Vickers Viscount Type 700 Aloha Airlines 1:87

[hjlyuen]

I remember the Vickers Viscount as the first plane that I flew on my own (without my parents) in 1969. I was in college then and it was a short flight from Honolulu airport (HNL) to Kahalui airport (OGG) on the island of Maui. I also remembered the plane because of Aloha Airline’s eye catching orange floral “Funbird” livery designed by John McDermott of the Fawcett McDermott Advertising Agency. There was nothing like it at that time except, maybe, for Braniff’s 1965 “end of the plain plane” liveries designed by Mary Wells of the Jack Tinker Agency. At that time, the livery of most other airlines was a solid band of color along the length of the fuselage at the window line (cheat line) and the airline logo on the tail. Nowadays, there are so many beautiful airline liveries applied to an entire fleet that there are websites with lists of the 25 most beautiful or the 15 coolest paint jobs for the current year. And that doesn’t include the stunning and spectacular commemorative and novelty liveries that an airline may apply a single plane within its fleet.

Anyway, I could not find a free model of a Vickers Viscount. There is one for sale but it is a Type 800 with rectangle doors, 13 windows on the starboard side and 12 windows on the port side, and a fuselage length of 26.11 m. Aloha Airlines flew a Type 700 with oval doors and only 10 windows on both sides. Furthermore, Aloha’s Viscounts had a weather radar which resulted in pointed nose and total fuselage length of 24.94 m. So, I had to design my own in Sketchup, which is easier said than done.

After 5 months and about a dozen frustrating attempts to get the paint aligned correctly between conic sections, here at last, is the nose and cockpit. As a way of giving back to the paper modeling community, I am sharing the patterns. Note: the glues tabs are white in the pattern where as in the photos, I hand painted the edges of the parts and glue tabs either black, orange, or gray to match the livery in an effort to hide the seams. Still to come are the tail, wings, engines, and landing gears. The tail and wings have already been designed and unfolded in Sketchup but not painted in Adobe Illustrator. The engines and landing gears still need to be designed in Sketchup.

[chicharrero]

Awesome bird, friend.
Big thanks for tharing this pretty model.
We can't wait for the rest of the model...

[MacSongLi]

Unbelievable. Fantastic job. A big thank you.

Gary

[elliott]

What an unexpected present. If this is anything like your first plane (and there's no reason it shouldn't be) it will be fantastic. Looking forward to the remaining parts being released.

[hjlyuen]

Help: (1) how do I edit a post? I just realized that I misspelled Viscount. (2) Is there a secret to getting the size of a pdf file below 200 mb? Thanks, Henry Yuen

[murphyaa]

You only have an hour to edit a post, after that, you need to bri...I mean ask an admin to change it for you.

As to the pdf size, what do you use to edit the file? In my case with Photoshop, I set the resolution to 200 pixels, and make sure to flatten all the layers.

[herky]

the only commercial model viscount i have seen is the schreiber viscount 803

[N96HBK]

I'm so glad you are designing this!!!!

[Mike1158]

Thanks, very kind. Looking forward to the remainder.

[hjlyuen]

Hello, I got a request to paint the Vickers Viscount engines and wings with an aluminum finish. I don't know how to do that with an inkjet printer. In other words, I don't know how reproduce aluminum in CMYK or RGB other than to find a gray that matches. To mimic a reflection on metal, I think one has to create a gradient of colors but that changes with the angle of view. I think I can do it with something flat like the windows but I don't know to approach something 3-D like an engine nacelle unless the model is always view from the same angle. Any ideas?