AVIATION: The Bumbling Boffins

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Britain's aviation industry last week was taking one of its heaviest shellackings since the Battle of Britain. The walloping came from a wartime R.A.F. squadron leader named William A. Waterton, who later became a Paris-London speed-record holder (1947) and chief test pilot of Gloster Aircraft for seven postwar years. In the past two years, as aviation correspondent for London's Daily Express, Waterton has seldom concealed his conviction that British planemakers have allowed their aircraft to lag farther behind U.S. and Russian planes.

In a new book The Quick and the Dead, a hard-hitting indictment of the whole industry, Bill Waterton charged that British aircraft firms, "emasculated by safe government contracts," lack competitive drive. Fearful that the industry will be nationalized, they are less concerned with turning out fast airplanes than with turning a quick profit. As a result, the industry is shackled by incompetent, underpaid employees, overlapping programs and antiquated factories that look like "back-alley garages" beside U.S. aircraft plants. Said Pilot Waterton: "We have tried to muddle through by guess and by God. Britain [is] almost an also-ran in the aircraft stakes."

Cover-Up v. Correction. The British have spent huge sums on aircraft, e.g., the Bristol Brabazon, that were abandoned before they ever went into operation (TIME, Dec. 19). And many combat planes, such as the Supermarine Swift fighter (cost: some $60 million), were delivered months or years late, then proved so inadequate that they had to be withdrawn from service. The British, charged Waterton, are "trailing behind America and Russia," which have both produced supersonic fighters in quantity and have bombers in service "twice as big as our largest." Through lethargy and bad planning, Britain's planemakers have missed the rich civilian market for helicopters, light business aircraft and long-range jet airliners. Even if the British wished to introduce U.S. designs, "we haven't the means of transferring them to the production belt. We are building planes almost identically in the way we did 15 or 20 years ago."

The main trouble, says Airman Waterton, is that "few British firms understand development work." British aircraft companies seldom produce enough prototypes of a new plane, thus face delays if a prototype is cracked up. Instead of trying to correct the deficiencies that show up in the prototypes, British aircraft "boffins," i.e., chairborne scientists, try to cover up to save costly redesigning. Despite the industry's often brilliant performance at Britain's annual Farnborough air show, Waterton points out that the show is "a lot of sham." The aircraft entered are often prototypes, years from the production line and often perilously undertested. Says he: "It is a miracle that there are not mass disasters at Farnborough every year."