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Old 11th Sep 2013, 20:25
  #46 (permalink)  
Chris Scott
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Blighty (Nth. Downs)
Age: 77
Posts: 2,107
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D P Davies and the B707

This may be old-hat to the afficionados, but I've found a well-researched article on the 'net, originally published in a magazine called "Airways" (?) in 2010, here courtesy of the Renton (Washington, US) website:

http://rentonwa.gov/uploadedFiles/Li...20combined.pdf

Compare the fins (VSs) on the photos on pages 32 & 33. The account of the British certification process that led to the modifications starts on the right column of page 35.

I hadn't realised that the ventral fin retrofitted to those early models was dual-purpose - it also stopped the a/c over-rotating on take-off, in the absence of a suitable stick-shaker for that purpose. ** The other part of the B707 "fix", the top extension, is clearly visible when you compare the two photos.

The B707-320B/C "Advanced" types, such as I flew in Caledonian/BCAL, had dispensed with the ventral fin, apparently for the reasons stated on page 36 (yaw-damper and a stick-shaker).

OFF-TOPIC
Although the stick-shaker was supposed to prevent over-rotation on T/O, I once over-rotated (and probably rotated at too-high a rate) on a MTOW departure at LAX, and had to check forward slightly before the a/c would unstick.

** The British certification authority, the ARB, had pioneered the test of taking-off with the tail scraping along the runway, and the concept of Vmu (minimum unstick speed), as a result of accidents on the Comet 1.

Last edited by Chris Scott; 11th Sep 2013 at 20:40. Reason: Minor layout improvements
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