Dave Reid, I do take your point and agree with you that if one wanted a medium to long haul (60s versions) aircraft the VC10 was ideal . It should have been obvious even ti Vickers and UK government hat no one else did and hence its demise. As I said nothing against the aircraft at an individual level , very elegant-well the super was not so sure about the standards and a really comfortable plane even in Y . the point I was making was that sadly as a country we seem to have little or no idea about marketing complex machinery . Back when I was standing watching G-ARVA taxi out from behind the BOAC base for its first LHR departure the Uk built Ships Aircraft Cars Trucks Railway engines and multi units in large numbers and employed large numbers of skilled and for the time pretty well paid people. But unlike France Germany Italy and others we did not change with the times our government either didnt support or backed the wrong horse . So now we have virtually nothing in these segments except some some assembly work for foreign entities. Oddly aerospace seems to have survived better than the other industries where Airbus UK and RR make genuinely class leading products and one hopes they will continue to do so and that Uk will still be major part of Airbus Industrie
So to head back to the VC 10 , and to speculate a bit. Would it have faired better as a trijet with two wing engines and one trident/tristar style to minimise the excess rear structure and gain from wing bending relief or were sufficiently powerful engines no around back then. On the other hand , and perhaps this had to be at the Govt level , should someone have just said no to both the trident and the VC 10 since in the case of the latter the 707 was underwritten by the vast expense of the C135 program giving it a head start in scale and R&D write off . And realising if that was the case competition with the 727 was handicapped from the start. Perhaps its ironical that it was Concorde-an even more ridiculous vanity project -which provided the clear demonstration that the only way forward was Anglo French and then Euro cooperation could really work and spawned Airbus Industry which struggled at the start but became a true global leader and caught up with and has at time outpaced the USA . Sadly us Brits didnt learn much from that either did we