In November 1955 the British government cancelled a four-engined jet transport that was around 80 percent built, on the grounds that nobody in Britain wanted it.

Eleven months later the same government approved the purchase of fifteen Boeing 707s for its state airline, at a cost of £44 million, powered by the same British engine it had just declined to fund.

The aircraft was the Vickers V.1000, and its civil version the VC7. The prototype was scrapped where it stood.

A transport that could keep up with a V-bomber

The requirement was straightforward. Britain was deploying nuclear-armed V-bombers around a shrinking empire, and the Hastings piston transports that supported them were slow and elderly. The RAF wanted an aircraft that could carry 120 troops at the same speed and over the same distances as the bombers themselves.

Vickers’ first answer, the Type 716, bolted a new fuselage onto Valiant wings, tail and undercarriage. By the end of 1952 the company had thrown all of that away and was designing something new. Vickers won the competition in March 1953, beating submissions from Handley Page, Avro, Bristol, Shorts, Saunders-Roe and de Havilland.

What emerged was ahead of its time in several respects. A compound-swept wing — around 38 degrees at the inner leading edge, around 27 degrees outboard — with curved Küchemann tips. Four Rolls-Royce Conways buried in the wing, set well outboard to keep cabin noise down and the efflux off the rear fuselage. A cabin and engine bay designed on explicitly fail-safe principles, which the Comet 1 had not been. Pressurised underfloor holds. A hydraulic freight lift so the RAF could load it without ground equipment.

And a fuselage twelve feet six inches wide, allowing six-abreast seating — at a moment when Boeing was still arguing internally about the width of the 707 and Douglas was contemplating five-abreast on the DC-8.

The weight problem, and the airline

It got heavy. By mid-1955 the all-up weight had risen well beyond the original forecast, and the extra mass ate into the one thing the civil version absolutely had to have: non-stop London to New York.

BOAC, which had been involved in the studies from the start, went cold. Its managing director Miles Thomas did not believe Rolls-Royce would deliver the Conway thrust increases needed to fix it, and BOAC was already committed to buying Comet 4s and Britannias. Government meetings in September 1955 formalised the airline’s disinterest.

That mattered enormously, because of a doctrine the minister stated openly.

No home airline, no aircraft. It is not an unreasonable principle. It did mean that the fate of Britain’s only large jet airliner rested on the commercial judgement of one nationalised corporation.

11 November 1955

The Ministry of Supply announced the cancellation at a press conference. Maudling confirmed it in the Commons seventeen days later, giving three reasons: the aircraft was late, the long-range Britannia was going well and could arrive sooner, and BOAC did not want the civil version. The contracts for one prototype and six production aircraft were cancelled.

There was an additional consideration nobody mentioned in the chamber. Short Brothers in Belfast had just lost Comet 2 licence production and the Supermarine Swift, and needed work badly. Britannias could be built there.

The Commons did not take it quietly. On 8 December, Paul Williams, member for Sunderland South, opened an adjournment debate.

He also had the best line of the night about the ministry’s claim that the V.1000 existed only on paper: “Can my hon. Friend tell me where else the D.C.8, for example, exists today except on paper?”

William Robson Brown put the physical reality of it plainly: the carcass was very nearly completed and the prototype could be finished within twelve months. Air Commodore Harvey pointed out that nearly £3 million had already been spent, and that for perhaps another £11 million Britain would have a transatlantic aeroplane flying in 1959 or 1960. John Peyton observed that the decision was welcomed only by competitors in the United States.

The full V.1000 and VC7 story, and what Britain gave away in November 1955.

The government’s case

To be fair to it, the government had one. F. J. Erroll, replying for the Ministry of Supply, reduced it to three facts: the military aircraft could not meet the full specification in time; it might have met it several years late; and the long-range Britannia had gone forward well and could be available earlier.

On the civil side, he relayed BOAC’s reasoning at length — that the Comet 4 and the long-range Britannia would keep the corporation competitive on the North Atlantic well into the 1960s, that turboprops were more economical than jets, and that an aircraft capable of flying non-stop from London to New York would not seriously damage British traffic in the early 1960s.

He added, for good measure, that the cost per passenger mile of the Britannia would be considerably less than that of the Boeing 707 or the DC-8 — noting that those two American aircraft had still to be proved on transatlantic flight.

Eleven months

On 24 October 1956, Harold Watkinson announced government approval for BOAC to buy fifteen Boeing 707s at a cost of £44 million. They were 707-420s, fitted with Rolls-Royce Conways. One condition of the deal was that BOAC’s next airliner had to be British.

Before that announcement, Watkinson had asked George Edwards whether the Vickers 1000 could be restarted. Edwards told him the whole thing was finished.

The Conway went on to have, as one account puts it, an almost flawless development cycle, and powered 707s for BOAC, Lufthansa, Varig, El Al and Air India, and DC-8s for Trans-Canada, Alitalia and Canadian Pacific.

The VC10 — the aircraft Vickers did eventually build, arriving in service in 1964, several years after the 707 had taken the market.

El veredicto

The line most often quoted about all this is attributed to George Edwards himself: that Britain had handed the Americans the entire world market for big jet airliners without a struggle. It is worth being careful with it — the wording varies between accounts, its published source is Lance Cole’s 2000 book on the VC10, and Edwards is not recorded saying it in Hansard. The sentiment, however, is amply documented in his behaviour at the time.

The historian Derek Wood put the failure down to a lack of understanding of the air transport industry within the British government of the era. Others go further and argue that the V.1000, not the TSR.2, is the moment the British aircraft industry lost its way.

The Comet, the 707 and the moment the jet airliner market was decided.

What is beyond argument is the sequence. In November 1955 Britain cancelled a nearly complete long-range jet transport because its state airline did not want one. In October 1956 it approved the purchase of fifteen American long-range jet transports for that same airline. In between, nothing changed about the aeroplane. Only about the argument.

Sources: Hansard, House of Commons, 28 November and 8 December 1955; C. F. Andrews and E. B. Morgan, Vickers Aircraft since 1908 (Putnam, 1988); Derek Wood, Project Cancelled (1975); Keith Hayward, “The Blame Game”, The Aviation Historian No. 14; Richard Payne, Stuck on the Drawing Board (Tempus, 2004); vc10.net; Wikipedia; Wikimedia Commons.