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The Handley Page H.P.67 Hastings was a British troop-carrier and freight transport aircraft designed and built by Handley Page Aircraft Company for the Royal Air Force. At the time, it was the largest transport plane ever designed for the RAF, and it replaced the Avro York as the standard long-range transport. ==Design and development== Handley Page's answer to meet Air Staff Specification C.3/44 for a long-range general purpose transport was the H.P.67.〔Barnes 1976, p.435.〕 It was an all-metal low-wing cantilever monoplane with conventional tail unit. It had all-metal tapering dihedral wings, which had been designed for the abandoned HP.66 bomber development of the Handley Page Halifax and a circular fuselage suitable for pressurisation up to . It had a retractable undercarriage and tailwheel. The Hastings was powered by four wing-mounted Bristol Hercules 101 sleeve valve radial engines. In service the aircraft was operated by a crew of five and could accommodate either 30 paratroopers, 32 stretchers and 28 sitting casualties, or 50 fully equipped troops. A civilian version of the Hastings was developed as the Handley Page Hermes. The Hermes prototypes were given priority over the Hastings but that programme was put on hold after the prototype crashed on its first flight on 2 December 1945 and the company concentrated on the military Hastings variant.〔Barnes 1976, p.437.〕 The first of two Hastings prototype (''TE580'') flew at RAF Wittering on 7 May 1946.〔Barnes 1976, p.440.〕 Tests showed that the aircraft was laterally unstable and that it had poor stall warning capabilities. The prototypes and first few production aircraft were subject to a series of urgent modifications and testing to resolve these problems. A temporary solution was found by modifying the tailplane with 15° of dihedral, while being fitted with synthetic stall warning.〔Jackson 1989, p3.〕 This allowed the first production aircraft (Hastings C1) to enter service in October 1948. The RAF initially ordered 100 Hastings C1s but the last six were built as weather reconnaissance versions as the Hastings Met. Mk 1, and seven other aircraft were converted to this standard. Eight C1 aircraft were later converted to Hastings T5 trainers which were used for training the V bomber crews; three at a time. While tail modifications introduced to the C1 allowed it to enter service, a more definitive solution was the fitting of an extended-span tailplane, which was mounted lower on the fuselage. These changes, together with the fitting of additional fuel tanks in the outer wing, resulted in the C Mk 2,〔Jackson 1989, pp. 5—6.〕 while a further modified VIP transport, fitted with yet more fuel to give a longer range became the C Mk 4.〔Jackson 1989, p.7.〕 A total of 147 aircraft were built for the Royal Air Force and four for the Royal New Zealand Air Force, a total of 151. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Handley Page Hastings」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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