Clicked on that You Tube link and watched the clip from "The man in the sky." Not a film I'm familiar with, but it looks like a classic British fifties movie-one I'll have to look out for on TV.
I am no pilot and not knowing the plot of the film, I don't know what was wrong with the Biffo in it, but I'm sure I've read that the B170 couldn't maintain height if one engine failed. Is that right? Because it seems to be maintaining height here, with one engine failed.
I visited Pendeford airfield in October 1975, at the tail end of my planespotting days. I remember I travelled for miles on buses from Edgbaston, finally arrived there and found that it had been disused for some years and seemed to have become home to hundreds of tons of assorted industrial junk. From looking at modern maps, it looks like it was later built over as a housing estate-the fate of so many airfields. I packed in planespotting a few months after this.
Whilst on the subject of Biffos, here is a link to a photo I took at the Reynolds Museum in Wetaskawin, Canada, in September 2005, showing one of the few survivors-Hawkair's machine. First time I'd seen a short-nosed B170 since the unforgettable night in 1971/2 when Aer Turas's EI-APC clattered (and believe me it did "clatter"-I'll never forget it) out from M/C over my parents' house.
Also saw another B170 on that trip, at Yellowknife, where it had been mounted on a pole since 1968-1st wheeled a/c to land at the North Pole, according to a plaque by it, in 1967.
JetPhotos.Net Photo » C-GYQS (CN: 13060) Private Bristol 170 Freighter Mk.31M by Michael Blank
And here's the one at Yellowknife-photo not taken by me.
JetPhotos.Net Photo » CF-TFX (CN: 13137) Wardair Canada Bristol 170 Freighter C.1A by Peter Unmuth-AirTeamImages
What a characterful aircraft the Bristol 170 was, even tho I only ever saw one in the air and G-APAU and G-APAV at Coventry in 1972 or 1973, before my encounters with two more in Canada in 2005. I don't think it was such a nice aircraft to be a passenger in tho, again from what I've read, or to fly?