Originally Posted by
Phoenix1969
Want me to OCR and post the relevant pages from Star Dust Falling?
Just found this on the relevant Wikipedia page, from BSAA's chief pilot and manager of operations, Gordon Store: "The Tudor was built like a battleship. It was noisy, I had no confidence in its engines and its systems were hopeless. The Americans were fifty years ahead of us in systems engineering. All the hydraulics, the air conditioning equipment and the recircling [sic] fans were crammed together underneath the floor without any thought. There were fuel-burning heaters that would never work; we had the floorboards up in flight again and again"
Not on my behalf thank you. I'm well aware of Jay Rayner's views.
The Tudor is often said to have polarised opinion among its pilots. Yet the odd thing is that these well-used quotes from Gordon Store are totally at odds with the opinions of ALL the former Tudor pilots I spoke to. Without exception all the people I contacted who had first hand experience of flying the Tudor said it was fine. Nothing exceptional, but absolutely fine. In fact a couple described the Tudor 5 as being very pleasant to fly. I even asked Eric Brown some years ago for his opinion of the Tudor and he told me that once the small modifications to the engine nacelles and wing roots had been made (at the prototype stage) it was a very nice aircraft.
Incidentally, the heater design and layout were not unique to the Tudor by any means, but nobody ever seems to talk about the cabin heater in these other aircraft (DC-6 for instance).
The Tudor losses are also frequently used to support the claim that the aircraft was poor, and even dangerous. Now, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe any of the Tudor accidents were ever categorically attributed to mechanical faults with the aircraft. Yet the accidents are cited as proof that the aircraft was a failure. Curious isn't it?!