Vickers Viking
The Vickers VC.1 Viking is the post-war British twin-engined airliner — not Vickers' 1919 amphibian of the same name — built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Brooklands from the wing and undercarriage of the Wellington bomber. It first flew on 22 June 1945 and opened British European Airways' scheduled services in September 1946. In all 163 were built, production ending in 1948; BEA flew them until 1954, after which they passed to independent airlines, and only six survive.
Why It Mattered
The Vickers Viking was the airliner that put British civil aviation back to work after the Second World War: an interim short-haul type, ordered to a peacetime specification in 1944, that could be ready years before the advanced airliners then on the drawing board. It could be built quickly because it borrowed the wing and undercarriage of the wartime Wellington bomber, a design Vickers already knew how to produce. With it, the newly formed British European Airways opened Britain's post-war scheduled network in September 1946 and operated the type on its trunk routes for eight years. One Viking airframe made a separate mark on aviation history: fitted with two Rolls-Royce Nene turbojets, it flew in April 1948 and is credited as the world's first pure jet transport aircraft.
Design Notes
To speed development, Vickers used the Wellington's wing and undercarriage design unchanged and put an entirely new fuselage on them. The first production aircraft, the Viking 1A, kept the Wellington's fabric-covered geodetic wing and tail structure over a metal fuselage; after customer feedback the Viking 1 switched to stressed-metal wings and tail units. Production Vikings were powered by two Bristol Hercules sleeve-valve radial engines of 1,690 hp, and all retained a tailwheel undercarriage. The Viking 1B lengthened the fuselage by 28 inches and raised seating from 21 to 24, later 27; in the 1950s BEA went further, refitting its remaining aircraft with 36 seats as the 'Admiral Class'.
Operational History
The first prototype, the Type 491 G-AGOK, flew at Wisley in Surrey on 22 June 1945, with Vickers' chief test pilot Joseph 'Mutt' Summers at the controls. The third aircraft was delivered to BOAC at Hurn in April 1946 for development flying, and when British European Airways was formed that August, the Vikings were transferred to the new airline. BEA's first regular Viking service ran from Northolt to Copenhagen on 1 September 1946, and the airline eventually took 73 Vikings into service. BEA flew the Viking on its European and UK trunk routes for eight years, until late 1954, when pressurised types — the Airspeed Ambassador and Vickers' own Viscount — displaced it. Production ended in 1948 after 163 Vikings; sixteen went to the RAF, four of them for the King's Flight, and twenty were supplied to the Argentine government. Sold on by BEA, Vikings spent their later years with Britain's independent airlines on scheduled and charter work and with other European operators; most had been retired by the mid-1960s. Of the 163 Vikings built, 56 were lost in accidents. The worst accident came in September 1963, when an Airnautic Viking crashed into a mountain in the Pyrenees with the loss of all 40 occupants.
Afterlife
The Viking line continued in uniform: the 58th Viking built became the prototype of the Valetta, a strengthened military transport for the RAF, and the tricycle-undercarriage Varsity crew trainer was developed from the Valetta. Of the 163 Vikings produced, only six survive today, all of them museum exhibits or restoration projects. In Britain, G-AGRU is under long-term restoration on outdoor display at the Brooklands Museum in Weybridge — the same site whose factory built the type — while G-AGRW came back from long storage in Austria in 2023 for restoration by the Blackbushe Heritage Trust. The remaining survivors are held in Argentina, Pakistan, Switzerland and South Africa, the South African example by the South African Airways Museum Society.