Jump to content

Viscount - looking for material


Recommended Posts

I've been asked to prepare an article for my club's magazine on the Vickers Viscount in Australian service. The words aren't a problem - they're mostly written already - but I'm expected to produce a set of drawings as well, and that is where the difficulties arise. I'd like to make my set as accurate as I can. I have the Aviation News drawings, but I don't know how reliable they are, even as a guide to general outline. I'll be working in AutoCAD, and would be grateful if anyone can point me in the direction of reliable source material (e.g. dimensioned drawings, station diagrams and the like) that could be used as a basis for the exercise. I have Kittle's Air-Britain book and the Airliner Tech Viscount volume, but they don't take the exercise very far.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's your lot more or less. The AN plans have been discussed previously. They  are recognisably Viscount but have obvious errors when compared to pictures of he real thing. They are also very generic when it comes to the V800, window positions and door sizes do not tally with the colour schemes and particular airframes which they illustrate. Your best bet is to get access to the real thing. There are several (I believe) in the Antipodes but since distances down there are unimaginable for us, I'm unsure how practical that would be.

 

There is an excellent group website called The Vickers Viscount Network here:

http://www.vickersviscount.net/Default.aspx

 

They aim to record and preserve anything related to the Viscount. You can join or just use it as you wish. Highly recommended.

Good luck, Nige B

 

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks, Nige. I know there's a 700, ex-TAA, in Melbourne (at the Moorabbin Museum), but that's about 900km away, and I'm not likely to be down there in the immediate future. Last time there I was too busy measuring their DC-3 ... I have access to some reasonable photos of both TAA and Ansett aircraft, which should help with details like door and window placement, and I'll follow up on that web site.

 

Best

 

DC

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nige B is completely right -- there is pretty well nothing out there. Even Viscount brochures printed for Farnboroughs and Paris Salons show a basic shape with sparse detail. (They do show the 810 Series' assymetrical tailplane well, though. Sadly, I don't have them.) The 1970s A Handbook of the Vickers Viscount (a minor modellers' cult title at the time) copies some detail axonometric views of engines and gear from a manintenance manual, but fails to come up with a set of coherent drawings.

 

I do have an early 1950s Vickers modelmakers' drawing of the early 700 (might even be of the pre-production 600 -- can't remember). It was ran by an unidentified British aviation mag of the period, in white-on-blue, sized about 8 in square. Shape looks okay-ish (for a tiny drawing), with a small scatter of cross-sections. But there is no detail _at_all_ -- not even of obvious and visible joints, let alone things like landing gear. The b***er is, I am moving house and the thing is buried G*d-knows-where. If I find it, it will be no earlier than next week.

 

Below are some potted renditions (likely based on the sales brochures cited above) which the Aviaiton News draftsman probably took into account when doing his set. The rigging/dimensions drawing has sound figures, but is not to scale (or shape...) The 1950s/60s Aeromodeller drawings (with the brown tape through them) were state-of-the art before the Aviation News ones. Sadly, I have no larger sizes than these:

 

Viscount_zpsm0jkasa0.jpg

 

viscount_instr_str1small_zps4ymzw2du.jpg

 

993302_10201553768150484_414922034_n_zps

 

1044714_10201553769470517_167731787_n_zp

 

 

VickersViscount800_zpsjd1wyigw.jpg

Edited by skippiebg
clarification
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks, Skippie. At least I've got a few more dimensions! I'll track down the TAA and Ansett archives - surely one of the must have some tech manuals or rigging diagrams, at least. I can start a basic layout with what I've got, but I'm a long way from a good set of drawings ...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There's also The Vickers Viscount in Ian Allan's Classic Civil Aircraft Series by Alan J. Wright and also the Viscount in the Profile Publications series. Both have drawings and the latter even has a 5-view drawing of a TAA Viscount.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Drawing old British airliners can be a harder call than old Soviet ones! I am having unbelievable trouble finding hard dimensional information on the Trident. Tried BAE Chester (who now hold Hatfield archives), BAE Heritage, BA Heritage, the Civil Aviatio Authority (who solicitously referred me to "modellers' groups interested in the subject"!), the Joint Airworthiness Authority, the British Library, the Science Museum, the de Havilland Technical School, the Public Records Office at Kew, the Imperial War Museum at Cosford (well, yess... they criminally destroyed the sole surviving Trident 1C in 2006, among much else), diverse groups at Duxford, diverse internet forums, Save the Trident, and a dozen others I can't now recall. I even had hilarious Google Translate exchanges with Chinese geezers who ended up sending me a Trident flight manual for MS Flight Simulator! :) Only the RAeS Library at Farnborough had anything -- and that no more than a 1964 sales book. Though modest, what the Heathrow Trident Collection turned out to have was a veritable goldmine that puts all the august bodies listed above to utter shame. Yet, even that is insufficient: for reasons best known to themselves, de Havilland/Hawker Siddeley fastidiously removed practically all but the most anodyne dimensional information from their publications. A de Havilland Tech School source tells me a couple of tonnes of Trident drawings might well have been simply dumped by a van driver en route from Hatfield to Chester some 35 years ago! (I did say "unbelievable" above!) Sorry to flood your Viscount topic with this, but I though it might raise a smile when talking of drawings...

Edited by skippiebg
added info
Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, skippiebg said:

Drawing old British airliners can be a harder call than old Soviet ones! I am having unbelievable trouble finding hard dimensional information on the Trident. Tried BAE Chester (who now hold Hatfield archives), BAE Heritage, BA Heritage, the Civil Aviatio Authority (who solicitously referred me to "modellers' groups interested in the subject"!), the Joint Airworthiness Authority, the British Library, the Science Museum, the de Havilland Technical School, the Public Records Office at Kew, the Imperial War Museum at Cosford (well, yess... they criminally destroyed the sole surviving Trident 1C in 2006, among much else), diverse groups at Duxford, diverse internet forums, Save the Trident, and a dozen others I can't now recall. I even had hilarious Google Translate exchanges with Chinese geezers who ended up sending me a Trident flight manual for MS Flight Simulator! :) Only the RAeS Library at Farnborough had anything -- and that no more than a 1964 sales book. Though modest, what the Heathrow Trident Collection turned out to have was a veritable goldmine that puts all the august bodies listed above to utter shame. Yet, even that is insufficient: for reasons best known to themselves, de Havilland/Hawker Siddeley fastidiously removed practically all but the most anodyne dimensional information from their publications. A de Havilland Tech School source tells me a couple of tonnes of Trident drawings might well have been simply dumped by a van driver en route from Hatfield to Chester some 35 years ago! (I did say "unbelievable" above!) Sorry to flood your Viscount topic with this, but I though it might raise a smile when talking of drawings...

 

Thanks - I think! Your experiences really give me inspiration to go looking further ...

 

I'm not surprised that your most useful Trident source was not an "official" one - how often is it that the most useful information is preserved only by those who have an interest in seeing that it does not disappear? The official attitude seems to be that if the type's no longer in production, the paperwork doesn't need to be kept. The idea that an archive has value doesn't seem to have dawned on far too many people.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...