BOAC - how were they allowed to behave as they did?
Discussion
Having just finished re-reading Empire of the Clouds, I actually got quite angry at the behavior of BOAC during the late 50s according to the book, and the consequent damage to the British aircraft industry.
The book alleges that BOAC had a desire to buy American airliners - ok, that's fair enough after the Comet accidents. However, it seems the deliberately went out of their way to trash the British offerings.
Firstly, the Britannia - with the icing problems on the Proteus engines all but solved, and only occurring in a very easily avoidable set of circumstances, BOAC publicly alleged it was a seriously dangerous aircraft and said they didn't want to buy it.
Secondly, having finally bought a few Brits... Vickers offered them the V-1000 prototype as an airliner after the military cancelled its new heavy lift program. "No thanks", they replied, "We forsee ourselves coping perfectly well for the next 5 years on our fleet of Comet 4s, Brits and American piston types". Cue massive financial and emotional trauma to Vickers and its staff at several years of their work being totally wasted. 6 months later, BOAC went cap in hand to the government for £20 million to buy several new Boeing and Douglas jetliners as "our fleet will soon be obsolete".
Thirdly, staggeringly, a couple of years later they were back at Vickers' door asking for an all-new jetliner capable of operating from hot, short and dusty empire airports. Having duly come up with the VC10, BOAC then repeatedly and needlessly changed their mind over passenger capacity, necessitating several redesigns. This delayed the aircraft by enough years that not only were many valuable sales and the market lead for a new generation of jetliners lost, but the very reason for its existence was eroded by the growing number of empire airports expanding to modern runway standards. With this, BOAC turned round and publicly (again) declared the aircraft as too expensive to operate competitively - pretty much killing all but a handful of external sales for Vickers.
They then ordered more new Boeings and only a handful of VC10s - which ended up working out cheaper on a lot of routes than the 707!
So my question is, why the hell were they allowed to get away with almost single-handedly ruining the British airliner industry? Where was the outrage from a still pretty patriotic population at that time? Why did the UK industry repeatedly take this lying down instead of standing firm and refusing to deal with them? Why did the Government, given it was a national airline, not rap their knuckles and tell them to stop publicly denouncing the UK PLC?
The book alleges that BOAC had a desire to buy American airliners - ok, that's fair enough after the Comet accidents. However, it seems the deliberately went out of their way to trash the British offerings.
Firstly, the Britannia - with the icing problems on the Proteus engines all but solved, and only occurring in a very easily avoidable set of circumstances, BOAC publicly alleged it was a seriously dangerous aircraft and said they didn't want to buy it.
Secondly, having finally bought a few Brits... Vickers offered them the V-1000 prototype as an airliner after the military cancelled its new heavy lift program. "No thanks", they replied, "We forsee ourselves coping perfectly well for the next 5 years on our fleet of Comet 4s, Brits and American piston types". Cue massive financial and emotional trauma to Vickers and its staff at several years of their work being totally wasted. 6 months later, BOAC went cap in hand to the government for £20 million to buy several new Boeing and Douglas jetliners as "our fleet will soon be obsolete".
Thirdly, staggeringly, a couple of years later they were back at Vickers' door asking for an all-new jetliner capable of operating from hot, short and dusty empire airports. Having duly come up with the VC10, BOAC then repeatedly and needlessly changed their mind over passenger capacity, necessitating several redesigns. This delayed the aircraft by enough years that not only were many valuable sales and the market lead for a new generation of jetliners lost, but the very reason for its existence was eroded by the growing number of empire airports expanding to modern runway standards. With this, BOAC turned round and publicly (again) declared the aircraft as too expensive to operate competitively - pretty much killing all but a handful of external sales for Vickers.
They then ordered more new Boeings and only a handful of VC10s - which ended up working out cheaper on a lot of routes than the 707!
So my question is, why the hell were they allowed to get away with almost single-handedly ruining the British airliner industry? Where was the outrage from a still pretty patriotic population at that time? Why did the UK industry repeatedly take this lying down instead of standing firm and refusing to deal with them? Why did the Government, given it was a national airline, not rap their knuckles and tell them to stop publicly denouncing the UK PLC?
Some Gump said:
Perfectly good as in flawed?
The VC10 was a perfectly good aircraft that turned out to be very competitive to run, plus had extra popularity from passengers due to the low noise level inside. It could abd should have been a world beater - imagine it in place of all the DC9/MD80s currently in service The Brit, Ok the engines could still ice up but only if you deliberately kept it in a narrow set of conditions. Not really a major flaw.
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