RodH,
I did say on a later post............
Have some very pleasant memories of the Viscounts, and some not so pleasant memories too.
I was only Licenced on the engines on the Viscount 800 never the airframe, but I worked on the airframes back then, yes they had some truly horrible faults, and as you alluded to, we had an English Engineer who worked with us back then and he said they were never meant to be in Australian conditions when they were designed, he reckoned they were great in Europe and hardly ever needed a lot of maintenance and just a weekly check.
It is all relative too in a way, one day back then when I was working at Essendon an RAAF VIP Viscount was there and the Commander (or whatever he was called) was worried about a prop leak, I was sent over to check it. I could not see any problem but the Commander wanted assurance it was safe to fly back to Canberra. I took the spinner off and all I could see was a very small amount of grease, no oil leaks, and he said that was what he was worried about. I took him over to see one of our Viscounts in the hangar undergoing maintenance, he was then confident he would make it back to Canberra.
Also john_tullamarine, back then they used to say the BEST aircraft you can have was an American airframe with British engines.
