My 1967/8 Janes lists the Gipsy Queen as having 120mm bore, light alloy forged pistons with two compression and one oil control piston rings. Looks like your piston has indeed got three rings.

All of these are fair points, but I think that by 1963/4 the die was cast.
From memory of Charles Gardener’s history of BAC (I no longer have the book, alas) the government of the late 1950s believed Vickers to be the more capable project manager, having delivered the Valiant on time and on budget and made a success of the Viscount.
To have put EE in charge of the whole thing once the project had started would have invited even more internal politicking than already suggested.
Again from memory, one of the big selling points of the EE/Vickers TSR-2 design was the integrated avionics, a concept new to the British at the time. It’s a point for debate as to whether a switch to a US avionics suite would have saved any money or time once the project was under way.
BTW, I recall that there was wry amusement at the way the British had terrain-following radar, while the Americans preferred the slightly more frightening term terrain-avoidance radar:confused:

Only recent one I can recall is the hijacked 767 off the Comoros in 1996.. There’s video footage doing the rounds – try Ethiopian airlines/767/hijack/ditching on U-tube – and, as far as I recall, about 25% of those on board survived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_961

and try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing

Nice copyright-free pic here of a Nieuport taken in 1917…

The more I think about this the more my blood runs cold. Looking at the photographs, BA was lucky that the 777 was lightly loaded.
Briefly going back to the Air Transat A330, I don’t see any contradiction in praising the crew’s flying skills while making the observation that they shouldn’t have got themselves into that position in the first place, which should not be read as any specualtion as to what happened today.
I see also that PPRuNe seems to have crashed at the moment – sheer weight of postings on this topic, I suspect.

Edit: My first belief that the u/c had penetrated the fuselage was mistaken, going by later pictures.

It’s tricky at any time, and even trickier without any accurate size.
Just to state the obvious, it’s got the large centre spot, so it’s post-war. If it’s roughly three feet across then it’s probably come from a fuselage or tail boom, given the obvious curvature. If it’s from a fast jet then it’s probably pre-early 70s (cos that’s when two-colour roundels became the standard).
If the background colour is grey rather than silver that might point towards a transport or training type.
Beyond that we’re in the land of guesswork. Chipmunk? Basset? Argosy? Who knows?

Well said Michelf and Vega ECM. Am I the only one who thinks the government of the day did BAC a great favour by refusing to support the rear-engined wide-bodied Three-Eleven in the early 70s?
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the time, but I’ve always felt the Three-Eleven was an overweight commercial disaster waiting to happen.
The same government also refused to back the A300, but at least HSA decided to stay in on a business basis.

There was a MiG-21 at the 1990 Farnborough show with a price tag on it of around £50K if I remember rightly. I’d just sold my house and as I didn’t want a lot of money hanging around I’d just ‘parked’ it in my current account over the weekend.
It crossed my mind that I could have signed a cheque for the MiG and it wouldn’t have bounced. But the effect on my marraige may have been a bit drastic!