by Damien Burke
There was to be just one further proposal to get TSR2 back into the air, and this came from the Central Fighter Establishment at RAF Binbrook. A paper entitled Use of the TSR2 for Towing of Supersonic Targets, issued by Squadron Leader Ken Hayr on 1 September 1965, recommended that a study be made of the feasibility of doing just that. It went out to the MoA, MoD, A&AEE and RAE, and suggested that, rather than using the aircraft as a target for testing air-toground armament, they would be better employed as supersonic target-towing vehicles for trials of Red Top and other British missiles, and for possible future use in conjunction with the Fighter Command Missile Practice Camp. The MoA had been looking for a suitable supersonic target system for many years without success. The French CT41 drone had showed promise but lacked performance, and now the USA had been asked to develop a suitable towed-target system. A pair of Lightnings and support staff were planning to deploy to Point Mugu in the USA, at some considerable expense, for Red Top trials on their weapons range, and top target speed there would be Mach 1.4, rather than the Mach 2.0 the MoA really wanted. In comparison a TSR2 could attain Mach 1.7 and had a large weapons bay suitable for installing a reel-and-winch system for the target, of which suitable items were available off the shelf from the USA (such as the RMU-8A/TDU-9B). Flight Refuelling Limited also manufactured a similar system under licence which could fit in the TSR2 weapons bay. The paper’s final conclusion was that: ‘If the TSR2 were to be adapted to perform target towing duties it might well confer upon the United Kingdom the most flexible high-performance target system in the world, and instead of British missiles being tested abroad, the situation could be reversed.’
Sadly the MoD thought that the proposal would ‘founder on the grounds of cost and spares’, so no attempt was made to take it further.
Aftermath
Contrary to popular belief, no general order was issued calling for the immediate destruction of all evidence of the project within hours of the cancellation announcement. The pair of surviving airframes should be enough proof of that. Standard practice was to include a break clause in any major contract, which spelled out broadly what was to be done if the project was cancelled. The contractor was to be paid a fair price for all the raw materials, bought-out components, partly fabricated parts, etc., which would then be disposed of by the MoA as it saw fit, and the same applied to TSR2. For this to happen the contractor would have to list each item and its cost. The contractor could also choose to retain some items if it had a use for them, in which case it would effectively buy them back from the MoA. With a project of the scale of TSR2 this meant listing hundreds of thousands of individual items, most of which had no more than scrap value, an accounting task for which the Ministry would have to pay, and for which neither BAC nor the Ministry had any appetite. Instead, BAC agreed with the Ministry at a meeting on 12 April simply to come up with an overall figure for its outstanding costs plus an agreed amount of profit. The company would then list just the items of any residual value (such as unused raw materials, standard items of equipment that could be reused on other aircraft, etc.), all major assemblies (in case some use could be found for them, such as complete airframes for ground-training tasks) plus all jigs, tools and test equipment (of which the Ministry already had a register). A general destruction order simply could not have coexisted with this situation, and despite anecdotal evidence that jigs, parts and airframes began to be cut up within hours of the cancellation, no documentary evidence has come to light to prove that this happened, or indeed that orders were given to do this, though a wealth of evidence to the contrary does exist. (Indeed, one senior BAC officer confirmed to the author that he had never seen any such order, and, at a dinner with Denis Healey around forty years later, Healey asked him if he had any idea who had started the story.) A single newspaper report claimed that jigs were ‘torn out of the concrete’ by cranes at Weybridge on 9 April, but this sounds an incredibly destructive way of dismantling a jig. BAC was certainly not ‘instructed immediately to scrap all the aircraft on the line’ as soon as the cancellation was announced (a claim made in Charles Gardner’s book British Aircraft Corporation, and which the continued existence of XR222 alone disproves).
On 15 April the TSR2 Project Office at Warton sent a memo to other departments, informing them that the Project Office held complete sets of minutes for the various regular meetings (progress, production, project control, and so on) that been held throughout the project, and that departmental heads could assume they had no need to retain their own copies in addition to these. A TSR2 Master File would be kept, containing every relevant document, and if any departments were destroying files, anything referring to TSR2 had to be checked to see if it was contained in the Master File, and forwarded for inclusion if necessary. This process may have given rise to the popular myth that every single TSR2 document was ordered to be destroyed, when the basic process was really one of consolidation.
As for physical parts of the project, at Weybridge the Production Manager assured Warton on 20 April, in response to an enquiry on spares holdings to back up the proposed flight-research programme, that ‘no disposal instruction had yet been received’. Works Order 16A was issued there on 27 April, backdated to the 7th, and covered all costs arising from the clearing up, lifting of jigs, restoring of working areas, run-down of work and possible waiting time for staff pending reallocation to other work. Work orders 17A and 18A, issued on the same date, covered other work related to the project’s draw-down. The covering memo stated: ‘It will be appreciated that due to the magnitude of the task associated with the cancellation of the TSR2 project it is essential that full and proper records are maintained of the costs that will be incurred in putting the cancellation into effect’.
Wings that would never fly, XR226 in the foreground. Contrary to popular belief, there was no immediate general destruction order and many TSR2 components, wings in particular, survived beyond the end of the project. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
A TSR2 Disposals Team was formed by the Ministry to plan and execute a disposal programme, and the Ministry agreed with BAC’s listing of valuable items fairly quickly and progress began on the physical disposal of items which both BAC and the Ministry agreed were worth only their scrap value, such as airframe subassemblies. These items had effectively become government property at this point, and BAC would understandably have wanted them out of the way anyway. Large components were disposed of by the simple expedient of cutting them into manageable pieces and having them carted off to scrapyards for reprocessing. The first mention of this cutting-up of parts appears on 27 April, in a memo from the TSR2 Project Office on Cutting Up of TSR.2 Components. The structural and material authorities on TSR2 had been consulted on any possible dangers, and pointed out that PTFE-coated wiring gave off toxic fumes when subjected to heat, that many fuel tanks had been pressure tested using fuel, that PRC sealants gave off possibly toxic fumes when burnt, and that anything containing DP47 hydraulic fluid should also not be subjected to cutting torches. The incomplete rear fuselages of XS669 and XS670 were scrapped the next day; the more complete rear fuselage sections of XS665 to XS668 were removed from their jigs and scrapped the following week.
On 6 and 7 May a meeting was held at BAC Weybridge to discuss which parts BAC should retain for the time being, primarily in aid of possible research programmes. These included all of the wings, rear fuselages and tailplanes so far delivered to Weybridge, plus a variety of wings and associated parts (tips, apexes, flaps, etc.), rear fuselages, tailplanes and associated parts, fins, bay doors, airbrakes and so on built at Samlesbury and Preston, mainly for airframes XR225 to XR227 and XS660 to XS663. The remaining structural items could then be considered for the scrapping programme that was already under way. Throughout late May and June the bureaucracy of closing down the project carried on, with individual tasks (design directives) being closed, mostly with no additional work authorized, though further work was permitted on the technical publications such as the maintenanc
e manual and spares catalogue. On 20 May a meeting about reduction of staff in BAC’s Lancashire facilities mentioned the jigs at Accrington, which the Ministry was insisting be retained, and asked whether it would be better to store them in a hangar at Warton or cocoon them and store them outside at Accrington. This tends to indicate that any destruction of jigs was nonexistent or extremely limited, at least to start with.
As the summer of 1965 wore on, those TSR2 components that had not had a use found for them were nearing the end of their days. By this point XR225 was dumped outside the factory at Samlesbury, awaiting the scrapman’s cutting torches. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
Throughout June XR219 was used as the backdrop for many group photographs of BAC staff. ‘Ollie’ Heath (TSR2 Project Manager) and Ivan Yates (Aerodynamics and control, Joint Design Team and later Chief Project Engineer) stand out as the tallest members of this particular group. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
In a quiet corner of Warton Airfield on 30 June 1965, far from the eyes of the workers, a myth is about to be born. The primarily wooden rear-fuselage mockup, along with the wooden mockups of various other items such as the wing box, are piled up in readiness for a fiery end. Note the employee sitting in the grass, cine camera at the ready. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
Buckets of fuel having been thrown over the mockup, the TSR2’s funeral pyre was soon burning fiercely. Roland Beamont later said that airframes themselves had been dragged out and burnt, with the magnesium burning ‘like a holocaust’. The TSR2 had hardly any magnesium components, and there is no doubt that he was actually referring to the burning of the Warton mockup. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
Early September 1965, and XR226’s fuselage is in the scrapping compound at Weybridge. A particularly brave or foolhardy cutting-torch operator has already sliced through the forward fuselage, right through the main fuselage fuel tank, and has also cut off the intake area. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
The factories at BAC Warton, Samlesbury and Weybridge were required by the MoD to host ‘open days’ of a sort in the early days of June, allowing members of the RAF, RAE, RRE, NGTE and so on to inspect the redundant equipment with a view to expressing an interest in acquiring any particular items. A letter of 18 June from Air Commodore Bonser, Director, RAF Aircraft Development, at the MoA to Roy Jenkins clearly stated: ‘The disposal of other fuselages [than the three completed airframes], which are in varying states of completion, and of components is still under discussion …’. Furthermore, a letter of 5 July from F.S. Wood on behalf of Air Commodore Bonser mentioned the quarantined airframe subassemblies of interest to the RAE Structures Department, which had made a request to use various structural components (wings, tailplanes, fins and fuselage assemblies) in a programme of structural research based on BAC proposals. While the extent of this programme was decided upon, all such components were protected from disposal. In particular, a large number of completed wings were preserved for research purposes.
On 24 June BAC was ordered by the MoA to take no action to remove instrumentation from XR220 as planned, but instead to hand the airframe over to the A&AEE ‘as lying’. BAC Weybridge was asked to segregate sufficient spares backing to support the aircraft for 25hr-worth of engine running, along with any special-totype tools and technical manuals. Work to remove instrumentation from XR219 could continue before dismantling it in preparation for transport elsewhere.
Samlesbury once again, this time on 7 September 1965, and two BAC fitters are cutting up TSR2 components; XR225 is in the background. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
It was common practice at every aviation company also to scrap jigs at some point after production was terminated on any project. They are rather large and unwieldy bits of metal to keep hanging around on the offchance that they will be of use again. Occasionally this kind of disposal would happen very quickly indeed. Vickers had wasted no time in ‘clearing the decks’ when the Vickers V1000 airliner was cancelled, for instance. The scrapping of jigs was a very visible end to the project for the workers, and suited BAC management, because it served to concentrate the workforce’s collective minds on the hard work they had ahead of them if the company was to remain a viable aircraft manufacturer, such as work on Lightning and Canberra upgrades and impending export sales of Lightnings to Saudi Arabia. Company photographers carefully documented the eventual scrapping of example airframe subassemblies, and when, in late June, the time came at Warton to clear some space in the corner of a hangar occupied by the wooden TSR2 mock-up, it was broken up and transported to a quiet corner of the airfield for a suitably dramatic (and photogenic) end. With fuel-soaked rags stuffed in and around it and a cine camera man and a couple of photographers waiting, the mock-up’s remains were set alight to produce the dramatic stills and film footage that would become the core of countless stories of the heartless destruction of Britain’s wonder jet. It was not ‘dragged out and burned in front of the workers’, as the location for the burning was beyond the southern end of Warton’s disused north-south runway, about as far from the factory as you could get while remaining within the airfield perimeter. None of the actual airframe subassemblies was burned. While some early scrapping had taken place, most of this work was not carried out until September 1965.
The MoA required a complete set of master drawings to be archived on microfiche, but decided in August/September 1965 that keeping the many thousands of paper copies of the drawings was not only unnecessary but also a security risk, and ordered these to be destroyed. (News of this was leaked to the press, and the Sunday Mirror published a report about a ‘Funeral’ for the TSR2 on 5 September 1965, to the government’s embarrassment.) There were many tens of thousands of these drawings, and it took the men at Warton tasked with the disposal many months to burn them all while accounting for each one in the process. Items of zero scrap value were often simply dumped as rubbish in a handy spot. For this reason, many of the concrete and rubber formers over which skin panels were stretched can still be found piled up in rows at the former Vickers plant at Weybridge, now the site of the Brooklands Museum.
As for the situation outside BAC, many contractors only destroyed paperwork many years later to free up storage space (BSEL regretted doing so after the fact; Martin-Baker only did so in 2003, sadly not long before research for this volume began), whereas for some companies TSR2 was such a minor part of their work that it warranted no effort in retaining documentation beyond the statutory periods demanded of accounting information. Reams of correspondence, progress reports, technical manuals, brochures and so on were kept in various locations, notably the Air Ministry and MoA, much of which can now be inspected at the National Archives at Kew or in the BAC and ancestor-company archives at Weybridge (Brooklands Museum), Warton and Farnborough (both BAE Systems). Brooklands also holds a very small sub-set of the drawings on several hundred microfiche cards, and BAE Systems Heritage at Warton has a substantial archive of drawings, though by no means a complete set (there were around 80,000 drawings in existence by the time the project was cancelled). The RAF Museum at Hendon also holds a selection of drawings. The eventual fate of the complete archive of drawings on microfiche that was ordered to be kept by the MoA is, at the time of publication, still unknown, but it is feared it may have been disposed of in the late 1970s.
Equipment associated with the TSR2 was mostly cancelled, including the navigation SLR and associated RPU and radio altimeter, the linescan datalink and the flight-refuelling beacon associated with the FLR. Development of the FLR and linescan continued pending a decision as to their suitability for use on the proposed Buccaneer Mk 2*; work on the Doppler continued as it could be useful for the maritime Comet (the Nimrod); work on the missile warning receiver continued as it could be useful on the Phantom. Similarly, development of the reconnaissance SLR and some other reconnaissance pack contents continued, and was destined to end up in the large EMI reconnaissance pod later carried by RAF Phantoms. Work on IFF Mk 1
0 also continued, as it was intended for use in a variety of other types. The HF transmitter-receiver ended up being used on the Nimrod and Phantom.
Surviving airframes
In the end the only research work carried out by the remaining airframes was ground use only; XR219, XR221 and XR223 were destined to be shot to bits at the Proof & Experimental Establishment at Foulness, lingering on in ever more shattered fashion through the 1970s. The millions spent on them made them probably the most expensive ‘damage to aircraft’ research tools in history. The fate of XR219, the only flyer, was particularly sad. An enthusiast had written to the Air Ministry in March 1966 to see if the aircraft could be saved and form the centrepiece of a new aeronautical museum near Warton, but with no luck. By the summer of 1968 Flight magazine had published a photo of XR219, now at Shoeburyness. A number of letters from concerned readers, outraged by the aircraft’s fate, followed, and on 30 May Roger Bacon’s ‘Straight and Level’ column in the magazine also mentioned the aircraft being ‘cynically and insultingly consigned as a ground target’, though the writer thought it would not come to any harm because ‘the blokes on the range won’t destroy it’. This sort of negative publicity certainly ruffled feathers at the new Ministry of Technology, the MoA’s successor. A letter from one G.G. Woodward at the Ministry addressed the subject and included the closing remarks that ‘XR219 is filling a valuable requirement at Shoeburyness of benefit to the country’s defence. The needs of posterity – and of Roger Bacon – will be catered for by the exhibition of XR220 in the RAF Museum.’ This completely ignored the fact that the people at Shoeburyness were busy blowing several other TSR2s to bits, so XR219 need not have suffered the same fate. The RAF Museum, in a delightful coincidence, wrote to Mr Woodward just days later, asking if they could swap XR220 for XR219, as the latter was of much more historical interest, so he was forced to ask RAE Farnborough (for whom the Shoeburyness trials were being carried out) if this would be possible, and if not (perhaps owing to excessive damage), whether XR219 could donate parts to make XR220 complete (by this time it lacked engines, jetpipes, a wingtip and various cockpit contents).
