Vickers’ Alliterative Flying Family
Vickers, Sons & Company, originally based in Sheffield in the north of England’s industrial heartland, specialized in casting church bells. This peaceful start soon segued into more profitable, and lethal, products with the company (which went public in 1867) entering the armaments industry in the late 1800s.
By the dawn of the new century, Vickers (the name was abbreviated in 1911) was a prominent arms manufacturer, primarily for the (British) Royal Navy. Capitalizing on a new technological frontier opening with the invention of the airplane, Vickers started an Aviation Department and a flying school, the latter based in Brooklands, Surrey.
During the years 1914 to 1918, as the First World War devastated Europe, the company seemed to have done quite well as a maker of ordnance, ships and submarines.
The Vimy
Perhaps using profits generated during the war, Vickers made a foray into designing and building aircraft, producing the Vickers Vimy bomber (someone in the company loved alliteration, hence our title!) which didn’t see service during WW1, but formed the core of the RAF’s (Royal Air Force) bomber fleet from 1919 for the next decade.
The type became famous for completing the first trans-Atlantic crossing in 1919, flown by John Alcock (a test pilot for Vickers) with Arthur Whitten Brown as his navigator. The success of that flight (since overshadowed by Charles Lindbergh’s solo crossing in 1927) made Vickers and the duo famous. They were both knighted by King George V, and the Vickers Vimy placed on display at the Science Museum in London, where it still can be seen.
The Vickers Vimy is also well-known in Australia as the winner of the Great Air Race of 1919. The Australian government offered a prize of £10,000 to the first Australians to fly a British aircraft (not a French or American machine— colonial prejudice was strong!) from Great Britain to Australia.
Two brothers from Adelaide (South Australia), Ross and Keith McPherson Smith, along with Sergeants Jim Bennett and Wally Shiers, left Hounslow Heath (near today’s Heathrow airport) in a Vickers Vimy on 12 November 1919. They reached Darwin, Australia on 10 December, having flown a total of 135 hours in 28 days to win the prize.
To put this in perspective, when Qantas operated non-stop flights between Darwin and London a few years ago, it only took around 18 hours in a Boeing 787!
The Viking
The original Vickers Viking was a single-engine amphibious aircraft designed in 1918. It is mostly known for having killed two famous aviators. The first was Alcock, who was piloting the new machine for display at the Paris Airshow but crashed in fog in December 1919 at Normandy, France.
Ross Smith, by then Sir Ross Smith KBE, also died at the controls of a Viking amphibian at Brooklands in 1922. His body was transported to Australia and given a state funeral at the North Road Cemetery in Adelaide.
A total of 31 Vikings was built and operated by the RAF and a few other countries’ air arms, including the Royal Canadian Air Force. Vickers revived the ‘Viking’ name in 1945 on a twin-engine, short-range airliner designated VC.1 Viking (‘Vickers Commercial’ 1). Although only moderately successful as an airliner, examples of the post-WW2 Viking served as test-beds for the turboprop and turbojet engines then coming into general usage. The basic Viking design also spawned the Valetta and Varsity derivatives, which served the RAF as military transports and navigation trainers, respectively. Propliners will take up the Vickers story in future installments.
To all my readers — Apologies for the long silence. I got tempted back into flying professionally, which left little time for writing. The ruthless nature of the airline business has meant that company didn’t last long, so I am able to return to my second love of writing.
Please do follow me and continue reading the subsequent installments of this story.
