Vickers Windsor

The Vickers Windsor was a Second World War British four-engine heavy bomber intended for high altitude flight. Barnes Wallis and Rex Pierson designed it at the Vickers-Armstrongs factory at Brooklands as a successor in the bomber line of the Wellington, after Vickers had proposed a series of designs. Only three prototypes were built, the original and the later Type 457 and Type 461, because refinements to the Lancaster made it suitable for the role the Windsor had been designed for. The first prototype, DW506, flew on 23 October 1943 and crashed on 2 March 1944 after an engine could not be feathered back into use; the second flew in February 1944 and the third in July. A production contract for 300 Type 483 Windsors had been placed in 1943 and was cut to 100 by November 1944. Planned production was cancelled at the end of the war, and a turboprop Clyde Windsor was proposed but not built.