Getting European Defence Projects off the Ground
In the 1960s Anglo-French efforts to collaborate on a new combat aircraft – the BAC/Dassault AFVG – hit turbulence.
On 19 June 1967 Paris informed London that it was withdrawing from the Anglo-French Variable Geometry (AFVG) supersonic combat aircraft project. For the incumbent Labour government, the consequences were enormous. Both the Royal Air Force (RAF) and British industry had lost a vital combat aircraft. Three months later, British magazine Flight International declared that the Labour government’s plan for a long-form defence-industrial relationship with France had ‘suffered a wound that has failed to heal’.
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