Variable sweep today

EARLIER this year, the British Government announced that one of the joint military projects to be undertaken by the French and British aircraft industries would be the design and development of a multi‐mission fighter/bomber embodying variable sweep techniques. Such an air‐craft would, the Government envisages, enter service during the mid or late 1970s as a replacement for the Buccaneer, Lightning and Phantom. Thus it would appear that after nearly twenty years of procrastination, a British Government has accepted that there could be something in the variable sweep concept after all.