Bristol 170 Freighter
The Bristol Type 170 Freighter was a twin-engined cargo aircraft built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company and first flown in December 1945. Designed during the war as a rugged transport able to carry heavy loads, vehicles included, it loaded through clamshell nose doors into an unobstructed hold, with the flight deck perched above the doors. It became best known as a car ferry, flying cars and their passengers across the Channel for Silver City Airways; the passenger version was the Wayfarer and the lengthened Mk 32 the Superfreighter. Bristol built 214 by the end of production in 1958, and the type also served air forces including New Zealand's. Only a handful survive, one of them now under conservation at Filton, where the type was built.
Why It Mattered
The Type 170 began as a wartime answer to a British Air Ministry search for a rugged transport able to carry heavy cargo, including vehicles. The first prototype flew in December 1945, after the war had ended, so the type was repurposed as a largely commercial aircraft: cargo freighter, airliner, and air ferry for cars and their passengers. Its lasting mark was the car ferry: on 14 July 1948 Silver City Airways flew a car from Lympne in Kent to Le Touquet in France, the first flight of a cross-Channel service that carried motorists with their cars. Aerospace Bristol records a further distinction: the Freighter was the first post-war aircraft to receive an unrestricted Certificate of Airworthiness. Beyond the Channel, Freighters hauled rail freight across New Zealand's Cook Strait and served with several air forces as well as airlines.
Design Notes
The design centred on an unobstructed, square-section hold, loaded through wide clamshell doors in the nose so that a vehicle could be driven straight in over a ramp. The flight deck sat in an elevated position directly above the doors, clear of the loading below, and the crew climbed to it by a fixed ladder on the side of the hold. Power came from two Bristol Hercules radial engines, and the undercarriage was fixed, because at the low speeds and short ranges intended, a retractable gear's fuel saving was outweighed by its weight, cost and maintenance. On the passenger-carrying Wayfarer the nose doors gave way to a fixed shell; the second prototype flew in that form, as a 34-seat airliner, on 30 April 1946. The final variant, the lengthened Freighter 32 — Silver City's Superfreighter — stretched the fuselage by five feet (1.52 m) so the hold could take three cars and 20 passengers, or two larger vehicles and 12 passengers.
Operational History
The type entered full production after the prototype trials, and one of its first sales was an Argentine Air Force order for 15 aircraft. Production moved to Weston-super-Mare in 1953, and the last two of the 214 built were delivered in 1958 — one to New Zealand in February, the last to Dan-Air in March. In 1954 Silver City worked its Freighters hard, averaging 2,970 landings and take-offs per aircraft across the year. In 1955 Silver City began air ferry services from "Ferryfield", a new airport it built at Lydd in Kent, and Channel Air Bridge started a rival operation from Southend, flying four Freighters to Calais. In New Zealand, SAFE Air moved rail freight across Cook Strait between Wellington and Blenheim from 1951, and later reconfigured its aircraft for palletised cargo that could be rolled into the nose. The RNZAF's 12 Freighters equipped No. 41 Squadron at Whenuapai and began a 22-year continuous presence in South-East Asia, operating in and out of Thailand, Borneo, Malaya and South Vietnam. Other air forces flew the type too — Argentina, Australia, Burma, Canada, Pakistan among them — and Canada's five Freighters carried spares and supplies between the United Kingdom and RCAF bases in France and West Germany. The RNZAF withdrew the remainder of its fleet in 1977, and the last Freighter in service made its final flight in 2004, a ferry flight to the Reynolds-Alberta Museum in Alberta, Canada.
Afterlife
Survival is sparse: Wikipedia counts 11 complete airframes surviving in the 21st century, while Aerospace Bristol counts 12 freighters still in existence, NZ5911 among them and the only one in Europe. Complete survivors are displayed in Argentina, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. At Wigram, the Air Force Museum of New Zealand displays NZ5903, the aircraft that flew the last RNZAF Freighter flight on 16 March 1978; it is shown today in its original camouflage scheme. In Britain, NZ5911 was returned to Bristol in 2018 after decades in storage in New Zealand, and is being brought back to life beside the place where it was designed and built. Aerospace Bristol launched the conservation as a live programme on 21 May 2026, worked by a team of between 20 and 50 volunteers expected to contribute more than 10,000 hours. In early August 2026 the centre wing was reattached, a step Vintage Aviation News described as one of the most technically significant stages in returning the aircraft to a substantially complete configuration.