Testing
A prototype, G-CYZJ, was constructed, after which the RCAF evinced an interest in the type as a communications aircraft. Service testing indicated that the aircraft was underpowered and the Armstrong Siddeley Lynx was replaced with a Wright Whirlwind of greater power (220 hp).
In September 1927, the still experimental Vickers Vanessa was used for series of trial airmail runs involving the first airmail delivery. While waiting off the dock at Rimouski, Quebec, on 9 September 1927, RCAF Squadron Leader John H. Tudhope received 502 pounds of mail from the inbound RMS Empress of France While taxiing the Vanessa for takeoff, a strut ruptured and punctured the aircraft's starboard float causing it to tip over to that side. The propeller lopped off half the float and the machine broke up, resulting in the aircraft sinking. Fortunately, Tudhope scrambled to safety and the mail was rescued, eventually reaching its destinations by rail.
Following a subsequent salvage, the Vanessa was considered uneconomical to repair and was abandoned.
Despite a very brief career, the Vanessa has the distinction of being one of the first enclosed cabin aircraft to be designed and built in Canada and the first aircraft to be used in an experimental airmail flight in Canada.
Read more about this topic: Canadian Vickers Vanessa
Famous quotes containing the word testing:
“Bourbon’s the only drink. You can take all that champagne stuff and pour it down the English Channel. Well, why wait 80 years before you can drink the stuff? Great vineyards, huge barrels aging forever, poor little old monks running around testing it, just so some woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma can say it tickles her nose.”
—John Michael Hayes (b.1919)
“Now I see that going out into the testing ground of men it is the tongue and not the deed that wins the day.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)