”A great ‘might have been’ “

Whatever the rights and wrongs of its cancellation, few would disagree with former BAC test pilot Don Knight’s view of the TSR2. We gathered his recollections of the stillborn programme — and look back at the thoughts of his late colleague Jimmy Dell WORDS: DENIS J. CALVERT Roland Beamont takes TSR2 XR219 into the air from Boscombe Down during the winter of 1964-65. Strictly speaking, there were no TSR2 prototypes and XR219 was the first of the development batch, XR219-227.