This is the inside of the walkthrough-Wellington:

And I’ve posted these before, but they show the structure. I think that most of the new tubing is in the covered section of the rear fuselage.

Front up with your Guilders and buy her back?

I would if I could, but since guilders are not accepted as currency anymore… 😉

I don’t mind her moving on but the purpose of the sale was to get money for other acquisitions and seeing as the museum went bankrupt a year or so ago, they didn’t manage their funds all that well. I don’t doubt that she will look great once restored but right now she is still a fairly complete time capsule from 40 years or so ago. That is something that we will lose. Anyway, back to the happenings at Duxford!

With all due respect to Vickers, it seems like a silly thing to do.
If you’re going to make a commercial aircraft, it should be reasonably modern for better performance and economics…

I don’t think that Vickers would have disagreed with you on that, but I think that it was more a case of getting back into producing airliners as soon as possible. And as the information seems to show, they did manage to improve a bit over the DC-3/C-47 which was going to be its main competitor. Designing a completely new wing takes time, and they must have decided to avoid that delay by using a known wing design.

“…as long as proper airspeed is maintained…” What, in the Flare?

Kenneth is correct in stating that you need to approach with the correct airspeed and maintain this until the flare. While flaring the airspeed will decrease, so in that regard you might have a point, but when approaching from a glide with the engine stopped or at idle, you aim to maintain your glide speed until the very last second. If you misjudge and start flaring too soon, you may find yourself approaching a stall or at least a descent with increasing vertical speed, without any option left. Your only way of increasing the speed at such a point would be to lower the nose but you may have run out of room (height-wise and speed-wise) for that as you need to trade altitude to get more speed.

From ‘Britain’s Airlines volume 2’: “The Viking was significantly faster than the Dakota although it had slightly higher operating costs and needed longer runways. When the German charter airlines began taking to the sky in the mid-50s, over twenty Vikings were used, their higher speed proving a real benefit on the longer sectors to Spain and the Balearics.”

On the Viking/Valetta you’ve got a wing spar running through the cabin which is not very handy when loading cargo. This is a major plus for the DC-3 design as that has a flat cabin floor. On the other hand, the seats near the spar were popular with male travellers on Vikings as there were some interesting views when the cabin crew clambered over the spar.

As mentioned before, the Viking design wasn’t built in the same numbers as the DC-3, I guess that there were just too many C-47s available second hand.

You could start with this list: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/11/bestukbookshops
If you’d like to stick to the UK then this might help: http://www.theguardian.com/books/bookshop/independent-bookshop-directory

What’s the story behind the Tristars at Bruntingthorpe?
Are they being stored? I didn’t count them all but there must be 6 or 8 of them.

They are currently in storage but due to fly out to the US sometime soon. They’ve been sold to a broker over there. See here: http://www.csdsaircraft.com/aircrafts_available.html