Nah the Phantom was predominantly a fighter and was a good enough aircraft to carve out its own niche, especially when they remembered to give it a gun for dogfighting in Vietnam!

Here is the WIki on the TSR2, makes for good reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2

Just read the wiki article, and saw this quote:

QuoteAll modern aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR-2 simply got the first three right.  — Sir Sydney Camm

Sad, but true. Not to mention slightly funny.

Sidney Camm seemed to have a great sense of humour as well as being a brilliant aircraft designer 

Talking of mach 3 bombers how about th XB-70 Valkyrie

There is a sight I have not seen in a while. I would like to go for a ride in that one

Unfortunately only two built and one of those crashed!!



It did go a long way to the understanding of the vortacies that large aircraft create, however it took the death of a very experienced pilot to learn that, all for what was a promotional shot for General Electric (who made the engines in all the aircraft present)

The lesser known Blackbird, the YF-12.

This was a mach 3 interceptor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12

You will notice the very different nose area, this was for the radar.



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one sweet machine there, way ahead of it's time 

Staying on the mach 3 theme and crossing through the Iron Curtain the Sukhoi T-4:



Nad the Wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_T-4

Been a while since anything was added here so thought I would stick in the Avro CF-105 Arrow.

In 1958 Canada was posided to take the lead in Interceptor technology when the programme was controvertibly axed before it's full potential could be gauged.

Nice video, Thanks for sharing. That thing looks like a great ride Sorry I have not been able to add anything lately.

No worries Syber, I've been a little busy myself recently 

Yes the Arrow was a large aircraft, but nice too. The US benefited hugely from it's demise as all the engineers who worked on it ended up working for US companies as the cancellation basically killed Avro Canada

You guys seen this ?

That machine was huge.  No need for Radar, you could see that coming from miles away.

She was a big old beast, but to be fair she was an interceptor the same as the English Electric Lightning so was designed to stop the russian bombers coming in over the artic. Size was really not an issue.

Although officially the prototypes were all scrapped and the machinery destroyed (the same as the TSR-2 programme in the UK) there have been persistant rumours that one of the prototypes was brought to the UK in secret for testing.  I should point out this was never substantiated, but it apparently was something of an urban legend in the RAF in the 60's.