Vickers Viscount: The World's First Turboprop Airliner

By some margin the most successful British medium-range airliner ever produced, the world-beating Viscount was a sublime combination of Vickers' state-of-the-art post-war design and Rolls-Royce's cutting-edge power-plant technology, both companies being at the very peak of their powers during the type's genesis and evolution.

Tracing its origins back to the wartime Brabazon Committee, the Viscount was one of several designs from various British aircraft manufacturers produced to fulfill the committee's specifications for a fast, economical short- to medium-range airliner to satisfy the demands of the burgeoning post-war civil aviation market, which was predicted to grow at a healthy rate over the following decades.