Why don't we make bikes in the UK any more.

flecc

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Oct 25, 2006
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I remember in the Fauklands war or could've been the first Iraq war, seeing on the news the Harrier Piolots boasting about their huge tactical advantage in dogfights through viffing, where they used the vertical jets to stop and jump up, leaving any following enemy fighters in front of them so that they could blast them. I found an explanation here:
The Eeriness of Viffing a Harrier
That was the Falklands conflict. However, while they obviously had fun with those tactics, they failed to prevent the devastating attacks on our landing craft and I suspect a fair degree of nationalist hype in the reports. In any case, those Argentinian strike aircraft were compromised by not having air to air missiles so were unable to retaliate effectively.
 

morphix

Esteemed Pedelecer
Oct 24, 2010
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Full integration will work since it means a federal state with a single economy. That is automatically a level playing field, all present countries being states within a United Europe with national fiscal control at the centre. The states would only have control over local taxation like the sales tax that US States operate.



Not really! The Harrier was the most over-hyped product we ever made. Although a huge technical achievement, it was useless as a warplane in it's original form since it's arms and ammunition payload simply weren't viable. In addition , it's VTOL capability has never been viable since it reduced the range to uselessness, hence it being used as a jump jet instead, taking off with ramps or using conventional take off and landing.

Very early on we tried to sell them to the US Marine corps but their findings were as I've said above, so they rejected the trial planes while the US continued it's own VTOL research. With that taking too long, the US returned to the Harrier idea and McDonnell-Douglas (later part of Boeing) did a complete redesign, naming it the AV8. That plane was made in various versions, mostly larger and much more effective, more heavily armed and with some range improvement.

The McDonnell-Douglas AV8s was so much better that we switched to the AV8 manufacturing program 31 years ago and the RAF was re-equipped with them, but the popular Harrier name was retained since in Britain it was officially called the Harrier 2, national pride and all that. We have now discontinued their manufacture and the planes we transferred to the US marine corps are their US designed AV8s of course since they don't use the Harrier 2 name.

So the planes we are familiar with were mostly AV8s of various types, made viable by US engineers I'm sorry to say.
I thought the AV8 was a joint venture between BAE and Boeing?
 

morphix

Esteemed Pedelecer
Oct 24, 2010
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To be able to manufacture e-bikes in Britain will require a Banking system that is pro business. Our Banks are very reluctant to lend to small/medium industrial ventures, despite the Bank of England incentives to Banks to increase there lending to business, they still prefer to speculate on risky ventures such as betting on the price of food products (Barclays makes £500m betting on food crisis - Business News - Business - The Independent) It is about time these banks are forced to go to gamblers anonymous to cure themselves of these destructive tendencies that is slowing down Britains recovery
The government should do what it keeps saying, or what Vince Cable keeps saying, which is completely separate this speculative investment banking from the retail side. We shouldn't have to be exposed to the market risks banks are taking with OUR money.
 

flecc

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Oct 25, 2006
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I thought the AV8 was a joint venture between BAE and Boeing?
No, the events were exactly as I've described, starting well over a decade before we adopted the McDonnell AV8 redesign in 1981. Subsequentto 1981 BAE co-operated with McDonnell-Douglas in development of the later versions, since their were a number of AV8 types for differing purposes.

Boeing had no part in the redesign since they didn't own McDonnell-Douglas at that time. They just inherited it when the two companies merged as one in 1997.

All AV8s are due to be replaced with the the F-35B STOVL variant of the Lockheed-Martin F35 Lightning II (formerly the Joint Strike Fighter).