The British Aircraft Industry by Keith Hayward

Abstract

380 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE collection of contemporary documents published in Britain by the Navy Records Society. These omissions do not much detract from this eloquent, useful, and most welcome survey. It is likely to become a favored textbook, and a point of departure for further research. Kennett never forgets that the first duty of a historian is to be interesting, and he peppers his analysis with lively detail. On the shortcomings of aerial reconnais­ sance by untrained observers, for example, he mentions the inexpe­ rienced German aircrew who reported that the men in a British post “were thoroughly disorganized and running about in blind panic” (p. 30). The Germans had flown over a group of Tommies playing soccer. David Omissi Dr. Omissi read history at the University of Lancaster, then moved to the Department of War Studies at King’s College, University of London, where he gained an M.A. and a Ph.D. Formerly a lecturer in history at the University of Edinburgh, he is now a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, working on a social and political history of the Indian Army. He is the author of Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919—1939 (Manchester University Press, 1990). The British Aircraft Industry. By Keith Hayward. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and St. Martin’s Press (distr.), 1989. Pp. xvi+ 221; tables, notes, index. $59.95. Keith Hayward’s work is the first in a series on British industry in the 20th century edited by Derek H. Aldcroft. In his introduction, the editor stresses imports and exports and employment but fails to note that international competition and linkages in technology and pro­ ductivity are key ingredients. This sets the tone for the book. Hayward, author of The Government and British Civil Aerospace (Manchester, 1983), tells a straightforward story of the evolution of the industry from its gentlemanly and shop-floor beginnings through its peaking in the four revolutions of 1935—45—the technological, the electronic, the jet, and the airfield. He concentrates on the development of airframes and engines, and this ultimately means that he focuses on Rolls-Royce and the British Aerospace Corporation. He duly notes how bad decisions were made after World War II when the industry tried desperately on the civil side to recover under the Brabazon Report proposals. He points correctly to the decision to take test pilots out of aircraft and to use rocket-powered models instead. Thus while the United States was struggling with its first not-verysatisfactoryjet aircraft, the British were largely limited to models. The British economy and the failure of the Treasury to grasp the new costing problems of modern aircraft coupled with the crash of the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 381 Comet I’s helped push the industry down in the 1960s. But at the same time the necessary consolidation of the industry and the newer technological developments were moving ahead. So on the one hand there were cancellations of aircraft such as the TSR-2 and on the other the successes such as the Anglo-French Concorde, a technolog­ ical if not an economic success. If the decade of the 1960s was a nadir, with phased cancellation of the VC-10 family in the face of American competition that under­ stood that aircraft had to be made for all customers and not tailored to a captive market of the nationalized airlines, then success was about to return in other guises. By the end of the 1980s, aerospace was driving British technology—40 percent of it in electronics. Moreover, the United Kingdom was surviving as one of only three countries in the world that could boast a complete industry (the others being the United States and the USSR, although France would come close). Part of Hayward’s thesis is that international market forces have been constantly affected by state interference. The truth of this can be gleaned in the three volumes by Ian Lloyd on Rolls-Royce (1978) and in the studies of Arthur Reed, Britain's Aircraft Industry: What Went Right? What Went Wrong? (London, 1973), and of Daniel Todd and Jamie Simpson, The World...