The British Aircraft Corporation's TSR-2 was an ill-fated cold war project in the early 1960s to create what would, at that time, have been one of the most advanced aircraft in the world, with supercruise ability, and similar thrust and Mach 2+ performance to the Rockwell B-1A and significantly higher performance than the current Boeing IDS B-1B



Project cancellation



The American team behind the General Dynamics F-111 project had been pressing their case and newspaper reports had suggested that the RAF were considering it. In response to suggestions of cancellation, BAC employee's had held a protest march. The new Labour (and suposedly pro-worker) government, which had come into power in 1964, issued strong denials. In the budget speech of April 6, 1965, the cancellation in favour of the F-111 was announced. A week later the Chancellor defended the decision in a debate in the House of Commons, saying that the F-111 would prove to be cheaper.



The TSR-2 tooling and partially completed aircraft were scrapped. The two finished aircraft survived, though with substantial internal damage inflicted, and can be seen in the RAF Museum at Cosford, and the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. A number of unfinished airframes were hastily scrapped, with very few parts retained intact. The only airframe to ever fly, XR219, was taken to Shoeburyness and used for as a target to test the vulnerability of a modern airframe and systems to gunfire. The haste with which the project was scrapped has been the source of much argument and bitterness since - some feel it was done with vindictiveness to score political points, though others have suggested that it was simply to prevent the very high technology secrets falling into the wrong hands, as the cancellation came at a period of particular paranoia during the cold war. Instead of the TSR-2, the RAF decided it would buy the swing-wing American General Dynamics F-111 - however, the F-111 itself suffered such enormous cost escalation (exceeding that of the TSR-2 projection ) that the RAF eventually cancelled their order, procuring instead the F-4 Phantom II and the Blackburn Buccaneer, some of which were transferred from the Royal Navy. Ironically, this was the very same aircraft that the RAF chose to deride in order to get the TSR-2 the go-ahead. Fortunately, the Buccaneer proved very capable and was still in service into the early 1990s. The TSR-2 nonetheless remains a lingering 'what if?' of British aviation, as painful in Britain as the Avro Arrow in Canada