Survivors
The TSR-2 tooling, jigs and many of the partially completed aircraft were all scrapped at Brooklands within six months of the cancellation. Two airframes eventually survived: the almost complete XR220 at the RAF Museum, Cosford near Wolverhampton, and the much less complete XR222 at the Imperial War Museum Duxford. The only airframe ever to fly, XR219, along with the completed XR221 and partially complete XR223 were taken to Shoeburyness and used as targets to test the vulnerability of a modern airframe and systems to gunfire and shrapnel.
The apparent haste with which the project was scrapped has been the source of much argument and bitterness since. The TSR-2, nonetheless, remains a lingering "what if?" of British aviation, comparable to the cancellation and destruction of the American Northrop Flying Wing bombers, and Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow interceptor that was scrapped in Canada in 1959.
- Surviving airframes
- XR220 (X-02) on display at RAF Museum Cosford.
- XR222 (X-04) on display at Imperial War Museum Duxford.
- Cockpit section owned by Brooklands Museum (currently under restoration at Farnborough College).
Read more about this topic: BAC TSR-2
Famous quotes containing the word survivors:
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)
“I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how to handle their parents. They see that their parents are traumatized: they scream and don’t react normally.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)