by Damien Burke
By the mid-1970s XR219, at Shoeburyness, was a shattered hulk propped up by breeze blocks, having been subjected to a sustained series of weapons effectiveness tests. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
A scene of desolation and destruction at Shoeburyness just a few years later. Pieces of XR219, identifiable only by the presence of the main undercarriage tie tube and wedged-open auxiliary intakes, are scattered on the Shoeburyness dump. By 1982 this yard was cleared and the only TSR2 to have flown was finally history. Brooklands Museum
Staff members of BAC line up in front of XR220 at Boscombe Down. The aircraft would soon be handed over to the A&AEE for various trials work, primarily noise trials in relation to the Concorde project. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
The second aircraft, XR220, at Boscombe Down during the post-cancellation noise trials. The aircraft is tied down, with the auxiliary intake doors strutted open to enable full-power runs, and a microphone is positioned close to the jetpipes. Solent Sky collection
At Henlow in 1974, XR220 is loaded up and ready for transport to Cosford for refurbishment and, as it turned out, permanent display. Glenn Surtees
Sadly the RAE’s response was unhelpful. It could no longer be guaranteed that XR219 was entirely original. Only the fuselage was identifiable, having XR219 painted on it, and the wings, tailplanes, fin and so on could be from any airframe, as various components had arrived at Shoeburyness and been used indiscriminately to assemble ‘XR219’. The RAE also pointed out that the RAF Museum was ‘notoriously difficult to foot the bill for their acquisitions’, and it could not accept the bill for any work itself; nor would it want any delay to its ongoing weapons trials. So XR219 stayed put, and while there were some unofficial efforts to protect it from the worst that could be thrown at it, the staff on the range could not hold back the trials for long. In May 1974 the Southend Historic Aircraft Museum enquired about the possibility of acquiring XR219 or another TSR2 airframe once they were no longer useful for research. Sadly, Shoeburyness had only shattered wreckage by this time, so there was nothing suitable for a museum. The last remnants of XR219 were scrapped in 1982. Various portions of the other airframes and other incomplete TSR2s, notably complete wings (a hold-over from the mass preservation of wing sections for structural research), could still be found in the undergrowth at Shoeburyness until they were also scrapped in the 1990s.
The second aircraft, XR220, stayed at Boscombe Down and was handed over to the A&AEE on 9 July 1965 to be used for many of the ground-research trials mentioned earlier, including noise trials investigating the efficiency of detuners on the noise footprint in the surrounding area and acoustic-fatigue effects on the airframe itself. By the end of February 1966 the A&AEE had just about completed its trials work with the aircraft (or ‘ground test vehicle’ as the A&AEE described it) and made the first noises about disposing of the airframe. On 5 May 1966 the MoA formally revoked the airframe’s certification as a military aircraft, and a week later the A&AEE wrote to the Ministry pointing out that, owing to resurfacing of its main apron, it had limited parking space available and with regards to XR220 would ‘welcome early disposal instructions’.
The Ministry wrote to several interested parties, asking if they had any further use for the aircraft, including RRE Pershore, the Empire Test Pilots School, the Blind Landing Experimental Unit, RAE Bedford, RAE Farnborough, the Civil Aviation Flying Unit and various RAF departments. All answered in the negative except for the RAF’s Air Historical Branch (AHB). However, it was unwilling to pay anything for the aircraft, so progress on disposal was slow. The engines were removed in October and placed in storage at the MoA’s Central Stores Depot at Sevenhampton near Swindon. While Treasury authority was gained for a transfer without charge between the A&AEE and AHB, the aircraft remained parked outdoors at Boscombe Down. It was not until February 1967 that all the required paperwork had been drawn up to allow the aircraft to be transferred. For accounting purposes the aircraft was valued at the grand sum of £1,000 (somewhat severe depreciation considering it had cost around £3 million to build).
More delays ensued, and it was not until 11 April 1967 that the new MoD authorized the transfer of XR220 from the A&AEE to RAF Henlow (then intended to be the site of a new RAF Museum), assigned the instructional airframe serial number 7933M and allotted for ‘Display’ purposes. Number 71 Maintenance Unit was given the task of dismantling, transporting and re-erecting the aircraft at Henlow, and transported it there on 20 June 1967. By August 1968 the RAF Museum had surveyed XR220 to find out just which bits were missing (a long list resulted, including the previously mentioned items plus both canopies, the nose radome, ejection seats, etc.), and some of these components were in due course sourced from Shoeburyness (in many cases there was no way to identify the donor aircraft). Further components to complete the aircraft were donated by Ferranti in 1969. In 1974 XR220 was transferred from Henlow to RAF Cosford, originally for refurbishment, but the airframe stayed on to become part of the new RAF Museum outpost at Cosford, and remains there to this day. Various other missing components have come to light over the intervening years, and as a result XR220 is now substantially complete (the major missing items being the engines) and, having never been repainted, is a particularly authentic-looking specimen. Close examination will even show signs of the repairs effected after the aircraft’s accident on arrival at Boscombe Down in 1964. At the time of writing the RAF Museum at Hendon sells surplus TSR2 titanium bolts to visitors for 50p each. The original cost to the taxpayer of these bolts was more than twice that, which works out at about £17 each in 2010 prices.
In 2010 XR220 dominates the RAF Museum Cosford’s ‘Test Flight’ exhibition, towering over every other aircraft in the hangar and continuing to stop visitors in their tracks forty-five years after cancellation. Damien Burke
Seen at Cranfield in 1973, XR222 looks fairly sorry for itself, with numerous panels missing, most of which had been absent since it left Weybridge. BAE Systems via Warton Heritage Group
In 1978 XR222 was transferred to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, and the second and most in-depth of two restoration efforts was carried out during 2005. Damien Burke
The other survivor, XR222, was not entirely complete at the time of cancellation, and along with the other substantially structurally complete but unequipped airframes was expected to be doled out to various MoA, RAF or educational establishments. Most ended up being scrapped, as so few establishments were interested in taking on an airframe of no obvious use to them. However, the Principal of the College of Aeronautics at Cranfield, Professor A.J. Murphy, wrote to the MoA on 16 June 1965 to request allocation of a complete airframe plus various discrete components. The college chose to ask for XR222, which was not complete enough to be of any particular security concern (unlike XR221), and by 9 July it had been sent the good news that it could have XR222. The airframe was dismantled in October and transported by road in the last week of that month. It served its purpose as an educational tool for budding aircraft designers for the next decade, but by 1975 the college was making noises about disposing of the airframe as it did ‘take up an awful lot of space’. It hung on ‘for sentimental reasons’ until April 1978, when Cranfield donated XR222 to the Imperial War Museum at its then-new out-station at Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire. As XR222 had never been completed it lacked various panels and components, and during its time at Duxford it has undergone two restorations during which it was cosmetically completed, with missing panels fabricated as necessary. The second and most most in-depth restoration (including a complete strip-down and repaint) was completed in 2005, but many internal items are still missing. Several external items are also missing, but these are really only obvious to those intimately familiar with the type. The aircraft is now displayed within the AirSpace exhibition at Duxford.
Ex-BAC personnel including pilots Jimmy Dell (in white) and Don Knight (left of Jimmy) stand in front of XR222 on the occasion of its formal unveiling on 16 December 2005
. Damien Burke
Test forebody T5 was used for thermal, air-conditioning and escape-system trials during the TSR2 project, and then remained at RAE Farnborough for further thermal and bird-strike trials for years afterwards. Rescued from the Farnborough dump in 1992, it is now on display at its birthplace, Weybridge, home of the Brooklands Museum, where is seen in January 2010, undergoing even more thermal trials! Damien Burke
A TSR2 ejection seat and navigator’s canopy at the Midland Air Museum in February 2010. Damien Burke
TSR2 skin forming templates at the Brooklands Museum. Damien Burke
More useful work was carried out using the TSR2 forebody originally constructed for ejection-seat and air-conditioning trials with the RAE at Farnborough. After these tests it was scheduled to be used for further air-conditioning and demisting tests of the intended trainer version, both at Farnborough and back at Weybridge in the stratospheric test chamber. However, with the project cancelled the nose section stayed with the RAE and was allocated to it for further use as appropriate. Some further use was made of it for thermal and materials tests in aid of the Concorde programme (in particular, investigation of crew comfort at high speeds with associated kinetic heating), but it went on to spend most of its useful life having dead chickens fired at it from a compressed-air cannon. After some years of these birdstrike trials it ended up on the dump at Farnborough, and was eventually rescued by the Brooklands Museum at Weybridge. Returned ‘home’ in 1992, the nose section was cosmetically restored and at the time of writing remains on external display at the museum, a short distance from the collection’s Concorde airframe.
A scattering of other components also survives in various museums. There is a wing apex from XR227 at the Newark Air Museum (ex-RAF Cranwell, where it was used to demonstrate integral fuel tank construction), along with an engine access door from XR222; a nose undercarriage leg, rudder pedal, control column assembly, canopy and ejection seat at the Midland Air Museum (all ex-Cranfield); Olympus 320 engines at the RAF Museum Cosford, the Science Museum and the Gatwick Aviation Museum among other places; an ejection seat is also on display at the RAF Museum Cosford (in addition to those in XR220). Of the electronics, including the nav/attack system, very little remains; BAE Systems’ Rochester archive holds a few items, as does the RAF Museum’s stores.
Flight of the phoenix?
In late 1969 rumours abounded of XR220 being prepared for flight once more, to act as an Olympus 593 flying test bed, and a campaign was begun to try to get the then-Conservative government to resurrect the entire programme. This was somewhat ill-timed, as agreement on building MRCA as a pan-European co-operative project had just been reached. Nothing came of the campaign, though several newspapers reported the supposed plan, including a particularly detailed story in the Daily Mail of 27 August 1970. In this story (one can hardly call it a ‘report’) the paper claimed that ‘A team of scientists and RAF engineers are to restore a prototype of the hedge-hopping 1,600mph bomber to flying trim. Tests are already well advanced on increasing the enormous power of the Rolls-Royce Olympus engines which powered the only TSR2 to fly’, and furthermore, ‘… one of the completed prototypes was secretly saved by the RAF and kept in ‘mothballs’ at Boscombe Down. Now it has been moved by lorry to RAF Henlow, Bedfordshire, and work will begin shortly on rebuilding it piece by piece.’ This was, of course, nothing more than lurid fiction based on the disposal of the aircraft to the nascent RAF Museum.
Seven years after that, a more serious attempt to revive the TSR2 was born, though ‘serious’ is stretching the credibility of this effort also. Christopher de Vere, through his company Interflight Ltd, began looking at reviving TSR2 in 1977. By March 1979 de Vere had written to Stephen Hastings, Conservative MP and author of The Murder of TSR2, asking for help on how to proceed with his grand plan to resurrect the TSR2. Hastings, to give him credit, managed to reply with an entirely calm and rational recommendation that de Vere go away and return with further information; specifically, what roles the TSR2 could fulfil that the Tornado could not; whether there was a definite Service operational requirement for the aircraft; that the type had not been overtaken by technology and made obsolete; and that there would be good export potential. It was basically a polite brush-off, but de Vere was not put off and produced a paper entitled The Need for TSR2 in 1979, which talked of re-engining the aircraft with Olympus 593s and giving it square intakes so that the UK would have a means of delivering nuclear weapons to Russia in the mid-1980s, when the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines were expected to be worn out and a confrontation with Russia was ‘most probable’. He also suggested that it could also carry out long-range air defence, loaded down with missiles and fuel, and could operate from island bases on long-range maritime patrol. As for being made obsolete, it could easily be fitted with upto-date electronics, and regarding export potential, well, the Canadians needed an air-defence aircraft just like this (the cancellation of the Avro Arrow in 1959 having presumably passed de Vere by) and the US Navy could team up with the RN to form a Euro-American force to control the Indian Ocean using a maritime version based on Diego Garcia or Gan (cue several paragraphs going off at a tangent bemoaning the UK’s treatment of the natives of the Maldives). Other suggested export customers were Australia, China, South Africa and Japan. De Vere said XR220 could be back in the air by the 1980 Farnborough Air Show, and new TSR2s in service by 1984. Entertaining as this all was, even better was a supporting letter sent to de Vere in August 1979 in which the author, no doubt with tongue firmly in cheek, suggested that there was ‘… no sound argument against putting the TSR2 into production, and getting negotiations with the US Department of Defense under way’. As the first production RAF Tornado GR.1 had rolled off the production line the month before, there was at least one sound argument against resurrecting the TSR2.
Later that month de Vere had an aircraft maintenance engineer inspect XR220 at Cosford and produce a report on its condition. This was, however, a less-than-detailed study carried out without opening a single panel; nothing more than a visual study without a single piece of internal equipment being seen. Regardless, the report predicted that twelve to eighteen months of work would be necessary to carry out a real check of the airframe. It said that ‘engine installations may be a difficult area’ (masterful understatement, given the engines’ history of development problems), but that overall ‘… the feasibility, from the engineering standpoint, of restoring the aircraft to a standard of airworthiness necessary to continue with the development of the type subsequent to the production of a new Series of aircraft, is quite valid and could well be the means of recouping a considerable amount of the vast amount of public monies already expended on the project, which currently stands as a complete loss to the British taxpayer.’
Armed with this apparent good news, de Vere then wrote to the Chief of the Defence Staff in November 1979, enclosing his proposal, entitled TSR2 – The Choice for the 1980s. In this paper, amidst the hyperbole and outright nonsense used to try to justify the resurrection, de Vere outlined his plan to refit XR220 with Olympus 320 engines that by now were ‘benefiting from the extra years of development’ (though work on the 320 had ceased in 1965); manufacture production aircraft to be fitted with the Olympus 593 as used on Concorde; mount cruise missiles on the aircraft; use it for air defence against hordes of Backfire and Fencer bombers; and control the seas from the Indian Ocean to the South Atlantic via bases such as Gan and Ascension. Exports to the USA, Australia, Canada and France were on the cards (China, South Africa and Japan having quietly disappeared from the list). There was no reason why the aircraft could not be airborne at Farnborough in September 1980 (conveniently ignoring the report produced by his own engineer), and in production for the RAF by 1984. The Chief of the Defence Staff no doubt guffawed heartily and passed de Vere’s communication to the Chief of the Air Staff, who no doubt guffawed heartily and passed it to his Assistant, Air Vice Marshal Hall, for a reply. The reply was polite, and pointed out
that modern requirements and financial realities made the resurrection impossible.
However, de Vere was not downhearted, and replied in December 1979 in typically verbose style, attempting to justify his plan once more and suggesting that a mere £24 million would get two prototypes in the air; thirty men could dismantle the two airframes at Cosford and Duxford, transport them to BAC’s Filton plant, report on their condition and reassemble them within four months. This time the reply from the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff was shorter – and still very much in the negative. Admiral of the Fleet The Lord Hill-Norton was next on de Vere’s list, and after a visit in January 1980 wrote back to him: ‘… I do not think your proposal is a serious runner’. Lord Home received another copy of the proposal, passing it to the Secretary for Defence, Francis Pym, who replied to Lord Home, acknowledging that they were already aware of de Vere’s efforts and had been corresponding with him already, and further claiming that his paper had been ‘studied carefully by my Department’ but that ‘It certainly could not be accommodated within the defence budget unless we were to abandon or at least disrupt key equipment projects for which the services have a real need’.