How did Britain loose the lead in aviation ?

[FormerFlake]

Jetex Jim,

Comparing figures is only a small part of looking at combat aircraft. It is not like Top Trumps. Important factors are take off and landing performance, operational/combat range. Sadly as the TSR2 never entred service we will never know.

[Jetex Jim]

Sadly as the TSR2 never entred service we will never know.

Indeed, that's why the legend of the TSR2 will be forever bright

[diddy1234]

goudie wrote :-
Never understood why British designers prefered either, engines buried in the wing, or rear mounted, as opposed to pylon mounted engines.
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I would imagine that's why Britiain was so different, because of our deisgn's.

Aircraft today are all the same layout and boring.

In terms of looks, what looks better an A320 or a VC-10 ?

Id go for the VC-10 as the layout looks 'clean'.

[barit1]

Id go for the VC-10 as the layout looks 'clean'.

And we all know that sells a lot of airliners.

[Out Of Trim]

Never understood why British designers preferred either, engines buried in the wing, or rear mounted, as opposed to pylon mounted engines.

The VC-10 was designed to operate in Hot and High airports in Africa. Hence, the aircraft had a short but sturdy undercarriage to deal with rougher runways. Placing the powerful engines high-up at the rear. kept them away from any FOD kicked up. Also of course, the undercarriage would have to be longer to have a podded under-wing mounted engine. Or have a high mounted wing instead.

You should compare the take-off performance of a VC-10, compared to a B-707 at say JNB, South Africa. a Hot and High Altitude Airport and I would say the B-707 would struggle and need a much longer runway.

[tornadoken]

Spey/F-4 Out of Place Here: Hooray Roy Jenkins

#36/37, Smuff/BB: RN's selection of Spey/F-4K in 1963, to bale out of BS100 (single-motor)/P.1154 (single seat in primary, RAF version), was driven by bolter case. Perception that J79 could not respond to slam as quickly as Spey. Granted BB's drawbacks, but RR it was, or no RN F-4.

Oct.64, Jenkins as Minister of Aviation, explored putting Tyne on RAF's desired C-130K (failed, due RR's silly Bid), reheated Spey in F-111K (and was to go in 40 S.2 versions), and F-4E: RAF wanted 178 with J79. He, himself, alone, opposed by other Ministers and Treasury, imposed 118 Spey/F-4M. We paid upfront cash to RR, where J79 would have been on the drip, like all $-content. RAF made up the numbers by, begrudgingly, taking 60 P.1127(RAF), which in 1965 had no payload. All that business put RR in the position to buy BSEL in Oct.66, dump their workshare on JT9D, and launch RB211.

All BB's negatives influenced Greece to decline surplus F-4Ms in 1992, free, preferring to pay for F-4E. But effectiveness of RAFG would have been little greater with F-4E: I suggest this is a case where procurement business-politics did make sense in the bigger picture. Not a candidate for a declinist thread.

[HarryMann]

Originally Posted by Jim

Regarding the Comet, as every schoolboy (once knew) the Comet hull failures were caused by fatigue fractures starting at the corners of square cabin windows. Given that another part of British Industry had been safely making pressure vessels for years,- and knew enough to always make access ports with rounded corners - its astonishing that the clever boys at DH would not have looked to the boiler industry to see how a pressure vessel could be safely made.

There was quite a lot more to it than that... they were the overhead ADF windows, that whilst square obviously had generously rounded corners and substantial reinforcing frames. The main reason was an underestimate of the local stresses, resulting in the use of a fuse skin thickness at least one gauge too thin. Riveting techniques also came under scruntiny... They did however do substantial pressure tests on the fuselage, having pressurised to 16,000 cycles by the time of the Yoke Peter crash (which failed at about 1,000 flight cycles). It was found that earlier tests taking the same same specimen to 2 and 2.5 P may have actually strengthened the specimen by stretching and re-distributing loads around those hatches. Additionally, gust response wing-loads also increased the fuselage 'nodding' loads and hence stresses in tha area.

It was nice of Britain to pass the results of their pressure chamber testing to the USA, but since Boeing had been succesfully building pressurised aircraft since 1943 one wonders how much they could learn from it.

It was the water tank immersion test methods developed at RAE during the investigation that was the main gift to the world. And de Havillands were pressurising to what is normal today (8.25 psi) not what Boeing was then!

Despite this, other aircraft have had pressure hull failures since... de Havillands were indeed pioneering high altitude civil transports.

They also pioneered Redux bonding techniques for wing and fuselage stringers that became extremely succesful as well as many other early composite structural applicatons. One could say, with its sandwich wing and fuselage skins, that the Mosquito was a composite construction pioneer.

Well Jim, I don't see the comparison between the Vigilante and TSR-2. Whatever those figures are supposed the show, they were very different aircraft. A proper bomb bay for one, something the Lanc also had and the B-17 didn't - not that it needed one!

[HarryMann]

Never understood why British designers preferred either, engines buried in the wing, or rear mounted, as opposed to pylon mounted engines.

What you will find is form follows function... eventually all cars serving the same pupose will look substantially the same, all F-1 cars will, and most civil transports already do (as function is prime goal)...

Podded engines reduce wing bending loads in the gust-case... less fatigue considerations, > lighter wing.

Anyone else noticed how modern twin-jet airliners look so much like the ME 262 Swallow in rear view as they fly off to the sun-washed beaches we all worship?

Straight out of the box Messershmidt came up with a classic design.... was even built in modular form (like the Lanc).

[barit1]

Jetex Jim says:

It was nice of Britain to pass the results of their pressure chamber testing to the USA, but since Boeing had been succesfully building pressurised aircraft since 1943 one wonders how much they could learn from it.

Actually, it was five years earlier: http://www.aviation-history.com/boeing/307.html

And Lockheed had a testbed XC-35 flying a year or two before that.

[Jetex Jim]

Doing Less with More

My reasons for making the Vigilante/TSR2 and J79/Spey Phantom comparisons were to illustrate that the British aircraft industry does seem to be rather pre-disposed to do less with more. As ‘tornadoken’ puts it, the Spey F4M was perhaps not THAT much worse than the standard model. Given the work it created for British industry the RAF didn’t have too much to complain about.

‘Brewster Buffalo’ points out that the Spey Phantoms cost £3m apiece rather than £1.2m for the standard model, but perhaps even this can be justified as a job creation scheme, not unusual in the Wilson/Callaghan era.

It’s easy enough to say that the Vigilante/TSR2 were quite different aircraft, yet their capabilities do seem to be very similar, and the payload figure shows the Vigilante payload WAS larger.

The curious thing is; why was the RAF calling for such a huge thing? The TSR2 was intended for delivering tactical nuclear weapons, which by the early sixties had got to be much smaller. The WE177 that the TSR2 was intended to carry weighed in at (270kg) the B43 types carried by the Vigilante - about 950kg - to put that in perspective, a WE177 could be carried by a Sea Harrier!

However, as with the later AEW Nimrod, loads of work was done, paid for and many skilled workers were employed, and eventually the RAF got aircraft that could do the job, (E3A and Buccaneer).

So why worry, everybody’s happy, except possibly the taxpayer?

[Viola]

We were ahead of the game in some respects around the 2nd World War - Spitfire, Comet (jet) are obvious examples.

However, think about the London to Australia Air Race. Alright, the UK won with the Comet Racer, but it was a specially designed 2 seater 'racing' aircraft.

The USA came second with a DC2 - in effect a commercial passenger aircraft!

The writing was on the wall then, I think.

It's very surprising that we were still designing for the 'hot and high' airfields of the Commonwealth/Empire in the 1950s (as I've said before). It was obvious that the UK was moving out of Africa and the East - Ghana gained its independence in 1957, India/Pakistan/Burma had done so 10 years earlier, and the others would soon follow.

Why we didn't look to the future, I don't know.

[Feather #3]

Hangon a bit!

Cough! Cough!

I think Viola that the Dutch would have seen themselves as coming second, albeit in an American aircraft.

G'day

[barit1]

And Roscoe Turner a close third, in a Boeing 247-D, an already-aging airliner.

Strange in retrospect that nobody entered a Lockheed 10 Electra in the MacRobertson Race, but no matter - British Airways bought a fleet of them anyway.

[Jetex Jim]

tornadoken Smuff/BB: RN's selection of Spey/F-4K in 1963, to bale out of BS100 (single-motor)/P.1154 (single seat in primary, RAF version), was driven by bolter case. Perception that J79 could not respond to slam as quickly as Spey. Granted BB's drawbacks, but RR it was, or no RN F-4.],

tornadoken writes that the Spey Phantom was predicated by the ‘Bolter’ performance of the Phantom, (Bolter – missed arrester wire go-around). The decks of HMS Eagle and HMS Ark Royal being smaller than the US carriers that the USN were operating Phantoms from. (In fact USN F4s were flown on and off the 1970 era Ark Royal). However it does appear that the F-4C would have been compatible with the larger CVA01 class, but these boats were cancelled, estimated cost at time of cancellation £100m each.

52 F4K were ordered, for Ark Royal and for Eagle. In the event only the Ark got the F4K, the rest of the navy order went straight to equip 43 Squadron at Leuchars.

Cost of std, F4 say £1.2m apiece, Spey Phantom £3m each.
52 Std model at £3m minus 52 at £1.2m (156 –62.4 = 93.6) the UK paid £93.6m more for 52 Spey F4K

Just a little short of the CVA01 cost.

If we take in to account the 1965 Defence White paper which states that the RAF Phantoms were to be swing role and would operate from land and the RN carriers!!!
See: http://navy-matters.beedall.com/cva01.htm

For the same numbers with the F4M we see for: 118 aircraft 354-141.6 = 212
UK paid £212m extra for its 118 Spey F4M. Or two more carriers and lots of ship yard jobs.

So has the UK aircraft industry been feather bedded by government defence spending (at the expense of other areas) or what?

[Viola]

I would say the USA aircraft industry has also been feather bedded by defence spending too!

But unlike the UK it hasn't been at the expense of more sensible economic projects.

It's understandable that we were developing seaplanes in the 1930's for the 'Empire' routes, but to carry on developing long distance aircraft SPECIFICALLY for the Commonwealth routes in the 1950's for a world that was passing is very suprising.

The USA really had the lead in passenger aircraft by the early 1930's because they were building aircraft for ordinary, every day use - such as the mail!

(Yes, I know it was a KLM DC2 that came 2nd, but it was an American aircraft.)

Going back to Airbus - the European countries' governments decided to get involved. Our government in the 1980's would not.

BAE (with all its faults) did get involved and although they have now sold out, at least some parts of Airbus are manufactured here.

[tornadoken]

ReDux Disbonding

HM, #47. Do you have a view on the (alternative? additional?) issue of inadequate surface preparation to ensure bond longevity? P.King, Knights of the Air,1989 is explicit that within weeks of publication of Cohen/RAE Report, metal fatigue at cutouts, RAE identified disbonding as (a) cause. B.Gunston, Back to the Drawing Board,1998 appears to allude to this,saying of one DH catastrophe, it was "the first of many DH designs to come 'unglued' ".

[HarryMann]

HM, #47. Do you have a view on the (alternative? additional?) issue of inadequate surface preparation to ensure bond longevity?

No, other than the following...

There were some who raised the issue of bonded stringers during the inquiry which if you read it all, seem to have been dismissed comprehensively at the time, with no references in the final conclusions. Peeling or partial failure after a surrounding failure or a crash can fairly obviously be expected, but I have never come across references of the bonding being suspect in normal service...

I expect de Havilland further developed the Redux bonding systems and quality control afterwards, as almost every aspect of production was re-assessed... When I saw on a daily basis, wing skins being chemically cleaned, treated, and bonded for the DH 121 Trident years later, I never heard nor suspected anything about this system being other than a n excellent development, with loads being transferred from skin to stringer in an ideal manner (continuously). Everything always looked spotless. The most important thing to note were the anti-peeling bolted fasteners at each end, which I presume the Comet had too.
Test samples were taken of every batch being processed.

IMHO, they just relied slightly too much on testing, rather than belt 'n braces 'what-if' design analyses backed up with strain gauge spot checks.. Testing was very thorough, though in retrospect not thought through fully maybe, one dubious area being using test samples of the fuse, rather than the whole thing in one piece.
I think they just went one skin gauge too thin, but weight and engine power and hence payload were fairly critical at that time... though I've always been one to point out to those fussing over going up a few thou on a critical component - that an ounce or two here and there is not the end of the world when the pilot might have had a full english breakfast and also with the crap that often accumulates on board an aircraft - and always thought carrying duty-free booze around the skies in airliners was verging on criminal!!

References to things becoming 'unstuck' are either purely metaphorical or refer directly to the Mossie in the far East, when it took a DH representative sawing right through a wing chordwise to prove they weren'tall coming apart at the seams! But after a while in those hot and humid climes, the glues did start to suffer but have always believed they were being replaced by better adhesives in production almost at that same time... Some also warped a bit, allegedly. From what I've read also, pilots never lost faith in the Mossie out there, surprising when flying over dense jungle for 8 or more hours at a time. Indeed, quite a few long range records were set (3,000 miles?)
One was lost due to suspected structural failure, but not sure of the details, we're talking tropical weather, routine max take-off weights, etc. etc.

[tornadoken]

HM Thank you. All I can add is that early A300B had a belly laminate issue. Orion's (ex-LH). Fixed with rivets.

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

The talk of Redux bonding pioneered by de Havilland reminds me of the similarly pioneering work by AVRO on Araldite bonded aluminium alloy honeycomb construction. DTD900 4703A still remains as a reminder.

Much of the research is Shackleton and Vulcan vintage and, if I remember correctly the only Aluminium honeycomb in the Vulcan was the flight deck floor. The technology was shared with AVRO Canada and found its way into the Arrow.

If I may quote from Flight, 1954 Farnborough edition:

Avro. At Manchester,

considerable research has gone into the development

of efficient structural honeycomb materials,
and—according to an overseas journal—
they will find an important application
in the forthcoming light delta-winged
ground attack machine which has been
designed to the requirements laid down by
NATO. Be that as it may, Avro showed

at Farnborough that they have a great

knowledge of honeycombs, and most of

these are built up of 0.003in honeycomb
sandwiched between any gauge of skins.
Araldite bonding, sometimes aluminium- 4
filled, is employed.
For machining the honeycombs to the
required thickness, the hexagonal interstices
are filled with soft wax, so producing
a core sufficiendy rigid to prevent buckling
of the individual "three-thou" walls; after
cutting away, the wax is simply melted
out. The result of the technique is that
honeycombs can be used for really sharpedged
aerofoils; this was exhibited, as was
the use of the method in shear attachments,
test specimens and other forms. Most of
the honeycombs were of half-inch thickness.
Two basic forms can be made: the
standard hexagon, which can only be bent
into two planes, and the staggered honeycomb,
rather like a brick wall in form,
which can be bent in all three planes. An
example of the latter showed the core
alone used as reinforcing for a hemispherical
bottle.

After the first flight of an aircraft with

a honeycomb skin, some form of test is
necessary to determine whether any parting

of the skin from the core has occurred.

Avro have developed a very simple

pneumatic suction-cup device, which is

allowed to adhere to the portion of the skin
under investigation. Powered electrical
probes then descend on to the skin with
a known force and, depending on whether
the honeycomb is still sound or not, green
or red lights flash. The equipment can
work on plane or curved surfaces without
re-setting, and the sensitivity is such that a
fault of lin diameter can be detected on
12-gauge skinning. The chief advantage
is, however, the speed with which it can
cover big areas—even the wing of the

Vulcan would not be too much to tackle.

When I think back, a lot of our houshold ornaments and my toys were very expertly repaired with Araldite 121 N. Things never broke in the same place twice!

PS

Sorry for the totally mong quote formatting. Bloody Acrobat.

[HarryMann]

.. and certainly in the late 60's de Havillands were using similar honeycomb structures, as well as phenolic honeycombs as filling in the sandwich, presumably for radar hatches and domes.

Phenolic microballons incorporated into cold-set resins is a common technique used today when laying up low production composite components, as in the light and ultra-light private sector. Add a lot and you get a lightweight but compatible filler.