Turbine Ambassador

[simcaptain]

G'day gents,

Sorry, haven't been around for a couple of days due to the holidays. Family, you know...

Anyway, thank you all very much for you help. Especially Ian, of course. These are outstanding shots.

Pity the guy with the climb out shot puts his captions on the pic itself - positively un-googlably so. We could have done with that mention of blue trim earlier. Allright, amendment will follow, as will Darts and Elands, time permitting.

RE revenue flying: agreed, 'KRD was only with BEA until '53, but 'LFR soldiered on until '55 - surely by then route proving was done? Plus, both of them got fleet names, if that's anything to go by. But let's not argue this minor point.

Best regards and a belated Happy New Year,
Georg

[ianhind]

Georg,

Not sure if you got the large pictures because I removed them yesterday. If you want them let me know and I'll reinstate them. Same pictures, just the full 2500x1200 pixel version.

And I agree with you on the dates that 'KRD (Golden Lion) and 'LFR (Golden Hind) became engine testbeds. What they were doing until then seems not totally clear -depends what you read.

Ian

[ferryman]

Airspeed wanted to develop the turboprop Ambassador.

Unfortunately, de Havilland, their parent company, (still smarting at having had to build Oxfords at Hatfield?) seem to have had only 2 interests at the time:- (1) marketing the Comet; (2) taking over Airspeed's Christchurch factory to build the Comet.

[Garry Russell]

Those two were test beds.

I can't see that Airspeed would have wanted to produce it as the Ambassador was long out of production. There was talk at the beginning of turbine version as indeed there were about Centaurus/Hercules engined Viscounts, along with double Niads and even two Turbo props and two Nenes.

Airspeed went ahead with the piston engines as they were at the time proven and by doing that got the BEA order instead of Vickers.

They may well have wanted to develop one.......but never did

There were at that time lots of things put out about new airliners with all kinds of promises, but they were more wishful thinking than anything else.

At that time the two T/P (Dart and Mamba) we still being developed and were full of snags.

If they had pursued turbo props it would have probably failed like the Apollo as the Viscount was far superior.

That was something different to these later testbeds

They may have put it around that is there was enough interest they might considered building something but again any serious thoughts would have been well reported.

Garry