Cold War Interceptor: The Raf's F.155t/O.R. 329 Fighter Projects

by Dan Sharp

The West was stunned when the Soviet Union dropped its first atomic bomb in August 1949 and a year later the Korean War showcased Russia’s incredible technological progress in the form of the MiG-15 - a fighter capable of besting anything the RAF had to offer at that time. In the wake of the Second World War, funding for the RAF’s Fighter Command had fallen away dramatically but now there was an urgent need for new jet fighters to meet the threat of Russian bombers head-on. Britain’s top aircraft manufacturers, including Hawker, English Electric, Fairey, Vickers Supermarine, De Havilland, Armstrong Whitworth and Saunders-Roe, set to work on designing powerful supersonic aircraft with all-new guided missile systems capable of meeting a Soviet assault and shooting down high-flying enemy aircraft before they could unleash a devastating nuclear firestorm on British soil.

The result was some of the largest, heaviest and most powerful fighter designs the world had ever seen - and a heated debate about whether the behemoths should be built at all as guided weapons became ever more advanced. This is the story of Britain’s secret cold war fighter jet designs, fully illustrated with a host of drawings, illustrations and photographs.

200 pages, Hardcover

Published January 19, 2020

Reviews

[Emmanuel Gustin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The memory of the Battle of Britain lingers. In the early 1940s, bombers cruised at around 300 km/h and usually at altitudes of 4000 to 5000 metres. Fifteen years later, British officers contemplated the possibility that their new enemy would in a few years be able to attack with bombers flying at or above 18,000 meters (60,000 ft) and at speeds in the range of 1,400 to 2,200 km/h (Mach 1.3 to Mach 2). During the Battle of Britain, radar could detect enemy aircraft up to an hour before they reached their targets. But in the worst case scenario, if the enemy fielded Mach 2 bombers, this could shrink to as little as 10 minutes. And they might be dropping thermonuclear bombs.

Hence OR.329, a requirement for an interceptor that would be able to reach 60,000 ft (18,280 m) of altitude and a speed of Mach 2 in three minutes after take-off. The obvious goal was to intercept the hypothetical enemy bombers while they were still over sea. This staggering demand could probably only be met by using mixed power, i.e. rocket engines in addition to powerful jet engines, despite the disadvantage of their huge consumption of fuel and oxidiser (hydrogen peroxide). The interceptor would have missiles as its primary armament, either relatively small IR-guided missiles (Blue Jay) or large radar-guided missiles (Red Dean). With a substantial load of electronic gear and a crew of two, the OR.329 interceptor would be a big, heavy, and very specialised aircraft.

Dan Sharp investigates the eight proposals formulated by different manufacturers. They presented a very diverse set of solutions to the problem, with loaded weights that varied from 14 to 44 metric tons. (Making the Saunders-Roe P.187 proposal as heavy as the Tu-128P.) Sharp cites an insightful comment made at the time, that the less experienced a design team was, the more confident it was of being able to meet the requirement — and some did not hide their pessimism. The designs prepared by English Electric and Hawker suggest that these design teams were far more interested in growing their technology in an organic and evolutionary way, than in trying to meet some radical requirement formulated by the Air Staff.

After thoroughly reviewing the design proposals one by one, the author then proceeds to analyse the decision making around them, a process that involved officers, civil servants, and politicians. (Some were quite obviously more knowledgeable than others.) Choices were based as much on industrial policy as on design merit, because at this time there was still hope of supporting all of Britain’s rather large number of aircraft manufacturers. But proposals that were either too conservative to meet the requirement, or too outrageous in their features, were weeded out. The effective winner would be a big delta-winged fighter proposed by Fairey, which looks relatively conventional compared to some of the alternatives, and benefited from the experience that Fairey had acquired with the design of the FD.2.

In the end it all came to naught, because the British government concluded, probably rightly, that no fighter force that it could afford to pay for, would offer significant protection against nuclear attack. It decided to invest in its nuclear deterrent and in ground-to-air missiles instead. Fighters would still have a role, but that was limited to protecting the bases from which a nuclear counterattack would be launched.

This is a revealing study of British military thinking in the 1950s, during some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War. Dan Sharp mostly describes it objectively, citing or summarising the original documents without much comment, but what emerges is a picture of some seriously muddled thinking. OR.329 certainly was the product of people who tried to find the best possible solution to the problem on front of them, but unfortunately it was the wrong problem (the threat never emerged in that form) and it wasn’t a solution that could be practically implemented. It’s probably a good thing that none of these aircraft were ever built, but their detailed history is still a good read. The author did a very thorough job. The only thing I miss a bit in this study is a deeper analysis of the proposed missiles, as their characteristics hugely influenced the OR.329 designs.

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this on something of a whim, as while "paper" projects always fascinate me I wasn't familiar with the publisher or, I thought, the author. Well, it turns out that had I remembered Sharp had written a very good work on British space projects, I would have felt more at ease, as this is a very good study of the RAF machines that would have been contemporaries of the MiG-25. This is had small matters of cost, technology, and a mission that really wasn't relevant, not reared their ugly heads. As it is, the guts of this work are the proposals submitted by the various manufacturers, so, along with the color images commissioned for this book, there are lots of period diagrams and drawings. On the basis of all this, I hope that Sharp also provides companion volumes on the supersonic bombers and recon aircraft that were a gleam in the eye of the RAF in the mid-1950s, and that would have been the contemporaries of these aircraft.

It might be noted that the book I have in my collection is the 2019 edition.