[Thermodyne]

TSR-2, been a while since I heard anyone mention that plane. With the advantage of hind sight, it’d probably best that it wasn’t built. By the time it would have entered service, speed was no longer a viable defense, and it was slow by the standards of the day. Lots of countries were caught in more or less the same position at that time. Here, the B58’s were much more advanced, but found to be too expensive to maintain. They were pulled from service after a very short service life. And the B70 was probably 2 generations more advanced, but never saw production partly because of survivability and cost of operation issues. The plane that did fit the specs came a little later, but was not well received. The US fielded a few F111’s and Australia bought a few. England had already purchased F4’s by then, and screwed that up by replacing the engines with units of lower performance. And if ever there was a plane that needed all of the raw power it could get, it was the Phantom II. Then SAC bought a few FB111’s, longer range higher bomb load F111’s, as a stopgap until the B1 rolled out. But then we screwed that up by first delaying the B1 and then scrapping the high speed low altitude intake system which castrated the engine performance.

Another plane that fit the specs and was flying at the time was the A5 Vigilante, but the Navy also found the cost of operation to be more that they could stand. I guess it’s a good thing that Boeing and Avro built some damn good bombers, since their designs have both out lived several generations of replacements. The plane that the TSR-2 was going to replace also lived on for quite a few years. The US built high altitude versions of the Canberra were almost the state of the art for high altitude recon work, second only the U2’s and a hell of a lot easier to fly.