Jagman,
There's a difference between the conclusions of the inquiry, and the evidence presented to it. At risk of a little cynicism, I'd say that a statement from
"retired members of the Nimrod MRA4 Project Team, one of us having been employed in the UK aircraft industry for over fifty years, of which nine years were involved on the Nimrod MRA4 project at BAE Systems as a consultant engineer, and the other having served with the RAF as Mission Crew on Shackleton and Nimrod MR1 and MR2, and more recently having been employed by BAE Systems as a member of the Trials Team on MRA4"
claiming that there were no real problems, all was well, and only a *little* more time, effort and money would be needed to make the aircraft fully capable and airworthy... needs to be taken with several grains of salt.
Isn't a refrain oft heard on ARRSE that contractors such as BAE need to be held to account for failure to perform, rather than endlessly bailed out with blank cheques to fix the failing systems they've delivered?
The TSR.2 analogy is actually worth looking at: after a somewhat troubled development, it was shaping up to be a very good airframe, with the pilots almost unanimous in praising its flying qualities. However, the hardest part - the sophisticated navigation and attack avionics - remained at the stage of "and the magic will one day happen in this black box..." at cancellation, and that's where aircraft projects of the period tended to *really* come unglued. Even on the airframe alone, costs were rising and performance slipping (the range was reduced to 60% of the original requirement; the avionics hadn't even begun to be tested yet...
Experience overseas - such as with the F-111 we were supposed to buy to replace the cancelled TSR.2 - demonstrated that airframe problems could be ironed out, but avionics issues could kill or cripple programmes (the only reason the F-111 survived at all, was that it was made in John Tower's constituency and he was a key figure on the House Armed Services Committee; it took until the F-111F version before it was reliable enough to actually use, the joke being that you could walk along the flightline and listen to the sound of F-111Ds breaking...)