Vickers Armstrong

There’s a nasty dig in the English Electric brochure that I mentioned only in passing. This has to do with the Viscount aircraft, which hasn’t sold as well, or so the brochure claims, as the Canberra. It is a nasty dig because it is a way of making a difference between English Elec­tric and one of its rivals, perhaps its major rival, the manufacturer of the Viscount aircraft, a firm called Vickers Armstrong.

For English Electric was not alone in hoping to win the GOR 339 contract. A host of other companies were jostling for a piece of the action,8 and one of these was Vickers Armstrong. It was really two firms. One was based at Weybridge in the southern suburbs of Lon­don. The Weybridge firm was in the process of digesting another based in Hampshire, in the south of England, called Supermarine. I’ll Cultures 71

Meanwhile, Vickers Supermarine had been working on a num­ber of alternative designs, the vulnerability of which had been carefully tested against the ideas of Vickers Guided Weapons Division. Their experience was limited to transonic aircraft. . . . The various designs were submitted to a cost-effect examina­tion against GOR 339, and as a result Vickers tendered first for a small single-engined plane suitable for both the Air Force and the Navy. The design was in the Supermarine Spitfire Tradition. (Hastings 1966, 30)

So here we see another historical story, the construction of a series of similarities, descents, that take us back across time to what is per­haps the best-known British aircraft ever built, the Second World War Spitfire fighter. And these too are links that tell of an integrated, cutting edge, and militarily outstanding descent from the past to the present. Other such genealogical stories are also possible, for in­stance, tracing lineage to the civil aircraft mentioned earlier, the Vis­count. Here the link takes another form, pointing out that this aircraft had been built efficiently and to cost, and emphasizing that Vickers had a ‘‘track record of production management and on-time deliver­ies” (Gardner 1981, 31). And then again, reminding the reader that the Viscount had been designed, like all good civil aircraft, for ease of servicing and quick turnaround. Both points can also be read as an unkind cut, however, for in reading between the lines you are meant to understand that Vickers builds reliable and matter-of-fact aircraft and completes its projects to time, whereas English Electric does not. So this is the production of more genealogical similarities, similari­ties that make intercompany differences.

Small, versatile, easily serviced on a modular basis, deriving from the Spitfire and the Viscount, this is not a bad origin story. But con­sider this:

The 571 was a revolutionary proposal in that it offered the re­quired blind terrain-following, nav-attack and weapons system as a fully integrated package—the complete opposite of the ‘‘add­on’’ afterwards school of thought. The argument was that the sys­tems were the heart of the airplane and a high performance flying platform should be built around them. (Gardner 1981, 30)

‘‘A revolutionary proposal.’’ This is the historian of the British Air­craft Corporation, Charles Gardner, talking. My reason for drawing attention to this passage is that it makes another kind of cut, a divi­sion between the past and the present, between what are now being distinguished as ‘‘the ‘add-on’ afterwards school of thought’’ and the ‘‘fully integrated package.’’ Gardner implies that we are witnessing a historical step change—and then he distributes value across that boundary in favor of whatever comes later and is thereby in touch with the present. It is the performance of a past where things were both different and not as good.11