English Electric

English Electric: in the 1940s and 1950s this was a proudly indepen­dent company based in and near Preston, a large town north of Man­chester in Lancashire in the UK.

A brief history of English Electric? The company was a success­ful Second World War aircraft manufacturer. It worked by taking the designs of other companies and producing them under license effi­ciently and on time. This was fine for wartime because the United Kingdom needed all the aircraft it could get, and it needed manufac­turers even if they didn’t design their own aircraft. But at the end of the war, the directors could see that if the company was to survive as an aircraft manufacturer, it would henceforth need to create its own aircraft from scratch. So in 1945 it created its own design team.

The new team knew that they only had one chance. If they got it wrong, English Electric would have to make do with manufacturing industrial machinery or domestic appliances. So it needed to design an aircraft that would be attractive and would sell. This meant, in par­ticular, that it should be cheap, flexible, reliable, and simple. So, bor­rowing the technology of the defeated Germans, the company built a light bomber and reconnaissance aircraft. Straightforward, subsonic, but immensely versatile, it was code-named the Canberra and turned out to be a world-beater. It sold in thousands, both to the Royal Air Force and overseas, and was manufactured under license in large numbers abroad.

The gamble had paid off. English Electric was successfully estab­lished as a front-rank aircraft manufacturer. But what should follow?

At this point there was a disagreement between the English Electric designers and the Whitehall civil servants who were responsible for British military aircraft procurement policy. The mandarins thought 66 Cultures that supersonic technology was risky, that it wouldn’t pay off, so they

continued to order subsonic aircraft. At English Electric they thought differently, and putting their money behind their ideas, they designed and built a prototype supersonic fighter aircraft, code-named the P1.

In some ways this was a tricky machine. It wasn’t easy to service, its move into production was beset by delays, and it carried little fuel so its range was very limited. But in other ways it was extremely suc­cessful. In particular, it flew brilliantly. In the end Whitehall came around and bought a developed version of the P1, called the Light­ning, for the Royal Air Force. And, though it didn’t match the extraor­dinary success of the Canberra, the P1 also went on to sell very well overseas.3

Two out of two: the Canberra followed by the P1 Lightning. English Electric had become a very successful aircraft company. But what would follow the P1?

We have reached 1955 now and find that the Royal Air Force was thinking hard about its future aircraft. Here’s an excerpt from a con­fidential government memo:

The Canberras, with the ability to deliver the tactical atomic bomb and trained to operate at low level, must continue to pro­vide our tactical strike and reconnaissance force for some time to come. It is difficult to say how long they can continue to be re­garded as an effective tactical force. However, operated strictly at low level, they might perhaps continue to do so until the enemy can develop an effective low level surface to air guided weapon.

At best this might be until 1963. (AIR8/2014 1955)

So there was a gap, a space for a Canberra replacement. It was a space defined by the threat to subsonic, medium-altitude bombers flying over Russia posed by antiaircraft missiles which might shoot them down. And it was a space that gradually took shape between 1955 and 1957 when it was specified in a document called General Operational Requirement (GOR) 339. This is what English Electric was after: the contract to design and build the GOR 339 aircraft, the Canberra re­placement.

It’s possible to tell a story about the evolution of that design, the steps the English Electric designers went through.4 By 1957 this de­sign had stabilized in a particular proposal code-named the P.17A.

This design was described and justified in a long brochure written Cultures 67

in response to the Whitehall requests for designs for a GOR 339 air­craft. Most of the brochure is given over to technical description of one point or another. But it also contains a history or perhaps it would be better to say a genealogy of the P.17A, which was, so to speak, a description of its antecedents.

The value of the Canberra experience cannot be over-estimated.

It is the only modern tactical strike and reconnaissance aircraft in service with the R. A.F. and many other Air Forces. More Can­berra aircraft are in service with foreign countries than the Vis­count, which holds the record for British civil aircraft. This is due to the flexibility of the Canberra in its operational roles and per­formance, and is a factor which has been kept in mind through­out the P.17A design development.5

In this excerpt from the brochure we’re not only being reminded of the history that I have just recounted but also (in a version of the policy genre discussed in chapter 3) of its relevance. For the Canberra, or so the document is going to tell us, is an excellent test bed for all the tactical equipment needed for the new aircraft—the radars, the bombing equipment, and all the rest. The Canberra also has the virtue that it does some of the same jobs that the GOR 339 plane will do: ‘‘the Canberra is being used for low level strikes with delivery of tactical atomic stores by L. A.B. S. manoeuvres” (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958, 1.S.3). LABS is an acronym. It stands for Low Altitude Bomb­ing System, which is a term that describes the maneuvers the plane goes through in order to avoid destroying itself as a result of delivering ‘‘tactical atomic stores.’’

So the Canberra was some kind of progenitor. But in many systems of kinship, offspring have two parents and the P.17A was no excep­tion. So we move to more history, or more context.

Meanwhile the P1.B is the only aircraft under operational de­velopment having high supersonic experience and appropriate auto-pilot and instrument systems. Moreover, it is the first air­craft under development as an integrated weapon system with all-weather equipment and a reasonable degree of automaticity.

Perhaps most important of all, it is the only aircraft in the world known to have flown with satisfactory controllability up to a

Mach number of 1 at very low altitudes in very rough air. (English Electric/Short Bros. 1958,1.S.3)

So the argument was that the P1.B already flew like the OR 339 aircraft, very low and very fast, and it did so well. The promise was there. The experience of the P1.B would be built into the P.17A. More lines of descent. And what this particular passage doesn’t mention (though it crops up in the narrative elsewhere) is that many of the techniques used to design the P1.B were also being used for the P.17A.

The P1.B stress calculations, for instance, were run on a big com­puter, the DEUCE, which was purchased for the P1.B project. Now the same computer was being used to design the P.17A, not to mention the high-speed wind tunnels and all the accumulated design office experience.

The brochure adds the following:

It will be seen that the P.17A represents a completely straight­forward application of our design experience, as of 1957, just as the Canberra was a conventional application of aerodynamic and structural design knowledge in 1945. This is for the same reason; to guarantee that the R. A.F. have a practical aircraft in service as near as possible to the desired time scale.6