Vickers Viscount - The World's First Turboprop Airliner (Stroud Nick)(Paperback)

By some margin the most successful British medium-range airliner ever produced, the world-beating Viscount was a sublime combination of Vickers' state-of-the-art postwar design and Rolls-Royce's cutting-edge power-plant technology, both companies being at the very peak of their powers during the type's genesis and evolution. Tracing its origins back to the wartime Brabazon Committee, the Viscount was one of several designs from various British aircraft manufacturers produced to fulfill the committee's specifications for a fast, economical short- to medium-range airliner to satisfy the demands of the burgeoning postwar civil aviation market, which was predicted to grow at a healthy rate over the following decades. Vickers' chief designer and Managing Director George Edwards was quick to respond, the result being the Dart turboprop-powered Vickers V.630, which made its first flight in July 1948, despite its future looking uncertain after British European Airways having twenty examples of ordered its chief rival, Airspeed's Ambassador, six months before. The Viscount nevertheless entered full service with BEA in 1953, much to the relief of its manufacturer, orders flooding in thereafter from numerous airlines -- and air forces -- all over the world. Ultimately, some 200 individual airlines, companies and organizations in more than eighty countries operated the dependable and, crucially, development-friendly Viscount over its long and distinguished career. This book tells the ful
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