A splendid enamel painted cast aluminium model of a Handley Page Hastings on newly made polished aluminium stand. This model was originally made for the Air Ministry at the end of the 1940’s when the Hastings was first introduced.
Dimensions: 52 cm/20½ inches (length) x 571.75 cm/28⅛ inches (wing span) x 31.25 cm/12⅛ inches (maximum height on stand).
Designed and manufactured by aviation company Handley Page for the Royal Air Force (RAF). The HP.67 Hastings was a large purpose-built four-engined transport aircraft used as a British troop-carrier and freight transport aircraft. The Hastings was powered by an arrangement of four wing-mounted Bristol Hercules 101 sleeve valve radial engines. At the time of its introduction, the Hastings was the largest transport plane ever designed for the service. Roughly 3,000 cubic feet of unrestricted area could be used to house various cargoes or passengers.
The Hastings was rushed into service with the RAF during September 1948 due to the pressing need for additional transport aircraft to meet the demands of the Berlin Airlift. Between September and October 1948, No. 47 Squadron rapidly replaced its fleet of Halifax A Mk 9s with the Hastings; the squadron conducted its first sortie using the type to Berlin on 11 November 1948. During the airlift, the Hastings fleet was intensively used, principally to carry shipments of coal to the city; before the end of the crisis, two further squadrons, 297 and 53, would be involved in the effort. The final sortie of the airlift was performed by a Hastings, which occurred on 6 October 1949; according to aviation historian Paul Jackson, the 32 Hastings deployed during the operation had delivered a total of 55,000 tons (49,900 tonnes) of supplies.
As the RAF's Hastings fleet expanded during the late 1940s and early 1950s, it supplemented and eventually replaced the wartime Avro York, a transport derivative of the famed Avro Lancaster bomber. RAF Transport Command operated the Hastings as the RAF's standard long-range transport; as a logistics platform, it contributed heavily during conflicts such as the Suez Crisis and the Indonesian Confrontation.
A total of one hundred Hastings C1 and 41 Hastings C2 were procured for service with RAF Transport Command, who commonly deployed the type upon its long-range routes, as well as some use as a tactical transport until well after the arrival of the faster turboprop-powered Bristol Britannia during 1959. A total of four VIP-configured Hastings were assigned to 24 Squadron. An example of the latter use of the aircraft was during the Suez Crisis of 1956, during which several Hastings of 70, 99 and 511 Squadrons dropped paratroopers on El Gamil airfield, Egypt. Beyond its use as a transport plane, several Hastings were modified to perform weather forecasting. Hastings continued to be heavily used by RAF up until the late 1960s, the fleet finally being withdrawn in its entirety during 1977.
