This blog posting represents the views of the author, David Fosberry. Those opinions may change over time. They do not constitute an expert legal or financial opinion.

If you have comments on this blog posting, please email me .

The Opinion Blog is organised by threads, so each post is identified by a thread number ("Major" index) and a post number ("Minor" index). If you want to view the index of blogs, click here to download it as an Excel spreadsheet.

Click here to see the whole Opinion Blog.

To view, save, share or refer to a particular blog post, use the link in that post (below/right, where it says "Show only this post").

UK Ministry of Defence buys new planes with 1950s capabilities

Posted on 21st February 2015

Show only this post
Show all posts in this thread.

I was rather bemused by this story in the Telegraph. It described how the UK MoD (Ministry of Defence) is to buy two new solar powered Zephyr 8 spy planes from Airbus Defence and Space for £10.6m.

The report describes how this new plane flies so high ‘that it is described as a “pseudo satellite” ’. Seriously! The operating height is reported as 70,000 feet (although it could be a little more, and being kept secret). 70,000 was the ceiling height of the U2, built from 1955. On the Wikipedia page about the U2, it (at the time of writing) states “In 1984, during a major NATO exercise, Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant Mike Hale intercepted a U-2 at a height of 66,000 feet (20,100 m), where the aircraft had previously been considered safe from interception. Hale climbed to 88,000 feet (26,800 m) in his Lightning F3“. This was apparently only one of many such interceptions (the Wikipedia page has recently been edited to remove much of the detail about these). I first heard about one of these interceptions in 1982 or earlier, so the statement in the Wikipedia page that, in 1984, "the aircraft had previously been considered safe from interception" is clearly not true. Nevertheless, the upshot is that the The U2 was in range for Lightnings, and probably other interceptors of the time, and was proven to be in range for Russian missiles when Gary Powers was shot down.

I really don’t see how new spy planes with 1955 performance, able to be detected, intercepted and shot down decades ago, are a good investment by the MoD. These planes certainly don’t earn the label “pseudo satellite”. True, they will be solar powered and able to stay aloft for “weeks on end”, but otherwise the basic performance is 60 years out of date!