http://www.airliners.net/photo/Vickers-VC-10-1100/0075987/M/

for pic of VC-10 crinkled fuselage

Avro Airliners

Did Avro have a decent wind-tunnel early in WWII…..did all their designs around then need an ‘evolutionary’ period?….the Lancaster had to be evolved from the unsatisfactory Manchester….the ‘unhappy’ Tudor as AJ Jackson called it took a painful amount of development…..why did they bother with Lancastrians when the York could have been churned out instead ?

Perhaps it wasn’t a mock-up….much of the Vampire’s fuselage was only made of plywood anyway 🙂

The Jetcraft Mystery Jet project was meant to offer several bizjet conversions of the Vampire. From memory I think the most ambitious had seven seats!
Vampire XD527 was acquired from Hawker Siddeley in 1969 and was in a workshop on the side of Aviation Traders hangar. The wooden mock up went to the Historic Aircraft Museum Southend in early 1972. My old newsletters say the Vampire was transferred as well but I never saw it. The mock up was under the port wing of the Beverley for a while wrapped in plastic sheets but was returned to Aviation Traders by April 1972 as the project was supposedly going to be revived. The newsletters say the museum kept the Vampire but I never saw it at the museum and I am 99% sure it never left Aviation Traders. The picture from a Historic Aircraft Society newsletter shows the mock up in the museum compound. I think it ultimately wound up with Sandy Topen but I have no idea where XD527 went. I seem to remember seeing pictures of an unflown prototype stored in the desert in the USA possibly at Marana Air Park.

Was Concorde a British design?

The question to ponder is ‘Would the Concorde programme have gone to completion if it had just been British ‘…i’ve always understood that Britain was locked into an agreement with France so the British Treasury/Politicians could not do their usual wriggle out when costs escalated…..Which country had the determination to play the long game building airliners?