Not sure I understand all of alertken’s post but I think I agree with it.
Another factor which badly affected British airliner construction was that, by and large, the designs churned out by the manufacturers were based on official government requirements – usually for the national airlines or the Board of Trade.
The idea of polling world airlines to find out what they actually might want was something which the UK manufacturers rarely did. As a result, their projects were always at the whim of the British government or the viscitudes of the UK airlines. It was only AFTER a project had got the go ahead that some marketing work might be carried out to see whether other airlines might be interested in the design.
In that respect, airliner manufacturing in Britain was not a lot different to military aircraft building i.e government based specifications and government based orders.
The 146 suffered because Hawker Siddeley would not go ahead with the project in 1973 without government backing. It wasn’t unril BAe was formed in 1977 that the project got the go-ahead. I wonder how much more successful the 146 would have been if it had entered service in 1976/77 rather than 1981/82?
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