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Old 30th Dec 2012, 20:49
  #102 (permalink)  
BEagle
 
Join Date: May 1999
Location: Quite near 'An aerodrome somewhere in England'
Posts: 26,817
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BEages will know more.
Not me, although my limited time on the Bucc included very comfortable low level trips at up to 480 KIAS. The experts, such as Bruce C*****e summed it up by saying "You don't fly over hills, you fly through them. Then you look for someone to ram!".

Long moment arm movement nearly stopped the early XB-70 flights due to the large vertical motion experienced on the flight deck when taxying.

The nHz natural frequency has led to some nasty infrasound experiments. It was also thought that juddering through the steering of fat-tyred racing cars at around that frequency when cornering hard probably caused a few accidents in the 1960s; also, the spooks developed some infrasound devices using the beat frequency between 2 ghetto blaster speakers radiating sound at slightly different frequencies to 'inconvenience' rioters - and similar beat frequency devices have been built into binoculars to nobble race horses, I gather....

You could often see the node/antinode effect on AAR hoses as they were wound and trailed; fortunately there was usually sufficient damping to avoid any movement becoming divergent - although I've seen recent film of precisely that effect when a new generation tanker with a low inertia drogue encountered mild turbulence which was at just the 'wrong' frequency, causing significant excitation. Both to the drogue and to the tanker and receiver crews!

I also noticed some odd physiological effects when demonstrating stalling in the VC10K flight simulator as the motion rams simulated the vertical bounce motion just prior to stick push. You felt shortness of breath and difficulty in pattering to the student pilot if the regime was maintained for any length of time; however, all was well once the stick pusher operated. I don't think that it did the simulator motion system much good either!

Last edited by BEagle; 30th Dec 2012 at 20:57.
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