United States of Venezuela

KIKE92

Post subject: Re: United States of Venezuela

Posted: January 19th, 2016, 10:30 am

Posts: 546
Joined: July 26th, 2012, 12:29 pm
Location: Barcelona, Spain

BAC Three-Eleven

The Three-Eleven was introduced at the 1967 Paris Air Show. It was a widebody in the size, weight, and range class of the original, somewhat smaller European Airbus. At the time, the Three-Eleven was widely assumed to have emerged with encouragement from some British government circles and circles close to Rolls-Royce, who were anxious to have a fall-back option in case the European Airbus failed. BAC was thought to have welcomed such encouragement, not being part of the European Airbus (as distinct from Hawker Siddeley) and having little airliner work for the future as the One-Eleven project wound down.
In order to proceed, the Three-Eleven needed what was termed at the time "government launch aid." In 1967, the British government entered the Airbus Industrie consortium through Hawker Siddeley and could not support competing projects. After withdrawing from Airbus over the issue of British engines in 1969, the government was theoretically free to support the Three-Eleven.
In 1969, the British government-owned airline British European Airways (BEA) expressed willingness to operate the proposed airliner, as did the private Court Line Aviation airline. No orders were placed: design was not finalised and the programme had not launched. By this stage, but in early 1970 an order from Varig for 15 aircraft suddenly jumpstarted the entire program and with this order BEA now had an incentive to order the aircraft aswell since it wouldn't require government funding. Although their was now international support for the aircraft another problem loomed inthe horizon with Rolls royce bankruptcy, but this would be prevented by the intervention of the Brazilian and Venezuelan governments, the Brazilians due to their interest in the aircraft and the Venezuelans because they had chosen the RB211 as the secondary powerplant for the AC-10 and VA120 widebody jets and had orders from airlines which had chosen the British engine. The international intervention not only prevented Rolls royce's bankruptcy but also allowed the development of the engine to be completed on schedule.
The first prototype was finished in february 1972 with the first flight taking place two months later followed by a year of flight testing where the Three-Eleven demonstrated outstanding performance, especially in the shorter runways where the advanced wing demonstrated it was capable of providing the aircraft with similar takeoff and landing performance to that of smaller aircraft. The first production Three-Eleven entered service with Varig in January 1974 on the Sao Paulo - Caracas Route, Varig would later increase its Three-Eleven order to 30. The second airline to receive the aircraft was British Airways which ordered twenty to complement its L1011 Tristar fleet.

[ img ]

Note: All VeneAvia jetliners have been renamed, the thread will be updated soon.

_________________
kike-92

Top

Shipbucket

Who is online