Originally Posted by
crisso
Whilst last weeks BBC2 programme was quite good and enthusiastically presented, I still feel the best documentary on this subject was the Channel 4 Secret History episode originally shown back in early 1994.
I recollect then seeing footage for the first time of Lancasters being hit by water splash also, an explosion off Reculver of a live Upkeep mine.
I was involved for the 60th anniversary in a later C4 project.
The plan for a while was to use a light/microlight aeroplane with substantial modifications to drop a scaled down bouncing bomb. We got very enthusiastic about this, and had various boffins involved doing a lot of maths.
It turned out that the size and speed of the splash-plume creation was such that basically anything slower than a Lanc couldn't do it. Either you were so high that the bomb wouldn't bounce, or you were so low that the plume would strike and probably damage / destroy the aeroplane.
Which was very dissapointing, and that bit of the project got knocked on the head.
One interesting lesson from that - working with the boffins at Qinetiq, was that much of BNW's calculations had been destroyed at the end of the war, the assumption being at the time that this knowledge was too dangerous to leave in the archives. So a lot of his maths on how the bouncing bomb worked had to be derived again from scratch. Much faster second time around - we had Microsoft Excel - which nicely replaced a whole team of assistants that BNW would have had.
The rest of it however, clearly went well and it was a great programme. I'm just very sorry I wan't involved after we dropped the scale-bouncing-bomb bit.
G