It would be one thing to physically fit a Spey into a Lightning or Sea Vixen, but something else to redesign the intakes to cope with amount of air that flows through a Spey.
FWIW I’m firmly in the Sea Vixen camp. The Javelin always seemed like a bodge too many to me.

William

Right – it’s a question of mass flow. Look at the mods that had to be made to the Buccaneer to get the Speys to fit (not to mention the Phantom) – the engine fit wasn’t an issue but the intake and exhaust had to be made a lot bigger. Not too much of an issue on the subsonic, non afterburning Bucc, but with the Mach 2 Phantom it caused many problems resulting in the most expensive, most delayed, lowest performing Phantoms in the world!

That said, I’d love to have seen the Sea Vixen developed further. It’s a shame when you see examples of great British design having their lives cut short because the bean counters think they know better. The Sea Vixen might have been big enough to make the necessary alterations. The Lightning I fear would have been quart-in-a-pint-pot stuff.

American aircraft bought by the British, at least Naval ones, have dreadful names. Vought Chesapeake?? Curtiss Cleveland??? Grumman Tarpon???? Brewster Bermuda?????

By that record it should be named after a place with tenuous British and American connections, or a dodgy fish name. How about The McDonnell-BAe Cod, Birmingham, Sardine, Harwich, Tuna, or Whitebait?

On a more serious note, I like Fury, acceptable because there was a North American Fury as well as the Hawker variety. For British service I would like to see that or perhaps Firefly.

What’s no.1?

Is no.5 a H(arvard)ellcat??

I also love the sea vixen. Shame the only one flying isnt in period colours, but at least shes flying![IMG]

Ah, who cares??

There was certainly a wooden mockup of the Hawker P.1121, a development of the P.1103 at Kingston and that was cancelled by Duncan Sandys White Paper. The P.1103 had a more F-16esque appearance.

Someone I know whos father worked on the design team at Glosters states that the thin-wing Javelin did have the horizontail tail… he remembers a model of it on their kitchen table as a boy all those year ago! However, as an engineer myself and knowing some of the shortcomings of the original Javelin, I can see obvious merits in deleting it!

The P.1121 was a development of the P.1103 bringing it more into the strike role than pure interceptor as the Air Ministry had indicated to Hawker’s that this would be looked on favourably. It was all, strictly speaking anyway, private venture at this stage. It was even suggested that Hawker’s put forward the P.1121 for the TSR2 requirement, but again it was given fairly short shrift. Any chance the project had as an interceptor was killed by the Sandys-storm, but in reality the Air Ministry didn’t want it anyway.

The ministry briefly flirted with the idea of buying an “Anglosied” Arrow but rapidly moved on to Spec F155T which spawned the Fairy Delta 3. This was then cancelled by D Sandy in 1957.

According to Tony Buttler, Avro Canada were invited to submit the Arrow for F.155T but it did not meet the specification so did not proceed to the design conference. This gives an impression of just how radical the specification was, as the Arrow was already several notches above anything else then considered.

Other more sensible designs that didn’t get beyond the initial stages of the competition were a larger, aera-ruled Lightning development and the Hawker P.1103 which was a Mach 2 interceptor-cum-strike fighter, as well as a second offering by Fairey which was a less radical development of the Delta 2. Any of these would, in my opinion, have kept up with the best in the world at the time.

Following the ‘thin-wing Javelin’ discussions, I believe DH considered a thin-wing Sea Vixen as well, which would have had afterburning engines and true supersonic performance. Again, it was probably overtaken by events.

I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to read another Vulcan thread. I wish I had kept my promise.

BTW how many Seafire threads are there active at the moment? Why not merge them?