Geoff Byham was Chief Engineer at Westland and remembers working on the development of the Wildcat

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815 Squadron Royal Navy Wildcat

The Company had been doing quite a lot of design studies to see how they could stretch or grow the Lynx and improve it, but it was getting pretty heavy by then. I mean the Lynx went into service having been designed as a 8,000lb (pound weight) aircraft and by 2000 it was a 12,000lb aircraft. It was 50% heavier than the day it was designed and the MoD had been saying it’s running out of performance, it’s not very agile, it doesn’t manage hot weather or high altitudes very well. How can you give us something that is worth keeping going for another 20 or 30 years? And, in the end they just threw down the gauntlet and said make an irrefutable case that it’s worth keeping the Lynx going or we will bring it to an end and go looking for something else to replace it.

My job was to bring the Lynx to a standard that it could live for another 30 years

The Company set-up a working party to look at the business issues, the logistics issues, and my job was really to try to bring together all of the technical steps we might make to bring the Lynx to a standard that it could live for another 30 years, growing steadily in weight, and have good battlefield performance at the end of that period rather than the beginning. So, fortunately, I was aware of most of the research activities that had been going on for the technologies that were being developed and we could put together a pathway step-by-step, changing the tail rotor, the transmission without throwing things away, but basically sucking in the technical steps that we had been building and the case hung together quite well. The technical people at the MoD gave it the thumbs up. So that was quite a relief because the feeling had been that we hadn’t got a hope, you know, the Lynx was just going to struggle a bit longer and then be taken out of service. So now you have the Wildcat which is the aircraft that emerged out of it.

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