VC10

01 · General arrangement

The whole aeroplane

The VC10 was drawn for BOAC’s routes into Africa and Asia, where runways were short and airfields hot and high. Four Rolls-Royce Conways sit at the tail, which leaves the whole wing free to make lift.

It first flew from Brooklands on 29 June 1962 and entered BOAC service on 29 April 1964, London to Lagos.

Length

158 ft 8 in48.36 m

Span

146 ft 2 in44.55 m

Height

39 ft 6 in12.04 m

Max take-off

312,000 lb141,521 kg

02 · Fuselage

Maurice’s department

A pressurised light-alloy tube built as a fail-safe semi-monocoque: frames for the hoops, stringers running fore and aft, and skin over both. More than half the structure’s weight was machined from solid metal, with skin and stringers cut from one billet.

The cross-section is a double lobe faired to an oval. Maurice Wilmer was fuselage project manager on the engineering team that designed it.

External width

12 ft 4 in3.76 m

External height

14 ft 1½ in4.31 m

Cabin width

11 ft 6 in3.50 m

Cabin length

92 ft 4 in28.14 m

03 · The door

Maurice’s door

In July 1958, with the VC10 on the drawing boards at Weybridge, Maurice filed a patent for a passenger door that cabin pressure holds shut. The skin is drawn as glass here so you can see how it works.

04 · The door

Held shut by the cabin

The door is a plug. Lugs machined into its edges sit just inside matching lugs on the door frame.

In flight, the cabin pushes outward on the door with a force of several tons. All of it goes through the lugs and into the airframe, not through a latch. The harder the cabin pushes, the harder the door is held.

05 · The door

Unlocking

Push the handle down and two feet extend from the bottom of the door. They press on the sill and lift the whole door, with springs helping, until its lugs line up with the gaps between the frame’s lugs.

While the cabin is pressurised, friction between the lug faces stops the door lifting. It stays shut even if its bolts fail to engage.

06 · The door

Parallel motion

Once the lugs are clear, the door swings outward on its hinge arm. A second link keeps it parallel to the fuselage the whole way, so it never twists in the doorway.

53 later patents cite Maurice’s, among them door designs from Boeing and Airbus.

07 · Wing

A clean wing

With nothing hung underneath, the wing could be given over to lift. Four slat sections run along each leading edge, five Fowler flap sections slide out of the trailing edge, and three spoilers on top double as air brakes.

The curved Küchemann tips were added after flight tests found too much drag. Inside, the torsion box is also the fuel tank.

Sweep, ¼ chord

32° 30′

Wing area

2,851 sq ft264.9 m²

Thickness

13% root9% at the tip

Fuel

17,925 galimperial, all tanks

08 · Flying controls

Eleven surfaces, eleven motors

Every control surface is split: four aileron sections, four elevator sections, three rudder sections. Each section has its own Boulton Paul powered flying control unit, a small self-contained hydraulic system with an electric pump and reservoir.

Lose one unit and the other sections carry on. The whole tailplane moves to trim, driven through a screw jack by two hydraulic motors.

09 · Powerplant

How a Conway breathes

Air enters the intake and splits. Some flows round the outside of the engine as bypass air. The rest is squeezed by the low- and high-pressure compressors, burned with fuel in the combustion chambers, and pushed out through the turbines that drive the compressors.

The Conway was the first turbofan, or bypass engine, to go into airline service.

Engines

4 × ConwayRolls-Royce RCo.42

Bypass ratio

≈ 0.6bypass air to core air

10 · Powerplant

Four at the back

Each Conway gives about 21,000 lb of thrust. They hang in pairs from a torque box on either side of the rear fuselage.

Mounted high and aft, they stay clear of stones thrown up on rough strips and put their noise behind the passengers. The “beaver tail” fairings between the jet pipes were another cure found in flight test.

11 · Empennage

The T-tail

The tailplane sits on top of the fin, well clear of the engine exhaust, with a bullet fairing where the two meet. Its span is 43 ft 10 in.

On the Super VC10 the fin itself became a fuel tank, carrying another 1,350 gallons.

12 · Landing gear

Built for rough strips

Two four-wheel main bogies retract inward and a twin-wheel nose leg retracts forward. Wide, low-pressure tyres spread the load across the weaker runways of the Empire routes.

From selector to locked up took about nine and a half seconds.

Wheels

108 main, 2 nose

Wheelbase

65 ft 11 in20.09 m

13 · Cabin

The quiet cabin

With the engines behind them, passengers sat in one of the quietest cabins of the jet age. BOAC filled its VC10s better than any other type in its fleet.

BOAC’s Standards were fitted for 109 in two classes; six-abreast, the cabin could take 151. Four crew sat on the flight deck.