSR.2, P.1121 and the two large Royal Navy aircraft carriers

The first prototype of the P.1154 was something like 80% complete
http://www.harrier.org.uk/history/history_p1154.htm

So what happened to all the research and the testing rig? It seemed like a promising program that suddenly went quiet

Pretty sure that the P.1154 was to have PCB, im sure ive seen a picture of one of the BS100 Engines developed for the P1154 painted in an odd rainbow spectrum of heat sensitive paint?

The airframe involved XV798 is preserved with the Bristol Aero Collection. See:
http://www.bristolaero.com/exaircraft.htm

Tim

I think that the last I heard of this was that they were testing the idea in a Harrier tethered in a rig at Foulness but it all seemed to go quiet after a while – and I don’t just mean that it went quiet because they they turned the engine off!
I seem to remember that the Harrier was reported as derelict on Foulness after the trials so I presume it landed up as a test piece for exposives or as a target on the Island.

I’m afraid I don’t remember the details but recall John Farley being very scathing of the PCB idea. I think he thought having the equivalent of an afterburner running that close to the pilot was a tad to risky.

Roger Smith.