End of a distinguished career?
 

Heard a sad rumour today - The Vickers funbus is to end passenger flights and become tanker only! Any gen? If true, then even more of the defence budget will have to be spent on leasing.

But even less of the Defence Budget will have to be spent on keeping an obsolete airframe airworthy.

That's a pretty harsh response to passenger complaints about the inflight meals...

All true I'm affraid. Concerns about airworthyness apparently. VC10 passenger A/T tasking will go to charter or 216 (in the unlikely event that a Tristar is available.)

This is perhaps an odd position to question - but will not chartering not provide a more modern and fuel efficient service to get pax between two points?

Will this not also strengthen the resilience of air refueling assests prior to the PFI (Pay For it Indefinitely) contract?

Those almost seem to be good things.

I suppose this all assists with THE war regardless of any future scenarios which might come our way.

Not over quite yet. To be reviewed next week. More a case of worries about lack of kit as opposed to "airworthiness".

As usual until final decision made there will be over-speculation and conjecture threads here:ugh:

Not so much an `airworthiness` issue, but more to do with the lack of `safety` features fitted that are mandatory on commercial passenger carrying ac such as:
GPWS
FDR
CVR
Lack of emergency floor lighting to assist egress in dense smoke
etc etc...
Has been mitigated for at Platform Safety meetings previously, but it now appears that the `appetite for risk` at ministerial level has been withdrawn.
A crying shame really.

Airworthyness, saftey, whatever......It's a shed.

Crying shame indeed. :(

"...the lack of `safety` features fitted that are mandatory on commercial passenger carrying ac such as:
GPWS
FDR
CVR
Lack of emergency floor lighting to assist egress in dense smoke
etc etc..."

That list would put any civil aircraft off line for quite some time - and looks and sounds like a lack of "airworthiness" to me! Just like the lack of hush kits stops them from using many civil airports.

And most of those items are also required on freighters too!

Seems like the long term lack of investment in modern flying equipment and standards has finally caught up with the old dears.

If it's not fit to fly, then it shouldn't regardless of role!:ok:

It is fit to fly but it would appear that it does not meet civilian Passenger carrying regs. A bit of a shame but try and imagine the outcry should the funbus suffer a similar fate as the 737 at Manchester Airport....Not nice and consequently the MOD cannot afford the risk to our servicemen.

Seconded. It has been a shed for a number of years.

At last!!

Absolute travesty that the thing was being used to haul pax....110(ish) pax for a fuel burn of 7T an hour and could just about reach the east coast of N America.

Leasing may be cheaper, but surely there must now be a case for dry (or perhaps moist) leasing some 330s to backfill the AT. After all, we are talking another 5 years before FSTA is online. 330 course = 3 months. IOC by late summer...job done.:hmm:

Poor old girl
 

She might be long in the tooth, but she gets to the US a lot faster than a Herc and a lot more reliably than a 3*.

To know her (properly) is to love her......

Having been in the biggest hangar in Oxfordshire for some years in the mid 80s, my opinion of the 'funbus' was well past its prime then. The 'C' was under used and under funded, and falling to bits, the spares situation was critical and robbing was daily musical parts. Problems reported were diluted at each upward step of the chain so by the time it got to the people at the top of the tree, the VC10 had no problems!!
BA must have been over joyed when the MoD said that they would BUY all their old VC10s that they had lying about waiting to be scrapped, I would think that the person who offered them that still has a strained wrist from that handshake. Leaving them parked up for a few years was a good idea , gave the airframes time to continue rotting away before they got converted.
The cost of refurbishment and conversion of the 'K's must have been astronomic and only partial, as the amount of corrosion that was found on primary and secondary structures during the first majors was to prove.
The supply system did not help at all. We would order short supply items for green line entries, for them to be provisioned for the next servicing, usually giving them 12 months to source the spares, but after 6 months if spares were not chased they got cancelled, so officially we had no spares problem, but we did have 4 or 5 grounded jets awaiting servicing, to pick a bit from, if they were all not robbed already.
It got to the stage where even a minor could take months instead of weeks and the majors where a joke. Manpower was also an issue, when I arrived I had 15 Cpl's and below when I escaped the madhouse 3 1/2 years later, I had 6, and we were only part of a whole team.
When aircraft finally got released back to the sguadrons they were handed 2 700s, 1 for every day use and 1 for green lines. I vowed then that I would never fly on a VC10 from then on, and I never have.

Would have been better spending the money updating the Victor :ok:

Just let go. It's a machine. Sadly falling to bits.

Someone needs to get a sense of proportion. It wasn't that long ago that the FunBus was carrying royalty around the world....

So it doesn't meet current EASA passenger carrying requirements. But don't forget those assume a 2 person flight deck, whereas the FunBus still carries a couple of cushion-dampeners on the flight deck. The navigator, in terminal areas, effectively becomes a food-powered GPWS, for instance.

One concern I always had was at the woeful weather radar. That really isn't good enough for the 21st century; many of us experienced lightning strikes with no threats showing on the weather radar, for example.

The huggy-fluffies would probably take a dim view of the passengers sharing the same compartment as palletised freight, but for heaven's sake, flying passengers in a C-130 is infinitely more hazardous than in the VC10.

Beagle, are you serious? A navigator is not a substitute for EGPWS, not even slightly. Let it continue as a tanker, a job for which it is more suited. It's just a shame they scrapped all those Ks!!