Originally Posted by
tartare
There was a statement in there that the Victor could go supersonic.
Shurely not...?
I know it's Wiki, but I first saw reference to this event sometime before even the ZX81 was marketed:
'On 1 June 1956, a production Victor XA917 flown by test pilot Johnny Allam inadvertently exceeded the speed of sound after Allam let the nose drop slightly at a higher power setting. Allam noticed a cockpit indication of Mach 1.1 and ground observers from Watford to Banbury reported hearing a sonic boom. The Victor maintained stability throughout the event. Aviation author Andrew Brookes has claimed that Allam broke the sound barrier knowingly to demonstrate the Victor's superiority to the earlier V-bombers. The Victor was the largest aircraft to have broken the sound barrier at that time'.