Originally Posted by
vascodegama
TT
Your grey matter is clearly well preserved by the vin rouge-have just checked, RAF VC10s were fitted with 200 mph ie 174 max gs nosewheel tyres.
In which case, for anyone else who may be interested
, the T/O performance would have had to be predicated on a 200 mph (174 kt) max ground-speed, even if the main-wheel tyres had the 225 mph rating. The operation I was referring to was in the early 1970s, but maybe by the 1990s or later the manufacturer was no longer offering the special nose-wheel tyres with "chines" for the VC10 with the 225 mph rating. (The main-wheel tyres did not have chines.)
And, returning to topic, lifting the nose-wheels off the runway prior to VR increases aerodynamic drag and is therefore not an option to improve performance.
You RAF guys ended up operating almost every original type of VC10 (albeit modified in most cases) except the one that I did. You must have had many different sets of graphs or tables - or was it all computerised?
