All the "big" 4-engined prop aircraft designed/introduced in the late 1950s were poor sales performers. The piston aircraft were worse - American took DC7s in 1957-58 which only lasted for 5 years and they could never resell them - they were scrapped in the early 1960s.
One of BEA's issues was that most of their European competitors went for the Caravelle. That was a jet, and in 1960 that was it. Actually the Caravelle, like the Comet, was a fairly slow jet, but no matter.
The Vanguard was also rather large for its time. Yes the theoretical accountants looked at seat-mile costs, but it was very difficult to sell 140 seats on short haul, all day, every day, in 1960, and indeed even 20 years later aircraft on its routes tended to have lesser capacity.
The issue with the 707/DC8 generation of jets was they were twice as large, twice as fast, and needed half the maintenance downtime as anything that had gone before, so they sucked up a huge amount of potential capacity, even on medium-haul routes, especially in the USA, which had been a good market for the Viscount. This carried on for some years being economical for 300-500 mile runs, but the Vanguard was just too big.
Vickers sales teams were also not that well organised. There were few direct competitions between the Vanguard and the Electra, but one was in Australia. Vickers thought all they needed to do was get HMG in London to lean on the Australian Government in Canberra (or even Australia House in London, not bothering to make the trip out there). Lockheed made a big sales play, appropriate and different for each operator, understood that financing, training, spares and support were more important than just the original purchase decision, had done a good support job with Qantas on their Constellations (which apparently could not always be said about Vickers and the domestic Viscounts in Australia) and made a single sale in one hit all across Qantas, TAA, Ansett and TEAL in New Zealand (and influenced a little colonial carrier nobody else bothered with called Cathay Pacific, who had a lot of Australian contacts).
I've questioned elsewhere why the Vanguard was so noisy (and apparently vibration-loaded as well). We lived in The Wirral near the WAL VOR when they held down the Heathrow-Belfast service, and they were readily audible from the ground. In Edinburgh I've stood at the castle in the city centre and heard them manoeuvring out at Turnhouse. I've also been inside the (old) terminal at Turnhouse when one was coming on stand outside, all conversation had to stop. I've always blamed the (De Havilland) square-ended props, as opposed to the (Dowty) rounded ones on the Britannia. Unlike the Britannia, the Vanguard was certainly no "whispering giant".
Last edited by WHBM; 12th Jan 2016 at 12:00.