A Little VC10derness

Morning all,

Been having a chat with Rob Curling (once of BBC, now of Top Landing Gear pod) on Twitter. The question of the sub-component manufacture came up.

Does anyone have a definitive list of what they made in St Nazaire, when, and the background.

We know it was all part of a commercial agreement pre Concord(e), probably was the tail/fin (although some of these were made at Hurn?) and doors (which Shorts/Harland got upset about).

Anyone seen any documents other than what’s in the various books?

C

Based on photos from the Brooklands Museum archives and the notes on these:

• Fins were built at Hurn, including the tailplanes. Photos from 1961 illustrate this (example from a 1961 progress report below), including a test fitting of a tailplane to a fin in the Hurn factory.
• On 6th March 1963 the first Super tailplane arrived from St. Nazaire. This was delivered straight to Weybridge and was unpacked in the flight sheds for use during final assembly.

Based on that, I take it that Sud Aviation built the Super tailplanes. Fins continued to be built at Hurn AFAIK. I will look into this a bit further and will ask around.

This is from a 1965 article about the Super VC10 in Aircraft Engineering: I will see if I can find a similar list for the Standard VC10, it may well be the same though. Based on this, I guess I was wrong about all the fins having been built at Hurn.

Found it, but no mention of Sud Aviation in this list: This article on the previous page does include a line about Sud Aviation though: Both of these are from The Aeroplane from April 1964.