=== You cannot make it up===  What a cluster!  I had read that the British pursued the Nimrod AEW as they felt that "...the E-3 Sentry is not as capable."  And yet in the end, after squandering billions and countless delaysthey end up purchasing the E-3!   
 To prove there are a bunch of nuts running Whitehall, they repeat the entire exercise with the Nimrod MRA4; yet more billions down the hole.   
 Oh, and it turns out the plane wasn't needed anyway as the "mission" will be assumed by a few ships and a couple of helicopters.  What a colossal embarrassment.