Peter Stickney wrote:

snip Walt's comments

Thanks, Walt. I'm the one that quoted Beamont's report.
To place it better in context, it should be pointed out that he was
here as much in mis capacity as English Electric's Chief Test Pilot as
anything else, and one of his tasks was to eveluate stuff like the
dampers in the -102, (And, for that matter, all other U.S. Supersonic
aircraft) and his high-speed test of them was well above the handbook
limit. (Somehwere around 0.95 Mach, while decelerating from a run to
Vmax.) He was, of course, very much involved with testing of the P.1B
and Lightning at that time, and so was very interested in why the
U.S. was goig to artificial stability augmentation. There was a bit
of a difference in philosphy there - The Brits really didn't like
adding such systems, and went to great lengths to avoid them.
For example, teh Yaw Damper was invented for teh B-47. The V-Bombers
spent a bunch of extra development time getting fiddled with to make
them stable enough in yaw to not need one. Whether that's because any
Sability Augmentation System that they'd be putting in would be built
by Lucas...

I've never heard an F-102 pilot say bad things about the airplane.
They all wished that it were a bit faster, though.

I do believe that would be the F-102B, aka F-106 ;-) Six pilots seem to
have liked them just as much, although it suffered from the same "one big
move, and then your energy is all gone" problem of all conventional deltas.

Guy