Fly to museum home page	Handley page Victor K.2

Wing span	120 ft	36.48 m
Wing area	2,597 sq_ft	241.3 sq_m
Length	114 ft 11 in	35.03 ms
Height	28 ft 1 in	8.57 m
Empty weight	91,000 lbs	41,275 kg
MTO weight	216,000 lbs	97,980 kg
Maximum speed	640 mph / 555 KT	1,030 kph
Service ceiling	52,500 ft	16,000 m
Combat radius	2,300 Miles / 2,4000 NMiles	3,700 km

The Handley-Page Victor The Victor was arguably the most unconventional of the three V-bombers, but it proved very successful, persisting in service into the 1990s in the tanker role.

HISTORY

The Handley-Page Victor was the last of the three British V-bombers to enter service. Handley-Page had been considering concepts for some time and the basic design, designated HP.80, was designed to operate at high speed and altitude, above the ceiling of contemporary fighters. The aircraft featured a crescent wing, with the sweep decreasing in three steps from the root to the tip, and the chord similarly decreasing to ensure a constant limiting Mach number across the entire wing and a high cruise speed.

The HP.80's crescent wing was to be tested on a one-third scale radio controlled glider, designated the HP.87, but it crashed on its first flight. This exercise having proven a failure, in 1948 the Air Ministry issued specification, E.6/48, for a piloted demonstrator, which emerged as the HP.88.

HP.88 design and construction was farmed out to General Aircraft LTD. General Aircraft obtained a fuselage for the Attacker jet fighter from Supermarine and refitted it with a crescent wing and a tee tail. The HP.88 performed its first flight on 21 June 1951. General Aircraft had been bought out by Blackburn by this time, and Blackburn test pilot G.R.I. Parker was at the controls.

However, the HP.80's design had changed in the interim and the HP.88 wing was no longer representative of the aircraft it was supposed to be testing. In addition, the initial HP.80 prototype was already under construction, it broke up in flight on 26 August 1951, killing the pilot, Duggie Broomfield.

WB771, the first of the two HP.80 prototypes, was hauled by road 90 miles from the Handley-Page factory at Radlett to the test centre at Boscombe Down for flight trials. WB771 was reassembled at Boscombe Down. WB771 was finally put into condition for taking to the air, and the prototype performed its initial flight on 24 December 1952, with Handley-Page's chief test pilot, Squadron Leader Hedley George Hazelden, at the controls. WB771 was powered by four Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire 7 Mark 200 turbojet engines. Hazelden described the initial flight as comfortable with no anxieties. WB771 made an appearance at the Farnborough Air Show in 1953, with the aircraft painted with a black fuselage with a red cheat line and silver wings. Trials showed the basic design to be sound, with some corrections needed. WB771 was lost in a crash on 14 July 1954 while on a low-level run. The tail assembly was weak and tore off, with test pilot Ronald Ecclestone and his crew all killed.

The second prototype, WB775, which featured a reinforced tail, performed its initial flight on 11 September 1954.

First flight of a production aircraft was on 1 February 1956, with test pilot Johnny Allam at the controls. Allam accidentally broke Mach 1 in a shallow dive on 1 June 1957, making it the largest aircraft to that time to exceed the speed of sound.

The type finally entered RAF service with Number 232 Operational Conversion Unit (OCU) in November 1957, and reached its first operational unit, 10 Squadron, in April 1958.

The Victor was made mostly of aluminium aircraft alloys, in the form of a two-skin sandwich with corrugated filling, held together with spot welding. The wing had large flaps and leading-edge flaps somewhat oddly called nose flaps ? to reduce takeoff distance, plus a sweptback tee tail.

The Victor featured tricycle landing gear. The nose gear had twin wheels and retracted backward; each main gear unit consisted of eight-wheel bogies, with two rows of four tires, and retracted into the wings. Large hydraulic airbrakes were fitted to each side of the tail cone, and the tail cone contained a drag chute. B.1's were initially painted in a tidy overall anti-flash white to reflect the heat of a nuclear blast.

The B.1 was fitted with four Armstrong-Siddeley Sapphire 7 202/207 turbojet engines with 11,000 lbs thrust each.

The Victor carried a crew of five, including a pilot, co-pilot, two navigators, and an electronics systems officer, all in a spacious cockpit. Ejection seats were only provided for the pilot and co-pilot, on the basis that they would generally stay with the aircraft until the rest of the crew got out. There had been thought of building the entire crew compartment as an escape module, but the Air Ministry judged this measure too tricky and expensive.

The nose featured a large dielectric panel for navigation / targeting radar. The Victor could carry a single thermonuclear bomb, generally a British Yellow Sun weapon, though it also carried American fusion weapons under a dual command arrangement. For conventional carpet bombing, the Victor B.1 could carry up to 1,000 pound bombs in its internal bomb bay. The bomb bay could also be fitted with a long-range ferry tank.

The production B.1 visibly differed from the two prototypes in a number of respects. The prototypes had proven uncomfortably tail-heavy, and so the forward fuselage was stretched by 42 inches and the height of the tailfin was cut to fix the problem. In addition, the crew door was moved to allow the crew to bail out without being sucked into the engines; cabin glazing was increased and rearranged; the tailfin fillet was eliminated and the tail tee-joint bullet fairing was modified; and the top of the outer wing was fitted with a set of small vortex generator airfoils to ensure proper low-speed airflow.

A total of 50 B.1s was built, with the last delivered in February 1961, and it also equipped Numbers 15, 55, and 57 Squadrons. By the time the Victor was in full service, adversary fighters and other defences were well able to reach or exceed its speed and altitude. To improve the survivability of the type, 24 were modified to the Victor B.1A standard, being fitted with the Red Steer tail-warning radar, a radar warning receiver (RWR), and a set of jamming transmitters.

Handley-Page felt they could do better with the Victor, and in 1955 began work on the definitive Victor B.2. A Victor B.1 was modified as the prototype, performing its initial flight on 20 February 1959. Unfortunately, this machine crashed into the Irish Sea in August 1959 during trials, the crew being lost. The program went ahead despite the mishap; the B.2 initially went into service with 139 Squadron in February 1962. The B.2 also equipped 100 Squadron.

Four Rolls-Royce Conway 103 turbojets replaced the Sapphires of the B.1 and providing 17,250 lbs thrust each. Fitting of the Conway's required substantial inlet modifications to provide greater airflow.

The wing was stretched, extended by 18 inches at the root and 3 feet 6 inches for an overall stretch of 10 feet.

XL164 in service

A revised electrical system was fitted, plus a Blackburn-Turbomeca Artouste auxiliary power unit (APU) in the right wing stub for engine self-starting.

They soon acquired a midair refuelling probe, sticking out from the top of the cockpit; under wing tanks; speed pod fairings on the rear of the wings to improve aerodynamics, with the pods also carrying chaff dispensers; a hump in front of the tailfin with jamming gear, featuring two prominent elephant ear cooling intakes preceding it; and a countermeasures system in the tail cone, which was ringed with small antenna fairings. Anti-flash white colours gave way to a disruptive camouflage scheme, with the first camouflaged B.2s going into service in early 1964.

A total of 34 B.2s were built up to April 1963, with 21 of these quickly modified to the Victor B.2(RS) specification, featuring up rated Conway 201 turbojets with 20,600 lbs thrust each and the ability to carry the Blue Steel standoff missile semi-externally. The Victor was also to carry the US-built Skybolt air-launched ballistic missile, with two under each wing for a total of four.

The Victor never fired a shot in anger the Victors never did perform any bombing attacks.

There had been plans to modify some of the Victor B.2s to the Victor SR.2 strategic reconnaissance configuration; the program was accelerated to make up for the loss of the reconnaissance Valiants.

The first Victor SR.2 was flown on 23 February 1965. It featured camera and other reconnaissance sensors, including a radar mapping system, fitted into the bomb bay. A total of nine B.2's were converted to the SR.2 standard, and operated by 543 Squadron, which received its first SR.2 in May 1965.

With the introduction of the Victor B.2, the Victor B.1/1A was judged obsolescent for the bombing role. A B.1 was converted to a tanker configuration in 1964 to evaluate the usefulness of the type for midair refuelling, but the Valiant was also being used as a tanker and the retirement of the Valiant force in that same year meant that the RAF suddenly needed new tankers right away and couldn't wait for the trials program to be completed.

Six B.1A's were hastily fitted with a Flight Refuelling FR.20B hose and drogue unit (HDU) under each wing to provide a two-point refuelling capability. They were originally designated Victor BK.1A and later re-designated as Victor B.1A (K2P).

The initial tanker trials were completed and the rest of the conversions of the B.1/B.1A were more thorough, with these airframess fitted with both the wing HDUs and an FR.17 centreline station, with a fuel tank in the bomb bay. Eleven B.1s and fourteen B.1As were modified to this three-point configuration. They were originally designated BK.1 and BK.1A respectively, later changed to K.1 and K.1A. The first Victor tanker squadron, Number 57, became operational in February 1966, to be followed by 55 and 214 Squadrons.

The Victor had not been designed for the low-level operational role, and by 1968 it was apparent that the B.2s would have to be retired from this duty, leaving the Avro Vulcan to carry on in that function. The decision was made to refit the B.2s to a three-point tanker configuration. Handley Page had conducted technical studies on the matter from 1967, but the company went under in 1969, and the contract for the upgrades was awarded to Hawker Siddeley in 1970. Hawker Siddeley completed the upgrade program, with some difficulty since the company had little expertise with the Victor and had to start from scratch.

24 B.2s were upgraded to Victor K.2 spec, with the first flying on 1 March 1972. All the bombing gear was removed, while the wing was strengthened and 18 inches were clipped off each wingtip to reduce flight stress. The under nose glazing was finally eliminated. The K.2 could carry 91,000 pounds of fuel.

543 Squadron was looted for B.2s to make the K.2s, and as a result the squadron was disbanded in May 1974. The first Victor K.2s went into service with 57 Squadron in July 1975, followed by service with 55 Squadron beginning in April 1976. With the improved K.2s in service, Number 214 Squadron, which had been operating the old K.1s, was disbanded. The SR.2s had already been retired by this time, with the last withdrawn from service in 1975 for conversion to K.2s. They were replaced by reconnaissance-configured Vulcan B.2s.

In 1982 Argentina seized the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, and as part of the operation to retake them, the RAF was to conduct raids with Avro Vulcan bombers. The nearest RAF base was on Ascension Island in the central Atlantic, so that meant a heavy reliance on midair refuelling, provided by Victors. The effort was codenamed BLACK BUCK.

All the Vulcan attacks involved a single bomber, supported by a number of Victors. The first BLACK BUCK strike was on 1 May, with a Vulcan bombing the runway at Port Stanley in the Falklands with high explosive (HE) bombs. It was the longest bomb raid that had ever been flown to that time; it was not only effective in denying local air support to the Argentine Falklands garrison, but also gave the Argentine government notice that the RAF could bomb Buenos Aries or other mainland targets if needed.

A second raid with HE bombs was flown on 3 May. Vulcan's were then fitted with Shrike anti-radar missiles provided by the US, with a flight on 28 May being scrubbed in-flight due to a technical problem with a Victor, but similar missions were flown on 29 May and 2 June, with Argentine radar installations successfully targeted and disabled. The fifth and last BLACK BUCK flight, carrying HE bombs fused for airburst to attack Argentine troops, was on 11 June, with the Argentine garrison finally throwing in the towel on 15 June.

The second combat operations of the Victor took place in the Gulf War. Following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, an American-led Coalition assembled overwhelming force to throw him out. The RAF was a significant contributor to the effort, the British component being named OPERATION GRANBY, and eight Victors provided tanker support. They were painted in Desert Pink, really more of a sand colour. The Victors flew 229 sorties, providing refuelling services for US Navy aircraft along with the RAF fleet. Victors also provided tanker support for air patrols over Iraq into 1993.

However, this was the swan song of the Victor, since the Vickers VC.10 was gradually replacing it for tanker duties. The last Victor unit, 55 Squadron, was disbanded in October 1993, dissolving the very last remnant of the V-force. There is now no flying example of any Victor left. Five remain as static display items, all in the UK.

Variant	Built	Updated	Notes
HP.80	2		Initial prototype.
B.1	50		Initial bomber variant.
B.1A	-	24	B.1 with improved ECM.
B.1A(K2P)	-	6	B.1A quick bomber / tanker conversions.
K.1	-	11	B.1 tanker conversion.
K.1A	-	11	B.1A tanker conversion.
B.2	34	-	Improved bomber, new engines, wider span.
B.2R	-	21	B.2 with Blue Steel, uprated engines.
SR.2	-	9	B.2 strategic reconnaissance configuration.
K.2	-	24	B.2 tanker conversion.

Total	86

As with any successful aircraft, there were a number of un-built variants of the Victor. There was talk of a commercial airliner / transport derivative, with the same flight surfaces but a different fuselage, variously designated the HP.97 and HP.111. Handley-Page also considered a supersonic Victor, with a redesigned forward fuselage, an area ruled rear fuselage, a shorter wing, and new engines. The company also came up with an un-built design for a low-level bomber, with short wings, but it had little in common with the Victor except for the cockpit.

XL164 at Gatwick Aviation Museum

Handley page Victor K.2

HISTORY

XL164 at Gatwick Aviation Museum