The flying boats had definately gone from Cowes by 1967, we stayed at the youth hostel there in August 67 and 68 and took the ferry from West to East Cowes several times.

I missed a trip with a bunch of aeronautics students to see the Princesses broken up. They all brought souvenirs back so there’s probably quite a lot of parts still around.

Google says it was July ’67 and I think that’s probably correct.

Several other books and sites note the apparent hostility towards British designs by BOAC. On the other hand BEA seems to have been quite a supporter of British designs.

Would there have been any improvements in British airliner manufacturing fortunes if BOAC didn’t have the monopoly on intercontinental routes but had to share them with BEA (or whatever it would be called)?

Can we please put away this simplistic attitude and take a look at the task BOAC was set up to do?

In the late Forties and the Fifties Britain still had a vast Empire to service. This required getting large numbers of diplomats and senior military personnel to every corner of the globe and bringing them home again using, initally, modified wartime bombers of very limited capacity. The BOAC network was long, thin and extremely fragile. It was an immensely complex operation. Overseas engineering operations had to be set up, fuel sourced, Rest Houses for accommodation built and managed, telecommunications systems laid and runways built and extended. BOAC was not an airline as we would recognise one today but a Government transport department. Airline managers were not subject to passenger complaints quite as they are today (there was hardly any “leisure” traffic), but instead subject to pressure from very high level military and government officials, who were themselves working to Government deadlines.

In response to this BOAC had a need for new aircraft that would solve some of their problems, not ones that required nursing into service thus creating new problems. It had teams of development pilots available to bring new aircraft into service but simply couldn’t afford to nurse a new aircraft just because it was made in Britain. On the other hand British aircraft manufacturers had come to expect the development work to be lead by the customer – traditionally the RAF. BOAC (and later BEA) didn’t have the capacity to do this unless there was seen to be a very considerable benefit – “Blind Landing” would be a good example where they thought the investment of time and money worthwhile. Remember we are talking years of development here: three years to the first passenger-carrying service of the Britannia, five years or so to the first commercial Autoland with the Trident. The Comet – we all know about.

BOAC was never hostile to British designs. It simply needed aircraft that did what it said on the box – and American designs nearly always did that. The Connies and Strats, the DC7C brought in as a stop-gap, and later the 707 were all reliable workhorses tried-and-tested requiring hardly any modification. The Comet and Britannia introductions proved to be absolute nightmares. The VC10 was a success in that it could go places the 707 could not, but by the time it was in service, airfields all over the world were being extended to allow the 707 to operate and its strong selling point was quickly overtaken by its poorer economics. The Super VC10 was a stretched, but not really a developed i.e. more efficient, version of the Standard VC10, which was what was really needed at the time.

BOAC was not to blame for the failure of the British commercial aircraft industry. BOAC had its own job to do and it used the best equipment it could get its hands on, given the constraints set by the Government, to do that job.

So Willie Walsh now joins the list of past and present BA directors who have to take their own sandwiches on board their own aircraft for fear of being poisoned by their own cabin crew.

At least his predecessors had the comfort of knowing any poisoning would have been deliberate. Willie would not know if he had been deliberately fed something unpalatable or whether his food handlers were suffering from something they picked up on a previous trip but were too intimidated to report sick under his new scheme and stay at home until they had recovered.

The way eBay is currently run any bid placed outside the last ten seconds of an auction is a complete waste of time.

I suspect that in the current “climate” most airframes will end up in operational storage.

Quite.

Only the UK cuts up, or sets fire to its assets while the engines are still warm. Other nations have the sense to store ’em until the next crisis.

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At the risk of bringing the thread back to the original subject, fatigue cracks are a simple fact of life in metal aircraft, now as then, and much was already known about the subject at that time.

What the Comet design was missing was a knowledge of the propagation of these cracks and in particular the need to ensure any crack is limited in its ultimate length by some design feature: panel joint, panel thickening etc.

“British Airways is working closely with Brooklands Museum to preserve as much as possible of the fuselage of this aircraft, the last standard VC10 to serve with the airline.
Allan Winn, Director, Brooklands Museum

I’m most grateful to you, Allan, for taking time to post this excellent news.

Unfortunately it raises as many questions as it answers. What does ..”as much as possible of the fuselage…” mean?

This statement has something of the air of British Airways’ Geoff Want’s original statement that the BA Collection was to “..be saved”, when in fact he knew the Trident, the 707, and VM were to be shredded. How much of the fuselage does Brooklands want?!

There has been an air of secrecy about Brooklands and VM ever since the Cosford bombshell – but why? If Brooklands had said they wanted more than just the cockpit I’m sure funds could have been raised to secure the whole aircraft. VM had a major role in BOAC and BA pilot training in the 60s and 70s. I’m sure many former BOAC/BA aircrew would have put their hands in their pockets, but the impression was given that Brooklands had its own VC10 and little interest in VM.

There is a quite mistaken, in my opinion, view that when the RAF disposes of its VC10s there will be plenty of good airframes to go round and therefore there is no urgency to save the airline versions. In fact the Air Force ones are being cannibalised at such a rate to keep an ever diminishing number in service that there will be very few parts left, let alone airframes, when the final one lands.

It would be good if Brooklands, as the home of the VC10, could take a leading role in managing the preservation of this aircraft – or we shall end up with all the civilian ones in the open corroded to destruction and just one RAF version preserved under cover.

Remember Machmeters on subsonic aircraft are very inaccurate approaching Mach 1.

The BOAC VC10 alleged to have got to M0.96 Indicated, or whatever, in a dive was probably well short of that really.