To those of you who are waxing lyrical about the strength of Vickers aircraft, I was at Teesside on the afternoon sometime in 1971 or 72, when a BEA VC9 was training. During one take-off, with a simulated engine failure, the wrong side was apparently identified by the trainee and incorrect (opposite to that required) control input was applied. I was visiting crew and enjoying a cup of tea with my first officer when he pointed out an aircfaft in plan view through the restaraunt window. It was a Vanguard! It flew out of view for a moment and when it reappeared, it was climbing away normally, except that the port wing tip was turned up in much the same way as that of a Prentice, if you remember those. Apparently, the crew were aked if they were OK by the tower and they were unaware of the damage as the aircraft was flying normally!
I looked at the aircraft later, after it had been hidden in a hangar. About three feet or so of the wing tip had dug into soft earth and was bent up at about 40 degrees. There seemed to be a hundredweight or so of exrta ballast!
Funnily enough, about three weeks later, I was again in Teesside and BEA had a 1-11 make a wheels-up landing, again whilst training.
Alledgedly, this one was practising a flapless landing and had the warning horn supressed by the usual circuit breaker method as was common practice at the time. As luck would have it, the aircraft slid nicely off the runway, onto the grass and out of the way of the active runway, thus allowing us to land.
Red faces all round but happily, nobody hurt in either of these occurences.
Makes one wonder how many accidents have been avoided in the last 30 odd years by the widespread use of decent simulators.
[ 05 January 2002: Message edited by: boris ]</p>