Reply to post: Re: Is their hardware history better or worse than their software history?

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Is their hardware history better or worse than their software history?

But we did invent the Jet engine that the jump jet uses and then promptly gave the Americans the details for free.

I'm guessing you're talking about the Bristol Siddeley (later Rolls Royce) Pegasus as used in the Harrier/AV-8A, which which was licensed (presumably for a lot of money) to Pratt & Whitney, so they could build them for the US version of the Harrier (also sold for money). According to Wikipedia though P&W never built any though, so they were all built by RR instead.

So no, we didn't 'promptly' give the Americans anything, there was a quite a few years between the first flights of the Kestrel/P.1127 (early 1960's) and collaboration with the US (1970s). There's also no evidence that the license was 'for free'.

The Harrier and it's engine are actually a rare success story in selling aircraft to the US military, which historically tends to only buy domestic models.

(That said, by the end of production of the Harrier, it was being built by Boeing and BAE, both of whom are multinational companies and it's tricky to assign knowledge to a particular country.)

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