What Happened To The Black Valiant "Pathfinder" WJ954

I wonder if any of it remains out on Foulness Island, great photos and welcome to the forum

There were actually very few changes to the TSR2 spec after contract award
True, most aspects were fixed before construction began but the project still ran hopelessly out of control. There was no clear project leadership and no overall control, and this enabled the project to continually drift and become increasingly expensive. It was a classic illustration of how not to run a military aircraft programme.

It’s quite ironic that we mention TSR2 really because the Vickers-Supermarine 571 emerged from the same factory that produced the Valiant B2. The endless nonsense that dogged TSR2 was partially the responsibility of Vickers, and yet Vickers was the company that designed and built the Valiant without fuss and without complication within a remarkably short time scale. It was a tragedy that the same discipline didn’t extend to TSR2.

Vickers had two design teams ;- The Weybridge large aircraft team under George Edwards;-Viscount, Valiant, Pathfinder, V1000, Vanguard, & VC10. And the other was the former Supermarine team at initially at Hursley Park (small AC) and initially under Joe Smith; – Spiteful, Attacker, Swift, Scimitar, & TSR2. Chalk and cheese

The Valiant B2 was a very promising design and it was a great shame that it didn’t survive any longer than it did. I was castigated many years ago when I wrote a book on the V-Force, in which I stated that if we were to make a judgement as to which V-Bomber was the “best” design then in my view it would be the Valiant, or more precisely the Valiant B2. I based this assertion on the fact that it was designed and built cheaply and quickly, and it did precisely what Edwards said it would do. It was then transformed into the very aircraft that the RAF would need, when operations switched to low level, but by that stage the Valiant B2 project was gone.

On the basis of what actually happened (rather that what might have happened) then the Vulcan proved to be the most successful design, as it didn’t suffer from any structural problems, it performed flawlessly, and it was sufficiently rugged to operate in the low level role. In terms of Value for Money, the Vulcan was obviously money well spent. But I still think that if things had been a little different and the low level role had been identified earlier, then maybe the Vulcan and Victor would never have been built. The Valiant B2 would have been a perfectly adequate machine for the role and would have been produced at a fraction of the cost that arose from the V-Force programme. But then hindsight is a wonderful thing 🙂

7:44 if you are interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DDHL8-5L7s

Wonderful film – brings back so many memories for a young teenager at the time!! And I note the year as 1953 so that is probably correct although we went every year….the air to air shots of each aircraft are superb and we haven’t seen any of those low passes for a long time!!

I recently rediscovered a (long mislaid) Air International article on the Valiant which contained this account (though not about the B.2)….
…..’ Sir George Edwards recalls a much less well-known but intriguing ‘what might have been’ in the Valiant programme.Obviously having been impressed by the aircraft’s performance in the U.S. bombing contests, the redoubtable General Curtis LeMay, head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC), led a high-level USAF team visit to Weybridge to study the Valiant further. Much impressed by its take-off performance, they were even toying with the idea of PUTTING IT ON AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER. (my caps) However, all that eventually resulted was that LeMay insisted that Boeing put side-by-side pilot seating, as in the Valiant, into the B-52 Stratofortress bomber instead of the tandem seating of the B-47 and B-52 prototypes, so at least the USAF pilots received a lasting benefit from this episode.’
(Dr Norman Barfield, ‘Vickers Valiant’, pp153-161 A.I. Oct92)
Presumably the U.S. visitors included a U.S. Navy contingent and would have been in the period when the U.S. Navy had the North American Savage operating from carriers with nuclear weapons as part of the U.S. deterrent a type followed in service in 1957 by the Douglas Skywarrior. The article doesn’t mention if the Americans watched the Valiant take-off from the Weybridge factory short runway at Brooklands, though all the production Valiants did before landing at the nearby Vickers airfield at Wisley for pre-delivery test flying

There were actually very few changes to the TSR2 spec after contract award
True, most aspects were fixed before construction began but the project still ran hopelessly out of control. There was no clear project leadership and no overall control, and this enabled the project to continually drift and become increasingly expensive. It was a classic illustration of how not to run a military aircraft programme.

It’s quite ironic that we mention TSR2 really because the Vickers-Supermarine 571 emerged from the same factory that produced the Valiant B2. The endless nonsense that dogged TSR2 was partially the responsibility of Vickers, and yet Vickers was the company that designed and built the Valiant without fuss and without complication within a remarkably short time scale. It was a tragedy that the same discipline didn’t extend to TSR2.

W J did appear at Farnborough in 1954 i think a very hansome aircraft indeed.
re

7:44 if you are interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DDHL8-5L7s

The Americans didn’t export strategic bombers (except for a B-47 given to the Canadians for an engine development program)

The B-47 was in competition with the V-bombers for an RAAF order, something in the order of three squadrons worth.

The RAAF went as far as having crews qualified on the B-47 but the requirement was dropped because the F-111 was ‘imminent’…

W J did appear at Farnborough in 1954 i think a very hansome aircraft indeed.
There was a nice shot of it on the back of a Queen Mary going down the motorway to be shot at in The Air Pictorial in the late fifties
Brian c d Wakefield West Yorkshire

(my #14 amended to provide source for $ contribution to Valiant)

Beermat #20: screwy folk: absolutely: one Senator, Hickenlooper, was clearly loopily Anglophobe. The nuclear “secret” was jealously guarded before USSR evidently had it: in part to preserve US national security, in part because the “secret” could/might (who knew) read across to power generation, which had civil/business consequences, especially for Texans.

Knocking copy and dirty tricks are part of the business process: see the interminable (pointless) WTO Cases on “unfair” State subsidies to (Boeing: Airbus, Bombardier: Embraer); now US international carriers: M.E. carriers. There are those in US that have alleged that UK has on occasion engaged in deviousness.

I only said that this piece of halibut was good enough for J. Boyle…

For crying out loud, saying IF anyone was upset it was more likely the Americans, rather than Whitehall, is NOT a conspiracy theory. It is not the same as suggesting that ANYONE did ANYTHING. I was suggesting that some might have been upset, but I can’t see it was the British.

I am nervous about expanding on it. I do so with the massive qualification that this is NOT a conspiracy theory. There were some in the US who were nervous of anything particularly useful as a weapon being developed outside of the US, and they MIGHT have worried. Not done anything, just felt concerned about it. Probably not, but it was more likely than Whitehall worrying about it. That’s all I was suggesting. And as I said, I do not actually pretend to be able to really know what was going through peoples heads then, especially some of the more unusual thinkers of the time*. That was my point.

I held up the possibility that some people might have been concerned by something because of a world-view, against a proposition that a different set of people were upset about it for different reasons, and said in my opinion the former was less unlikely, if anything.

To be honest, the chorus of disapproval thus elicited will do more to persuade a young ‘un that something fishy happened back there (and I don’t see that it did) that if my post had been read in context and not knee-jerked at.

*Edit – Senator McCarthy launched a smear campaign against William Benton, the American owner of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He suspected he was a Communist as he had a lot of his work printed in England. This is the kind of now-unfathomable (to me) thinking I was talking about. Essentially I was saying ‘I wouldn’t put it past them to be upset by this’ about some people in power at the time, but not suggesting that it was actually the (much more ‘conspiracy theory’) case in this instance that anything untoward then happened, especially where there are completely rational reasons based on known facts.

The specs were very demanding and not realistic.
Very much so – and they kept changing and growing as time went by.

.

There were actually very few changes to the TSR2 spec after contract award.;- the contract (KD/2L/i2/02/C.B.42 (a))was awarded against issue 1 of OR343 with an agreed evolutiion to issue 2. After this there were 5 ammendments (AL1-AL5) between Aug 61 and June 63. The 5 amendments are really quite minor.

The massive spec creep was a big issue for Nimrod AEW3 but people seem to automatically associate it with all project failures.

Think it’s best to simply set the record straight – the US had no interest in scuppering any of the UK’s military programmes and there’s no evidence to suggest that anything of this kind ever happened. The only evidence we do have is that the US actively supported a great many of our programmes, and often paid for quite a lot of them too.

Problem is that there have always been – and always will be – people who will try to suggest otherwise because a scandal always sells copy. But the same applies to stories from British people about British projects. TSR2 is the classic example. Decades of stuff written about TSR2 and most of it was nonsense, but nobody ever bothered to check.

There’s no mystery surrounding the Valiant B2. It was simply unnecessary. The irony was that it would have been an ideal aeroplane for the RAF if it had still been available a few years later.

If anything it’s more probable it upset the Americans.

That theory…which seems to indicate you agree with some conspiracy against the Valiant B.2.

Again, you suggest something, then offer no proof or compelling logical argument other than your distrust of the US.
“…there were some screwy people around in both the US govt and industry in the 1950’s.”.
What’s that based on, the US not paying for the other half of the Valiant? 🙂

Duncan Sandy probably had more to do with the death of the B.2 than any American.

So far on this thread we’ve heard the UK scuttled the aircraft because it was either too good (post 21) or you blaming the Americans despite the fact you a seem to agree with Ken and his rational explanations, then say you still think the Americans must of had had something to do with it.
You can’t have it both ways. You either agree with Ken or you don’t.

I’m not picking on you. I’ve been on this forum forever, and very few of the old guys are left.
What we do have here now is a generation of younger people, I just don’t want them to carry on some ideas that have no real basis in fact.
Feel better? 🙂

I am not worried about US industrialists sixty years ago, why would I be?

However, I am getting increasingly worried about this forum.

My ‘theory makes even less sense’.. I do not recall positing a theory apart from saying Alertken is probably right.

I did not want an argument.. and if you had read what I wrote there probably wouldn’t be one.

I added the observation there were some screwy people around in both the US govt and industry in the 1950’s. That’s all. I wish I hadn’t.

Increasingly, otherwise rational – and previously reasonable – people are apparently trawling these threads looking for someone to argue with – even turning a blind eye to what has actually been written if it makes it harder to get agitated about the ‘statement’.

Maybe it’s the weather.

Did say ‘if anything’.. meaning ‘if any ‘conspiricy theory’ is true’. It is even more likely to me that the mundane and logical answer Ken gives is the real explanation.

Still, as a general point I am not sure we can in fact second-guess the thoughts and feelings of US industrialists in the 1950’s. It does appear to one who was born later to have been an odd and sometimes unfathomable time in terms of the motivations and fears of some quite powerful people.

Again, why would anyone in the US be against a British aircraft that the US wasn’t going to buy (It had its own) an had little chance of export sales (thus in the minds of conspiracy buffs, be a danger to US sales?).
The Americans didn’t export strategic bombers (except for a B-47 given to the Canadians for an engine development program), so the success of the B.2 (or any other V-bombers) would have been of no consequence to the Americans.

And if Alertken is correct, if the US did pay for half the cost of the Valiant B.1 fleet, you theory makes even less sense.
And if the B.2 did need clever avionics, there is a fair chance that some of those would have come from America or from UK firms with US backing, and the sinister US industrialists you’re so worried about would have made a quid or two.

The specs were very demanding and not realistic.
Very much so – and they kept changing and growing as time went by.

Mountbatten was bad-mouthing it
He wasted his time as nobody listened. Australia abandoned TSR2 because they wanted to buy American – their government records confirm this. Our Government finally told Mountbatten to keep his mouth shut.

merger of the aviation industries at the same time shows bad timing
It was deliberate. Vickers and EE became BAC as part of the agreement to give them the TSR2 contract. BAC was blackmailed into existence.

The F-111 being more affordable than the TSR2? We bought Buccs and Tooms in the end, after that Jags and Tonkas
F-111 was way cheaper because it was to be bought on credit. Buccaneer was the eventual replacement for TSR2, F-111 and AFVG. Tornado was in effect the direct replacement for AFVG. Jaguar was a more complicated project that started out as a trainer but became a partial replacement for the Hunter and Phantom (so Phantoms could go to AD to replace Lightnings).

There was no mystery to any of these projects. Valiant B2 being one of them. Problem is that a lot of nonsense was written about all the projects and a great deal of it simply wasn’t true.

Sorry if you get the impression I thought we were robbed.
There were many factors why such projects failed. As I said, money, a not always realistic policy/specification, political in-fighting and incompetence. That America strong-armed us I doubt very much.
If I remember correctly, the TSR2 specification was originally written by RAF officers. The specs were very demanding and not realistic. A lower spec would have been more affordable and possible.
The fact that Lord Mountbatten was bad-mouthing it a number of times didn’t help. The forced merger of the aviation industries at the same time shows bad timing. You can run through a whole list of projects that died at the time. Money was a major influence of course, the UK was as good as bankrupt.
The F-111 being more affordable than the TSR2? We bought Buccs and Tooms in the end, after that Jags and Tonkas.

Some strange notions expressed here. Valiant B2 was abandoned because the Air Staff didn’t want/need it as there was no longer any requirement for a pathfinder/target marker. There was no political reason behind it at all. If the switch to low level operations had happened sooner then it’s likely that Valiant B2 would have been ordered and the history of the V-Force may well have been very different. With Valiants designed specifically for the low level role, the Victors and Vulcans might well have been withdrawn sooner than they were, and it would probably have been the Valiant that would have survived longest.
As for Skybolt, the story is simple – the US pulled out because it was troublesome and expensive, and they had other (better) systems in the pipeline. It was offered to Britain but Britain wouldn’t shoulder the rest of the development cost, so it was abandoned. No conspiracy. As for TSR2, it was simply far too expensive and the RAF eventually accepted that F-111 was more affordable and more likely to be delivered within a reasonable timescale, and so they agreed to accept F-111 instead of TSR2.

As Alertken says, the many conspiracy theories are all nonsense. There was commercial competition but in terms of military programmes the US never stressed over British policy. The old stories about the US trying to kill-off TSR2 are nonsense. The US (McNamara) wanted Britain to build TSR2, not abandon it.

Did say ‘if anything’.. meaning ‘if any ‘conspiricy theory’ is true’. It is even more likely to me that the mundane and logical answer Ken gives is the real explanation.

Still, as a general point I am not sure we can in fact second-guess the thoughts and feelings of US industrialists in the 1950’s. It does appear to one who was born later to have been an odd and sometimes unfathomable time in terms of the motivations and fears of some quite powerful people.