Important British Aircraft
 

With respectful and light-hearted reference to the "Most precedential airplanes thread" !

Seeing no British aeroplanes being mentioned on the proposed list prompted me to think of my own list of British pioneers. I will kick things off with a selection and reasons for mine, all are free to add their own choice and reasons, and ultimately I hope this will provide enough information for a British plane to be included on "The List".

1) Sir George Cayley's gliders.....first heavier than air machines to carry humans aloft (and even return them to ground alive!)

2) Short S-64 Seaplane: first torpedo plane, led to Fairey Swordfish whose successes ultimately led to huge permanent changes in air and sea tactics and hardware around the world.

3) Vickers Vimy, first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, a highly important trade and transport route, and paving the way for it to be crossed regularly by plane.

4) Supermarine S6: won the Scheider Trophy outright for Britain, a great achievement, but of greater world significance as it was a stepping stone to a great fighter, the Spitfire, and a great engine, the Merlin.

5) de Havilland Mosquito: showed what could be done by imaginatively re-inventing "obsolete" manufacturing materials and dispersing manufacture, and becoming one of the best multi-role aircraft ever.

6) Gloster E28/39. A very odd inclusion by any standards, but I have my reasons! The British Government failed to take interest or support Frank Whittle's work on jet engines for a very long time. Furthermore, and quite incredulously, they saw no "usefulness" for it and did not even bother to classify his Patents. The result was that the Germans studied his details, saw that Whittle had described centrifugal and axial engine types, and decided to develop the more powerful type. Once the British Government finally did get interested they first got Rover, a car company in! The British ultimately decided to play safe with the centrifugal engine, less spectacular but more reliable with the metallurgy and technology of the time. Pabst von Ohain went for the power, but did have very short service life. Germany did beat us to getting the first jet into service, the Me 262.

However, if, IF IF our government had shown the slightest bit of sense, helped Whittle quickly and early AND classified the Patents, then the E28/39 or its descendants (like the Meteor) would have been the first turbojet. So this plane is included as an example of what Britain could have done!

7) Vickers Viscount. first turbo-prop airliner, stunned all who flew in it, heralded the jet age for passengers.

8) Rolls Royce Thrust Measuring Rig ("Flying Bedstead"): a significant step towards the Short SC1 and thence to the P1127, thence to the Harrier and thus practical VTOL capability.

9) de Havilland Comet: First turbojet airliner into service. Sdaly there were crashes, the biggest air accident investigation, long grounding, complete re-design......and even after all that STILL finally came back into service as the first trans-Atlantic jet airliner.

10) Concorde. Extensively copied and even beaten to 1st place by the Tupolev 144, but the first safe, strong, fully developed and reliable supersonic airliner.

VC-10, not a huge commercial success but surely the most graceful British aircraft, historic, comfortable, good performance, and evocative of its age.

Viscount, commercially probably the biggest success, 444 built.

The VC10, a magnificent plane and if it had been made by Boeing would have sold in the thousands.

Very sad the way British planes went.

Britten Norman Islander - still being built first flight back in 1965......

Sopwith Triplane!
It inspired Fokker to create the renown dr1, wich again created a legend!

The VC 10 is by far my favourite airliner of all I have flown on, in terms of comfort, style, advanced quality engineering and all manner of other fine attributes.

Sadly, I did not feel it could be included because it set records but not precedents, and did not really influence airliners that followed it (for reasons which are NOT the plane's fault!) We are talking "Influential" rather than favourite, fastest, best, etc.!

VC10 my favorite airliner after Concorde. Lovely aeroplane but fatally flawed by being built to a BOAC 'Empire' spec for hot and high airfields, so too much wing (draggy at cruise speed) and excessive high lift devices (so extra weight) both of which hampered its cruise performance.

Concorde was just magnificent. The US and the Russians tried and failed, Concorde gave almost 3 decades of Mach 2 luxury travel. I don't think it could be done today; it shows what can be achieved when engineering excellence and no-compromise are the drivers, and the accountants were still in their box. Bit like Apollo.

We just don't do that sort of exciting stuff today.

I never did fly on a Concorde, so it will always be 2nd favourite to VC 10. I did include it in my list as it was a real World's first, and the Tupolev only beat it by stealing design work but still failed to make a good plane!

Any more British aircraft which were international game changers/trend setters/influential?

Hmm, what defines important? I'm going to shoot for aeroplanes which had the greatest impact on the country and community.


Camel, Hurricane, Harrier - the three Sopwith products that massively contributed to winning (or at-least not losing) three wars. The last also bought us a seat on the team producing F-35, and went a very long way to defining the modern jet combat aircraft.

Concorde: trained one generation of aeronautical engineers, and inspired the next generation of engineers and pilots. Also established the paradigm of multinational aeroplane projects, and was the first true FBW aircraft.

Supermarine S6b. Reminded the country what it could do, trained a certain designer in how to build high performance aeroplanes.

Pegasus XL-R: The aeroplane that really brought British microlight production into mass production, and private aviation to thousands of people who otherwise could never have afforded it.

Tiger Moth: How many generations of pilots did this inspire and/or train?, and to some extent, it still is.

de Havilland Comet: Massively significant both for what it achieved, and it didn't. Also pretty much put Britain into the world lead in air accident investigation.

Lynx: Established Britain as a country who could on its own build world class helicopters; we may not have actually done so first, but we've been equal or lead on multiple projects since.

Hawk: Pretty much defined both the modern jet trainer, and post 1970s British defence export practices.

Canberra: Defined the first generation of jet strike aircraft. Also flew the research projects that demonstrated the behaviour of stratospheric circulation and what that meant about nuclear fallout. Pretty good post war exports as well - even the Americans bought it.

R101: Inspired a nation, then in failing ended all large airship development in the Empire and diverted Britain's design efforts towards large aeroplanes. Trained a big chunk of the generation of engineers we'd need in Ww2.


I reserve the right to edit this later and add a few more as they occur to me :)


Non-inclusions for me. VC10: a superb aeroplane, but one which had minimal national or international impact, essentially because it was designed to meet the requirements of BOAC and nobody else, compared to parallel Boeing aircraft that were genuinely designed to a world market. Mosquito: a fantastic aeroplane, but an evolutionary dead-end, unless you count the plywood fuselage of the Vampire.

G

Hawker Hunter - arguably, the most beautiful jet fighter.

But it's significance? Very pretty, quite a lot of fun to fly so long as the hydraulics were working, an interesting evolutionary step between the last WW2 fighters, and the Harrier.

But I'm not convinced at the Hunter's real importance either nationally or internationally. The export sales were okay, the influence on future designs moderate, the display record similarly moderate. Was it really a game changer?

G

Concorde, of course, apart from doing something not possible today, started Airbus Industrie. Many systems in today's Airbus aeroplanes can trace their lineage back to the beautiful white bird. Quite apart from what it did, it also first FBW airliner and first electronic managed power plant. First carbon fibre brakes, too.

TU144 didn't copy Concorde. If they had, they'd have got the wing and the intakes right. 2 things made Concorde work where TU144 didn't - the wing and the intakes! Particularly the intakes. In cruise, they provided no less than 70% of the thrust (and a teeny bit of drag)!

deH 88 Comet.........Winner of the England Australia Air Race 1934, just over 70 years ago.

Progenitor of the Mosquito........

PM

Three words........ The Black Diamonds !!!

PM

Success isn't always necessary, so I think the Comet and Concorde were certainly very important to the uk, as were the more successful Spitfire, Viscount and Harrier.

S.B.

Airbus.

Sure we design and build just the wings (Broughton and Filton), and on the increasing proportion powered by Rolls (Derby), the engines. But with over 13,000 ordered, and over 8,000 now built, those big bits have done far more for the UK industry than 10 Concordes, 54 VC-10s, or whatever. The UK built less than 1,000 commercial jetliners in about 50 years, from the first Comet to the last 146/RJ.

Avro 504,DH Fox Moth, DH Dragon,Short Empire flying boat, Supermarine Spitfire, DH Mosquito,EE Canberra, DH106 Comet, Vickers Viscount,Bristol Britannia, Fairey Delta 2, Fairey Rotodyne,Vickers Valiant,BAC-111,Blackburn Buccaneer Mk2, Hawker (Siddeley) Harrier, B-N Islander
(Collaboratively, Jaguar and Concorde)
Perhaps a blend of significance , importance, interesting engineering and national pride.

DH.125 - the first bizjet for people taller than 4'6" - and still flying in various guises after 52 years

A30yoyo,

You beat me to it - the Avro 504 must be on the list - an RFC/RNAS/RAF basic trainer from 1913 to 1934, plus the world's first bomber.

On 21 November 1914, four RNAS 504s flew from Belfort in France and bombed the Zeppelin works at Frierichshafen.

And on personal note, both my grandfathers learnt to fly on them. :ok:

The Trident? First full autoland aircraft.