Touched a jet research aircraft? I did at Rochester, UK. A Shorts SB.4

[Mitzi.]

Visited the 'medway aircraft preservation society' based at Rochester airfield in Kent UK, recommend you do the same.
Tucked away is a jet research aircraft, SB.4 Sherpa.
The volunteers who restore aircraft (spits notably) very informative. Told a tale of a restored spits first flight.

The SB.4 in process of being restored, could not resist touching it.

Regards. Mitzi.

A site wiv info on SB.4

http://www.vectorsite.net/avval.html

[John Farley]

If you are passing RAF Cosford then the museum there has several UK research aircraft. FD2, SB5, H126 and Bristol Type 188 for sure (memory is going like everything else - perhaps an Avro 707) plus TSR2. The BAC221 and HP115 are at Yeovilton and the Short SC1 and Hawker P1127 at the Science Museum South Kensington.

[Loki]

Have seen the FD2, HP115, Short SC1 and P1127 in flight.

[Smoketoomuch]

Anyone have any info on the UK research aircraft that was to investigate high speed flight? It looked similar to the SR71 but I'm sure preceded it. From memory it was all silver bare metal finish. Saw a pic a while ago but would be interested in learning more. Was any info transferred to the US for their aircraft? Much of our expertise seemed to be all given away in those days.

[BEagle]

I think that you're referring to the Bristol T188, a small scale version of the still-born Avro 730 supersonic bomber.

The T188 would have been an excellent research vehicle were it not for the useless, fuel-guzzling Gyron engines with which it was accursed! It currently lives at the Cosford museum.

[Smoketoomuch]

Thats the one! Thanks Beagle. A quick google reveals v little info on it though, and a suspiciously large number of the sites on it are Russian :ooh:


http://www.aeronautx.net/Historix/content/hist_1005.htm

Link added.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Am I alone in suddenly finding this thread deeply depressing.

All these fascinating and innovative British research aircraft, which ultimately led to many major breakthroughs in aviation technology and products like the Concorde, Airbus and Harrier.

Right now, although I can think of one or two development prototypes in FT, I can only think of a single British research aircraft flying - the VAAC Harrier.

Did we just give up?

G

N.B. I have idly played around with scale laws and the possibility of making a light aircraft based upon the basic aerodynamic form of the HP115. I'm pretty certain that it would work but imagine landing at those sort of AoA values might be entertaining.

[John Farley]

Genghis

I agree with you about the depressing side of the thread. Clearly our industry and the government did give up, but there is more to it than that. Compared to say 50 years ago the world as a whole has ‘given up’ on research aircraft. Only Russia still uses a lot of tunnels and I suspect that is not for much longer. So why? Well I guess we know most of what there is to learn about basic aero stuff which cuts back the ‘I wonder if?’ driver. But also of course CFD is now SO powerful (Richard Noble Thrust 2) and SO validated that people (correctly) look there for answers.

As to a scale 115 I would have thought a 50-70% (ie 10-14ft span) one would have been doable. Keep it slow enough, say 180 Vd, and it should be light enough to land at conventional alphas at say 80 kts thus avoiding (as did the real one) the stab and control issues concerning the dutch roll mode. It would need to be a pusher prop type job for cg /realism/not contaminating the wing flow and so the prop clearance would likely be the main concern.

If you think about that I might think about a 15% R/C model one.....

[Genghis the Engineer]

Interesting point there. I'd looked at doing it against Section S or JAR-VLA, which means that at the absolute would mean a Vso no more than 45 KCAS. Now getting that is not all that hard with a Delta, but only at very high alpha. Presumably with an aircraft like this you have to look to a rather larger than 1.3 factor from Vso to Vref partly to avoid the very high drag regime on landing (as you do, say, on a flexwing microlight where Vref>=1.7Vso), and partly to actually put the nose low-enough that you can reasonably see what you're doing and control the aircraft. Would that be commensurate with your 80kn

I agree re: a pusher. I had toyed with a ducted fans, hovercraft style as a possibly elegant solution to the propstrike problem, although that'll almost certainly give a very high thrustline. Whatever one does, I suspect that a fairly long and spindly undercarriage is inevitable.


I do disagree with you however John that we've learned all that there is to learn about basic aerodynamics, or that CFD tells us everything we need to know. I'm hopefully (at last!) publishing my PhD thesis next year covering (amongst other things) a previously unpublished oscillatory / departure mode that has killed people (and so far has defeated most attempts to model), and also a chunk of spinning work which I am quite certain isn't fully understood yet - the established mode might be, but the mechanism of recovery is very poorly so (in my opinion). That is just two areas out of my research portfolio, and there are I'm sure many other fascinating areas of aerodynamic doubt and uncertainty - how about statically stable helicopters for example - there's only so far you could possibly go there without building something and flying it - at least in a tunnel.

No, I think it's ceased to seem that important to the people with large research-chequebooks who prefer to fund giant particle accelerators or prototype wave generators - maybe they're right but it still seems a shame. Maybe the home of such aircraft should be small research aircraft operated under B-conditions by universities and private research "clubs", there's certainly not always the need to spend the amount of money that kept you so entertained in the 60s and 70s.

G

[John Farley]

G

I just picked 80kts as a touchdown speed out of the air as I have flown one or two elderly GA aircraft that needed that and they did not pose major strip length issues.

The real a/c landed at 90kts for back end reasons although it was controllable below 40 at height. The actual speed (‘stall’/min demonstrated) of your VLA device is going to be so dependant on the weight you can build down to. No floppy wing structure to worry about though!

As to the other more contentious stuff, I did not mean to imply that everything was known (I did say most not all) just a very high percentage compared to 50 years ago. The other way of looking at it is to list all the past research aircraft you can think of and then ask yourself what questions they were intended to answer. Not questions we have today I suspect.

All the tunnel guys I talk to are concentrating on unsteady flow regimes as the ‘last subsonic frontier’ to be sorted.

The thing that depresses me is that the last 25 years has seen nothing designed to fly higher or faster than had already been achieved by 1978. That stagnation of envelope expansion has gone on for 25% of the time we have been aviating!!!!

J

[Genghis the Engineer]

On that last point, I sadly must agree completely.

On the earlier points, the nature of research is that answers breed more questions. Problem is, the people with chequebooks don't seem to feel that the questions are important enough to explore in FT anymore.

G

[Blacksheep]

Ah Ghengis and John, major aviation had matured into a purely commercial concern by 1978. All the fun's gone out of it - unless you bumble about on a grass strip somewhere or jump into Popular Flying, American style. There's certainly quite a few very peculiar looking 'research' vehicles flying around Oshkosh most years, so don't get too depressed. That chap with the home built jet that looks like a mini F5 has the right idea...

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Through difficulties to the cinema