Flying Failures - Aviation Traders ATL-90 Accountant
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ธ.ค. 2024
- Hello again! :D
In this instalment of Flying Failures, we look now at a very obscure product from the Aviation Traders company of Sir Freddie Laker, when during a cutthroat period of innovation as turboprop commercial airliners were rapidly pushed to the fore by the huge success of the Vickers Viscount, various different competitors attempted to seek domination of this new market segment, with Laker stepping in with his own aircraft resale and scrap brokerage company developing its first ever bespoke model, the ATL-90 Accountant, an aircraft that promised many great things on paper, but due to the inexperience of the firm in creating new models, delivered very little in real life.
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References:
Key Aero (and their respective references)
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They knew how to choose a dynamic, exciting name. Comet, Vanguard, Viscount, Trident ... Accountant. Presumably the thinking was that it would suggest it was careful with money, but it's not the most stirring
Accountant. It was for Budget airlines?
As an accountant, I 100% agree. They also had future plans for the ATEL Actuary and the ATEL Solicitor.
My favourite Aviation Traders aircraft is the ATL-98 Carvair. For those who don't know, it's the turboprop 747.
I used to watch them in the 60s, as they took off from Lydd in Kent, along with Bristol Freighters, and flew over the beach at Greatstone on the way to France. Wonderful.
The Carvair retained the DC-4s Pratt and Whitney piston engines.
This channel already has a video on the Carvair: th-cam.com/video/GJcXJG9LRhI/w-d-xo.html
Coming from Rochford in Essex , I knew several people that worked at Aviation traders at Southend Airport, they had quite a lot of staff there .in the Sixties there were always Carvairs flying over, I think I was lucky to have some great memories of that time.
Somehow as I began watching this brief, I saw shades of the DC4 based Carvair in the Accountant. Great narration, it makes the brief interesting to watch. Thank you Ruaridh
I love how you pluck these obscure aircraft (to me!) and make such wonderful short docs. Many thanks.
Of all the aviation (or transport in general content) i watch i find your channel the most easy to watch. You have the perfect voice to narrate, Im surprised you don’t do TV…but you nail the content too. Your other video about the least popular passenger Jets is one of my all time faves too…Thanks so much
This aircraft has fascinated me ever since I saw a grainy black-and-white photo in the book "Fly Me, I'm Freddie." I have always had a soft spot for the ugly duckings of aviation, which includes such "failures" as the Accountant and the Chinese Y-10 airliner. Thank you for a very interesting video.
Superb video Ruairidh! This aircraft really is a mish mash. You can see the Viscount and HS748 in it and the tail looks almost jet like. The irony of calling it the accountant. Great video as usual. 👍
I use to live near Southend, I remember seeing the Shorts Belfast of the H air frieght flying over head every now and then :) Never knew there was an aircraft factory at southend though! Great video :)
The Shorts Belfast were operated by Heavylift Air Cargo. Remember them well 👍🏻
That hello at the beginning was personal 💀
Made me think of Leslie Phillips the way it was said.
12:40. You have to love the license plate on Lakers Rolls. Only one small change: FA1L.
# It's fun to charter an Accountant / and sail the wild accountan-sea... #
One suspects the poor plane always wanted to be a Lion Tamer...
Or a lumberjack!
Vocational guidance counselor…
@@flaps45 Vocational Guidance Counsello-o-o-o-o-r...
Great vlog as always! More aircraft? You have the DH-114 Heron, the Swedish Scania, and the east german Bade 154. Keep up the good work!
Love your civil aviation videos. Some of the best on here!
Well, hello… to you too.
I’ve never heard of this company and aircraft.
Interesting…
Great stuff, well done. it's story needed telling.
And there will be DC3s at star fleet academy.😁
I do like aviation as my dad is a big fan of aviation and knows about planes and helicopters. And my Grandad used to fly planes during the war.
Freddie Laker also went on to pioneer low cost flights across the Atlantic and around the world but ran up against opposition from governments bought off by state owned carriers..
True, however Laker also had gone on a buying spree with brand new DC-10-30’s and A300B4’s despite not having firmly established routes for them.
Low cost long haul has never worked on the long time. Let‘s see how long Norse and Play will last.
Obscure is the word!
Never heard of this before now.
Good video.👍🙂
Freddie Laker . That explains all.
Never even heard of this!
The Accountant? Pretty sexy name. Right up there with the Patrician
Talking about obscure aircraft = good content :]
It’s hard to overcome looks and a name like that on a aircraft let alone actual shortcomings.
I know. Why would anyone name a plane that?
Huh. You win some, you lose some.
Curiously, one of the drawings showed all the passenger seats of the ATL Accountant airplane facing rearward.
I can't believe something named after the thrilling, ceaselessly exciting world of chartered acccountancy somehow failed.
I noticed at 6.02 that the diagram showed backward facing seats.
Yes, similar to the RAF VC10’s where you sat facing the rear.
Have you done the Canadair CL-44 yet? Another "could have been" concept that didn’t quite work out.
Fuel was still cheap and the CL44 was really slow compared to the fancy 707s and DC8s of that time. To late for a propeller driven plane to be successful.
Ruairidh, how about the DC5 another flying failure due to the C47 surplus ;-)
Make a video on Dornier Do-228, It was a great competitor for DHC Twin Otter, but lost in the end.
They say if it looks right, it will fly right. The Account just looked all wrong - the proportions were all off. The huge vertical fin points to directional stability issues in the fundamental design.
Good video. Why was the Carvair notorious?
Freddie’s career writ small. It’s all there.
Ah those days of Freddie and Kerry Packer 😂
Naming an airplane the accountant is truly the dumbest thing I've heard in aviation in quite a while.
👍Thanks for video. A shame that the prototype was scrapped.
The evocative names of British aircraft - Spitfire, Hurricane, Apollo, Vanguard, Britannia, Comet… and then there’s ‘The Accountant’ - never going to make the heart race was it?
I can see why this aircraft 'failed'. Besides that, the DC-3 it was meant to replace is legendary, and for good reason.
Do the history of the London Underground
That Grumman Gulfstream looks like it has the MAD boom of an S2F Tracker.
But yet, the Gulfstream I ended up being the first in the line of Gulfstream airplanes intended for the business market. The Gulfstream I actually sold fairly well, and some actually were sad the plane went out of production in favor of the jet-powered Gulfstream II.
Although only successful as an executive aircraft, of which the Ford Motor Company had 3 examples based at Stansted airport, it did indeed spawn the extremely successful Gulfstream 2 executive jet. That design has evolved into probably one of the world’s most successful corporate aircraft today.
He named it the Accountant? That doesn't add up.
Laker was a superb innovator with some overly whacky ideas and zero business acumen and, as far as I am aware, no properly successful ventures. He was mourned at his death in 2006, but despite a huge legacy, cost a lot of people their livelihoods whilst making a not insubstantial personal fortune.
An aircraft with the name “Accountant” is doomed from the start
Depends. Run the numbers by me.
The Canadair CL-44 version of the Bristol Britannia was a far more advanced version of the Carvair.
Sounds like an accountant's nightmare...
(🙈 I'll see myself out now)
Can we ‘count’ on that?😎
Why is the Vickers Viking notorious? What for?
Frankly, you don't have to be an aerodynamicist to look at this and think 'it just isn't right'! Compare the HS748, F27 and Herald.
However, I ahve to pick up Ruairidh's statement that the Avro-HS 748 (twin RR Dart) was a 'replacement' for the Viscount (four RR Dart), as these aircraft fulfilled different market segment roles. The Viscount easily outsold the 748 and it was in fact throughout the 1960s the most utilised turboprop airliner in the world by hours flown. It's 'repalcemtn was the vanguard but it was displaced by the BAC 111 and HS Trident.
Freddie Laker: Alan Sugar with wings
Excellent narration but check your sentence lengths. Using many dependent clauses makes the flow hard to follow because of required mental backtracking.
It seems to be a thing with British narrators.
Ah, the Herald. Lesson 101 on how to build the same as the competition and then totally cock it up. Another thing I noticed about the Accountant: two (2) cars. Really. Seriously. Even the short original Bristol 170 carried at least three. And the seats backward on the Mark II. Just no. I can't even ride a train backward. Makes me queezy and dizzy.
You know what they say about planes: if it looks right, it'll fly right.
This aircraft doesn't and apparently didn't.
It failed because risk-averse and cautious buyers were put off by the glamorous and racy model name.
Does this plane look like a dog trying to hump something to anyone else? It's back is all hunched up like that and honestly, it makes me laugh.
They called it the Accountant?
Well.., it could've been the Estate Agent.
I am wondering if this is the perfect example of a reasonably good plane being squeezed out of the market by lesser planes.
Edit: Not quite. But a good college try, and it's what happens when you have a good idea but not the money or development resources.
Seems strange to me to create a new model with similar capabilities to already existing WW2 aircraft that there were already multiple thousands of in existence
They didn't know at the time that the DC-3 would have an almost infinite structure life, and they saw that there were thousands flying around that would eventually need replacing; seems a pretty reasonable reading of the market to me
The name couldn’t have helped. Like naming a car the “Ford Appliance”.
Who names a plane "The Accountant"?
The HS 748 was and is a brilliant design and owes nothing to the ugly Accountant. It remained brilliant right up to the moment when they tried to over-milk the design with the totally failed ATP.
'The Accountant' of all things. Freddie sure didn't spend much on the marketing department. What a stupid name for any product.
Still better than "Tax Collector".
@@KanJonathan 😆
The design of the cockpit does not seem aerodynamic
With the name of "Accountant" it was doomed to fail. Absolutely horrible...
Avro Actuary, Gloster Quantity Surveyor...
Ugly AND a boring name: together at last
What an insult! To call a good-looking aircraft, "Accountant". But the plane does look very like the de Havilland Dove.
Sad
It's as if he UK was determined to destroy anything innovative
The name probably didnt help! Freddy Laker lived a couple of miles up the road from me, would sometimes chat to him if he was about when on my bike training rides which passed his house! Decent guy and his fortunes slaughtered by bigger airlines squeezing his business to death! 😢