V for Victory

In a corner of Hurn Airport, near Britain's south coast, stand six black-painted hangars belonging to Vickers Ltd. Inside are planes abuilding that pose the biggest threat to U.S. domination of the world's transport airlanes. The planes are Vickers Viscounts, 48 place, 320-m.p.h. airliners with four turboprop engines. A fortnight ago the first Viscount of a 22-plane order for Trans-Canada Airlines flew across the Atlantic to Montreal. Last week another new turboprop took off for the other end of the world, one of a six-plane order for Trans-Australia Airlines which the company finds ideal for its needs.

In the hangars, three more Viscounts are nearing completion, the first of a Go-plane, $67 million order for Capital Airlines, the first U.S. airline to switch from piston to turbine power and the first in history to buy anything but U.S. planes. With American Airlines, biggest U.S. line, shopping around for replacements for its 77-plane fleet of two-engine Convairs, U.S. planemakers will have to scramble to keep Vickers from making an even bigger dent in the short-haul airliner market. All told, the world's airlines have ordered 177 Viscounts, and many of the new planes will replace American equipment.

Viscounts in Vickerland. To Britons, Vickers' new Viscount is soothing balm after the blows to their prestige from the De Havilland Comet crashes. British aviation experts make the point that wherever Viscounts have flown on trunk (under 1,000 mile) routes, the turboprop planes have proved tough competition for piston-engined U.S. transports. Their four 1,400-h.p. Rolls Royce jet engines, hooked to propellers, not only make them about 35 m.p.h. faster than competing Convairs, but also much quieter and smoother riding. (British European Airways passenger traffic has gone up about 26% since switching to Viscounts from DC-35 and Vikings.) Instead of expensive high-octane gas, they fly on cheap kerosene, are easier to operate and maintain since the engines have fewer moving parts. At only 30% of capacity, say Vickers, the Viscount can cover operating costs. Vickers has also learned the trick of U.S.-type maintenance; it has already arranged for special parts depots in Winnipeg, Man. and Alexandria, Va. for maintenance of Trans-Canada's and Capital's new Viscounts.

The Viscount is Britain's greatest single commercial victory of the postwar years, but it is only a tiny fraction of Vickers' mighty empire, sprawling over 17 separate divisions. Vickers has 80,000 workers, assets of nearly $400 million; last year its profits hit $20 million on an array of products from aircraft to yzarine (a type of suede cloth for shoes).

To show the variety of its production, Vickers' brass like to describe a trip to an imaginary city: the visitor arrives aboard a huge ocean liner built by Vickers' shipbuilding division, steams into a harbor past Vickers fishing vessels and ties up at a pier near a Vickers drydock. Boarding a Vickers-made bus (now running in cities from Cairo to Montevideo), the sightseer travels past rows of cement kilns made by Vickers, past Vickers oil-storage tanks, Vickers rubber plants, steel mills, printing plants, bottling plants, all equipped with Vickers machinery. He tours the suburbs on a Vickers electrified train. Going home again, he boards a Vickers airliner on an airfield carved out by Vickers tractors and earth movers. And this is only half the business. For defense, Vickers also makes shells, cannon and 50-ton Centurion tanks, battleships (the 44,460-ton King George V), carriers (the 31,790-ton Illustrious), destroyers, a new type sub that runs on hydrogen peroxide, jet fighters and bombers for the R.A.F.

Elbowroom & Gun Buses. The boss of this giant combine is handsome, white-haired Sir Ronald Weeks, 64, who was a Tommy in World War I (Distinguished Service Cross), after the war worked his way up the rungs of Vickers to become chairman in 1948. The last Vickers family interest was dissolved 25 years ago, and the company is now owned by 65,000 stockholders. But when Edward Vickers founded Vickers to make steel in 1828, he set out to make it big by diversification.

Starting with steel, Vickers first pushed into shipbuilding, by 1900 was building a large portion of Britain's fleet and its first submarine. In World War I, Vickers saw new business in the budding air age, turned out the Vickers "gun bus," one of the world's first planes armed with machine guns (which Vickers also produced). Later, the first flight across the Atlantic was made by Alcock and Brown in a Vickers "Vimy."

The Swift & Valiant. Between wars, the company expanded still more by swallowing up Armstrong-Whitworth, one of Britain's leading manufacturers of engineering equipment, went into a whole line of heavy machine tools. For its heavy military business in the '30s, Vickers was tagged a "merchant of death." But in World War II, its fabled Spitfire (935,000 sorties by 1945) helped win the Battle of Britain, and its slab-sided Wellington bomber supplied the R.A.F.'s first counterpunch.

Since then Vickers has cut back its military business to slightly under 50%. Chairman Weeks will keep it that way, ready for hot or cold war, spreading his bets over a variety of products in every division. Planes are no exception. In addition to its civilian Viscount, Vickers is also busy making its supersonic jet Supermarine Swift for the R.A.F., though bugs have slowed production. Its huge, four-jet Vickers Valiant is Britain's first long-range A-bomber to hit the production line. And to back up its short-range Viscount in the battle for airline supremacy, Vickers designers are at work on the Vickers 1,000, a huge swept-wing transport with four Rolls Royce Conway bypass engines, designed to carry 150 passengers nonstop across the Atlantic.

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