Handley Page Victor: XH648

Jon White (JW): "Here this is the actual bomb bay of the Victor, and this would have held its nuclear bombs or its nuclear missiles or whatever the payload was at the time. Predominantly in here it's  just been cleaning work, this is one of the areas which was a lot better condition than we actually thought it was going to be.

"One of the issues with particularly like British aircraft is the fact they're all hand manufactured, they weren't mass produced. But as I say, this variant here, there's only six ever made of them, so literally they were changed during manufacture. It is one of the larger projects we've undertaken here at the museum and it is also probably the first time that anybody has done this amount of work on a Victor in the last 30 years."

Duxford's Handley Page Victor has been under conservation now for four years. Victor XH648 is currently in Hangar 5 with no outer wings, no tail plane, no fin, a large chunk of her undercarriage removed, and her paintwork almost entirely stripped. So what does it take to preserve a Cold War bomber? With no instruction manual to guide them, how did the team begin this project, what can be repaired, and what needs replacing, and what have they discovered so far?

Newsreel: "The V bomber force are patrolling for any signs of enemy movements. They're ready and able to deliver heavy strike power if it's needed."

Originally built as a B1 model, this Victor first flew in November 1959, and just six years later, Handley Page converted the aircraft into a two-point tanker BK model. Only six of these models were ever built and this Victor is now the last BK model left in the world. We’ll take a look at exactly what a tanker BK model is in a bit. But their rarity  
meant that when our conservators began their work 4 years ago, they didn’t really know exactly what they would find, or what condition the aircraft would be in.

Over the last four years the exterior and interior of the aircraft have been thoroughly checked for corrosion, the paintwork has been stripped and needs reapplying, and cracking in the undercarriage has meant that some new parts have needed to be manufactured. But before any of this work could even begin the huge Victor needed to be entirely  disassembled so it could even fit in the hangar.

JW: "The museum got the Victor in 1976 and one of the issues was that there wasn't anywhere large enough to keep the Victor. So it stood outside for a long time which did cause a few issues with corrosion etc. One of the most difficult parts of the process of getting it in for conservation was actually disassembling and bringing it into what is essentially a First World War hangar, which is obviously never designed to take an aircraft that large. So what we've had to do is disassemble the Victor, take its outer wings off, its fin and tail plane off, and managed to get it in."

One of Britain’s V bombers, the Victor was designed from a specification drawn up in 1947. Three candidates were put forward to be built: the Victor, the Vulcan and the Valiant.

The Victor was striking in appearance and sophisticated in design, boasting a range of 6000 miles and bomb load of 35,000 pounds. The role of the V bombers was to be high  
level strategic nuclear bombers. Throughout the 1960s, the main RAF bomber bases each maintained at least two V-Bombers loaded with nuclear weapons on standby alert, 
ready to take off on four minute’s notice. However, this role relatively was short lived, as Soviet surface-to-air missiles plus Polaris missiles made high-level bombing virtually redundant.

The Valiants were switched to become refuelling aircraft, but they were brought out of service due to spar fatigue issues. To fill this gap, six B-variant  Victors were converted into refuelers instead. XH648 was one of these, converted in 1965.

JW: "The B1K as ours is very unusual as a refueller because of the fact it still has its bomb bay, and it can still carry nuclear weapons. And it's a parasitical refueller, which means it uses its own fuel to refuel other aircraft. So the more you refuel other aircraft, the less range this particular aircraft has.

"It wasn't particularly a successful aircraft because it only had two refuelling points with a very low flow rate so these were actually phased out quite early on. The museum's Victor is actually the only Victor that has ever dropped a full bomb load: it was 36,000 pounds worth of bombs. It was during the Indonesian confrontation in the ‘60s, just basically a show of strength."

This Victor first flew in November 1959 and was delivered to 59 Squadron at Honnington. In 1960 it was converted to a B1 A, and equipped with electronic countermeasure equipment, improved radio and radar equipment and Sapphire turbojet engines.

Following its conversion, XH648 flew as part of the Far East Air Force during the Indonesian Confrontation. In 1965, it was converted into a two-point tanker. It was retired in 1976, when it was gifted to the IWM.

XH648 was on display outdoors at Duxford for many years, and conservation work has not been done on the aircraft since the 1980s. So in 2007 she was brought into a hangar, and in 2017 the extensive conservation project began.

JW: "The first thing we do when we get any aircraft or object in to conserve, we will do a full survey on it. This is particularly difficult on a large object like an aircraft is because you  have to do internal, external ones so you have to practically disassemble the whole aircraft to actually see what the state of the aircraft is.

"The aircraft, when it's finished, it will be in its camouflage scheme: it will have a white underside and a grey and green upper side and it will be full gloss, as its 57 squadron’s colour scheme."

One of the biggest difficulties with aircraft conservation is trying to find out how the aircraft was manufactured.

JW:: "A lot of the knowledge has been lost. We can ascertain the materials it was made of originally but it's actual, the physical process of how things were put together. One of the issues  with aircraft from this particular period is they're very much from a generation of being built with semi-modern technology and older technology, there's so many different materials in it, so the Victor itself has the latest, of the time, modern aluminiums in it, it has plastics in it, nylons and even wood. So all of those different components have to be looked after in different ways, which does create some issues sometimes.

JW: "A lot of the materials and hardware - hardware as we call it being nuts, bolts, rivets and stuff like that - we can still get supplies of those and if possible we like to retain the the originals so the aircraft remains original. But if needed we can actually purchase some of the original hardware.

"It's practically a straightforward aircraft. Most aircraft up until probably the late '80s were practically all the same construction. There isn't any modern materials in it like carbon fibers or you know other things like that which we can't understand yet, because they haven't been around long enough, how they will last the length of time say that like this aircraft has."

The conservation team is made up of around 16 conservators as well as a number of volunteers. Most of the team are from engineering backgrounds. Each member brings a different set of skills and knowledge and after 4 years working on the Victor, they now have a thorough understanding of the aircraft’s construction.

JW: "There's a multitude of processes involved in the conservation of a large aircraft like this. Predominantly we use various chemicals: we use blasting techniques, we've even used laser paint stripping on this particular aircraft as a trial. You treat steels differently to aluminiums to plastics to everything else.

"When we got the Victor into the hanger and disassembled it was surprisingly good condition. One of the major issues we've had with this is that it's got a very high magnesium content and magnesium is a very unstable metal, so we've had to manufacture all the magnesium components, like the trailing edges and parts of the undercarriage and everything that were corroded, we've made these out of proprietary modern aluminium."

This aircraft is not being restored to flying level. To make an historic aircraft fly, modern regulations need to be abided by. Instead, IWM aims to preserve historic objects as a reference piece for future generations. This means that some of the original equipment within the aircraft is missing and can’t be replaced.

JW: "So here is one of the avionics bays. It would have various radios in it, transmitters in it, gross electrical components. Unfortunately we don't have all the equipment to go in here because a lot of it was lost due to a process of when the museum does get stuff, the RAF have a policy of doing spares recovery, which means anything that is usable on something else they will keep that. But that's one of the things in doing conservation of something this large - we will never ever finish doing this because there will always be one more bit that we need to find or do so it's just a, you know, it's continuous ongoing procedure."

At this point in time, with around four months to go before the end of the project, the team are now working on replacing sections of the undercarriage. They’ve had to fabricate new parts for it due to cracking and corrosion.

JW: "This here is one of the components of the undercarriage, one that takes the largest torsional loads. When we started stripping the undercarriage down we found it had a lot of really large cracks in it which could have caused  the undercarriage to break so these actual parts here have all been newly manufactured. 

"This is the port undercarriage leg which has been fully stripped down and fully rebuilt. In the upper parts which fitted on here we found some stress cracks and that we've had to replace all those items. These are the ones that are here."

As well as working on the undercarriage, one of the final stages that the team have started working on is finishing off the surface treatment, which needs to be done before the outer wings, tail plane and fins are put back on.

JW: "It's just a matter of you know - we stripped all the paint off of it to see if there's any corrosion on the skins, so as you can see behind me, half the aircraft is practically painted, the other half now is just finishing off the surface treatment and is ready for its paint layer. Once the surface treatments are finished off we'll put the primer on the aircraft, then it will be repainted with its camouflage.

"Once that's done the few minor other assemblies will be put on: we will put the outer wings on the aircraft,  we will put the tail plane on the aircraft and the fin. Then there's a few other little items to go on like the outer wing refuelling pods and then the aircraft will be ready for display.

"The team working on it, they've been doing it four years and they're really looking forward to getting the project finished, and it's just going to be great to see the Victor done and looking as it was when it flew into Duxford in 1976."