The bomber that armed Britain’s deterrent — then cracked

What makes it special

Full specifications

Figures are for the production Valiant B.1. Contested values (thrust, ceiling, number built) are hedged; several sources differ slightly.

Baseline note: the figures below describe the Valiant B.1 as delivered to Bomber Command from February 1955 — four Rolls-Royce Avon RA.28 Mk 204/205 buried in pairs in the wing roots, five men in one pressure cabin, and a bomb bay sized around the 10,000 lb Blue Danube. Deltas for the B(PR).1 photo-reconnaissance aircraft, the B(PR)K.1 and B(K).1 tankers and the one-off B.2 low-level prototype are given in grey. Four cautions before any number below is quoted. First, the sub-marks are not different aeroplanes. With the single exception of the B.2 they share one airframe, one wing, one engine installation and one set of dimensions; the suffixes describe what was bolted into the bomb bay — a camera crate, a hose-drum unit — and a four-column table of near-identical figures is telling the reader nothing. Second, published production totals genuinely disagree: 107, 108 and 111 all appear in reputable sources, and the sub-type counts most often printed do not add to any of them. The arithmetic is set out in the variants section below. Third, maximum weight is quoted two ways — 140,000 lb is the normal figure and 175,000 lb the overload figure with underwing tanks — and a table that prints one without saying which is describing two different sorties. Fourth, the Valiant is routinely called a B.35/46 design. It was tendered against B.35/46 and rejected as insufficiently advanced; what was built was the Type 660 to Specification B.9/48, a separate specification written round the Vickers submission after George Edwards argued that a conservative bomber in service in 1955 was worth more than an advanced one in 1958. He was right, and the same conservatism killed the aeroplane ten years later.

Armament & payload

The Valiant carried every nuclear weapon Britain ever dropped from an aeroplane, and the only V-bomber load ever released in anger

Everything the Valiant could do offensively happened inside one bomb bay, and that bay was sized in 1947 around Blue Danube — ten thousand pounds, roughly twenty-four feet long and a little over five feet across, the smallest atomic bomb British technology of the day could manage. There were no guns, no missiles, no rockets and no defensive armament of any kind. The alternative to one nuclear weapon was twenty-one thousand-pound conventional bombs, and in the whole V-force only the Valiant ever dropped those in anger.

The nuclear inventory it carried is a compressed history of the British deterrent. Blue Danube of 10 to 12 kilotonnes from 1955, with 58 built and a stockpile once planned at 800. Yellow Sun Mk.1 with the Green Grass warhead, about 400 kilotonnes, from 1959. Yellow Sun Mk.2 from 1961 with Red Snow, an Anglicised version of the American Mk 28 that yielded 1.1 megatonnes and cost 500,000 pounds against 1.2 million for the Mk.1 it replaced. Red Beard, the first British tactical weapon, for the smaller-yield job. And from 1961 the twenty-four Valiants assigned to SACEUR carried American weapons outright: two Project E Mk 28 bombs each, replaced by Mk 43 laydown weapons in early 1963, held in United States custody under a dual-key release with a USAF authorisation officer on the base.

That last arrangement matters more than it usually gets credit for. Half of Britain’s airborne deterrent, for four years, could not be released without an American turning a key, and it was the Valiant squadrons that carried the arrangement longest — Project E weapons were phased out of the strategic force by the end of 1962 but stayed on the Valiants until the fleet was grounded. Fits varied sharply by squadron, by base and by year: a Wittering aircraft in 1957, a Marham aircraft on SACEUR alert in 1963 and a Honington tanker in 1962 were the same airframe carrying entirely different things, and only the aircraft actually on quick reaction alert held live weapons.

Sourcing: weapon fits here are reconstructed from Humphrey Wynn’s official history of the RAF strategic nuclear forces, Andrew Brookes’s unit history, Hubbard and Simmons’s account of the Grapple drops and the declassified Project E record. A weapon being available to the V-force is not evidence that a Valiant squadron held it, and this page states what a given aircraft carried only where the record is explicit. Two figures are firm: the 842 long tons dropped at Suez, and the eight British nuclear weapons detonated after release from an aircraft, every one of them dropped by a Valiant of No. 49 Squadron. Most of the rest of the day-to-day loading picture is inference from squadron records, and where sources conflict on yields the ranges rather than an average are given above.

Variants

Vickers built one Valiant and sold it four times, and the only version that could have survived low-level flying was the one the Air Ministry cancelled

Vickers built one Valiant and sold it four times. Strip away the designations and the B.1, the B(PR).1, the B(PR)K.1 and the B(K).1 are the same aeroplane with different things bolted onto the bomb-mounting points inside the bay: bombs, a camera crate, a hose-drum unit, or two of the three at once. The dimensions do not change, the wing does not change, the engines do not change. The only genuine variant Vickers ever flew was the B.2, and the Air Ministry cancelled it.

The production arithmetic deserves stating plainly because it is a mess. The usual total is 107 including three prototypes; the Wikipedia article on the type says 107 in one section and 108 in another, and Aviastar prints 111. The sub-type counts that circulate most widely — five pre-production, 34 full-production B.1s, 11 B(PR).1, 14 B(PR)K.1, 44 B(K).1 and one B.2 — sum to 109 before the two flying prototypes are added, which is impossible. The breakdown that reconciles to 107 gives 35 B.1s in total, pre-production included, and that is the version used below. Anyone quoting a Valiant production figure to the unit should be asked which breakdown they are using.

There were no exports and no licence production. Every Valiant built was a Vickers aeroplane for the Royal Air Force, and no foreign air force ever operated one — the only V-bomber of which that is true without qualification, since the Vulcan and Victor at least reached museum collections abroad. There was also never a Mark 2 in service, which is the whole tragedy in one sentence: as Vic Flintham put it, there is a fine irony in the situation, because Vickers had produced the Type 673 B.2 as a fast low-level aeroplane and the Air Ministry was not interested. Eleven years later the Ministry ordered the high-level B.1 fleet down to low level and broke its wings.

Type 660 (prototype, 1951, 1 built)

WB210, first flown on 18 May 1951 by Joseph "Mutt" Summers — the man who had first flown the Spitfire — with Jock Bryce as co-pilot, twenty-seven months after the instruction to proceed and comfortably inside the date George Edwards had promised. Four Avon RA.3 of 6,500 lbf, narrow slot intakes. Lost on 12 January 1952 during V.1000 noise measurement work when an engine relight started a fire in the starboard wing; most of the crew got out, but the co-pilot struck the tail after ejecting and was killed.

Type 667 (second prototype, 1952, 1 built)

WB215, flown on 11 April 1952. Ordered with Armstrong Siddeley Sapphires and completed with Avon RA.7 of 7,500 lbf and rounded intakes to feed them. Later cracked its rear wing spar at Boscombe Down after a rocket-assisted take-off at overload weight, an incident reported in Flight in May 1957 on an airframe that had never had the production fix for a known rear-spar weakness. It was broken up for wing fatigue testing after 489 hours. The warning was there in 1957 and it was read as a one-off.

Valiant B.1, pre-production (Type 674 and related, 1953–54, 5 built)

Avon RA.14 / Avon 201 of 9,500 lbf. WP199, the first, flew on 21 December 1953, again inside Edwards’s promised date, and was delivered to the RAF on 8 February 1955 — the day the V-bomber force formally came into existence. 138 Squadron had reformed at Gaydon on 1 January to receive it, with 232 Operational Conversion Unit following on 21 February.

Type 706 Valiant B.1 (1954–57, ~30 built; 35 B.1s in all including pre-production)

The full-production bomber: Avon RA.28 Mk 204/205 of up to 10,500 lbf, longer tailpipes, water-methanol injection for take-off boost. These were the aircraft of the first-line nuclear squadrons at Wittering, Marham and Honington, and the aircraft of No. 49 Squadron that dropped every British nuclear weapon ever released from an aeroplane.

Type 710 Valiant B(PR).1 (11 built)

Bomber and photo-reconnaissance. Edwards’s team had planned for the role from the start: a removable crate in the bomb bay took up to eight narrow-field high-resolution cameras and four survey cameras, with two more in the fuselage and enlarged rear fuel tanks. Flown by 543 Squadron at Wyton, which is credited with photographing some 400,000 sq miles (1,036,000 km²) of Rhodesia in an eleven-week survey — usually dated 1965, which sits awkwardly with a fleet grounded on 26 January that year, and is more probably 1964.

Type 733 Valiant B(PR)K.1 (14 built)

The three-role aircraft: bomber, photo-reconnaissance and tanker, wired and plumbed for all three and flying with whichever crate was fitted that week. Also 543 Squadron. Two were written off in non-combat accidents that say something about the era — WZ398 burnt in a hangar at Wyton in September 1957, WZ399 abandoned its take-off at Offutt in Nebraska in November 1961 and caught fire after running off the runway onto a railway line.

Type 758 Valiant B(K).1 (44 built, 16 more cancelled)

Bomber and tanker, the largest single batch and, by the end, the version that mattered. A removable hose-drum unit and transfer tanks went on the bomb-mounting points in the bay. 214 Squadron at Marham was operational in the tanker role in 1958 and 90 Squadron at Honington in 1959; both became dedicated tanker units on 1 April 1962. When the fatigue inspection came, the tanker squadrons had the highest proportion of aircraft cleared to keep flying, because their work had stayed at high level. XD818 is one of these.

Type 673 Valiant B.2 (1953, 1 prototype; 17 ordered and cancelled)

The road not taken. WJ954 first flew on 4 September 1953 in gloss black night-operations finish and was inevitably called the Black Bomber. Fuselage stretched to 112 ft 9 in for extra avionics; the wing torsion box made continuous by deleting the main-wheel cut-outs, the gear moved to four-wheel bogies retracting rearwards into large trailing-edge fairings; the whole structure strengthened against low-level turbulence. It was cleared to 580 mph at sea level against the B.1’s 414 mph and touched 640 mph on test. Production aircraft were to have Conways. It was cancelled because the wartime pathfinder concept looked obsolete in the nuclear age, spent a few years on Super Sprite rocket clearance and brake-judder taxi trials, and was scrapped in 1958.

Radio-countermeasures conversions (1957–63, at least 7 aircraft)

Not a separate mark but a distinct fleet within the fleet. C Flight of 199 Squadron received Valiants at Honington on 29 May 1957, replacing Lincolns, and was renumbered 18 Squadron at Finningley on 17 December 1958. American APT-16A and ALT-7 jamming transmitters, Airborne Cigar and Carpet jammers, APR-4 and APR-9 receivers and chaff. Disbanded 31 March 1963.

Vickers Type 1000, Type 1002 and VC7 (1953–55, 1 airframe scrapped incomplete)

The transport derivative, and the reason the Valiant was the last purpose-built military aeroplane Vickers ever produced. Low-mounted wing, span out from 114 ft 4 in to 140 ft, fuselage to 146 ft, uprated engines; a military Type 1002 and a civil Type 1004 or VC7 were to follow. The prototype was nearly complete when it was cancelled in 1955 — a decision Edwards and a good many others regarded as one of the worst ever taken in British aviation, since it left the transatlantic jet market to Boeing.

Disposition: the type is extinct, and it ended faster than any other British bomber of its size. A cracked spar was found in one of the three Operation Pontifex aircraft in July 1964; on 6 August the starboard wing rear spar of WP217, an OCU aircraft from Gaydon captained by Flight Lieutenant "Taffy" Foreman, failed at 30,000 ft, and the aeroplane came home with no starboard flap, buckled fuselage skin, popped rivets and a cracked engine door. A fleet inspection found wing spars fatigued at between 35 and 75 per cent of their assessed safe life. Repairs were actually under way at Marham when, in January 1965, the incoming Wilson government under Denis Healey decided the cost could not be justified against the aircraft’s remaining life. The last sorties had already been flown on 9 December 1964 — XD812 of 214 Squadron refuelling Lightnings over the North Sea, recalled before the exercise finished, and a bomber sortie by XD818 — and the fleet was permanently grounded on 26 January 1965. Healey told the Commons on 1 February that the decision was "not in any way connected with low-level flying". Of the hundred-odd airframes built, exactly one survives complete: XD818, listed by the Royal Air Force Museum’s own accession record as a Valiant B(K) Mk.I although it is often catalogued as a B.1, the aircraft from which Wing Commander Kenneth Hubbard released Short Granite off Malden Island on 15 May 1957. It was retained as maintenance airframe 7894M, displayed for years at RAF Marham, and now stands in the National Cold War Exhibition at the Royal Air Force Museum Midlands at Cosford beside a Victor and a Vulcan, with a Yellow Sun casing under its wing — the only place on earth where all three V-bombers can be seen together. Four nose or cockpit sections survive and nothing else: XD816 at Brooklands Museum in Surrey, XD826 at the Imperial War Museum Duxford, XD857 at the Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum at Flixton, and XD875 at Morayvia at Kinloss. There are no reproductions, no replicas and no flyable examples anywhere; every piece listed here is original structure, and no Valiant has flown since 9 December 1964. The rest were cut up at their operating bases from 1965. That is why the first V-bomber into service, the only one to drop a British nuclear weapon and the only one to bomb anything in anger before 1982, is the one the public almost never sees.

From specification to scrapyard in seventeen years

Twelve Vickers Valiant stories

The Valiant in pictures

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The Vickers Valiant in motion

A curated video feature for the Vickers Valiant is coming soon. In the meantime, explore the photo gallery above and the operations map below.

Where the Valiant flew

The record that defines it

The Valiant is a bomber, not a fighter, and holds no aerial kills — but it owns a unique distinction: it is the only one of Britain’s three V-bombers ever used in combat. During the 1956 Suez Crisis (Operation Musketeer), Valiants flying from Malta bombed Egyptian airfields — and did so as conventional bombers, never nuclear. Bombing from high altitude, accuracy was reportedly poor and the raids are generally judged of limited military value. The Valiant’s greater mark on history was made on the test range: it dropped Britain’s first atomic bomb (1956) and first hydrogen bomb (1957).

Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures as of July 2026.

Everything people ask about the Vickers Valiant

Continue the tour

Every fact, checked

• RAF Museum — Valiant XD818 individual historyOfficial museum record of the sole surviving Valiant and its H-bomb drop.
• Thunder & Lightnings — Vickers Valiant historyDetailed history: prototype, WB210 crash, Suez squadrons and the WP217 grounding.
• This Day in Aviation — first British atomic dropThe 11 October 1956 Blue Danube drop, crew details and B.1 specifications.
• Imperial War Museums — Operation MusketeerAuthoritative context for the Suez Crisis and the RAF bombing campaign.
• Vulcan to the Sky Trust — The Black BomberHeritage account of the Valiant B.2 pathfinder and the low-level fatigue irony.
• The Royal Air Force Chronicle — Vickers ValiantThe “insurance” design, anti-flash white, tanker role and fatigue withdrawal.
• Jets of the Cold War — Operation GrappleThe 1957 hydrogen-bomb trials and the underperformance of the first device.
• Military Factory — Vickers ValiantConsolidated specification table for dimensions, weights and performance.