Vickers Vendace

The Vickers Vendace was a 1920s British trainer aircraft, originally designed as a floatplane trainer for the Royal Air Force. In October 1924 the Air Ministry issued Specification 5A/24 for a floatplane trainer, and Vickers designed a two-seat biplane, the Type 120 Vendace I, for which a single prototype was ordered in August 1925 alongside the Parnall Perch and the Blackburn Sprat. The Vendace I was a two-bay biplane with folding wooden wings and a steel tube fuselage powered by a Rolls-Royce Falcon, whose undercarriage could be changed from floats to wheels in ten minutes. It first flew at Brooklands by March 1926 and was tested from HMS Furious and at Felixstowe, and the RAF chose it, but the requirement was cancelled as a cost saving and the RAF kept the aircraft for experiments. A Vendace II with an ADC Nimbus engine was sold for survey work in South America, and three Vendace IIIs with a 300 hp Hispano-Suiza went to Bolivia as trainers, entering service in July 1929.