British Aerospace | Weapons of Mass Production | Topic

Video from the channel Topic about British Aerospace, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 9:30. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

This piece from Topic's "Weapons of Mass Production" series portrays Freckleton, a village in Lancashire, in north-west England. Its largest employer is the company that designs, flight-tests and manufactures military aircraft in the area, known locally as BAE Systems and British Aerospace. A former executive and his wife, a florist and a pub owner speak. All describe the village's economic dependence on the factory and defend selling aircraft to other countries.

Phil Humphries joined the company in 1978 and was a manager for almost twenty years in commercial, procurement and business development areas. From August 1990 he was posted to Saudi Arabia during the crisis triggered by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. His family remembers the air-raid alarms, the Scud missiles that reached Riyadh and the evacuation of the families. The video also visits the site of the Freckleton air disaster of August 1944. An American Liberator bomber crashed in the centre of the village and one wing fell on the youngest children's classroom.

61 people died in that disaster, including schoolchildren and teachers. Humphries presents Saudi Arabia as an ally of the United Kingdom and argues that not every customer can be held to the same ethical standard. On the war in Yemen, he says the death of children depresses him, but he does not feel responsible for having manufactured the aircraft.