THE FAILED V-BOMBER? - Airfix's 1/72 Vickers Valiant - Kit Review

In this video I review Airfix's Vickers Valiant. I've build this kit before and it's a really enjoyable kit. The Valiant was the first of the RAF’s V Bomber trio to enter service. The most conventional of the three designs, it was also the first to drop bombs in anger against Egyptian airfields during the Suez campaign. It was also the first RAF machine to drop a Hydrogen bomb during the Operation Grapple tests in 1957 (let's see how many of you read this bit - my own little test for the algorithm :-P). However its career was cut short by serious problems with its rear spar, leading to fatal accidents and subsequent grounding of the fleet.

[@baanibarnes9711]

As you were going through the parts, I didn't see any cameras for the PR version - is that the case? No cameras? Missed opportunity if that's the case, if you're gonna do a PR plane with all that otherwise good interior detail I would have thought it would be a given to include the cameras as they are pretty important on a PR machine . . . It does, however, present an interesting opportunity to scratch build some, hmmmmm!

[@stephenpayne4896]

Personally I don’t think that the Valiant was a failure. She was an interim insurance policy if Victor or Vulcan failed. Designed for high altitude deployment where she would not get roughed up by turbulence, moving to low altitude sorties was her undoing. Buffeting would weaken her primary structure, exposing it to stresses beyond her design specification.