Tag Archives: Surrey

VC-10 Time

Our visit to the Brooklands Museum meant were were at the home of the Vickers VC-10. The museum has a complete example along with another fuselage and some test items related to the development of the aircraft that was undertaken here. The complete airframe belonged to the Sultan of Oman and it was flown into Weybridge in the late 80s before the runway was rendered unavailable. It was quite a luxurious configuration in its day but does have a rather basic look compared to what might be available today.

Brooklands Museum

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One slightly overcast Saturday, I dragged Nancy along to a museum that I was keen to see. The Brooklands Museum is one I had been to a couple of times before we left the UK. I first went there in 1990 when it wasn’t actually open to the public. I was doing some research for an exhibit that were were putting together in the Department of Aeronautics on Barnes Wallis’s Swallow project. The archives at Brooklands had a lot of material that we could access. The next time I went, it was when I worked in London and we had a team meeting at the museum which then included the chance to have a look around.

A lot has changed since that time, and I wanted to see what it is currently like. The museum sits on the site of what started out as the Brooklands motor racing circuit and then became the Vickers Weybridge factory. The museum reflects this extensive history. The racing circuit had banked curves and, while much of the circuit is now built over, there is still some of the original banking in place behind where the museum is located. The banking does not look that steep either in pictures or even when looking at it from a distance. However, when I was there on the previous work trip, we were allowed out on the banking, and my work shoes couldn’t maintain any traction on the concrete. I just slipped back down when trying to walk up the slope. On this visit, they strongly discouraged any walking on the banking.

The museum has three core elements. The first is the racing history of Brooklands. The infield infrastructure is nicely maintained with old garages for the tenants along with the clubhouse and associated buildings. There are car exhibits as well as bicycle and motorbikes. Apparently, road racing of bicycles was illegal in the UK for many years so races on the track were the only option. Motorbike racing was an obvious option if you were a car racing circuit, so the collection of old motorbikes made sense.

The second element is the aerospace history. The factory was heavily involved in manufacturing aircraft in the Second World War with the Wellington being possibly the most famous product. The site then moved into airliner production post war with the Viscount, Vanguard and VC-10 being well represented. Weybridge was also central to the development of Concorde and one of the pre-production jets is also on show. There are also Hawker jets on display, and I have covered them separately in other posts. There are also some test facilities that are rather unusual including the stratospheric chamber which will get its own coverage in due course.

The third part of the museum is a collection of buses belonging to the London Bus Museum. This is included in the admission, and I was not even aware of it before we got there. Aside from plenty of buses, there are lots of exhibits about the supporting elements of bus operation from years gone by. It was a pretty interesting collection, and I was surprised how much time I ended up spending in there.

The museum proved to be a really interesting day out and I think Nancy, while maybe not quite as enthusiastic as me, also found it reasonably worthwhile. The collection has expanded significantly since I was last there and it is able to provide a full day out if you want to check it out. Here is a selection of images from the day. It won’t surprise some that know me to find out that there are way more images from the day than I have included here!

The History of Harriers in One Place

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The Brooklands Museum might be located in the home of Vickers and include a lot of Vickers exhibits, but it also has some Hawker products too. I might be slightly exaggerating about the full history of Harriers, but they have three different examples of the Harrier lineage on display. The first is actually a Harrier but a P1127. The original demonstrator that led to the Kestrel and ultimately the Harrier. The design philosophy is clearly the same, but this was the beginning of the journey for the Kingston design team.

Then there is a Harrier GR1. Unusually it is fitted with the extended wingtips which provided a little extra fuel and a slight reduction in drag. The reason the plane is fitted with them is that it is one of the airframes that took place in the Transatlantic Air Race and won. It is surrounded by some displays of the race and the competitors it defeated – most importantly the Royal Navy!

Last but by no means least is a two-seater, G-VTOL/ZA250. This was a company funded demonstrator and was a regular sight at air shows throughout the 80s. It undertook sales campaigns with various countries and undertook trials of things like the ski jump take off and the Skyhook concept. It seemed to be in a different paint scheme every time I ever saw it on TV. Sure, no Sea Harrier or Harrier II but this is quite a collection to have in one place.

A Hawk With Many Guises

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In the days when the old Hawker plant at Kingston/Dunsfold was still around, products like the Harrier and Hawk were generating plenty of revenue and opportunities. The company would build its own demonstrators for use outside the scope of the core client – the RAF. A Hawk airframe was company funded and it was registered G-HAWK. It was originally built as a 60 Series jet before having modifications to reflect the airframe shape of the 100 Series. It also had a COMA serial of ZA101 added at some point.

This aircraft moved to Warton when Dunsfold closed and continued to be used for all sorts of development work. I was long gone from Warton by the time its use ended. I was, therefore, pretty pleased to see it again at the Brooklands Museum. It is in the BAe house colours, but the nose is not a shape I recognise. I guess it did something interesting that needed another nose to be grafted on. I photographed this jet at various times over the years (although very little when I worked at Warton and could have seen it frequently!).

Reinforcement Around a Cargo Door

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The Vickers Vanguard might not have had the sales success of its predecessor, the Viscount, but a number of the passenger planes had a long career as a result of conversion to the Merchantman freighter configuration. One of these is on display at the Brooklands Museum. Since the cargo door was not an original design feature, the fuselage needed to be reinforced to accommodate the stress redistribution around the door aperture.

Since this was a retrofit, it was far simpler to have the reinforcement on the outside of the fuselage. Looking closely at the example at the museum, you can see the multiple layers of reinforcement to build up the thickness in the areas with the greatest stress increase. There were about ten layers in total with them tapering out as you got further from the opening. This was all prior to the days of finite element analysis so would have involved a lot of hand calculations!

Springtime Means Lambs

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One of the things that I used to love about spring in the UK was the arrival of the lambs. When they are very young, they are so energetic and will be bouncing around all over the place. I thought the time would be right to see them not long after I arrived but didn’t have a good chance to see any. This led to me thinking I had missed the opportunity. However, luck was on my side.

We took a trip to Polesdon Lacey with the family and, while the house and gardens were the point of the visit, the fact that there were loads of sheep in an adjoining field and they had a bunch of lambs was not going to escape me. The lambs were gambolling energetically. There was a dip in the ground which they would jump down into. Sadly, this meant they would be out of sight but, a little patience would pay off. My favourite shots came when one of the lambs was alone coming across the field to join its friends and it bounced its way across the field. Soon they will be bigger and heavier and less cute!

A Selection of Wisley Plants

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Earlier in the year, we made an afternoon visit to Wisley – the headquarters of the Royal Horticultural Society. I have posted about it previously but, this post is about some of the really cool looking plants that they have. That is what you would expect for a horticultural society, of course. Some of them are really fascinating looking plants so here are some shots.

Parakeets in Their Natural Habitat?

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Parakeets must be remarkably adaptable birds. When they escape, they seem to rapidly establish themselves in cities from which they did not originate. When we lived in Chicago, there was a park on the south side of the city which had a large parakeet colony. Richmond Park in London is a similar spot. We heard the parakeets before we saw them, but their bright flashes of color made them easy enough to spot when they got moving. They just seem to flourish wherever they are, even if they really should not be there.

How Much Purple is There on These Houses?

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While walking through Richmond, we came along a street of older houses in what seemed like quite a desirable neighborhood. The dominant feature of most of these houses was the preponderance of wisteria on their frontages. Some of the plants were confined to one house while others seemed to span whatever property that they felt like. The purple blooms were most impressive, and it seemed like they were competing to see which house could be more purple than the next. I don’t know how long wisteria blooms for so did we get lucky with our timing, or could we have been there at a wider range of times?

RHS Wisley

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On our last full day in the UK on our most recent trip, we met up with family and the Royal Horticultural Society’s grounds at Wisley. It has been quite a long time since we were last there and I only had some limited memories of the place. They were good memories, but I clearly hadn’t seen as much of the place as I could have. The old house is the first thing you see when you arrive and I’m glad that it is still there since it provides a nice introduction, even if it isn’t terribly relevant to the average visitor these days.

They have built a really nice gift shop and café/restaurant complex, and we did make good use of that on our visit. Then we headed into the gardens. They are just as nice as you would expect from an organization like the RHS. We went through one of the glasshouses and then climbed the hill to the cunningly named Hilltop building. The grounds around it are nice but they also have a rooftop area which provides a great view across the grounds. I think if I had been alone and with more time, I might have gone further afield in the grounds, but that day was not the day to do so. I did see what looked like a nice avenue on the map so wandered up through the trees to a very scenic view down back towards the main area.

Wisley is a lovely spot. I would highly recommend it if you like gardens and plants or even if you just want somewhere pleasant to wander after a decent lunch. I suspect we will make a return visit if we have a chance for more time when back in the UK.