During the 1950's NATO faced a new threat from the Soviet Union. Western
intelligence believed they were building a fleet of supersonic nuclear bombers
that could fly higher and faster than anything NATO had including its
interceptors, the UK's response was to create a groundbreaking fighter that
would not only outperform a Soviet threat but would also be an ideal
interceptor to equip the frontline NATO countries in Europe but in a twist of
fate worthy of any Cold War espionage novel it will be brought down not only
by the UK government, again but also by some rather unfriendly competition from
a rival aviation company. As the Cold War deepened after the Second World War the
Soviets made great strides in technology they surprised the world and in
particular those in the West when they exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949
and the surprises kept on coming with the launch of Sputnik on top of the
world's first ICBM in 1957 and then the Myasishchev M-50 supersonic strategic
bomber of 1959. Having seen the effectiveness of the mass bombing raids
on Germany and Japan by the Allies in World War two there was thought to be a
need for a force of high performance interceptors as it was believed that the
Soviets would use the Tupolev Tu-95 to use the same bombing techniques but with
nuclear weapons against the West. With the frontline NATO countries like West
Germany being so close to the Soviet aircraft based in East Germany no more
than a few minutes away any fighters would need to go from runway to fifty to
sixty thousand feet in under three minutes something which none of the NATO
fighters could do at the time. As World War two came to a named the Allies
scoured Germany for secret weapons and the scientists and engineers that built
them the Americans rounded up most of the rocket scientists and took them back to
the States to work on what will become the American
ICBMs and ultimately the u.s. space program. Several of the top German
aircraft designers ended up in England including Alexander
Lippisch. Lippisch had designed the world's first rocket plane the
Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet which was the
fastest plane of a war capable of over 1,100 kilometers an hour in level flight
and just short of Mach 1 and was designed to do hit-and-run attacks on
Allied bombers. The problem with jet engines of the early 1950s was that they
couldn't accelerate fast enough and were running out of power at high altitudes
where the Soviet bombers would be. The British looked at a purely rocket power
plane like the comet, this would have the acceleration but whichever way they did
it they couldn't fit enough fuel capacity into the airframe to achieve
the range desired. A rocket engine would also not provide the power to run the
electrics and hydraulics to control the plane when it came back to land making
the first rocket planes effectively gliders when they ran out of fuel. The
breakthrough came when they decided to use both types of engine in the same
plane, a small jet engine for takeoff and landing which would also power the rest
of the systems and a rocket motor for the high-speed acceleration. The job of
building the prototype will be given to a company called Saunders Roe and the
plane was called the SR-53. This was a small plane that would be as light as
possible to give it the performance required. The SR-53 was also being
developed at the same time as the first rumors of the Soviet supersonic bombers
came out and although the SR 53 s performance was
very good it was still lacking in key areas of one of those was finding its
target. The new Soviet bombers like from Myasishchev M-50 were designed to
cruise at Mach 1.3 at 60,000 feet normally ground radar would pick them up
and relay the information along with they're heading to the pilots of the
interceptor who would then head off to find the target. But because the Soviet
bombers were so high and fast it was very difficult for them to find them
without some form of airborne interception or AI radar. The SR-53 was
just too small to fit all the required radar electronics into it and keep its
performance so a new plane was planned called the SR-177. This would be a larger
version of the SR-53 with a bigger more powerful jet engine AI radar and the
same rocket motor. It would also be capable of midair refueling and out
sustaining air for much longer. This new mixed fuel aircraft with the
onboard radar would have incredible interception capabilities, well beyond
any other fighter of a time and something that was exactly what the West
German Luftwaffe were looking for to counter the Soviet threat from just
across the border. The SR-177 was poised to become the new NATO fighter which
would be a huge contract for anyone who won it. However at the same time the
British government who was basically broke after the war and the cost of
maintaining military spending at wartime levels was too much to bear. In the now
infamous white paper of 1957 the government put forward the idea of
basically scrapping huge sections of a military infrastructure to concentrate
on intercontinental ballistic missiles. This meant that the interceptor projects
like the SR-177 would be deemed obsolete and not ordered by the RAF. The English
Electric lightning will be the last interceptor ordered by the RAF to cover
the time until surface-to-air missile technology had evolved enough to do the
job. But this white paper didn't cover a Royal Navy who saw the SR-177 as a good
carrier aircraft and had a provisional order for 27 although only nine would be
supplied in the short term. Because of the German interest in the SR-177 it
also made it a NATO project as well. The UK government applied for special NATO
funding from the US to complete its development but to the surprise of a
British the U.S. refused the funding request but the reason for this would
soon become clear. During the Korean War the Soviet MIG 15 was often in combat
with the American F-86 Sabres but there were many US pilots that felt the Sabres
were inferior to the lighter and less complex MIG. Lockheed's chief designer
Clarence "Kelly" Johnson seized on this information and went back to the u.s. to
come up with a simple yet high-performance plane that will become
known as the F-104 starfighter. Although initially welcomed by the USAF problems
with the F-104 soon became apparent. It had a short range, the small wings gave
it a high stall speed and it couldn't carry much in the way of munitions and
also lacked an all-weather radar system. In the end it was dropped by the USAF in
favor of a Convair F-106 which ironically had been designed by Alexander Lippisch,
designer of a Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet. To meet the German requirements Lockheed had to
modify the plane substantially including fitting wing mounted fuel tanks and a
new heavier more complicated all-weather radar these plus other modifications
made the F-104 which was already known to be a tricky plane to fly even more
difficult especially for the less experienced pilots. Even though the SR-177
seemed ideally suited for the Luftwaffe needs, the contract for the new
NATO interceptor went to the Lockheed F-104. This was the last straw for the SR-177
and with the loss of the NATO contract the Navy also pulled out and the
project was cancelled completely in 1959. The F-104 went on to be sold into many
of the air forces around the world including Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy,
Belgium and Spain but it's safety record became a cause of great concern for many
of those countries. Due to a change of use from a high-altitude interceptor to
a ground attack plane the very modifications for Germans required such
as the extra fuel tanks made the F-104 difficult to control an unduly stressed the airframe causing metal fatigue. The radar
was also more of a distraction than a help when flying low in hilly terrain
and was blamed for crashes due to overburdening the crew with information
at crucial moments. In the end of the Germans lost 262 f-104 to crashes, 30% of
the entire fleet and killing a 110 pilots. The Canadians fared even
worse, they lost 46% of thier fleet of 235 F-104's. It will be almost 20 years
before it became apparent as to why the SR-177 lost the contract to be the NATO
fighter. After the Watergate scandal and the renewed interest in the U.S. into
corruption, it was discovered that Lockheed had paid out some $22 million
in bribes from the 1950s to the 1970s two foreign government
officials in order to secure deals in particularly from a so-called "Deal of
the century" for the sale of the F-104 in Europe in Japan and one wonders if this
was the reason for the refusal of NATO cash for the development of the SR-177
to clear the way of any competition. The scandal nearly brought down Lockheed and
the public and foreign outcry forced U.S. President Jimmy Carter to bring in
a new law banning U.S. citizens and companies from bribing foreign
government officials. Although the SR-177 was gone
there was still a couple of flying prototype SR-53's and it was decided that
they will be used like the X-15 in the US and launched from the back of a
Valiant bomber to fly to the edge of space for research
as part of the British space program. However after the crash of one of
the prototypes and the cancelling of the rest of the UK space program the
remaining SR-53 ended up like so many of the other unfinished British aerospace
projects, in a museum. And as for the Soviet Myasishchev M-50 supersonic
strategic bomber, well only one was ever built
but helps set off the West onto a wild goose chase in believing the Soviets had
a huge fleet of them while the Soviets actually switched to making an ICBMs.
So maybe the British government was justified in doing the same in the 1957
white paper. so what do you think of the British rocket fighter and the underhand
practice of Lockheed to get rid of the competition let me know in the comments.
So it just remains for me to say thanks for watching and please subscribe, thumbs
up and share.