A merger at gunpoint

BAC was born of government pressure. At the end of the 1950s Whitehall told Britain’s many aircraft firms it expected them to merge, and backed the message with incentives: research money, launch aid for promising airliners and, above all, the contract for a supersonic strike aircraft, the TSR-2. In 1960 Vickers and English Electric, each with 40 per cent, and Bristol, with 20 per cent, formed the British Aircraft Corporation, and BAC soon took 70 per cent of Hunting Aircraft. It inherited a remarkable catalogue: the Lightning, Canberra, VC10, Viscount, Britannia and Jet Provost. George Edwards of Vickers ran the aircraft division from a head office at 100 Pall Mall.

The airliner that saved it

The first aircraft to carry the BAC name came from a Hunting study. The One-Eleven, a twin-jet short-haul airliner with engines at the tail, was launched as a private venture and first flew on 20 August 1963, almost a year before Douglas’s DC-9. Two months later the prototype crashed during stall tests near Chicklade in Wiltshire, killing test pilot Mike Lithgow and his crew. The investigation uncovered the deep stall, in which a T-tail is blanked by the wing and engines. The One-Eleven sold to British, American and European airlines, and in a decade of cancellations it probably saved the company. In all, 244 were built, nine of them in Romania.

Death of the TSR-2

The project meant to be BAC’s foundation became its wound. The TSR-2, a Mach 2 strike and reconnaissance aircraft, made its first flight from Boscombe Down on 27 September 1964 with Roland Beamont at the controls; on one later flight it simply accelerated away from its chase Lightning. But costs kept rising and inter-service rivalry kept questioning the need for it. In April 1965 the government cancelled the order. Only one TSR-2 ever flew, and remaining airframes, jigs and documents were ordered destroyed. The cancellation is widely seen as a blow to the whole British industry, and the RAF filled the gap with American Phantoms.

Concorde

BAC’s most famous project began as Bristol’s Type 223 supersonic airliner, merged with Sud Aviation’s work into the Anglo-French Concorde. BAC built prototype 002 at Filton, and on 9 April 1969 Brian Trubshaw flew it to Fairford, five weeks after the French prototype’s first flight. Twenty Concordes were built. By 1969 sixteen airlines held 74 options, yet only Air France and BOAC, later British Airways, bought it, and scheduled services began on 21 January 1976. Flight International called it an aviation icon and one of aerospace’s most ambitious but commercially flawed projects. BAC’s guided weapons arm, meanwhile, produced the Rapier, Sea Wolf and Sea Skua missiles.

From Riyadh to the Tornado

Exports and partnerships carried BAC through the 1970s. In 1966 Saudi Arabia signed for forty Lightnings and, eventually, forty Strikemasters, and in 1973 BAC became prime contractor for the whole Saudi air defence system, with spending passing £1 billion; the Strikemaster, a light attack Jet Provost first flown in 1967, sold 146 worldwide. With Breguet, BAC formed SEPECAT in 1966 to build the Jaguar, which first flew in September 1968, and in 1969 it joined MBB, Fiat and Fokker in Panavia to build the Tornado, whose first British prototype flew from Warton in October 1974. On 29 April 1977 BAC was nationalised and merged with Hawker Siddeley and Scottish Aviation into British Aerospace.

Továrny

• Filton · Bristol — Ex-Bristol works; built the British Concorde prototype 002
• Warton · Lancashire — Ex-English Electric; Lightning, Strikemaster, Jaguar and Tornado
• Weybridge (Brooklands) · Surrey — Ex-Vickers; second One-Eleven line, 13 built 1966–1970
• Hurn · Dorset — One-Eleven assembly; prototype rolled out July 1963
• Luton · Bedfordshire — Ex-Hunting; Jet Provost birthplace

Lidé

• Sir George Edwards · head of the Aircraft Division — Former Vickers chief
• Roland Beamont · test pilot — Flew the TSR-2 on its first flight in 1964
• Brian Trubshaw · test pilot — Flew the first British Concorde in 1969
• Mike Lithgow · test pilot — Killed in the One-Eleven prototype crash, 22 October 1963
• Jimmy Dell · test pilot — Flew the Lightning chase plane on TSR-2 tests