Bristol Freighter

Bristol Freighter

The Bristol Type 170 Freighter was a British twin-engine aircraft designed and built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company as both a freighter and airliner, although its best known use is as an air ferry to carry cars and their passengers over relatively short distances.

¼==Design and development==

The Bristol Type 170 was designed to Air Ministry Specifications 22/44 and C.9/45 originally as a rugged, heavy-duty transport to operate from unimproved airstrips. After the end of the Second World War the design was adapted by the Bristol Chief Designer A.E. Russell and his design team as a rugged, heavy-duty aircraft. It was an all-metal, twin-engine high-wing monoplane and built without the use of expensive alloys and with a minimum of machined parts. The square-sectioned fuselage was designed to be clear of internal obstructions. The flight deck was high in the fuselage nose, accessed via a ladder.

The Freighter was a somewhat bulbous and cumbersome-looking aircraft. Like the more slender prewar Bombay, it was a high-wing monoplane with fixed undercarriage, the main gear legs supported by substantial vertical struts beneath the Bristol Hercules radial engines and horizontally from the lower edge of the (slab-sided) fuselage. The cockpit sat atop the forward fuselage, with two large clamshell doors in the nose, making the unpressurised fuselage somewhat breezy; one Kiwi pilot claimed his charge was "40 thousand rivets flying in close formation."

The prototype, registered G-AGPV, first flew at Filton on 2 December 1945; it was an empty shell without nose doors.