Talk:Avro Tudor

Removing Tudor 2 specs

Only 5 Tudor 2 aircraft were built, so I'm removing the specs here, reproduced below. WP:AIR prefers just the most common variant, and with an aircraft as rare as the Tudor, I'm not sure it will be missed. A list of variants can include the changes just as effectively. ericg ✈ 06:51, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

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Reason for delays

There's a Pathe News video on the Tudor II, "The Tudor Muddle", on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZk48bIkz4I

The delay in introducing the Tudor II is attributed to; 'hampered for three years by government in triplicate' and modifications requested that made the plane '8,000lb overweight'. The Courtney Report into the affair is mentioned, which places the blame on BOAC and the Government. A figure of £6,000,000 ($24,000,000) lost by the taxpayer is also mentioned. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.40.254.43 (talk) 11:07, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

This needs to be backed up

In the lead section: "customers saw the aircraft as little more than a pressurised DC-4 Skymaster, and few orders were forthcoming, important customers preferring to buy US aircraft."

This could do with a citation in and of itself, I think. But more importantly, the conclusion it draws doesn't seem to make sense. A pressurized cabin allows an aircraft to fly higher into thinner air, which can improve its range substantially (less air resistance = more efficient use of fuel) and thus make it significantly cheaper to operate commercially. Given that operating cost advantage, no aircraft buyer would have looked at the Tudor and thought, 'It's just a DC-4 with a pressurized cabin, so I may as well just buy a DC-4.' -- Hux (talk) 21:03, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

The Tudor's main problem was mucking-about by the customer, i.e., BOAC via the MoS. Put simply the customer kept changing their mind about what they wanted to do with the aircraft/what they wanted it for, often when the latest sets of changes had just been implemented. They changed the requirements a number of times, including changing the cabin windows from rounded to square ones, because the passengers preferred them, and various other changes which not only increased the weight, compromising the operating costs, but also vastly increasing the overall cost of the aircraft. One of the successors to BOAC, BEA, did the same thing a few years later, with the Trident, resulting in another aircraft that did less well than it should have. After the round windows on the partially-completed Tudors had been changed to square ones, it was then later found after the Comet crashes that they needed to be changed back to rounded ones. The customer also changed the seating capacity required a number of times, necessitating the fuselage length being changed more than once, with subsequent effects on the stability, due to the fixed size of the tail surfaces. The tail surfaces later required enlarging due to the much increased side area in the new lengthened nose section ahead of the wing. 'Stretching' an airliner by adding new sections into the cabin is fairly common nowadays, but it helps if the possibility of 'stretch' is factored-in at the initial design stage, but for the Tudor it was not. I think that in all probability, BOAC didn't really KNOW what it wanted, and it was only when it was offered the opportunity to buy something that someone else was using successfully, such as the Boeing Stratocruiser and Lockheed Constellation, that it knew what to buy. The Stratocruiser was also based on a bomber design (the B-50) so it wasn't anything to do with the Tudor's military ancestry. Because of the involvement of the MoS in the Tudor project, that also meant that not only Civil Servants became 'involved' in the design, but also politicians, and the net contribution of their 'interest' was the early Tudors.

it's probably fair to say that Avro might have been forgiven for telling BOAC and the MoS to get stuffed after the fiasco with the Tudor. Given the choice I suspect that Avro would have preferred to start again with a clean sheet of paper, but they were not allowed to. At least the Tudor IV was quite an elegant, handsome-looking machine compared to the earlier Marks, and it did at least 'look right'

.

I forgot to say - the reason that few customers bought the Tudor was most likely due to economics, i.e., they were unable to make a profit using the aircraft on the routes they had planned. Considering the excellent fuel-economy of the Merlin engine (which was also used on the Canadair North Star/Argonaut) any high operating costs could not have been due to high fuel consumption, so presumably there was some other reason, I suspect that the passenger-numbers originally specified by BOAC may have been uneconomic for other airlines, but it may just have been that the aircraft demanded high maintenance due to the lack of proper (i.e., unhurried) development. Another factor may have been the noise of the un-silenced Merlin engines, which also affected the North Star/Argonaut, however Rolls-Royce were working on the cross-over exhaust design that may have cured that problem for both aircraft. Then again, Rolls-Royce were having a hard time getting the highly-tuned Merlin certificated to civilian standards, so that may have also had a bearing on the prospective viability of the aircraft - TBOH is important for an airline - much less-so for an air force. From the customer's point of view it was probably just a safer bet to buy the US-built airliners. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.112.61.98 (talk) 20:35, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Just reading what Eric "Winkle" Brown has to say on the early Tudor, which the RAE was asked to help sort out, apparently it had excessively high cruising drag, high engine-out safety speed, bad stalling characteristics and "control difficulties" during take-off - presumably that means a pronounced swing with the early small fin/rudder. He says that they managed to fix most of the problems but that it was never going to be a "specially good aeroplane". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.112.84.120 (talk) 19:20, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

A bit in a 1947 issue of Flight on the inquiry into the Tudors - "The Tudor Position" - cites a swing on take-off and an unexpectedly low Air Miles Per-Gallon (AMPG) figure when flown from 'hot and high' airfields at weights of 80,000lb, here; [1] ... and some general info on the Tudor in "Tudor Topics" here: [2] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 20:23, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

One of the most interesting variants was the (never built) Napier Nomad engined version. This was a potential simultaneous development with the Tudor III and would have offered excellent fuel economy for the long-haul runs, much better than anything US-built. Of course the abandonment of the Nomad I and the resultant delays were one problem, as was the Nomad's (and its exhaust's) impossibility to fit the standardised power egg fitting of the Tudor. However the real problem, as always for these decades, was in-fighting between the civil service and playing off the various aerospace companies against each other. Andy Dingley (talk) 21:49, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the info - 1954 Flight detailed article on the Nomad by Bill Gunston here: [3]

... an article by a Napier engineer in the same issue [4] quotes some 1954 UK aviation fuel prices which are; Avtur at 1 shilling & 10 pence per-gallon (pre decimalisation), 100/130 grade avgas at 2 shillings, 7 & 1/4 pence per-gal, and 115/145 grade avgas at 2 shillings and 9 pence per-gal. In contrast, diesel was 1 shilling and 8 pence per-gal.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 18:36, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

A Napier Nomad 2 mounted in the outboard nacelle of a Shackleton in a 1961 issue of Flight — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 15:47, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Price of the Avro needs to be determined. In the late 40s there were many thousands of military DC-3 and DC-4s up for sale. They were cheap and very reliable. Even US manufacturers suffered from this post war dumping of their own aircraft. The US govt compensated them with lucrative defence contracts. The Avro was a large machine and the tail dragger config becomes more dangerous with increasing size and weight. These machines ground loop too easily, and can tip over on soft muddy surfaces or upon hitting a pothole.220.244.72.167 (talk) 11:58, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

The Tudor was designed for BOAC which was state-owned at the time and so the people paying for the aircraft bought for that airline were the UK taxpayer and BOAC had in fact been set-up and operated to provide a service to the UK taxpayer and not just to make a profit, as at that time there was as-yet too little passenger traffic to actually make money with the services.

At this time c. 1945-46 due to the war the pre-war airlines had all needed to be amalgamated as the halting of airline services due to the war had prevented these small airlines remaining in business. As-such there was no-one other than the British government (i.e., the UK taxpayer) with the finances to run an airline. Airliners encountered over Britain and much of Europe by either side during the war were liable to be shot down, so the UK government had had little choice than to halt all airline operations, with the exception of what had been Imperial Airways which had been renamed BOAC in 1940. Being under state control it was possible to organise BOAC flights such that the UK air defences were aware of their flights and left them alone, and where possible they were routed away from enemy-occupied areas or areas where there were known enemy aircraft in the air.

The Tudor was specifically requested while WW II was still ongoing as a post-war airliner derivative of the Avro Lincoln bomber, and was to use as many components of the latter as was practicable. This included the undercarriage. After WW II most airports of any importance had paved concrete runways, so potholes were only likely to be found on lesser airports and airfields. The Tudor certainly wasn't envisaged as being operated from muddy fields. The majority of the Dakotas/C-47's in the UK had been obtained under Lend-Lease and were required once war was over to be returned to the US or scrapped, so there was no likelihood or indication of them subsequently becoming available to UK airlines until some time later. Hence the requirement for what became the Tudor, preceded by the stop-gap Lancastrian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.100.164 (talk) 11:02, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

References

Survivors?

I notice the article has no section on surviving examples of the type. Do any still exist? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.23.61.42 (talk • contribs) 00:02, 3 September 2013

• I dont think so the last ones were scrapped in the 1950s, the forward fuselage of an Avro Ashton survives which is a variant of the Tudor. MilborneOne (talk) 19:28, 30 September 2013 (UTC)