pathology_doc
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Browsing through BSP 1 (redux) last night, I came upon the unhappy story of the P.1083 Hunter development.
Brief background: this is a developed Hunter with a 50 degree swept wing and an afterburning Avon on steroids for supersonic performance and climb to rival a Lightning.
Full go-ahead is given on 12 December 1951, and design churns happily along... until April 1953, when the Air Staff decides it wants the armament to be Firestreaks. Four of them. So of course the numbers get run, and it's clear that with four missiles, the guns and all the missile support gear around, there's (a) not that much room for fuel and (b) less than sparkling performance.
Naturally the only solution is a full redesign but there's no money for prototypes for that, so the Air Staff says no, it's missiles or nothing, go away.
The irony: parts of the fuselage and tail make it into the Hunter F.6 (without afterburner) so the effort is not completely wasted, but this sort of changing horses midstream isn't going to be limited to Hawker. We see it later with the thin-wing Javelin being cancelled in favour of the CF-105, which is in turn cancelled because it won't be ready all that much before the supposedly better F.155T, which... well, we know what happened to that. And that's before we get to TSR.2 mysteriously growing from a Canberra replacement into something more semi-strategic...
(This post is in the Bar because the discussion revolves around the fickleness of the customer's requirements, not a plausible alternative history. But if you want that, it involves P.1083 actually getting built as first specified... and maturing in time to receive AIM-9B, with its relatively trivial support requirements. The fact that AFAIK no Hunter ever carried missiles in British service outside of trials firings makes the irony doubly distasteful.)
One can talk about the Sandys Axe all one likes, but it is just as informative to look at the malignant effect of specification creep... except the creep in this case is a massive jump!
Brief background: this is a developed Hunter with a 50 degree swept wing and an afterburning Avon on steroids for supersonic performance and climb to rival a Lightning.
Full go-ahead is given on 12 December 1951, and design churns happily along... until April 1953, when the Air Staff decides it wants the armament to be Firestreaks. Four of them. So of course the numbers get run, and it's clear that with four missiles, the guns and all the missile support gear around, there's (a) not that much room for fuel and (b) less than sparkling performance.
Naturally the only solution is a full redesign but there's no money for prototypes for that, so the Air Staff says no, it's missiles or nothing, go away.
The irony: parts of the fuselage and tail make it into the Hunter F.6 (without afterburner) so the effort is not completely wasted, but this sort of changing horses midstream isn't going to be limited to Hawker. We see it later with the thin-wing Javelin being cancelled in favour of the CF-105, which is in turn cancelled because it won't be ready all that much before the supposedly better F.155T, which... well, we know what happened to that. And that's before we get to TSR.2 mysteriously growing from a Canberra replacement into something more semi-strategic...
(This post is in the Bar because the discussion revolves around the fickleness of the customer's requirements, not a plausible alternative history. But if you want that, it involves P.1083 actually getting built as first specified... and maturing in time to receive AIM-9B, with its relatively trivial support requirements. The fact that AFAIK no Hunter ever carried missiles in British service outside of trials firings makes the irony doubly distasteful.)
One can talk about the Sandys Axe all one likes, but it is just as informative to look at the malignant effect of specification creep... except the creep in this case is a massive jump!
