The Mighty Fin
So I’m sitting in the Lytham hotel dining room tonight enjoying some quality nosh in salubrious surroundings, with a super view out of the tall old windows of the Ribble estuary right across the golden sands to Southport, and the hills of inland Lancashire off to the left intermittently disappearing in heavy rain showers ( and there are some pretty good associated partial rainbows between the cloud layers). I note a small black flying object – a Tornado a couple of miles out over the estuary (who can mistake the mighty fin??), about 2000 feet going right to left downwind LH for Warton, no doubt.
A short while later, the relaxed sounds of subdued Sinatra, quiet voices over leisurely meals, and the chink of crystal and fine china are subsumed by an increasingly loud roar. The Mighty Fin is back – left to right this time, and much lower and much closer, presumably off a go-around or a touch and go. Then he banks left out over the estuary and has everyone’s attention; we get a super-detailed plan view of the ‘Fin’ with wings swept forward in a steep bank away from us. And as the tall old windows start to rattle in their frames as he comes tail-on to us, we note the twin orange blobs of ‘burner.
Ok, it was a relatively steep turn (maybe 70 degrees), but it was slow and it was level. Why the need for ‘burners? Does the ‘Fin’ generate that much induced drag in such a turn?
SSD