104 The Aircraft of British Aerospace and BAE SYSTEMS 1977 - 2017
I
n the late 1970s BAe’s project team at
Warton began working on the fighter
to replace the Lightning and the
Phantom. Their objective was to
produce an aircraft equal to the General
Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon. In 1979
BAe and Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm
(MBB) agreed to work together on a new
fighter design and devised the ‘European
Combat Fighter’. Then Dassault joined
BAe and MBB and the project was
renamed the ‘European Combat Aircraft’.
This fell by the wayside but Warton’s
project engineers continued working on
their designs and produced a smaller,
cheaper version of the ‘European Combat
EAP to Eurofighter
Typhoon
Aircraft’, the all-British P.110, a twin-
engined delta with canards and a twin-fin.
This led to a design jointly produced by all
the Panavia partners - the Agile Combat
Aircraft (ACA) which was publicly
displayed for the first time as a full-scale
mock-up at Farnborough 1982. The ACA
was relatively light, highly-manoeuvrable
and capable of Mach 2. There was no
official support for the ACA but on 26 May
1983 the Ministry of Defence placed a
contract with BAe Warton to produce to
produce a single experimental aircraft
serialled ZF534 based on the ACA. It was
to be funded 50:50 by the state and by
industry.
The Jaguar FBW/ACT
As part of its preparation for the
Lightning/Phantom replacement British
Aerospace Warton had already been
researching into the benefits of ‘Fly by
wire’ (FBW ) technology and relaxed
stability. To trial these the MoD funded
the conversion of a Sepecat Jaguar to
prove them in flight. Originally built at
Warton, Jaguar XX765 first flew in June
1975 and after brief service with the RAF
was put into store at Abingdon twelve
months after its maiden flight. It was
reactivated and flown back to Warton in
August 1978 for its extensive modification
as a FBW trials machine.
The all-British
P110, a twin-
engined delta with
canards and a
twin-fin mock-up
was a BAe proposal
for an aircraft to
replace the
Lightning and the
Phantom.
(BAE SYSTEMS North
West Heritage)
