An Utterly Uncivil Guide to Cancelled British Airliners
From great wheezing imperial dinosaurs, via the drearily sensible to pleasingly mad speedsters, a ragtag bag of utterly appealing British airliners failed to enter service. Here are 11 of them.
11. Saunders-Roe Duchess 'Pass the duchy on the port-hand side'
The Isle of Wight in the English Channel was the last place in England to convert to Christianity. Against the menacing onslaught of Christian Anglo-Saxons, the isle's 7th century King Arwald was defeated after a spirited fight. Despite his plucky attempts to resist the imposition of a new popular idea, he lost. In much the same way, Saunders-Roe Limited, a British aero- and marine-engineering company, also based on the Isle of Wight, failed to defend their strong belief that airliners (and fighters for that matter) should take off from water.
Each British aircraft manufacturer embraced the new jet engine in their own style: Gloster fitted it to an unadventurous airframe, de Havilland made a fast tiny jet fighter and a fast radical airliner, while SARO, stayed in the happy niche of flying boats (aeroplanes that land on the water on their hulls). The very large airliner SARO wished to build required a lot of power; one de Havilland Ghost jet engine can power a Vampire fighter - four a Comet airliner - but the impressively large Saunders-Roe Duchess would need six.
The extravagant Duchess was the ripped trouser crotch of a nation straddling the past and the future. While its performance and propulsion pointed to the future, its basic concept of operating from the sea (and its name) were paddling in the past. Inheriting much from the Princess (see below) the Duchess would have offered 74 passengers an exciting and glamorous experience on routes of up to 2,600 miles. If as if this wasn't already wild enough, US companies Convair and Martin both designed and considered nuclear-powered Princess derivatives. However, the Duchess was (probably quite sensibly) cancelled.
Even the grand Duchess would have had to curtsy when the Queen appeared on the jetty.
10. Saunders-Roe Queen 'Size Queen'
There must be something wrong with the thrust figure I'm about to tell you. In fact, please correct me so I can sleep again. The Queen was intended to have 24 Rolls-Royce Conway jet engines giving it a mind-bending total of 444,000Ib* of thrust. That cannot be right. That's more than the most powerful aircraft ever flown, the An-225, with its relatively puny 309,600lb of thrust. I'm not a fan of exclamation marks, but they are utterly appropriate for the other mad facts about the proposed Queen. Such as the intended 1000 passengers carried in the luxurious comfort levels of an ocean liner(!) Or the 3000-mile range (!) or the 40,000 feet ceiling! This barnacle-encrusted behemoth was intended for intercontinental flights, especially for the Britain-Australia route.
