- Hamilton-Paterson, James.
Empire of the Clouds.
London: Faber and Faber, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-571-24795-0.
-
At the end of World War II, Great Britain seemed poised to dominate
or at the least be a major player in postwar aviation. The
aviation industries of Germany, France, and, to a large extent,
the Soviet Union lay in ruins, and while the industrial might
of the United States greatly out-produced Britain in aircraft
in the latter years of the war, America's
P-51 Mustang
was powered by a
Rolls-Royce engine
built under license in the U.S., and the first U.S. turbojet and
turboshaft engines were based on British designs. When the war ended,
Britain not only had a robust aircraft industry, composed of numerous
fiercely independent and innovative companies, it had in hand projects
for game-changing military aircraft and
a plan,
drawn up while the war still raged, to seize dominance of civil
aviation from American manufacturers with a series of airliners
which would redefine air travel.
In the first decade after the war, Britons, especially aviation-mad
“plane-spotters” like the author, found it easy to believe
this bright future beckoned to them. They thronged to airshows where
innovative designs performed manoeuvres thought impossible only a
few years before, and they saw Britain launch the first
pure-jet, and the first
medium- and long-range turboprop airliners into
commercial service. This was a very different Britain than
that of today. Only a few years removed from the war, even postwar
austerity seemed a relief from the privations of wartime, and
many people vividly recalled losing those close to them in combat
or to bombing attacks by the enemy. They were a
hard people, and not inclined to discouragement even
by tragedy. In 1952, at an airshow at Farnborough, an aircraft
disintegrated
in flight and fell into the crowd, killing 31 people and injuring
more than 60 others. While ambulances were still carrying away the dead
and injured, the show went on, and the next day Winston Churchill
sent the pilot who went up after the disaster his congratulations
for carrying on.
While losses to aircraft and aircrew in the postwar era were
small compared combat in the war, they were still horrific
by present day standards.
A quick glance at the rest of this particular
AIB [Accidents Investigation Branch] file reveals many similar
casualties. It deals with accidents that took place between
3 May 1956 and 3 January 1957. In those mere eight months there
was a total of thirty-four accidents in which forty-two aircrew
were killed (roughly one fatality every six days). Pilot error
and mechanical failure shared approximately equal billing in the
official list of causes. The aircraft types included ten de Havilland
Venoms, six de Havilland Vampires, six Hawker Hunters, four
English Electric Canberras, two Gloster Meteors, and one each of
the following: Gloster Javelin, Folland Gnat, Avro Vulcan, Avro
Shackleton, Short Seamew and Westland Whirlwind helicopter.
(pp. 128–129)
There is much to admire in the spirit of mourn the dead, fix
the problem, and get on with the job, but that stoic approach,
essential in wartime, can blind one to asking, “Are these
losses acceptable? Do they indicate we're doing something
wrong? Do we need to revisit our design assumptions, practises,
and procedures?” These are the questions which came into
the mind of legendary test pilot
Bill Waterton,
whose career is the basso continuo of this narrative. First as
an RAF officer, then as a company test pilot, and finally as
aviation correspondent for the Daily Express, he
perceived and documented how Britain's aviation industry was,
due to its fragmentation into tradition-bound companies,
incessant changes of priorities by government, and failure to
adapt to the aggressive product development schedules of
the Americans and even the French, still rebuilding from
wartime ruins, doomed to bring inferior products to the market too
late to win foreign sales, which were essential for the viability of
an industry with a home market as small as Britain's to maintain
world-class leadership.
Although the structural problems within the industry had
long been apparent to observers such as Waterton,
any hope of British leadership was extinguished by the
Duncan Sandys
1957 Defence
White Paper which, while calling for long-overdue consolidation
of the fragmented U.K. aircraft industry, concluded that most
military missions in the future could be accomplished more
effectively and less expensively by unmanned missiles. With
a few exceptions, it cancelled all British military aviation
development projects, condemning Britain, once the fallacy in
the “missiles only” approach became apparent, to
junior partner status in international projects or outright
purchases of aircraft from suppliers overseas. On the
commercial aviation side, only the Vickers Viscount was a
success: the fatigue-induced crashes of the
de Havilland
Comet and the protracted development process of the
Bristol
Britannia caused their entry into service to be so
late as to face direct competition from the
Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8, which were superior aircraft
in every regard.
This book recounts a curious epoch in the history of
British aviation. To observers outside the industry,
including the hundreds of thousands who flocked to
airshows, it seemed like a golden age, with one Made in Britain
innovation following another in rapid succession. But in
fact, it was the last burst of energy as the capital of
a mismanaged and misdirected industry was squandered at
the direction of fickle politicians whose priorities
were elsewhere, leading to a sorry list of cancelled
projects, prototypes which never flew, and aircraft which
never met their specifications or were rushed into service
before they were ready. In 1945, Britain was positioned to be a
world leader in aviation and proceeded, over the next two
decades, to blow it, not due to lack of talent,
infrastructure, or financial resources, but entirely through
mismanagement, shortsightedness, and disastrous public
policy. The following long quote from the concluding
chapter expresses this powerfully.
One way of viewing the period might be as a grand swansong or
coda to the process we Britons had ourselves started with the
Industrial Revolution. The long, frequently brilliant chapter
of mechanical inventiveness and manufacture that began with
steam finally ran out of steam. This was not through any waning
of either ingenuity or enthusiasm on the part of individuals, or
even of the nation's aviation industry as a whole. It happened
because, however unconsciously and blunderingly it was done, it
became the policy of successive British governments to eradicate
that industry as though it were an unruly wasps' nest by
employing the slow cyanide of contradictory policies, the
withholding of support and funds, and the progressive poisoning of
morale. In fact, although not even the politicians themselves
quite realised it – and certainly not at the time of the
upbeat Festival of Britain in 1951 – this turned out to be
merely part of a historic policy change to do away with all
Britain's capacity as a serious industrial nation, abolishing not
just a century of making its own cars but a thousand years of
building its own ships. I suspect this policy was more unconscious
than deliberately willed, and it is one whose consequences for the
nation are still not fully apparent. It sounds improbable; yet there
is surely no other interpretation to be made of the steady,
decades-long demolition of the country's manufacturing capacity –
including its most charismatic industry – other that at some
level it was absolutely intentional, no matter what lengths
politicians went to in order to conceal this fact from both the
electorate and themselves. (p. 329)
Not only is this book rich in aviation anecdotes of the
period, it has many lessons for those living in countries
which have come to believe they can prosper by de-industrialising,
sending all of their manufacturing offshore, importing their
science and engineering talent from other nations, and concentrating
on selling “financial services” to one another.
Good luck with that.
May 2011 