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.

I'm surprised no on has mentioned the good old BAC 1-11. A solid machine that was the backbone of short haul flying for many years with BA & BCAL.

Some great candidates folks!

The real thing which bothers me is that so much information these days (books, magazines, films, TV) originates in USA and I have lived and worked there for chunks of my life and love it!

However, I have found surprising numbers of Americans have little knowledge or interest in British aviation. For example, many I have met think that only Germany had jets in WW2 and that the B707 was the first trans-Atlantic jet.

I really, REALLY DON'T want to sound like a "Yank Basher" and I don't want to sound like an over-patriotic jingoist, but sometimes they are so keen on American planes and the Enemy planes they encountered, that they overlook British planes and achievements.

These British planes and achievements then get omitted from history, other writers and producers then reference this "incomplete" history and pass it on down the generations. Sometimes I have seen US Aviation programmes broadcast here in UK which are factually wrong, and completely omit pioneering British aircraft.

So what I feel we have to do here is to select a few British planes which were so technically brilliant, or so influential or superior that we can persuade our American friends to take note of them and give them back their rightful place in History.

Can it really be that no British plane is included in a list of the world's most precedent-setting aircraft? I honestly believe that several of the planes in my opening list would most certainly have been included if they had been American, but we don't need to convince ourselves, we need to convince our American friends and colleagues!

...and to our infinite regret, a salutary lesson against tailoring what could have been a world-winner too closely to one customer's needs - who kept changing their minds about what they really wanted!

Indeed, the Trident perhaps encapsulates in one aeroplane more than any other exactly what was wrong with the British civil airliner business.

First autoland could have been implemented in any airliner, so I don't think the Trident gains any kudos from that.

Wasn't the 146 / RJ the 'most produced' UK airliner? Bit of a niche machine, and no game changer for that.

387 146/RJs completed; Vickers built 445 Viscounts.

Britten-Norman Islander, 1,280 produced and still going, not sure how many may have been produced in Romania though, but, kinda knocks spots off 387 or 445 production designs :)

Without knowing the selection criteria it's difficult to agree or disagree but the Comet and Concorde should be on that list for sure!

I think the Comet has to be on any list of precedent setters as it was the first jet airliner, but our transatlantic cousins,usually non aerospace admittedly, tend to think it was the 707. In the same way they think Lindbergh was the first person to fly the Atlantic .

Concorde also ahas to be there as the only real SST but of course it is half French so not really a 'British ' aircraft.

The Lovely VC 10 doesn't really have any claim sadly, looking nice and making a lot of noise not really counting for anything, although the Trident with its Autoland which I think was designed in from the outset, actually does-and I liked tridents anyway.

Didn't we build the first real carrier borne aircraft and carrier borne jet too.
Also the worlds first stealth bomber the TSR2 which vanished on completion of its test programme.

Joking aside I think for all its many faults , most especially complete lack of marketing savvy and fatal government interference , UK aerospace industry has made some pretty big contributions and has a decent number of firsts which seem to have been overlooked .
PB

From Ghengis Britain has had many unique 'firsts' but for whatever reason, very little seems to have evolved, from some excellent designs

ie 707 to 747

SSD
First autoland could have been implemented in any airliner, so I don't think the Trident gains any kudos from that.

Sorry, but no. The Trident was designed with the necessary system integrity from the outset. With the electro-mechanical computing systems of the day only fully triplex systems could achieve a provable level of reliability for fully automatic landing.

GtE
Mosquito: a fantastic aeroplane, but an evolutionary dead-end, unless you count the plywood fuselage of the Vampire.

We haven't agreed that evolutionary dead-ends can't be Important!
Let's perhaps agree that it was an imaginative use of available resources and that it set aerodynamic standards which served the company and its successors well into the "jet age" - the much-praised Airbus wing team has its origins in the fluid motion section of the Hatfield Aerodynamics department.

Not everything we did at Hatfield was world-class, but at least give us credit for that which was.

On the balance of historical probability I think that the first 4 major Aviation Precedents were

1) The Mongolfier's ascent in their hot air balloon, setting the first World Precedent (on balance of historical probability) for humans aloft in a craft which resulted from planned research and experimentation.

2) Cayley's glider(s). Based on aeronautical science which he pioneered and which was studied as "first port of call" by subsequent aviators, this set the next major precedent (on balance of h.p.) : carrying a human aloft in a controllable heavier than air machine.

3) Getting a person aloft under power, and there are several candidates, my b. of-h.p. choice would be Clement Ader's Eole.

4) 1st powered, controlled, sustained flight, b. of h.p.: Wright Flyer

I believe these four are the World's First Aviation Precedents after which we get into refinement, improvement, speed, duration etc., and now we have to select the British planes of World-Wide precedent-setting importance. Sadly some superb and much-loved planes might not fit these specific criteria. Those that DEFINITELY DO, in my opinion, are

Vickers Vimy, first non-stop north Atlantic crossing, no breaks, no re-fueling.
Vickers Viscount, first turbine airliner
de Havilland Comet first jet airliner

Without the first 4 precedents, and without these three British planes I think that no list of over 15 planes from around the world is complete!


I would possibly add Concorde. Obviously it was not British but Anglo-French, so perhaps it set the precedent of multi-national airliner manufacturing, now becoming the norm.

If you want to exclude Concorde from the list:

You might argue that Concorde has set no precedent.
I would argue that Concorde has set no precedent.


YET!

So you're basically saying Alan Lupton that whilst it may have been a structural evolutionary dead-end, aerodynamically it wasn't and created knowledge that fed into the successful post war dH designs?


I have a bit of an issue incidentally with the "importance" of both the Vickers Vimy and the Wright Flyer. Both were firsts - yes. But both took the wrong technology to the limit it could go, but that then progressed no further.

The real inventor of the aeroplane wasn't the Wrights, it was Bleriot, who first designed and flew an aeroplane in what we would regard as a modern configuration. Similarly, Alcock and Brown were brave men, and it was an impressive achievement, but arguably the first real modern - non-stop, vaguelly-modern navigation techniques, enclosed cockpit, land-at-an-airport Atlantic crossing was either Lindberg or Chamberlin in 1927.

G

While the Mosquito may have been an evolutionary dead end structurally, (at least for military aviation), it did prove that the concept of the unarmed bomber was viable. It was also one of the earliest successful multi role aircraft.

I like threads like this. Gets one thinking. All the moans about the VC10 and the Trident (not being 707 or 727) reminded me that we British did not build a significant podded aircraft ever! The 146 may qualify but with it's shortcomings well known it was never going to sell in huge quantities. There were terrible quality issues too. We failed to go down the accepted best design route. We even tried to re-engine the Comet (sorry, Nimrod). Who on earth thought of that? Having said all that I flew the Vulcan, Canberra and Hunter. All gorgeous aircraft in their own way and true British classics.

....Which could have been done with any airliner of the time! Precisely my point! There's nothing down to any unique feature of the Trident as an aeroplane that helped autoland. The Autoland engineers could have fitted that gear to any number of other airliners, and later, did!

SSD
Precedent is often but not always the first to do or be recognised for doing something.

Autoland really would only work in a Trident because it had triplex systems all over it and other airliners of the time didn't. Several didn't have Triplex hydraulics or power generation and you cannot practically add those systems back into an airframe that was not built around them.
So for all its many faults the dear old DH/HS 121 gripper did indeed set the precedent for autolands. Sure many followed but Trident was the first to do it reliably and in full airline service.

Precedent means an earlier event or action that is regarded as an example or guide to be considered in subsequent similar circumstances. So, many later airliners had autoland and they had it because the trident provided a practical and realistic guide on how to land a plane automatically and that's why the Trident is the one that set the precedent

Yes, the Trident was the first to do autoland, but not because it was a Trident! The 'first' you are claiming a place in history for goes to the triplicated systems and the other autoland gubbins, not to the airframe and engines that constitute a Trident.

That it was fitted later to many and various types shows that to be true.

Isn't that a bit like saying that the Comet was the first jet airliner, but not because it was a Comet?

Not at all. A Comet is a Comet. A Trident is a Trident. Fit either with triple systems and autoland gubbins and it can do autolands. The ability to do autolands is independant of type.

You might as well say the first aeroplane to be fitted with a radio was a landmark aeroplane.

Er, Why do you think the Trident was called the Trident?
( Clue . It wasn't because it had three jet engines as power plants)
Or later four for that matter.