Ranting against the aviation bores you’ve had to endure for so many years

Two leading military historians (Al Murray and James Holland), a former Sea Harrier pilot (Paul Tremelling), a former Lynx Observer (Bing Chandler), and two of Hush-Kit’s drunkest writers (Joe Coles and Edward Ward) walk into a pub. Together, they vent their spleens (and hydraulic systems) about the Top 10 aircraft beloved by boring bastards. No punches are pulled.

Before we start, I must make it very clear: we are NOT saying the aeroplanes mentioned are boring. The aircraft are not the villains of this piece, nor is the appreciation of these machines. What we wish to attack is the boring way in which certain aircraft are loved. No aeroplanes were hurt in the making of this article.

“Whilst I do find the BRRRTTT-beige bunch teeth -extractingly painful, I do have a soft spot for the A-10 drivers. They have always been first-class and are actually what makes the aircraft cool. Them. Not the cannon or bathtub. Brave, brave boys and girls at the top of their game. And I can attest…that they throw one of the best beer calls you are ever likely to see. That schizz got completely out of hand!”

10: TSR-2

Dolorira
dolor (pain) + ira (anger)

Memory coloured equally by hurt and rage.

If you are reading this, you know the story: a wicked, penny-pinching Labour government killed a world-beating aircraft in 1964. This was part of the wider destruction of the British aircraft industry as a major global player and the winding down of the nation’s military might. Several books stoked the fire, notably Derek Wood’s Project Cancelled (1978). British children learned it in an Eagle annual in the 1980s, a message reiterated in the brilliant Take-Off magazines of the late ’80s. Then, more books and the internet brought an explosion in the story’s popularity.

Framing a nuclear strike aircraft—a machine designed for wholesale genocide—as a victim is weird. But declinists are weird: never quite sure whether their own country is great or weak, and a bit vague about why it is so deserving of a return to greater power. The TSR-2 Myth is the James Bond of plane myths; the success of the Bond films speaks to the insecurity of British men in a changing world, when Britain wasn’t quite so powerful (and, as the Irish comedian Hubert McIntyre observed, James Bond is also about how great it is to go on holiday and have a nice drink). The creation of a martyr of the TSR-2 is part of the same phenomenon.

It’s a bit unfair that aviation fans remember the Wilson government for cancelling the TSR-2 rather than for achieving Britain’s greatest military success of the entire Cold War: avoidance of the disastrous Vietnam War. While Britain’s non-involvement in Vietnam didn’t directly create the Beatles or Carnaby Street, it helped foster the environment in which this cultural explosion could thrive. Britain enjoyed a period of economic stability and cultural confidence. Pretty great result. Whereas spending billions on a bomber that would likely have taken years to become fully functional and then played only a small role in the Falklands (proving even harder to get there than the Vulcan) and Granby, probably not such a great result.

TSR-2 would likely have had some brilliant technology (eventually), but the timing was terrible; much of its pioneering electronics risked becoming obsolete almost immediately due to the microchip revolution. The TSR-2 would have been the last “pure analogue” advanced warplane. But the details do not really matter; what matters here is that you are likely to hear this same story (in the same words) repeated a gazillion times, and we’re all bored shitless. Change the record, mate.

If you want to get angry about a cancelled British engineering project that was capable of fucking shit up, how about the London Ringways? An ambitious but highly controversial 1960s plan to build a network of high-speed ring roads (motorways) encircling London. The dream was to drag the city into the modern, car-dominated age, cutting congestion in the centre and letting traffic flow smoothly around it, rather than choking its streets. In practice, it was a terrible idea. The scheme would have carved wide, often elevated motorways straight through established neighbourhoods, demolishing thousands of homes and splitting communities in two. I would be much more interested if someone started ranting in favour of that.

If it has to be atomic, a more interesting nuclear project to mourn might be the British fast breeder reactor programme? If we have to stay vehicular, then there’s the leaning Advanced Passenger Train (APT), though this may be the TSR-2 of train-people, which leaves us back at square one.

• Joe Coles

9: But, what about the Hurricane?

The world’s least-ignored ‘ignored’ aircraft was OK. It was available and OK (at least for the first couple of years of the war). By 1942, the RAF looked into what was in the fridge for a quick, improvised meal for unwanted guests and said that would do (while serving itself a delicious Spitfire steak for home defence).

They will tell you, “In the Battle of Britain, it scored the most kills,” though in their heart of hearts they know it’s the ratios that matter, and there was a fuck ton more Hurricanes. They were tasked with the bombers as they weren’t able to scrap on even terms with the fighters. A back-of-the-envelope exchange rate shows a 1.8:1 loss rate in favour of the Bf 109 when Camm’s finest had the bad luck to have to be a fighter.

Hundreds of books, 20 million Google search results. Overshadowed, my arse.

8: Broken Arrowheads

The Overton Window has become so far skewed in recent years that it could be used on the Rutan Model 202 Boomerang—while also enabling straight-faced commentators to describe the former head of the Bank of England, turned Canadian Prime Minister, as a ‘woke communist.’ We love Canada right now, standing up to tyranny, speaking smack to Trump, and looking relatively decent in this piggish age, but that does not excuse Arrow fans. If you’ve managed to live so far free from the Arrow story: In the late 1950s, Canada designed a brilliant, top-of-the-range interceptor, the CF-105 Arrow. But the project was too costly, and it became apparent it wouldn’t be able to stop ICBMs. It was cancelled, which was a bummer for the Canadian aviation industry. But it was cancelled 67 years ago, and the USSR never did try to attack Canada. But the mourning goes on, and on, on. At least TSR-2 fans know the jig is over, whereas you still hear Arrow fans say, “Never mind the F-35, why not just replace and redesign every last rivet on the Arrow and make that instead—that would be better.” Because reality, that’s why.

(Are we hypocrites for selling lovely CF-105 Arrow merch? We are)

Joe Coles

7: Fragile favouritism

“You’re so vain you probably think this song is about you.”

This is not about you, OK. The fact that you think it is only proves my point. I have encountered this many times, so sit down; this is not about you and your sordid love of the Douglas B-23 Dragon.

An obsessive’s relationship with the object of his attention is intense, complex, and personal. His aircraft may exist in his dreams as an extension of himself. So when someone takes a quick online poke at his holy machine, his response can be febrile. But you don’t get to nastily gatekeep a subject even if you have read three (or three thousand) books on it (having said that, when my friend’s dad tried to incorrectly plane-splain to me in a pub quiz, I may have ‘accidentally’ kicked him in the shin). Someone who may normally have a sense of humour and perspective can totally lose his rag when someone suggests that the Avions Fairey Belfair didn’t single-handedly win the war. A plane (this is where a bore will respond with a comment about woodworking tools), especially a military aircraft, is built to kill and survive a war, and isn’t even sentient; it can take a couple of jibes about its high wing loading.

Getting nasty with someone because they’ve been critical about a plane you like is not cool.

6: Boring B-17

Is the Mustang or the Flying Fortress the most famous American aircraft of the Second World War? Both are adored by the dull and tedious. The B-17 is a particularly odd aircraft to love, though, as—unlike the P-51—it was a failure: it could not perform the mission for which it was explicitly designed.

Like many aircraft that are liked in a boring way by boring people—such as the Tomcat and the Spitfire—the B-17’s fame is due in no small part to film and television. This process began early and at the expense of the superior B-24 Liberator, which was sidelined by the Fortress in the popular imagination both at the time and ever since. William Wyler’s “The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress” was released in 1944 and supposedly depicts the first US bomber in Europe to complete 25 missions and return home. In reality, of course, it doesn’t: a B-24 named ‘Hot Stuff’ completed 25 missions three months earlier, but no one had realised the propaganda value of the achievement at that time, so it remained unpublicised.

“The Memphis Belle” is, to be fair, an incredible film. Shot in colour on genuine missions over Europe in 1943, it depicts actual combat with German fighters and is an astonishing, occasionally shocking, record of early USAAF strategic raids. Curiously, however, it explicitly depicts two of the B-17’s major failings: namely that it wasn’t very accurate and it was appallingly vulnerable to fighters. The aircraft’s very name implied its supposed invulnerability and the Eighth Air Force’s bombing doctrine was one of surgical precision bombing: this was the whole justification for undertaking missions by day, which was necessarily more dangerous than flying by night. But the bombs shown exploding in the film have clearly missed their target (most fall in the sea, others on farmland).

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