Vickers’ Alliterative Flying Family — Part 2
As war clouds gathered over Europe, Vickers (as we know) was already in the arms manufacturing business. The aviation department was started in 1911, and in addition to fixed-wing designs and a flying school, the company launched an initiative to build a dirigible or airship.
This was in response to the Admiralty’s alarm at the growing capability of Germany’s fleet of airships produced by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and known eponymously as ‘Zeppelins’.
Vickers Airships
Vickers’ first design was grandly designated as His Majesty’s Airship №1 (following the tradition of naming naval vessels as His Majesty’s Ships or HMS) and formally named HMA Hermione. The ‘lower-deck’ (other ranks in Britain’s rigidly class-based navy) were skeptical of the venture and nicknamed it the ‘Mayfly’, which proved to be prophetic.
On 24 September 1911, the Hermione emerged on its first outing and promptly broke in two! British humourists immediately cashed in with a string of jokes such as, “It was the May Fly but now it is the Won’t Fly”.
Vickers Aircraft
As we mentioned in Part 1 of this series, Vickers continued to design and build aircraft, with the Vickers Vimy in particular, which proved to be an excellent machine. The company would merge with Armstrong-Whitworth in 1927 to form Vickers-Armstrong.
During this period, which saw frantic rearming by European nations who recognized that another conflict was looming, in 1935 Vickers-Armstrong designed a single-engine successor to the Vimy, the Wellesley light bomber. The RAF operated six squadrons of Wellesleys with the type setting a world record by flying non-stop from Ismailia, Egypt to Darwin, Australia in 1938. Considered unsuitable for the European theater during WW2, the Wellesley saw action in the Middle East and North Africa during that conflict.
Building on the success of the Wellesley, and using the same geodesic airframe developed by Barnes Wallis, Vickers produced the Wellington twin-engine bomber a year later. Both types were named to honour Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington and the architect of Britain’s victory over Napoleon in the previous century.
The Wellington
Introduced to service in 1938, the Vickers Wellington was used in many roles and had a multitude of variants. It would go on to become the most produced British bomber with over 11,000 built and the only one that was manufactured throughout the entire conflict.
There were a plethora of variants of the Wellington, or Wimpy as it was nicknamed, built with varying engines, roles and capabilities. Later in the war, although it was supplanted in the heavy bomber role by larger types (such as the Avro Lancaster, Short Stirling and Handley Page Halifax), the Wellington was in many ways the backbone of the RAF’s Bomber Command.
Following the naming convention set by the Ministry of War, heavy bombers were named after a British city or town, as seen with the Avro Lancaster, hence Vickers’ departure (reluctantly we assume) from their preference for names beginning with the letter ‘V’. The Wellington and its later variant, the Warwick of which 846 were produced, represented over 75 percent of the total number of aircraft built by the company during the war.
Post- WW2
By the end of the war, the role of aviation in the modern world was beyond dispute. While the British produced mainly fighters and bombers, the many thousands of transport aircraft manufactured in the USA had provided the logistical support so vital for victory.
The main non-combat type was of course the legendary Douglas C-47 transport in extensive service with the US Army Air Force and known as the Dakota by the RAF. Originally designed as a civil airliner named the Douglas Commercial Type 3, or DC-3, the type became known as ‘the aircraft that changed the world’.
Eager to use its expertise in mass manufacturing aircraft and the company’s accomplished design team, Vickers-Armstrong decided to enter the rapidly growing civilian aircraft market.
With the British bomber naming convention no longer applicable, the company’s preference to have names beginning with the letter V could be resumed. Accordingly, Vickers’ first purely civilian type was designated the Vickers Commercial VC.1 (a nod to Douglas and the DC naming convention perhaps?) and named the Viking.
The design was influenced by the British government’s specification for an interim medium-haul passenger aircraft to replace the thousands of Dakotas in use, until such time as the advanced types formulated by the Brabazon Committee would be available.
