Classic British airliners

During the war the Brabazon Committee drew up the airliners Britain would need once peace came. One was a small feeder-liner to replace the wooden Dragon Rapide, and de Havilland answered it with the DH.104 Dove: an all-metal, low-winged twin with flaps, constant-speed propellers and a retractable tricycle undercarriage. The prototype first flew at Hatfield on 25 September 1945.

The RAF and Royal Navy flew the Dove, as the Devon and Sea Devon, for more than thirty years from 1948.

G-ALFU was built as a Dove 4 and later brought up to Dove 6 standard with more powerful engines.

The Dakota began as an airliner. In 1934 American Airlines asked Douglas for a wider sleeper version of its DC-2, and the Douglas Sleeper Transport flew at Santa Monica on 17 December 1935, 32 years to the day after the Wright brothers’ first flight. Its day-coach sister, the 21-seat DC-3, could cross the United States in about 15 hours with three stops and was the first airliner that could make a profit from passengers alone, without a mail contract.

David Lord’s Victoria Cross was the only one ever won by a member of Transport Command. Over Arnhem on 19 September 1944, with his starboard engine on fire, he held Dakota KG374 low over the drop zone for a second run to deliver the last of its supply panniers, and ordered his crew to jump moments before the wing gave way.

KN645 was built at Oklahoma City as a C-47B, USAAF serial 44-77003, and taken on RAF charge under Lend-Lease on 18 May 1945.

The Viscount began with the wartime Brabazon Committee, which asked for a short-range airliner to replace the DC-3 after the war. Vickers chose four of Rolls-Royce’s new Dart turboprops, a gas turbine driving an ordinary propeller, and a pressurised cabin with large oval windows. The prototype, G-AHRF, first flew from Wisley on 16 July 1948 with Mutt Summers and Jock Bryce at the controls.

The Rolls-Royce Dart, first proven on the Viscount, stayed in production until 1987 and went on to power the Fokker F27, the Hawker Siddeley 748 and the Handley Page Herald.

G-ALWF, Vickers’ fifth production Viscount, first flew at Weybridge on 3 December 1952 and was delivered to BEA on 13 February 1953, in time for the first Viscount services that April.

Armstrong Whitworth designed the Argosy in the late 1950s as a freighter that could be loaded like a lorry. The fuselage was a short, square-sided pod slung beneath a high wing, with the tail carried on two slim booms, so that the hold could open at both ends and be loaded straight in from a truck bed. Four Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops, the engine of the Viscount, gave it a reliable, familiar power plant.

Both halves of the Argosy C.1’s rear door could be opened in flight: the lower half swung down and the upper half up, leaving a clear opening across the full width of the hold for dropping paratroops and loads on parachutes.

XP411, construction number 6766, was built by Armstrong Whitworth at Bitteswell as one of the RAF’s 56 Argosies and first flew on 6 April 1962.

The Trident began as the de Havilland DH.121, chosen in 1958 to meet a British European Airways requirement for a jet to replace the Viscount and Vanguard on Europe’s busier routes. As first designed it would have carried 111 passengers behind three Rolls-Royce Medway engines, but BEA, expecting a slump in traffic, had it cut down in 1959 to about a hundred seats and the smaller Spey. The result fitted BEA’s routes almost exactly and few others, and the Boeing 727, launched a year later to the larger specification, went on to sell more than 1,800 against the Trident’s 117.

G-AVFB was hit by gunfire on the ground at Nicosia during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in July 1974, while on lease to Cyprus Airways as 5B-DAC, and the repair patches can still be found on its starboard side; it is the aircraft shown here.

G-AVFB was the second of the fifty Trident 2Es ordered by BEA; it first flew at Hatfield on 2 November 1967 and was delivered on 6 June 1968.

The VC10 was built to a BOAC requirement of 1957 for a jet that could fly the Empire routes: the hot, high and short runways of Africa and the Far East, where the Boeing 707 could not lift a full load. Vickers answered with a clean, highly efficient wing with full-span slats and big flaps, and hung all four Rolls-Royce Conway turbofans in pairs on the rear fuselage, which left the wing uncluttered and gave the cabin a quietness passengers never forgot. The prototype, G-ARTA, first flew from the short runway at Brooklands on 29 June 1962, and BOAC put the type into service to Lagos in April 1964.

G-ASIX made the last flight by a civil VC10 when it landed at Brooklands on 6 July 1987, back on the runway from which the prototype had first flown twenty-five years earlier; it is the aircraft shown here.

G-ASIX was the second of three Type 1103 VC10s built for British United Airways, with a main-deck cargo door in the forward fuselage and a lengthened leading edge over the inner wing; it first flew at Weybridge on 17 October 1964 and flew BUA’s South American and West African routes before passing to British Caledonian in 1970.

The One-Eleven began at Hunting Aircraft in 1956 as the H.107, a thirty-seat jet for short routes. Hunting passed into the British Aircraft Corporation in 1960, and BAC reworked the design the following year into an eighty-seat airliner with two Rolls-Royce Speys at the tail and a T-tail, the layout the Caravelle had introduced. British United Airways placed the launch order for ten on 9 May 1961, Braniff of Texas followed that autumn, and in July 1963 American Airlines ordered fifteen, the first of thirty: the One-Eleven was the short-haul jet Britain sold to America.

BEA had its 510EDs built with a cockpit laid out like the Trident’s, so that its pilots could switch between the two types; the result was a One-Eleven that needed a type rating of its own.

G-AVMU, construction number 148, was one of the eighteen Series 510EDs that BEA ordered for its domestic and European routes, and it was delivered to the airline in 1969.

The Andover grew out of the Avro 748, a short-haul airliner designed at Woodford in the late 1950s to replace the Dakota, with a low wing and two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops. When the RAF asked for a tactical freighter that could carry troops, vehicles and stores into short, rough strips, Hawker Siddeley, which had absorbed Avro, reworked the 748 rather than start again. The fuselage behind the wing was swept up to make room for a full-width loading ramp under a raised tail, the tailplane was given marked dihedral, the wing was lengthened at the root, and more powerful Darts were moved further out to swing bigger propellers.

The Andover could “kneel”: its main undercarriage legs shortened hydraulically to tilt the cabin floor down to the height of a lorry bed or bring the rear ramp to the ground.

XS639, construction number BN23, was built at Woodford as an Andover C.1 and joined No. 46 Squadron in May 1967, moving with it to Thorney Island in 1970.

John Britten and Desmond Norman met as apprentices at de Havilland, built a light aircraft of their own in a shed on the Isle of Wight and in 1954 set up in business at Bembridge converting Tiger Moths for crop spraying. Flying their sprayers round the islands of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Guinea, they saw what the old Dragon Rapides and Herons were doing on short hops between poor strips and drew a replacement for them: a square-sided box of a fuselage seating ten in five rows, each pair of seats with its own door, a plain rectangular wing set high on the roof, two engines slung beneath it and a fixed undercarriage with twin wheels on each main leg. The prototype, G-ATCT, flew from Bembridge on 13 June 1965 on two 210 hp Continentals.

Loganair’s Islanders fly the shortest scheduled service in the world, the hop between Westray and Papa Westray in Orkney: timetabled at two minutes and flown in under one with a following wind.

G-BELF, construction number 823, was built at Bembridge as a BN-2A-26 and registered in January 1977.

Concorde was a joint Anglo-French programme, agreed by treaty in 1962, to build an airliner that flew at twice the speed of sound. Its slender ogival delta wing and drooping nose gave it a shape unlike any other airliner. The French prototype first flew at Toulouse on 2 March 1969, and the British prototype followed from Filton on 9 April.

Heated by air friction at Mach 2, Concorde’s airframe stretched by up to about 25 centimetres in flight and shrank back again after landing.

G-BOAC was one of British Airways’ original Concordes and served with the airline until the fleet was retired in 2003.

The Jetstream was Handley Page’s last design and the one that sank the firm. The HP.137 was a small pressurised turboprop with eighteen seats, aimed at the American commuter airlines, and it first flew from Radlett on 18 August 1967 on two Turbomeca Astazou engines. The engines were late and underpowered, an order from the United States Air Force was cancelled, and the development bill overwhelmed a company that had built the Halifax and the Victor.

The Jetstream 31 prototype G-JSSD began life in 1969 as one of Handley Page’s own Jetstream 1s and was rebuilt with new engines eleven years later; it is the aircraft shown here.

G-JSSD was built by Handley Page at Radlett in 1969 as Jetstream 1 G-AXJZ and sold at once to the United States.

Hawker Siddeley launched the HS.146 in August 1973 as a quiet regional airliner able to work from short runways close to towns. Rather than two big engines it used four small Lycoming ALF 502 turbofans, slung in pods beneath a high wing, with a T-tail and a tail cone that split open as an airbrake for steep approaches. The oil crisis halted work in October 1974, but the newly formed British Aerospace relaunched the design in July 1978, and the first 146-100 flew from Hatfield on 3 September 1981.

The 146’s tail cone splits into two petals that open as an airbrake, letting it descend steeply and slowly without extra engine noise, which helped it into noise-sensitive airports such as London City.

ZE701 was one of the two 146 ‘Statesman’ VIP aircraft delivered to The Queen’s Flight in 1986, and for almost nine years it flew the Royal Family from Benson.