In October 1978 a huge freighter lifted off from Rolls-Royce’s airfield at Hucknall with a problem its crew could not fix. The flaps had dropped on take-off and would not come back up. So pilots Bob Reynolds and ‘Rocky’ Oliver flew the whole ferry flight in landing configuration, then put the aircraft down on the very short runway at Cosford, the shortest a Belfast had ever landed on.

It was a fitting last trick for Enceladus, the tenth and final Short Belfast. Only ten were built. Together they served a single Royal Air Force squadron for about a decade, and every one carried the name of a giant or hero of legend. When the RAF let them go, the aircraft it had thrown away turned out to be the one it kept needing.

A Britannia with a whale’s body

The Belfast began in the mid-1950s as a sensible idea from Short Brothers. The company was already building Bristol Britannia airliners under sub-contract in Belfast, and its chairman, Sir Matthew Slattery, wanted to reuse as much Britannia hardware as possible rather than design a freighter from scratch. The first 1957 brochure even called it the Britannic.

The RAF then raised the bar, asking to carry 30,000 lb over 3,600 nautical miles. The design kept the Britannia’s wing and tail surfaces as its starting point, but gained a new wing centre section, four Rolls-Royce Tyne turboprops and a vast circular fuselage more than 16 ft (4.9 m) across. A contract for ten aircraft, designated Belfast C.1, was signed on 21 December 1960.

There was no prototype. The first aircraft off the line was a production machine, and on Sunday 5 January 1964 chief test pilot Denis Tayler and a crew of six took it into the air from Shorts’ airfield at Sydenham. After a twelve-day wait for an easterly wind, so they could climb out over Belfast Lough instead of the city, they flew for 55 minutes and landed at Aldergrove.

The Belfast had another claim to fame from day one. It was the first aircraft designed from the outset with a full automatic “blind landing” system, a triplex Smiths installation that let it land itself in fog. On a freighter meant to fly in all weathers, that mattered.

British Pathé’s 1964 newsreel “Air Giant Goes Up” on the new Short Belfast.

The biggest thing the RAF had ever flown

When it entered service, the Belfast was the largest aircraft the British military had ever operated. It spanned 48.4 m (158 ft 9 in), weighed up to 104 tonnes at take-off, and could lift about 78,000 lb (35 tonnes). That is well beyond the C-130 Hercules the RAF would soon rely on.

The hold was the point. Reached through a “beaver tail” ramp at the rear, it was roomy enough for two single-deck buses and for forklift trucks to work inside. It could take 150 fully equipped troops, a Chieftain tank, two Wessex helicopters or a pair of Polaris missiles.

No. 53 Squadron re-formed as the RAF’s first and only Belfast squadron in late 1965, and the first aircraft arrived in January 1966. After a spell at RAF Fairford, the squadron settled at RAF Brize Norton in 1967.

Unusually for service aircraft, every Belfast carried a name: Samson, Goliath, Pallas, Hector, Atlas, Heracles, Theseus, Spartacus, Ajax et Enceladus. The RAF Museum explains the idea simply: the aircraft was a giant, so each one was named after a giant.

Fixing the drag

There was a catch. The rear fuselage was swept up and flattened underneath to give the loading ramp a gentle angle and plenty of headroom. That shape created far more drag than expected, and the early aircraft could not reach the performance Shorts had promised. Engineers had to tackle what one 1967 technical paper called “the Belfast drag problem”.

The answer was a redesigned rear fairing, which is credited with raising the fleet’s cruising speed by around 40 mph. Aircraft went back to Shorts for the work: the RAF Museum’s record shows Enceladus returning to the factory in January 1969 for drag-reduction changes and autoland fitting, then testing at the Blind Landing Experimental Unit at Bedford.

Ruairidh MacVeigh’s documentary history of the Short Belfast.

Once fixed, the Belfasts went everywhere. In November 1967 two of them helped bring British troops home from Aden. In 1970 five flew to Singapore and back for Exercise Bersatu Padu, the biggest airlift exercise Air Support Command had ever run. That same summer, two Belfasts carried a dismantled Supermarine Stranraer flying boat from British Columbia to Brize Norton for the RAF Museum.

They hauled Harriers to Arizona for hot-weather trials and, in 1973, Concorde support equipment out to South Africa for hot-and-high testing. On 23 December 1971, all ten flew together in formation over Brize Norton.

Retired, then rented back

It did not last. After the transport force was folded into RAF Strike Command, a round of defence cuts in the mid-1970s also disposed of the Britannia and Comet fleets. The Belfast force was run down from June 1976, the aircraft were flown to RAF Kemble for storage, and No. 53 Squadron disbanded that September. Enceladus had logged about 9,229 hours.

Rolls-Royce bought several Belfasts, mainly for their Tyne engines, and scrapped most of them at Hucknall. It donated Enceladus to the museum, which is how she ended up on that flaps-down flight into Cosford.

Five went to the cargo airline TAC HeavyLift in 1977. Two were kept for spares, and three, Hector, Heracles et Theseus, were reworked for civil certification and flying commercially by 1980. They became the go-to aircraft for loads nothing else in the West could carry.

That included the Ministry of Defence. During the Falklands War in 1982, the RAF chartered Belfasts back from HeavyLift, and they flew for the British forces again in the 1991 Gulf War, carrying vehicles and helicopters too big for the Hercules. Several accounts suggest the charter bills cost more than keeping the fleet in RAF service would have.

Just Planes footage of a HeavyLift Belfast cargo flight from Paris to Dakar, dated 2001 in the video’s title.

By the 1990s, Volga-Dnepr’s much larger Antonov An-124 was taking over the outsize cargo market. Hector carried on, flying in Australia from 2003 before being parked at Cairns. A 2023 effort to return it to the air was reported, but Cairns was hit by flooding from Cyclone Jasper that December, and the aircraft’s future remains unclear.

The giant at Cosford

Enceladus, XR371, survives at the RAF Museum Midlands at Cosford, displayed under cover in the National Cold War Exhibition. Her working engines and propellers were removed after the 1978 ferry flight and replaced with life-expired units, and she has worn HeavyLift, Air Support Command and Transport Command colours over the years.

Stand beside her and you understand why the crews loved her and why the cuts still rankle. Britain built a freighter that could swallow a tank, land itself in fog and carry a dismantled flying boat across the Atlantic. Then it built only ten, retired them after a decade, and paid to rent them back.

Sources: Flight International archive (9 January 1964), RAF Museum (XR371 individual history; collections; RAF Museum Stories), Air of Authority (No. 53 Squadron history), Aircraft Engineering (1967), Vintage Aviation News, Wikipedia (Short Belfast)