Military Marvels Jet! When Britain Ruled the Skies

In the two decades following the Second World War,

the British aircraft industry flourished in a pageant of ingenuinety and innovation.

Britain had invented the jet engine

and was set to lead the world into an exhilarating new age.

The jet age.

British jets are years ahead of foreign competitors.

Very exciting time.

Absolutely fantastic performance.

This was a whole new world that was opening up.

Aircraft and the men who flew them were the stars of this age.

Thousands flocked to air shows to witness the daring feats of the fighter aces.

Who were now the pin-up idols of a country escaping

the austerity and pain of the war years.

Squadron leader, Neville Duke, wowed them all with a daring display.

It was glamour, sheer, damn glamour.

They flew fast, they flew high.

They'd be gone in two minutes.

Vertical, bang, up.

Flying these amazing new warplanes was the dream of many a young boy.

This, to me, was going to be my future.

A future fraught with danger,

where test pilots were flying into the unknown,

taking prototype military aircraft to the limit, and sometimes beyond.

Above all, this was an age where the sky was full of fighters

and bombers.

Meteors, Hunters, and Lightnings. Valiant's, Vulcans, and Victors.

This was the golden age of the jet, when Britain ruled the sky.

On a bright summer's morning at Coventry airport,

a very special plane is being readied for flight.

This is a Gloucester Meteor, Britain's first jet fighter.

British engineering genius, Frank Whittle, had invented first

the jet engine, then a prototype jet aircraft by 1941.

They paved the way for the twin-engined Gloucester Meteor, which proved

itself against Germany's V1 flying bombs in the last year of the war.

In 1945, the Meteor was state-of-the-art in military aviation.

The Gloucester Meteor is a fascinating plane.

I first encountered it as a kid, staring up at the sky, it was as

if you suddenly saw the modern world leap out of the black-and-white.

There was this plane, which just looked so different, so strange.

For hundreds of young RAF pilots who had learnt to fly in

piston-engined aircraft with propellers,

climbing into a Meteor for the first time was a bolt from the blue.

When you go into a Meteor,

the first thing that struck it was the fantastic view all the way round.

-You could see what you are doing.

-There was nothing in front of you,

whereas flying a conventional single piston engine aircraft, like

a Hurricane or Spitfire, there's a huge, great engine in front of you.

When you start the engine, it was just a quiet whir, nice,

smooth running up.

Whereas, of course, on a piston engine it was bang, bang,

bang, fighting to get it started.

You open the power, and then you're suddenly pushed in the back,

and you realise the first time what a jet aircraft really is.

It's so exciting, getting airborne, up with the wheels,

and tell you about 38 knots, pull it up,

and she would go up, well, we thought then, like a rocket.

The impression I got was this smoothness of it,

the lack of vibration, the lack of even noise inside the aircraft,

you don't hear all of that jet roar that you get from outside.

It's like a high-speed glider, almost.

It was such a terrific thing just a hugely, and I loved the Meteor.

What's remarkable about these early days of the jet age

is that this revolutionary technology was being

developed against a backdrop of austerity.

It was all done on the cheap because we were broke, we just fought a war.

In 45, we were looking at a country where a Labour government had just been elected,

and a Labour government had not been elected on the basis that we want

more Spitfires, it was elected by people who wanted somewhere to live.

This country had been blitzed, bombed, and poor.

But the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee,

also understood the importance of Britain's aircraft industry.

By the time the war ended, the aircraft industry was our

largest industry, because enormous effort had been poured into it.

And there was something like 30 separate aircraft companies.

You think of the people, not just building the aircraft,

but the engines, hydraulic systems, the material, the seats.

The electrics, huge numbers of people,

probably well over one million involved.

The obvious thing to do was to just say right,

let's scale it down to peace time.

But part of the problem of trying to rationalise it was that,

from a public's point of view,

they were almost sacrosanct these companies, they were so well

known, de Havilland, Avro, Vickers, they were sort of household names.

Just as sacrosanct was the Royal Air Force.

It had saved the country from invasion during the Battle of Britain.

But now, in peace time,

it joined forces with the aircraft industry, the RAF created

a new unit, a high-speed flight, with three wartime fighter aces.

Teddy Donaldson, Neville Duke, and Bill Waterton.

Gloucester provided the hardware, souped up Meteors,

the challenge, to break the world a speed record.

This is the star Gloucester Meteor, the world's fastest aircraft.

It is really a publicity stunt,

they wanted to sell the Meteor abroad,

they also wanted to trumpet England and all the rest of it,

it was very patriotic thing to go and break the world record.

The British held the record, 606 mph,

and now the Americans were snapping at their heels.

In late summer, 1946, the high-speed flight took to the air

over the seaside town of Worthing.

Now, for the run over the record mile,

watch out for the delayed action sound.

The plane is way ahead before your eardrums catch up with it.

If you take people going on holiday in '46,

they were suddenly enjoying a world where they knew they were not about to be bombed,

and they could sit on the front and watch this phenomenal aircraft

fly over their heads at 600 miles an hour.

Now, if you plonked people down on the beach in Worthing in 2012,

and flew the Meteor over their heads, they would still be staggered.

On September the 7th, group captain, Teddy Donaldson,

increased the record to 616 mph.

But this much trumpeted achievement was just the beginning

as far as the aircraft companies were concerned.

British aircraft designers never stand still.

So, they set themselves a new target.

There was this great desire to break through

what was seen as a technical barrier to high-speed flight.

The sound barrier.

There were films and talk of the sound barrier,

can you break through the sound barrier,

there were even those who said you couldn't get faster than sound,

that it was impenetrable barrier.

What's so ruddy peculiar about the speed of sound?

We all know exactly what it is, don't we?

750 mph at ground level.

But at high altitude, above 20,000 feet,

the speed of sound reduces to around 660 mph.

That target became the new holy grail for the RAF.

During the battle of Britain,

these brave, young men had flown planes against a visible enemy,

the Luftwaffe.

After the war, there was this mystical force,

as it was seen, which was the sound barrier.

What exactly does happen to an aeroplane at the speed of sound?

I don't know.

And shall I tell you something, Tony?

-What?

-No-one else in the world does either.

In the cockpit of a futuristic looking,

and, of course, British prototype jet,

our test pilot hero pushes his aircraft to the limit.

Still no response!

Bail out.

It's coming up to the last one!

Bail out, bail out!

Tony!

HORN

Being a test pilot in the late 1940s was indeed a dangerous business.

These chaps really were pushing their necks out

because the technology that was understood at the time was primitive.

These were real superheroes,

I mean, these guys got in to largely untried aircraft.

We had huge respect for them, because they had all done something

which we had never done and were never going to be asked to do.

And so, the life of a test pilot was hazardous in the very early days.

Anything could go wrong,

cos it was all at the edge of the known technology.

You know, they could get problems with pressurisation,

the cockpit canopies suddenly flew off and decapitated them.

Over the six years following the war,

a test pilot was killed virtually every month in Britain.

In September 1946, Geoffrey de Havilland Jr,

chief test pilot for his father's company,

attempted to break the sound barrier in their latest prototype jet.

He probably broke the sound barrier in that plane then,

but what happened, that plane broke up over the Thames estuary,

broke up in to the mud at Sheppey.

De Havilland's death was a national tragedy,

but it certainly didn't discourage test pilots continuing to take risks.

Test pilots, I suppose, never believed it would happen to them.

You flew these aircrafts

but you never believed that you were going to get in to trouble,

you always felt that you'd be able to rescue the situation yourself.

The test pilots of the late '40s were, generally speaking,

pilots who had been flying through the second world war.

Combat experience had made them a perfect fit for the job.

By 1948, Spitfire ace, Neville Duke, had joined Hawkers.

Hurricane veteran, Bill Waterton, had been snapped up by Gloucesters,

and now John Derry, who had flown Typhoons after D-Day,

had filled the gap left by Geoffrey Jr at de Havilland.

The test pilots of my boyhood were national heroes,

and they were household names.

Everybody knew them, they knew them as well as today's people

would know the names of Formula 1 drivers, or footballers.

Yet they handled that fame in a disarmingly understated way.

I think it was Teddy Donaldson,

after he had broken the world air speed record in 1946, he said,

"Right, that's it, chaps, I've got to go off and see mother now."

They were gentleman fliers, but they were personalities,

they didn't come out of a single mould.

These flying galacticos were ideal material for the media of the late 1940s.

And soon, children knew all about them as well.

They developed almost a cult following amongst young people.

And this was reflected in the sort of comics

which were full of all these superheroes and invented stories.

A sort of jet version of Biggles, really.

Comics like the Eagle,

they had all these wonderful cutaway drawings

which made you look in great detail about how all these incredible machines worked.

When you're little, you felt surely they must be better

than anything mere foreigners could build.

There was plenty of evidence to suggest that might just be true.

And the place to see all this aviation excellence in action

was the annual Farnborough air show.

Farnborough was very much a national event in the early years after the war.

For Britain's aircraft industry, this was the key shop window.

Farnborough showed only British aircraft in great profusion,

and it was almost an act of patriotism,

you went along and you just revelled

in this tremendous outpouring of mechanical brilliance.

They had buyers from around the world who would come,

and you'd have delegations from Arab countries and the Far East, the US.

There were even representatives from the Soviet Union,

drawn there by Britain's reputation for excellence in jet engine design.

There was a feeling if it was good enough for the Royal Air Force,

it must be quite good.

So, we better perhaps buy some.

Tony Blackman was a test pilot for the Avro aircraft company in the 1950s.

It was absolutely key to the firms

to have their latest aircraft at Farnborough.

At Avro's, it was the driving force, all our new developments,

we all strove like mad to get the aircrafts ready for Farnborough.

Farnborough's climax was the display over the weekend,

when the general public came in their hundreds of thousands.

Everywhere you looked there was excitement,

there were so many aeroplanes,

the sky was full of aeroplanes, all day long.

The pilots would really push the aircraft, it was quite incredible.

They were probably only about 15 or 20 feet above the grass,

and they came right over people's heads.

Most people were probably rigid with fear.

Here's the Follom Meek, designed by WW Catcher.

The commentators were very careful to point out who was flying the plane,

people would wait with great anticipation to see a particular pilot

put a particular aircraft through its paces.

With this machine, Jan Zurakowski

demonstrates the first, entirely new aerobatic for 20 years - cartwheeling.

It was like watching, I suppose,

in mediaeval times, famous knights waiting to climb onto their horses to joust.

At every show there were always new aircraft

for the test pilots to show off.

The Canberra, the first of Britain's new jet bombers,

powered by Rolls-Royce turbojets.

At Farnborough in 1949, the public got its first look

at the incredible English Electric Canberra,

the world's first jet bomber.

Flying it that week was test pilot, Roland "Bee" Beamont.

The way it was demonstrated in Farnborough by Roland Beamont was immensely popular.

He did it most dramatically, he threw things around the sky like a fighter,

and American commentators were most impressed

that you could fly a bomber like a fighter.

Just let me show you what has been happening.

What made the Canberra so special though,

was that it could fly huge distances and astonishingly high.

Certainly, the first aircraft that the Royal Air Force had

that would fly at heights of 48,000 feet.

Pete Peters first flew a Canberra in 1951.

Its distinctive, low-slung shape made an immediate impression.

A sleek, beautiful looking aircraft.

When you first walk up to it,

you think to yourself, "Jesus Christ, am I going to fly this?"

This version of the Canberra,

with extra long nose to house radar still turns heads today.

The aircraft itself was incredibly manoeuvrable and agile,

and it could hold its own, we believed at the time,

with most of the fighters of the day.

The Canberra would make headlines throughout

the '50s by setting a series of distance and altitude records,

including the first non-stop, unrefuelled, transatlantic crossing by a jet.

This was about more than just breaking records.

By 1950, following the Berlin air lift,

the Soviet Union's iron curtain had descended over Eastern Europe.

Britain was now on the front line of a new war, the Cold War.

The Canberra had arrived in the nick of time.

Brilliant aircraft, it's performance was so good it could fly

higher than anything else at the time, it could fly great distances.

And crucially, this meant the Canberra could stay

out of reach of the Soviet Fighters of the early '50s.

All these attributes paved the way for the Canberra's greatest coup.

It was sold brilliantly abroad to America,

it was the first time the Americans had taken an aircraft of ours.

This was a matter of huge pride.

Back then, British engineering was highly prized.

But for all the tub-thumping patriotism surrounding this British bomber,

there were clouds on the horizon.

Those same Soviet fighters that struggled to reach the camera's altitude

were having success elsewhere.

There was a hot war going on in Korea

and the Soviet Union was flying MiG 15s.

The MiG 15 was faster and better than any plane the British had in service.

With swept wings, it was a more advanced design than the Gloucester Meteor.

But the MiG 15 also benefited

from a bizarre decision taken back in 1946.

Rolls-Royce, with government blessing,

had sold some of their engines to the Soviets.

The Russians wanted them,

and Stalin says, "Oh, there's no point in asking the British.

"Nobody's going to sell their state secrets."

But they tried it on anyway and Rolls-Royce did sell them.

It was extraordinary and tragic, actually, as it turned out.

The Russians reversed engineered them for their MiG 15s,

which then started donning American Air Force planes in Korea within a year or two.

This did not cheer up the Americans or indeed

the Royal Australian Air Force who saw their Meteors

being shot down by these extremely fast Soviet aircraft.

Clearly, by 1951, the Meteor was outdated.

Britain needed a replacement.

But the government was not short of new fighter designs to choose from.

Test pilots at competing companies had been trying out all manner of prototype military jets.

And with them, experiments like Rolls-Royce's outlandish-looking flying bedstead,

an early attempt at the vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

In those days, almost every aircraft looked completely different.

You could look up at the sky almost any day in Britain

and see a shape that's never been seen before.

MUSIC: "The Nutcracker Suite"

Swept wings were now the thing,

and reflected in the graceful design of the new Hawker Hunter.

There was the boldly distinctive delta shape of the big Gloucester Javelin.

Even the dear old Meteor had a modern revamp with this long-nosed night fighter model.

At the Farnborough Air Show in 1952,

people turned out in vast numbers to see all these new aircraft daringly displayed by the test pilots.

One of the big draws that year was John Derry,

who would be flying the extraordinary twin-boom DH110.

And amongst the crowds on the Saturday was the five-year-old Richard Gardner.

The 1952 Air Show is one that I will never forget,

because although I was very young at the time, my father was taking a cinefilm

and I was standing next to him and we had the sunshine roof open in our old car.

He was following with his 16 mil cine camera the DH 110.

You have this extremely beautiful, if curious looking plane, flown by John Derry.

This aircraft approached at very high speed from my right

and banked over and it looked sort of glistening, silver coloured aircraft.

EXPLOSION

Derry broke the sound barrier, flung the plane higher and higher,

then the unexpected, the unbelievable happened.

The plane broke up.

My mother sort of grabbed my father's elbow and said, "Look, something's happening."

Father shouted back, "Let go, let go. Leave me alone, leave me alone."

Derry's DH 110 came apart in midair, right above the watching thousands.

I'll never forget. It looked like confetti. It looked like silver confetti.

The remaining airframe floated down right in front of us

and it just came down like a leaf.

Both Derry and his co-pilot Tony Richards were killed.

And then the two engines, like two missiles,

shot out of the airframe and hurtled in the direction of the air show.

One of them smashed into a hill where thousands were standing.

There was sort of silence and then one or two people screamed,

but mostly, it was just a sort of shock.

You could hear some people were sort of whimpering,

which was quite shocking if you were a young person.

You were not used to that sort of thing, grown people sort of crying.

It was carnage.

28 spectators had been killed and countless more injured.

This was an absolutely nakedly public event.

It took place in front of hundreds of thousands of people.

They could see it suddenly that it wasn't all about abstract glamour

or excitement, it was about a man dying in front of them in the air,

and it was also about a lot of spectators dying.

They were not just onlookers. They were tragic participants.

Derry's crash had also been witnessed by other test pilots

on the ground waiting for their part of the display.

I think everybody almost felt a personal loss

with John Derry being killed on accident.

But once the ambulance crews had treated the injured

and the wreckage cleared away...

They went on with the air show.

Can you imagine anything like that today

if something like that happened?

28 people.

Neville Duke in a Hawker Hunter took off,

flew the plane up to 30,000 feet,

dived it and broke the sound barrier.

Now, was that a kind of brutal act or an unthinking act?

No, I think what they realised was they had to keep the show on the road.

The air show was such an important event.

It was in the spirit of things to carry on.

And the next day in the pouring rain,

140,000 people turned up to watch the final day's display.

The difference between then and now

is that it never crossed anybody's mind to sue either Farnborough, the airfield organisers,

or De Havilland's, the company that made the plane.

Changes, though, were made to what test pilots would be allowed to do in future.

Besides an immediate effect, it had a lasting effect on flying,

because we were not allowed after that to do turns towards the crowd.

Safety in all aspects of flying became a more pressing concern.

Nowhere was this better seen than in the development of the ejector seat.

'As more and more jet aircraft come into service,

'the problem of saving the pilot in the event of mishap becomes increasingly difficult.'

The higher speeds that jet aircraft introduced,

the airflow was so enormous

that you would probably not even get your head out

much beyond the outside of the windscreen cover.

Experiments replicating this very powerful airflow

show just how difficult it was to escape from the cockpit.

But scientists have accepted the challenge.

A British company, Martin-Baker, came up with the answer.

In 1946, pilot Bernard Lynch climbed aboard a specially-adapted Meteor

and carried out the very first in-flight ejection tests.

And by the mid-'50s, ejector seats were standard in RAF fighters.

How did it work in a real emergency?

In 1956, Hawker Hunter pilot Alan Merriman was part of an RAF squadron in Suffolk.

I was doing this climb at full power and 400 knots

and as I passed through roughly 12,000 feet,

the engine completely exploded.

I lost control.

He had no choice but to eject.

The next thing I knew was that the aircraft was disappearing in front of me,

the seat was disappearing below, and I was hanging in a parachute.

It all happened automatically.

And you were there floating down gently so quietly

after all the fuss and bother that you had before - it was really peace and calm.

The next question really is, "Where am I going to land?"

There were one or two hazards that made you feel slightly uncomfortable.

Electric power cables with 33,000 volts running through them,

steam trains driving up the railway line at very high speed.

I spotted a tennis court,

a beautiful grass tennis court in a big house with its own grounds,

and I thought, "If only I could aim for that I'm going to be all right."

But Alan was already too low.

There was a great crash and I found myself bursting through the roof of a house

on the outskirts of the town

and there I was wedged in amongst the tiles.

His impact was even more dramatic.

My legs had gone through not only the tiles in the roof

but in the ceiling of an upper bedroom

in which there was a woman of 75

who was awakened and frightened by the crashing noise above.

His story made front-page news in the local press.

It was also picked up by the French media,

who revelled in the rude awakening of the elderly woman, who was described as shocked

by the two booted legs and the male derriere stuck in her ceiling.

Ejector escapes like Alan's were commonplace in the 1950s.

Fighter jets were going ever faster

as new aircraft shapes were constantly tested in wind tunnels.

British designers had learned much from German research.

During the closing years of World War II, Britain discovered

that the Germans had very advanced supersonic wind tunnels,

far more advanced than what we had in the UK.

In fact, this very wind tunnel in Farnborough

is one captured from the Germans and brought back to Britain.

Wind tunnel research helped produce a whole new generation of aircraft.

The V bombers.

The Valiant, the Vulcan and the Victor.

Three very different bombers with a common destructive purpose.

The story of the V bomber is intimately linked

to the story of Britain's view of itself in the world.

In the late '40s, the British,

in order to remain an independent great power,

they decided to embark upon creating their own nuclear weapons.

If they're going to create their own nuclear weapons,

they had to have a way of delivering them.

What do they do? In a way, they went back

to the tried and tested formula of the Second World War.

In the war, three heavy bombers -

the Lancaster, Halifax and Stirling -

had pulverised Germany.

Now the new generation - Valiant, Vulcan and Victor -

could strike a nuclear hammer-blow against the Soviet Union.

But why did the Air Ministry, in a seemingly extravagant move,

go for three different V bomber designs?

The ministry decided to go for three because the first aircraft,

the Valiant, was quite straightforward and simple

and could be produced quickly whereas the more advanced ones,

the Vulcan and Victor, were to be proceeded with

until it was clear that one of them was the better aircraft

and in the end, the Ministry went for all three because all three worked.

Absolutely incredible, if you think about it now,

-the way things are and the way they were then.

-It's all fantastic.

The largest, heaviest, and the most aerodynamically advanced

of the V bombers was the Victor.

With its other-worldly crescent-shaped tail and wings,

the Victor was massive.

Its enormous 110-foot wingspan

and distinctive cockpit gave it a predatory presence.

I think to this day, the Handley Page Victor

is one of the most evil-looking aircraft I've ever seen.

If you wanted a plane which looked like something

out of a 1950s science fiction, it was the Victor.

A bomber with an incredible range of 6,000 miles, the Victor was powered

by four thunderous Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire engines.

The pilots could call upon a mammoth 40 tons of thrust

to get this monster into the air.

But when it comes to making a lasting impression,

there's one V bomber head and shoulders above the rest.

The Vulcan really is an iconic symbol, I suppose.

Everybody knows about the Vulcan.

This strange delta shape, unheard of.

No bomber had ever had a shape like this.

It was like a great black bat.

With the wheels extended almost like talons. A fantastic sight.

The Vulcan was designed and built by the same company

that produced the great Lancaster bomber, Avro.

Now the world's first delta wing four jet bomber, the Avro Vulcan.

And there was no better man to show it off than Avro's chief test pilot,

Roly Falk.

Immediately I got into her,

I knew that had got absolute confidence.

'A brilliant man, a wonderful test pilot and a great salesman.'

He used to fly in a grey pinstripe suit, never wore overalls.

At Farnborough, which was very important,

he would have lunch with a customer and then he would dash out

in his pinstripe suit and get into the Vulcan and fly

and he always flew immaculately.

Everybody's used to bombers droning along

laboriously getting into air like flying pigs.

This thing just leapt off the ground, it was incredible.

At the 1955 Air Show,

Falk did what no one had ever done with a heavy bomber.

He rolled the Vulcan.

The crowds loved it but Falk was given a ticking off.

He was told this was inappropriate behaviour for a bomber.

By the time the Vulcan entered service with the RAF in 1956,

Tony Blackman was joining Avro as a test pilot.

He, like Falk, once wowed the crowds at Farnborough.

Now you must turn at once to Tony Blackman.

There he goes, now on the top of a loop.

He's over the top and he's rolling out.

Huge bomber it may have been but the cockpit is surprisingly cramped.

As well as two pilots in the front, the back had to fit in

a navigator radar, navigator plotter and electronics officer.

It's amazing to be back and nothing's changed.

Just slightly harder perhaps climbing up the steps.

I used to be a bit quicker and of course, the flight deck is so small.

A large aircraft with a minute flight deck with a stick

and it was just like a fighter, really.

The Vulcan served in the RAF for an impressive 28 years,

even flying missions in the Falklands War in 1982.

There's now only one in the world that still flies

and its based at Doncaster Airport.

It's an important day for XH558.

She's going to do a special flypast over a gathering

of former V bomber crews.

When you taxi out, of course,

the power is very low and there's not very much noise

and you don't really appreciate what a powerful machine you're handling.

It all seems so tame.

Then of course, when you open up the power,

it takes a little time for the engines to accelerate

and if you open up to full power on the brakes and then let go,

it's absolutely fantastic the acceleration rate.

The power in the 301 engines was so enormous

because you had four engines, 20,000 pounds static thrust each

and the Vulcan dry only weighed just over 100,000 pounds

so that's why the Vulcan would go.

You get this tremendous kick up the backside,

I suppose like driving a racing car.

Vulcan, you're clear to manoeuvre.

Beautiful airborne, the Vulcan triggers vivid memories

for those who spent long hours on the flight deck.

It was a typical Avro aircraft, it was black inside

and had the Avro smell of a mixture of hydraulic fluid, fuel and vomit.

Those engines have a sound

that anyone who's ever heard a Vulcan before instantly recognises.

You can hear it quite well there.

I reckon he's about 800 feet, I think.

-Happy days, I suppose, happy days.

-Nostalgic.

-Nostalgic, yes.

But these bomber crews had a deadly serious job.

Anthony Wright flew all the V bombers.

He spent most of the 1960s practising for nuclear war

with the Soviet Union.

I was 21 when I first was responsible for my nuclear weapon in my aircraft.

It was a cold war, they were against us, we were against them

and if they were going to hurt us, I would do the same to them.

Practice missions with dummy bomb drops were carried out

over areas of mainland Britain that replicated Soviet territory.

If you went on a mission east, you'd go high first of all,

and then you'd go down below the Russian Polish radar,

go in and drop your nuclear weapon

and come back.

That was it, really.

We always felt that the massive destruction that could be dealt

by the V bombers would have been so colossal

that no-one in their right minds

would even think about attacking this country.

I am very proud to have flown the V-Bombers,

under my father's command during the war.

He was only too pleased to bomb Germany,

the same as I had no problem whatsoever to bomb Russia

if I had to.

The V-Bombers were emblematic of the brilliance

but also the extravagance of the British Aircraft Industry

in the 1950s.

The big problem was,

there wasn't enough funding to pay for all these.

As well as all the bombers,

there was now an almost bewildering array of fighters in

or about to come into service

with both the RAF and Navy.

Gloster was building Javelins.

Hawkers had Hunters, Seahawks.

De Havilland made Vampires,

Venoms and Sea Vixens.

And Supermarine had their Scimitars and Swifts.

And even more potential new aircraft were already in development.

The government of the day,

when they looked at the requirements for the next 20 years

concluded that you couldn't afford to operate so many different types.

Something had to go

and the government was ready to bite the bullet.

In 1957, Duncan Sandys,

who was then the Conservative Defence Minister,

unleashed his White Paper for the future of defence.

Sandys was a great believer and had been since the war,

in guided missiles and rocketry,

and what he really wanted to do was to do away with aircraft

and just have guided missiles.

Missiles, not fighters, were supposedly going to be the future.

Which meant that the once sacrosanct RAF

would be first on the chopping block.

At a stroke, 14 Day-Fighter Squadrons

and about eight Night-Fighter Squadrons

had been disbanded virtually overnight.

A savage reduction in capability.

Aircraft companies were told they would have to merge.

Within three years,

most of the multitude had been rationalised down to just two.

The first big group - the British Aircraft Corporation.

Now that includes Bristol Aircraft, Hunting Aircraft,

English Electric and Vickers-Armstrong.

The second big group is Hawker-Siddeley Aviation.

But from these ashes, a phoenix would rise.

A shining hero that escaped the defence cuts...

..The English Electric Lightning.

When it was first released to the public

I think it had a huge media impact.

There was this utterly bizarre, silver aircraft,

which was then called the English Electric P1.

The fact that it was called English Electric was wonderful

cos it made it sound like it should be a washing machine.

Indeed, the company who had built this new prototype fighter

also made a variety of kitchen appliances.

'In this jet age,

'the English Electric Company is supreme with the Canberra Bomber

'and the P1 fighter, which exceeds the speed of sound in level flight.

'You will find the same supreme quality and workmanship

'in every English Electric domestic appliance...'

And if this happy couple

could be dragged away from the blissful perfection

of their English Electric kitchen to cast their eyes skyward,

there was this magnificent, shiny aircraft to behold.

Those P1 prototypes became... the Lightning.

Soon they began to be spotted in skies over Britain.

It just went, "Zoom!", straight over my head and I thought,

"That's for me, love it. Love it, love it."

Seeing a Lightning that day inspired Lesley Hayward-Mudge

to join the Air Force, where she worked in air-traffic control.

In those days, women weren't allowed to be jet pilots

but at least she could get closer to her beloved Lightnings.

The Lightning was something totally different altogether.

It was a rocket-fuelled delivery vehicle

and it just went like the clappers.

I'd have given me eye-teeth to have flown it!

Everybody loved the Lightning, it was so powerful.

It looked an utter thoroughbred

in gleaming aluminium when it first came out.

Two hugely powerful engines, one on top of the other,

were what made the Lightning really stand out.

'The Lightning, equipped with Firestreak guided missiles,

is the first fully supersonic fighter for the RAF.

In late 1959, Lightnings entered service with the RAF.

Future fighter pilot John Ward remembers seeing one up close

for the first time.

We watched as a Lightning taxied in past the hanger and to me then,

as an 18-year-old teenager, it was just a huge, powerful, awesome beast.

Above all else, the Lightning was about speed and acceleration.

That plane was so fast

it could break the sound barrier in a vertical climb.

It was a quite extraordinary aircraft.

'Want to fly a Lightning?'

'Want to climb two Everest's... in three minutes?'

With a top speed of 1,320 miles per hour,

this aircraft was the ideal recruiting tool for the RAF

in the early 1960s.

Under your left hand you've got something like

120,000 horsepower instantly responding.

And it's... It's a good feeling.

A brilliant feeling.

All that performance, though, came at a price.

As an RAF engineer, Tony Clarke spent seven years

toiling on this notoriously complex aircraft.

Everybody on the ground crew used to think

it was a great piece of aircraft to work on

and everybody liked it to start with.

Once you'd been there a little while, you didn't like it so much.

Tony, like all Lightning ground crew, had to put in

huge efforts to keep these high maintenance aircraft operational.

Lots and lots of hours were put in on the Lightning all the time.

Pilots generally done their job and went home

and we were there through the night, fixing it for them.

It wasn't so much a simple job - you had to get to it,

which meant taking engines out,

reheat pipes or ejection seats, anything.

Get to the problem and you'd probably fix it in an hour or so,

then you'd have to put it all back together.

An hour's job would properly turn into 25, 30, 40 man-hours.

The Lightning was also a thirsty fighter.

You were always watching the fuel gauges.

I could empty this in 15 minutes.

Shuuucck! And it was gone.

To tackle this problem, V-Bombers were used as tankers

for air-to-air refuelling.

The RAF had to spend a lot of time

working out ways of getting enough fuel on board

to keep the plane up long enough to do its job,

which was to shoot down the various Russian planes.

In the early 1960s, Cold War tension was at its height,

following the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Britain's Lightning squadrons

were almost in a permanent state of alert.

Leuchars - alert. Two Lightnings to two minutes. Acknowledge, over.

Suddenly the telephone would ring

and it would be one of the radar controllers from around the UK

ordering you to scramble immediately.

You would run to the aeroplane, jump in...

Russian Bear and Bison bombers approaching British airspace

were usually the trigger for these scrambles.

'Receiving - scramble, scramble. Acknowledge.'

Being in air traffic we used to count them out

and watch two or three taking off on QRA - Quick Reaction Alert.

Bears and Bisons coming in and you'd think,

pray, "Please let them come back."

You then start working out where you're going,

how far you've got to go.

Their job was to intercept Russian bombers over the North Sea.

It was a cat and mouse watching game at 50,000 feet.

They were just monitoring, listening, recording everything that went on.

You would get up alongside and normally they would wave.

Quite often there'd be a little white face at every window.

They knew that we were there just to watch them.

Sometimes these encounters became very tense.

One I intercepted when he violated the airspace

and I was trying to get him to land, it was scary.

He just wanted to get out of there.

He was out to dodge as fast as he could go.

He didn't want to mix it with me.

In the Cold War, Britain was privileged

to have a fighter like the Lightning guarding her shores.

By now though, building military aircraft as purely fighters

or bombers was not enough.

The Lightning was good, but only really in one role.

Versatility was the thing.

And Britain was ahead of the pack with a new development...

The TSR-2.

When it first flew in 1964, great hopes were pinned to it.

All the effort was ploughed into making TSR-2 something special,

right across the range from its engines to its aerodynamics,

to very advanced terrain-following radar.

It was years ahead of any opposition.

'It's the most advanced airborne weapon system ever developed.'

Returning from the TSR-2's maiden flight, test pilot Roland Beamont

was impressed by the aircraft's handling.

On the surface, everything looked sunny.

The TSR-2 had rave reviews in the press

when it went through its test flying phase

and everybody still views it

in the rosy glow of the reports of the test pilots.

Under this carapace of optimism, problems were mounting.

The very length of the title of the TSR-2

is a bit of a giveaway - it stood for Tactical Strike Reconnaissance.

It kind of beats as it sweeps as it cleans.

It is expected to do so many different things.

It was very difficult to get all this in one aircraft.

It had to fly very high, very fast.

It had to fly at a reasonable speed on the ground.

It had to carry an atomic weapon at low altitude a long distance.

Too much was being expected from a single aircraft design

and there was trouble at the top.

There was nobody in charge.

The air staff wanted certain things done.

The Ministry of Technology, as it came about, wanted certain things done.

Everything that was demanded by anybody was put on the TSR-2 budget,

which escalated the cost enormously.

In some respects,

TSR-2 was the aircraft that never actually had to confront reality.

It was a brilliant aeroplane, the test pilot said so,

but that's all we know.

Reality came crashing in on TSR-2 with a new Labour government.

Harold Wilson was dead against TSR-2,

even before he came to power in the general election in October 1964.

TSR-2 was heavily over budget

and it became clear that the government was going to cancel it.

When BAC factory workers got wind of this,

10,000 of them marched in protest through London.

The British aircraft workers demand a national plan for the industry.

The demonstrations were to no avail.

In April, 1965, TSR-2 was scrapped.

There was a public outcry, of course,

because it looked as though it was just another occasion

of throwing an immense sum of money down the drain

with nothing to show for it.

Roy Jenkins, the Minister for Aviation,

defended the government's decision

against furious attack from the opposition.

We can't go on spending £1 million a week

which is what we've been spending on this plane.

What this has done,

is it is the death knell for the British Aircraft Industry.

But there was no going back.

All that remains today of TSR-2 are a couple of mournful museum pieces.

TSR-2's downfall was a signal moment for British aviation.

By the early '60s, the climate had changed.

It was all about money.

Test pilots no longer had quite the say that they used to have

and nor did the companies that they belonged to.

If a company produced an aircraft that was extremely flyable

and got it to prototype stage, this was no guarantee

that it couldn't just be axed by the government at the last moment.

Amidst all this, one example of idiosyncratic British ingenuity

managed to counter the trend of cancelled projects.

In 1962, it made its debut at the Farnborough Airshow.

'The fighter of the future - the Hawker P1127.'

Better known today as the Harrier Jump Jet,

this was an astonishing,

revolutionary piece of engineering genius.

You suddenly could fly almost like a bird.

You could stop and hover like a kestrel

and the original design was called a kestrel,

and then accelerate forward again.

You could turn so tightly that nobody else could follow you around

unless they were in a comparable aeroplane.

Here was the world's first vertical takeoff and landing fighter.

A product of more than a decade's experimentation

by several different companies.

From Rolls-Royce's Flying Bedstead...

..to Short's SC1.

But it was Hawkers who had the drive to turn a concept

into a successful aircraft.

Sydney Camm, their chief designer,

wasn't prepared to do just another research aeroplane.

Camm's team took a French concept - vectored thrust -

and adapted it to their own aircraft design.

The idea was that you could swivel the thrust of a jet engine.

Point it downwards when you wanted it, out of the back when you didn't.

Simple, but clever.

What really added to the Harrier's brilliance

was that Hawkers had foreseen a need

for this kind of aircraft.

The concept that Hawkers had was

aerodromes are very difficult to defend

and all you've got to do is knock a few holes in the middle of the runway

and it doesn't matter how good the aeroplanes are in the hangers,

you can't fly them.

The Harrier didn't need a runway.

As Eagle comic proudly proclaimed,

the Harrier was so nimble it could land on a tennis court.

The Harrier was a stunning success.

It wowed the crowds at airshows, entered service with the RAF

and was sold to air forces all over the world,

most significantly, the United States.

A wonderful aeroplane.

Absolutely wonderful. And, of course, the Americans are still flying them.

In the mid-1960s,

the Harrier demonstrated that despite the debacle of the TSR-2,

Britain's aircraft industry could still be a world beater.

It was to be a final hurrah.

The last all-British-made fighter, perhaps the crowning achievement

of more than 20 years of creativity in British military jet aviation.

When we started it was like a one-man band,

but of course, what happened was, we became very much part of a team.

And that team was expanding all the time.

No longer was it exclusively the RAF and test pilots

experiencing the jet age.

It was the British public.

Not just appreciative spectators, they were now participants.

Next time...

Comets, cocktails and continental jet travel.

Things could happen. Britain could make it.

We were going to reach for the sky.

'Tales up for Britain.'

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd