operate from unimproved airstrips. After the end of the Second World War the design was adapted by the Bristol Chief Designer A.E. Russell and his design team to a rugged cargo aircraft. It was an all-metal, twin- engine high-wing monoplane and built without the use of expensive alloys and with a minimum of machined parts. The square-sectioned fuselage was designed to be clear of internal obstructions. It has a fixed undercarriage, the main gear legs supported by substantial vertical struts beneath the Bristol Hercules radial engines and horizontally from the lower edge of the (slab-sided) fuselage. The cockpit sits atop the forward fuselage with two large clam shell doors at the nose. The prototype, registered G-AGPV, first flew at
Filton, England on 2 December 1945. It was an empty shell without nose doors.
The engines and their systems
were also maintenance challenges. The engines were Bristol Hercules 731s with 14-cylinder sleeve valves producing close to 2000 hp each. They were essentially the same engines as in the Handley Page Halifax and the Hawker Sea Fury. Because of the sleeve valves, oil consumption was high, but the construction was rugged, and engines were known to keep operating even after total loss of a cylinder. The strong fixed gear, tail-dragger configuration and large Hercules C130 tires, a Wardair modification, enabled the aircraft to operate from rough strips and on snow covered
lakes if the snow drifts were hard, and it proved able to stand up well to operations in the arctic. However, getting the engines started in low temperatures could be a challenge. We noted that the engine would fire up after it turned past two to three blades, but it required lots of heat to make sure that all the gears in the nose case and the sleeve crank were kept nice and warm. They were easy to start once they had been prewarmed with the good old-fashioned Herman Nelson (he was not a German) heater. We used to install one heater duct on the engine which tightly wrapped around the engine and the second duct was placed inside the nacelle. That way we had everything covered and heated. Many of the Canadian aircraft
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