Chris Gibson (2)Critiques

hardback

Hikoki's series on Cold War aircraft has gained a good reputation generally, and this is one of the best I've seen.

Broader than Nimrod, this is a good overview of RAF procurement for a Maritime Patrol aircraft post-WWII. It's also a great introduction to the complexities of aircraft procurement, why it takes so long and why it goes wrong. This book will also be of interest to those interested in the great mergers of the UK aircraft industry through the '60s.

As a technical description of aircraft, it's also good. Although it's a book on many aircraft, not just Nimrod, and so there's still room on the bookshelf for a one-type history of it.

Although I've been a big fan of the author's work over the years I feel that this book is somewhat less successful. Instead of following a class of aircraft in RAF service, this time out Gibson is essentially trying to write a history of close support during the Cold War with a slant towards the RAF. This means that, while all the writing is informative, this book feels more like a collection of chapters chasing a theme; though Gibson winds up with a firm defense of the multi-role combat aircraft. That's probably a commentary on how much the poorly executed development and deployment of the Lockheed F-35 Lightning II has soured people on the concept of multi-role aircraft.½

In this installment of the author's ongoing study of RAF procurement policy one is given yet more evidence about the stresses that afflicted the process. The limited resources. The obsession with the best at the expense of the good enough. The efforts of British aviation industry to use government procurement as a means of subsidizing their own civilian efforts, and so on, and so forth. What I suppose had never dawned on me before was that the Avro Shackleton has been the only designed-as British maritime patrol machine to enter service in the post-WWII era and that the only reason the RAF got the Nimrod was due to a weird confluence of events. The RAF, having decided to bite the bullet and buy the Breguet Atlantic as an interim measure, sufficiently perturbed the leadership of the Royal Aircraft Establishment into putting its foot down and insisting that if the RAF was now prepared to compromise its very specialized requirements than the DeHavilland Comet could be made over into a patrol plane at a competitive price, thus producing the Nimrod, and the rest is history.

In the author's ongoing examination of the four dimensions of military aircraft in post-WWII Britain, that is to say "length, span, height & politics," it turns out that military transport aircraft are a much more contentious issue than one might imagine. This is between not spending more than necessary on support functions, the desire to preserve a British aviation industry (with its own "haves" and "have-nots") and British requirements that were often not easily met by simply buying something American off-the-shelf. More often than not the RAF simply had to "lump it," but they never went down without a fight!

Like the author's work on RAF manned-bomber projects during the Cold War, this book covers much more than simply aircraft, ranging from flak guns, missiles, early-warning systems (both ground-based and airborne), ancillary systems and the evolving policies and strategies that were to tie all this technology together; highly recommended.

A really excellent study that puts the evolution of the British nuclear deterrent into perspective, as author examines the decisions that were made to keep the manned bomber force viable. To a large degree this is a history of "stand-off" weapons used until a viable ballistic missile force could be deployed. Also, Gibson has little use for what might be called the traditional position of whining bitterly about the cancellations of much-touted aviation endeavors, seeing most of these projects as not being viable either because of changing technology or the limitations of the British economy.½