Aircraft Industry and Royal Air Force (Government Policies)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 13 July 1967.

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Photo of Mr Reginald Paget Mr Reginald Paget , Northampton 12:00, 13 July 1967

I shall come to the Jaguar in a moment. I am not as optimistic as the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock).

I was in Paris last November, and all my friends in the aviation industry told me then that the AFVG would not materialise. None of them seemed to have any doubt about that at all. During the debate on the Air Estimates I said, in column 318, that this plane would not materialise, and that it would be cancelled, for reasons which had not emerged at that time.

I would like for a moment to consider what we have lost. I do not think that research and development would have come out at less than £250 million. It had gone up to £240 million, and more was to come. With regard to the time of development, I doubt whether we would have seen it in service before 1978. The requirement was for 300 as a maximum, and the cost, including the research and development, would have worked out at very little under £3 million a plane.

What would we have got for that? We would have got a plane which was inferior to the F111. It would have been smaller, which means that it would carry a smaller load, and have a smaller range, because the two things are interchangeable. As a strike aircraft, it would have been subsonic. It would not have had the swivelling pylon, which would have meant its going subsonic until it got rid of its bombs. Thus, there would have been an inferior F111, 10 years late, at as big a price. This was not built-in obsolescence. It was pre-natal obsolescence, and it did not seem surprising to me that the French would not got on with it.

We are told that consideration is being given to going on with this venture with another partner. Heaven help us if we go in for developing a nuclear bomber with the Germans. I think that the effect on our foreign affairs policy would be difficult if we went in for that. Apart from that, however, this idea of going on with this plane seems to me to be a dead duck before it is even hatched.

I come now to the "choppers", which we are to develop jointly with the French. I take an intensely pessimistic view of this idea. We are committed to 100 of the SA330s, which are inferior in performance and load-carrying capability to the S61 Sikorsky, which we can build here on licence. But in any case we are developing a generation behind, because the future helicopter will be the rigid rotor, which is a big breakthrough. The development of the hot cycle, with the heat taken back through the rotors, will give helicopters a speed of 300 miles an hour, which is about double the speed of those which we are developing. Because we are committed to this arrangement with the French, we seem to be committed to an inferior machine.

Breguet and B.A.C. are working together on a strike trainer, and so far apparently the specification has not been juggled about. It is a Mach 1·7 plane to train people to fly at well over Mach 2. On the other hand, there is the Mirage F, with a speed of Mach 2·2, and the Northrop 530, with a speed of mach 2·4. Northrop 530, with a speed of Mach 2·4. European partner. They produced a plane at the same price, but again we are shackled to the French for an inferior plane.

Finally, we come to the daddy of them all, the Concord. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary did his best to cancel this aircraft, and it is a financial tragedy that he did not succeed. Let us consider what is to happen to the Concord. Research and development at £500 million is to go up another £50 million if we are to get a production of three per month which is wanted. Another £20 million has to be put on, and the cost will not come out at less than £650 million.

What do we get at the end? We get an aircraft of Mach 2·1 or 2·2, with a carrying capacity, across the Atlantic, of 124. There is a porpoise close behind us, in the form of a Boeing. That will fly at Mach 2.7 and will have a carrying capacity of 350. That will be there by 1975. We believe that the Concord will go into service in the 1972 season. Let us consider the cost. We have spent about £70 million on it already and we shall probably spend another £580 million. Have the French and ourselves, between us, anything like enough draughtsmen and other people to be able to cover a research and development programme of that size in that time?

It means a capacity to spend about £130 million a year. On the TSR2 it took us six years at maximum effort to spend that amount. Why do we suddenly think that we can get this tremendous advance? I do not think that the capacity is there. I think that we shall see the date going further and further back, while that of the Boeing, much more advanced and powerful, gets nearer and nearer.

Then there is the boom problem, which will affect the market. If it is acceptable over land we may sell 160, but if it is not we shall be lucky to sell 60. If we sell 100, what will the costs be? They will involve about £6½ million on research and development per aircraft, and another £10 million plus on production. We shall be lucky to sell these aircraft at £7 million each, so we are to sell the aircraft at a loss of £8 million or £9 million per plane. This will make groundnuts look like the bargain basement of financial disasters.

I do not believe that our aviation industry or any other has a future unless it is prepared to go into partnership with the great Power, namely, America. As I see it, the future of our aircraft industry lies in our going into partnership with the Americans, who have the resources to develop aircraft of the next generation instead of the last generation—which is what we are doing—and who have the market for those aircraft.

Of course we should be junior partners, but we should be fully employed junior partners. There is a great requirement. The Americans are pushing research and development to capacity. They would use every bit of research and development capacity that we have if we went into partnership with them. The whole thing would be spread and worked and organised. We should be fully employed. We should be junior partners, as British Timken are junior partners of Timken of America. It is a highly effective enterprise and of enormous advantage to my constituents. This is the only kind of future for the British aircraft industry.

As for defence requirements—first, we should not replace the AFVG. It does not fit into the picture of the kind of Power that we are. The production of 300 aircraft at a cost of £3 million each is not economic unless the aircraft are nuclear bombers. The damage which we could do with them is disproportionately small to the damage that we would receive because of the vulnerability of that kind of aircraft.

Secondly, independence defence capacity does not depend on having exclusive models built for oneself by oneself. Israel displayed a certain amount of independent defence capacity without an aircraft industry. It is defence folly to demand tailor-made equipment for this country. It is not only in the women's dress trade that an exclusive model is disproportionately expensive. At this point we ought to shop off the shelf. We ought to consider our defence requirements and buy where the right things are available.

Curiously enough, this has been the policy of the Marine Corps of America. That provides an extremely good example for us. The Marine Corps has a manpower of about 280,000—about 30,000 less than our combined Army and Royal Air Force. It has far more teeth than our combined Army and R.A.F. It has more aircraft. It has 1,200 operational aircraft, mainly Phantoms. We have a good deal fewer than that. Our attack aircraft number about 450 and are still mostly Canberras and Hunters. The Marine Corps has more lift. It has 250 Hercules, whereas we have a mixed bag of larger-weight carriers of about 100. The Marine Corps has many more and far more effective helicopters.

But the budget of the Marine Corps is only one-third of our defence budget. The Marine Corps has always taken the view that it should never specify. It says, "We will take what arms we can get. We are not going to ask for anything to be developed for us." I think that we should adopt that view.

I take another example from Israel. On mobilisation, in three days she put 270,000 men in the field, with astonishing success and a brilliant victory. Israel's military budget is £150 million a year—one-sixteenth of ours. I wish that we could put up the same kind of performance. Broadly speaking, we have been wandering round the world battered and humiliated. We must reconsider our whole defence policy. We must realise that we are no longer in the top class. We are no longer the kind of chaps who have tailor-made clothes, or special exclusive models. We should wait until the other people have done the developing—which is what the big chaps have to do—and then buy on the cheapest market according to our requirements. We shall not make sense of this programme until we have got that kind of policy.