LEYLAND HIPPO
The Leyland Hippo’s final use was serving the RAF as an aircraft refueller on military airfields all over the world. The Leyland pressure refueller was fitted with a 2,500-gallon tank, built by Thompson Brothers of Bilston in Staffordshire.
It could fuel and de-fuel both pressurised and non-pressurised aircraft fuel systems. An on-board pump, with an output of 5-600 gallons per minute, was coupled to the auxiliary gearbox power take-off. It was a very clean design with everything hidden in lockers. It was fitted with the, then, new Leyland O.600 six-cylinder diesel, displacing 9.8 litres, which gave this very big vehicle 133bhp to move around with, although it didn’t make very long journeys around the airfield. Although weighing in at over 13 tons unladen, the weight increased to 22.5 tons when fully loaded. It was designated FV 11202.
There were a few variations of this useful truck as a later model was a different design with fuel lines attached to the roof of the tank body, known as an open line pressure refueller; the body on these tanks look like cylinder tankers, where the previous design
