The book was recommended by the UK chapter of the VFS, whose past exec I was pleased to see provided the foreword. It caught my eye because so many of the aircraft names appearing among its annals were familiar from my past, and because uncompleted projects are as often as not more interesting than those which succeeded. Regardless of your own description of airline transport today, it is hard to get beyond boring… that from a pilot.
I’ll deal on a chapter-by-chapter basis, as all things benefit from being broken down into component parts and not least prototyping. Chapter 1 or the introduction is brief, but touches on Westland’s own might-have been in the design for an attack helicopter not unlike the Apache that would eventually supplant it. In the modern world, in fairness, their is an argument for everyone on the same side at least to be using the same kit, but that is a relatively recent view.
Chapter 2 details the company’s earliest ventures, which were with fixed-wing types for the simple reason that rotary-wing were yet to appear. The Dreadnought was built and tested to investigate German ideas for lifting bodies of the sort that NASA would look again at much later, An aircraft with a fuselage not unlike a wood louse, on escape from ground effect it tipped up, stalled, crashed and severely injured its test-pilot: game over.
More success would follow with Westland’s unrequited love for tailless types, and in more material form with the Lysander that did so much for French resistance forces in WW2. Paper projects like the Welkin would inspire the alloy Canberra, whilst the Wyvern became a naval fighter beside a pub next door to former RNAS Lee-on-Solent… I know, I’ve tasted the beer.
With the UK government underwriting all of the experimental work from out of our taxes, however, it would consolidate the industry following its ‘Size and Shape’ white paper, at which point Westland would be confined to production. Though it meant it lost out to aircraft like the Blackburn Buccaneer, it did produce a partnership with Sikorsky as of 1950 that guaranteed its success whilst others went to the wall continuing to prototype. As a result it was invited back into the design and development fold in 1959.
Despite the plethora of runways appearing in WW2, the military on both sides of the pond became obsessed with what might happen were they to be bombed. It produced off the wall (or runway) designs like the Sea Dart in the US, and Westland’s undercarriage-less carrier-borne fighter prototype in the UK. Both ideas now look silly, especially as the latter would ~ inspired by the Me-163 ~ be rocket-powered on the outbound leg.
Rockets would feature in Westland’s design for fighters for the simple punch they packed, although with jet-engines catching up fast they would lose out t interceptors like the English Electric Lightning… pitch up to 40 degrees and settle back to 400 knots, anyone? Interestingly rockets would appear in Westland’s venture into early jet airliners, being fitted as an add-on in case of engine failure. They would eventually revert to four engines instead, by which time they’d been overtaken (quite literally as theirs was as yet a paper dart) by the De Havilland Comet.
In fact the Westland fixed-wing efforts could be considered the Marlon Brando of the design and development world: they could’a been a contender? Accordingly their pitch for a trainer would lose out to the Jet Provost, the Percival Provost with its piston-engine replaced from in front of the cockpit by a radial-flow jet-engine to its rear. And in the same vein, their turbo-prop design together with the Australian Wamira would lose out in due time to the spectacularly successful Toucan from South America and Pilatus PC-9 from, if I recall, Switzerland. Thus concluded Westland’s pioneering in fixed-wing aircraft which might thus be described as having ended not so much with a bang (and it did with the Dreadnought at the outset), as with a whimper.
Post-war helicopter development would be altogether more successful, not least because their chief designer ‘Fitz’ Fitzwilliam had trained with Hafner. (My spell-checker wanted to replace this with Hefner, more notable for models of a different kind altogether). Early on they looked at tandem helicopters that would result elsewhere in the Belvedere in the UK and the Chinook from the US; the success of the latter is not least down to the extension of that dwelling-point of all designers, the usable range of the C of G.
With rapid development of the helicopter stemming from the power available from turbine engines, thoughts turned to giant types inspired by the Russians in particular, though with oddities like the tip-jet Fairey Rotodyne to inspire too. The Westminster would come to nothing despite Alan Bristow’s campaigning as test-pilot, and British forays into passenger helicopter service under the auspices of national domestic airline BEA would devolve once again to the Sikorsky-designed and Westland-adapted Sea King.
This was not least because the type dominated the growing UK oil industry and was a low-risk alternative for increasingly risk-averse governments. BEA itself was to be absorbed with BOAC into British Airways, who withdrew from helicopters altogether after the same type crashed into the sea during an approach to the Scilly Isles… as they would too from holiday charter market after a 737 caught fire prior to take-off from Manchester.
The Westminster was plagued by that bete-noir of all super-sized helis in the shape of vibration, the cure for which would usually be more blades or else a wider chord. Both reduce efficiency, and large helicopter design eventually comes up against the same constraints the almighty doubtless did with elephants on land and whales in the sea.
At the other end of the scale, though, Westland would adopt the tip-jet for tiny two-seat helicopters with which to furnish the US Army. It was in response to a research initiative in the US that would be dropped in 1978 as quickly, as it was adopted in 1977 and small or personal helicopters have not been looked at since… although they have now, with the advent of electrical VTOL. I know, because the Leonardo which Westland was to become have already downloaded one of my papers on the subject from the digital commons.
Chapter 6 deals with post-merger developments within the Group, led by Raoul Hefner who knew his onions when it came to VTOL design. The company had absorbed Bristol, Saunders-Roe and Fairey and as its inevitably the victor who gets to rewrite the history. As a long-term resident of Hatfield in Hertfordshire, the absorption of De Havilland around the same time would rankle as in-house projects (like ultimately, the A320 wing) would be re-badged by the winners.
That aside, as ever the top-brass (a UK name for those thirty-five miles behind the front) dictated that in the white-hot heat of technology the ‘60s was, warfare would be viewed as a three-card trick: jet transport to the theatre, forward transport from 300 miles away and helicopter from 50. This thrilling scenario in view, Westland would go on to design ~ you guessed it ~ something like the US version we’d eventually buy and could have saved money on all along.
It is though a fascinating review of why things are as they are. The project required a low ceiling (a real one and not the atmospheric version) to be able to fit inside jet transports, and so the engines had to be shoulder-mounted to save that space; likewise tandem was preferred because smaller rotors were easier to demount for transport. In the end though the project was hamstrung by the inevitable British penchant for compromises that please nobody. The Royal Navy who had been asked to share in specification threw their toys out of the pram and stuck with the Gannet airplane and Wessex helicopter, until such time as the Falklands war would result in their hurried replacement by the Sea King.
The Chinook was in fact pitched three times in all to the same requirement, in 1966 and 1970 and 1978. It would enter service in 1981 with the British Army and RAF, freed from the compromise that wanted it ferried around on ships as well. It is such compromises as these that have been the Achilles Heel of transport technology generally, once ministers and civil servants co-opted the roles of the Victorian engineers who built most of it. My own favourite was the turbo-prop Bristol Britannia. Why thirty-six seats, they asked? Well it was because the fore-runner of BA used to bus the passengers out to the apron with… you guessed it, thirty-six seats.
Moving soldiers around following the family fall-out was a gap filled by the Puma, so the company did not lose out from the deal although they had to settle with sharing a desk with the French, which historically aircraft designers in the UK viewed as possibly worse. Nonetheless the shotgun wedding of Westland and Sud Aviation was to prove lasting. It resulted in replacing the piston- and later turbine-engined light Scout helicopter with the single-engined Gazelle and twin-engined Puma, for instance, with the Royal Navy once again satisfied to use the former.
As things moved on into the 1970s, Westland was among the first to visualise the now-familiar tandem-set attack helicopter, proposing the Warrior as one such and working with German aerospace concerns to develop something concrete… would that have explained its failure? Nonetheless there is much to be learned from the history, for example, the reason attach helis have slab-screens is not, as I thought, to make them look better so much as to reduce sun-glint and consequent visual detection.
In the way though that the expense of incorporating sophisticated battle technology of ever-evolving cost would reduce the number of fixed wing types to a trickle, it has done much of the same with the helicopter and the prototypical ecosphere is as diminished as our real one as a result. My favourite and one which terminates the chapter is a project to drive around in a sort of jeep-helicopter combination menu-pick, in which the latter sits on the flat-bed of the former until it gate stuck in the mud, whereupon they transfer to the aircraft in order to hook it out. It must though have been a decade when even Westland’s brightest were unable to steer clear of the mushrooms.
Chapter 7 is a reviewer’s relief, the three-bladed light civil helicopter not seeing the light of day, which was probably a blessed relief with competition in the shape of Robinson in the making. It would however encompass designs on paper at least for the twin-rotored WG-28 study that at least anticipated, along with tilt-rotors from other manufacturers, the eventual emergence of Joby one we all realised that electrical motors were an easier thing altogether to tilt. Likewise the ‘Large Cabin Lynx Derivatives’ that form the subject of the following chapter are as much an antidote to sleeplessness for most, especially as they too never lifted cleared of the blue-prints.
More successful altogether was the EH-101 that I have actually heard of. In the true style beloved of airheads, the political ramifications behind this joint effort go unnoticed in the book in the way the fire that destroyed London in 1666 went unrecorded in Pepys’ diary. In short, in the way we bought ourselves into the EU by selling out Concorde, the beloved Mrs Tee considered collaboration with a European entity better served national interest than the more obvious nuptials with long-time partner Sikorsky… dumped at the altar?
The tenth chapter relates to the UK governments Air Staff Target 404, which I like to think they chose prior to Error 404 becoming all that familiar. It was considered necessary to replace both the Wessex and the Puma, now each long in the tooth. There is altogether too much detail in his chapter regards procurement, and it reads like a Hansard typescript of a quiet afternoon in the House of Lords. What is worse is the author insisting on the original abstruse names (and numbers) for projects that we all know as something else. It is in fact as mad as calling one of your children ‘A-Xii’. Thus it was that what became of target 404 was the AgustaWestland Merlin helicopter… though I needed Google to find it.
Chapter 11 returns to the attack helicopter, and with so much of Westland history we know the ending, so no fear of a spoiler alert here! In fact it goes to prove what ABBA said about the winner, in so far as I’d forgotten the other candidates that pitched for the Joint Staff Target involved: note that even the staff targets have been consolidated. They included the A129 which Westland had mocked up and was presented by Augusta instead; the Comanche and Bell Cobra from the US; the Rooivalk from South Africa that probably failed because no-one could spell it and the Tiger from Europe.
In 1995 the government bought the Apache because of the jobs that came with it, and because no government had ever been sacked for buying IBM. Beside being able to enter the ball accompanied by its belle, Westland also laid claim to many of the ideas the others appeared to have ‘borrowed’ and not least the patented retractable armaments, which in truth they may have stolen themselves from the ‘Transformers’ franchise.
The Future Light Battlefield Helicopter chapter I shall skip over entirely, for they basically got on stage to reveal a modified… Lynx. At which point they were, or should have been, booed off stage… the Lynx then having done more farewell tours than Tina Turner. Not so the thirteenth chapter, however, on convertiplanes and inter-city VTOL… an area that in the shape of Joby has taken practically seven decades to achieve commercial success.
For it is, when viewed in hindsight, a venture that required electrical motivation in quite the same way that fixed wing aircraft would not ~ literally ~ have got off the ground in the absence of the internal combustion engine. Interestingly throughout their various forays into convertiplanes the tilt-wing design always looked a better bet on paper, and yet the tilt-rotor like the tortoise was ever the only one to take shape in the real world.
Ironically, at scale that remains so with Joby’s eVTOL, although it does altogether better by pitching the motors well forward of the wing to reduce the obstructions to downwash to a minimum. This was not a luxury afforded turbine types, whose complex gearboxes weighed as much as a ton apiece.
It was though an age when people cared little about the noise, and as often as not relished it as a by-product of what PM Harold Wilson called the ‘white heat’ of technical progress. The Fairey Rotodyne was indeed cancelled due noise, but as much so because it looked like it was going to be expensive to operate. Afterward it turned out apparently that the dream of intercity flight would devolve to Westland with their tilting designs and to HAC in Hatfield, whose aircraft (like Dornier’s) relied upon a multiplicity of engines to assure safety at all times… but I mean, eighteen? What were they thinking?
Westland’s own WE.01 proposal was pitched back in the 1960s to the US Navy, but by then NASA and the US Army envisioned the Osprey. Bell’s XV-15 (and I’ve seen one parked overnight at Liverpool Airport of all places) contributed greatly to that program, and would eventually be used by Westland’s successor Leonardo themselves as the basis of various EU-funded projects called, inevitably, EUROFAR and ERICA.
One interesting design consideration to come out of this is that convertiplanes like all airliners have a fuselage with an extended nose, unlike the ‘bubble’ canopies of helis. The noise issue called for steep departures and approaches, for which the comparatively long nose actually got in the way. Eventually only London Docklands Airport was the only one to see steep approaches, and that by conventional airliners and not at steep compared to approaches by VTOL types. Plus as a pilot (I’ve been there), they are horrible to fly: like as my fellow pilot suggested, negotiating a very steep staircase.
What does not come over from the chapter is the ultimate reason why we’re still not flying around town like the Jetsons, and that is the cost of living. During the 1960s London still felt, they say, like a collection of villages and a place ordinary people could rent in and walk to work. Wind that on fifty years and real estate would be so expensive that a cleaners’ broom cupboard in an apartment block in Kensington would sell for a seven-figure sum as a potential studio flat, whilst most public toilets have since gone the same way.
Thus the space that even a vertiport might occupy in London would be eyed enviously by developers from the get-go. And the way it will likely work is that it will be government (viz. you and me) funded and host Jobys for a year or two, until a single accident and the accumulated noise complaints from the neighbours will see it sold off for a song to said developers who’ll retire to the Caribbean on the proceeds. I must be getting old…
Chapters 14 through 16 deal with uninhabited air vehicles, high-speed rotorcraft and Urban Air Mobility respectively and perhaps surprisingly there is little to be said about each. Prior to electrification practically every aircraft designer’s idea of a loitering air vehicle was one with co-axial rotors because to every hammer, everything looks like a nail. The simple reason though was that the power units involved, as always with helicopters, were heavy and expensive, beside requiring gearboxes: all of which limited your options.
Meanwhile the foray into high-speed aircraft focused on supersonic blades to overcome retreating blade stall at higher speeds, and eventually a look at relatively-simpler types of compound aircraft like the famous Fairey Gyrodyne. Despite Westland claiming to have pioneered UAM fifty years ahead of the game, too, their project foresaw a two-seater utility vehicle whose use they anticipated as being as widespread as that of cars… and presumably we’d get up to the office on the twenty-third floor with our jet-packs?
To some extent the book ends not so much with a bang as with a whimper, as so much of their recent projects deal with, as the chapter says, ‘MOD procurement and advanced projects’. Regardless of what they say about split-torque gearboxes and thermoplastic ice-shields for propellers, you can’t beat them as the ideal cure for sleeplessness…
The final chapter rallies however with the company’s ‘successes and adventures’ and as one of the subtitles suggests, the emergence of W. E. W. Petter as a designer could be considered the jewel in the crown. Even discounting his triumphs at Westland he went on to be foundational in the emergence of the Canberra, Lightning and Gnat: amongst the best-known post-war designs in the UK.
In particular his experience with his twin-engined aeroplane in the shape of the Westland Whirlwind circa WW2 led directly to the production of the Gnat, a development that he felt was essential in view of the increasing weight, cost and complexity of emerging types of military aircraft. These he felt were too sophisticated and costly to be deployed in the numbers that would be sufficient to counter the Eastern Bloc… and he may yet be proved right.
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