The week before my birthday 19 years ago I went to BAE Systems’ factory in Stockport, since closed, to see progress on one of the company’s problematic but potentially lucrative contracts.
BAE was building a new aircraft to hunt enemy submarines. Well, not entirely new. BAE wanted to soup-up the existing fleet of Nimrods with new engines, new computers, new nearly everything. The MRA4, as the plane was designated, was going to be a world beater. BAE execs talked excitedly about winning orders from Japan, even the US, and how the Nimrod production line would have to be restarted to make new planes.
There was only one problem. They could not make the MRA4 work. The Nimrods, descended from the Comet, the world’s first jet
