Tag Archives: Vickers

Reinforcement Around a Cargo Door

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!

KLM Vickers Viscount

First up, a disclaimer.  This is one of the few (only?) photos on the blog that I didn’t take.  When you look at it, that should be pretty clear.  I have been working through a scanning job of old negatives and slides that my parents took.  A few shots I took too with their cameras but that is off topic.  In the process of scanning these shots, I came across a few aviation shots.  (Thanks Mum for taking some shots of RAF Hawks at Chivenor in the camo days while she was traveling passed there!). My parent made a trip to the Netherlands long before I was born and they flew there on a KLM Vickers Viscount.  My Dad kindly thought to take a picture of the plane knowing that, decades later, I would be delighted to find it.  Nice job!