Vickers VC10 BAC Super VC10 Type 1151

To improve seat-mile costs, Vickers worked on a Super 200 with more powerful Conway engines and 8.5 m more fuselage, seating up to 212. BOAC, already doubting it could fill the 35 VC10s on order, did not believe in a two-hundred-seat aircraft. The stretch was cut to 3.96 m and so the Super VC10 (Type 1150) was born; the original design then became the Standard.

The first Super flew from Brooklands on 7 May 1964. Although on paper a minor development of the Standard, testing dragged on: each engine pair had to be moved 27 cm outboard and upwards, and given a three-degree twist, to cure the tailplane buffeting and fatigue caused by the thrust reversers. The wing gained 3% more area through a leading-edge extension that improved low-speed lift and reduced high-Mach drag.

BOAC received seventeen Type 1151s between 1965 and 1969. One was lost in the Dawson's Field hijackings in 1970. Retirement of the British Airways fleet began in April 1980 and finished the following year: fourteen of the fifteen survivors were sold to the RAF in May 1981, and another was preserved at Duxford. Five of those stored airframes were converted into K.4 tankers in the early 1990s.