How the Harrier and the Lightning Wrote the Epitaph of Britain’s Aircraft Industry

Stunning swansongs, because the world wanted geese

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“Like a virtuoso violinist who insists on playing the kazoo, Britain proved itself brilliant at the wrong instrument.”

At the end of the Second World War, Britain could plausibly claim to be the aviation capital of the world. The nation that had produced the Spitfire and the Lancaster went into peace with a dizzying array of airframe designers, thousands of engineers and draughtsmen, and the first really good jet-powered aircraft in operational service. The United States might have had the industrial scale, and the Soviet Union the sheer audacity of ambition, but Britain had the edge in finesse. It was first with properly good jet engines, a jet airliner, first with capable jet bombers, first in a great many things. At Farnborough, airshows were less about demonstration and more about theatre: a small island strutting as the world’s technological impresario.

And then, over the next three decades, it all disappeared. One by one, the great names of British aviation either went under or were merged into conglomerates whose names were better suited to balance sheets than to nosecones. De Havilland, Vickers, Avro, English Electric, Hawker Siddeley — all became acronyms, then footnotes. By the end of the Cold War, the only real survivor was the amorphous BAE Systems, a multinational engineering concern rather than a national champion.

Plenty of culprits can be summoned to the dock. There was the 1957 Defence White Paper, which in a moment of inspired futurology declared that manned aircraft were finished and missiles were the future. There was (debatably) chronic under-investment by governments who still wanted to maintain a global military presence on a provincial budget. There was also the tendency of British politicians to cancel ambitious projects — the TSR-2 strike aircraft, for example — just as they were beginning to look promising (in retrospect, the P1121 was probably more promising). But two aircraft deserve particular scrutiny: the English Electric Lightning and the Hawker Harrier. Both were technological marvels, loved by pilots, admired by onlookers, and studied by foreign rivals. Both, in different ways, helped hasten the demise of Britain’s aviation industry.

The Lightning was conceived at the end of the 1940s and looked it: a dart of aluminium, with two Rolls-Royce Avon engines mounted one above the other like a stack of ordnance. It was Britain’s first — and last — supersonic interceptor, able to reach Mach 2 in level flight and scramble into the stratosphere faster than anything else in NATO. Pilots adored it, crowds adored it, and even American test pilots admitted grudging respect. On paper, it was the perfect answer to the Soviet bomber threat.

On paper, however, is where the admiration mostly remained. The Lightning was designed for one job: to roar vertically into the sky and swat Tu-95 Bears before they reached Sheffield. It had breathtaking acceleration and climb, but the fuel tanks were comically small. A Lightning could get airborne, reach Mach 2, and intercept — but would then need to head home almost immediately, red lights flashing. Its endurance was measured in tens of minutes, not hours. There was no pretence that it could do ground attack, reconnaissance or fleet defence. At a time when the United States was turning the F-4 Phantom into a global multirole workhorse, the Lightning was a highly strung greyhound