Empire of the Clouds: When Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Toulouse area, France
Age: 93
Posts: 435
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Another right track ...
The Coanda machine seems also to have been followed by a similar effort by Caproni/Campini which had a piston engine driving a compressor, with combustion chambers downstream ...
But none of these was anything like a practical proposition like Sir Frank Whittle's, which was surely the first Jet Engine both to run and fly ...
Sorry, all, I completely forgot the He 138 and the German work, especially on axial-flow engines, which really pointed out the way to go. Whittle's centrifugal compressor, with its base in superchargers for piston engines, was a very good start for the first few years of military jets (and the Comet's engines), but my statement was W R O N GGGG ...
But none of these was anything like a practical proposition like Sir Frank Whittle's, which was surely the first Jet Engine both to run and fly ...
Sorry, all, I completely forgot the He 138 and the German work, especially on axial-flow engines, which really pointed out the way to go. Whittle's centrifugal compressor, with its base in superchargers for piston engines, was a very good start for the first few years of military jets (and the Comet's engines), but my statement was W R O N GGGG ...
Last edited by Jig Peter; 19th Oct 2010 at 15:18. Reason: Senior moment
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Auckland, NZ
Age: 79
Posts: 722
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
I think the Heinkel engine flew in the He 178 in 1939. I don't know when the first Whittle flight in a test-bed (Wellington?) was, but the Gloster E.28/39 was later.
Edit: I also was wrong: it seems the first Whittle engine to fly wasn't flown in a test-bed first. It continues to astonish me that for the first flight of a new engine, and especially a revolutionary engine, they decided to use a completely new aircraft, and a single-engined one, too.
Edit: I also was wrong: it seems the first Whittle engine to fly wasn't flown in a test-bed first. It continues to astonish me that for the first flight of a new engine, and especially a revolutionary engine, they decided to use a completely new aircraft, and a single-engined one, too.
Last edited by FlightlessParrot; 19th Oct 2010 at 22:47. Reason: Error
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: london
Posts: 285
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
... The He178 in 1939 was almost certainly the first jet powered aircraft to
fly - although there is a vague reference to an Italian achievement a year or so earlier. However it was the Me262 that was first to enter WW2 in operational role - being faster and better armed than the Glos. Meteor which arrived in operational role several months later. However fortunatly for the Allies the Me262 was not available in anywhere near sufficient numbers to make any great impact to retard the USAAF and RAF -together with problems over shortages of jet fuel.
...
fly - although there is a vague reference to an Italian achievement a year or so earlier. However it was the Me262 that was first to enter WW2 in operational role - being faster and better armed than the Glos. Meteor which arrived in operational role several months later. However fortunatly for the Allies the Me262 was not available in anywhere near sufficient numbers to make any great impact to retard the USAAF and RAF -together with problems over shortages of jet fuel.
...
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York
Posts: 875
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
By the way, for any followers of this thread who may still be interested in whether the book is any good, I've just started reading it--first couple of chapters--and I find it outstanding, so far.
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: West Sussex
Posts: 1,771
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
The Lock-Speiser pallet loading small cargo aircraft always struck me as a good idea never given a chance ( a few reasons not to do with the a/c ) ; a real Nevil Shute* type project.
* I know Nevil Shute Norway's aviation career as well as writing, was lucky enough to know someone who grew up with him; interestingly judging by the former comments, he said 'stuff the UK' and moved to Australia in the 1960's.
After reading the 'spending cuts' but seeing the mega-bucks doshed out to bankers on £1 million a year + bonuses, but defence, welfare & NHS under attack from Nazi's the like of which even Thatcher could never have dreamed of, I never thought I'd say it but my patriotism is wafer thin too !
* I know Nevil Shute Norway's aviation career as well as writing, was lucky enough to know someone who grew up with him; interestingly judging by the former comments, he said 'stuff the UK' and moved to Australia in the 1960's.
After reading the 'spending cuts' but seeing the mega-bucks doshed out to bankers on £1 million a year + bonuses, but defence, welfare & NHS under attack from Nazi's the like of which even Thatcher could never have dreamed of, I never thought I'd say it but my patriotism is wafer thin too !
Last edited by Double Zero; 4th Nov 2010 at 11:19.
There was another recent review of this book. The quote below is from the Sunday Times:
If you had to pick a day in the past 60 years “to reveal a country that was most unlike today’s Britain” writes James Hamilton-Paterson, then September 6, 1952 would be a perfect candidate. It was a cool Saturday, and at the Farnborough air show a staggering 120,000 people were pottering about among the various aircraft on display and looking forward to the afternoon’s acrobatics. Many of the larger planes were open so that visitors could climb inside and poke around, but what excited most spectators was the prospect of seeing the intrepid test pilot John Derry breaking the sound barrier in one of the new de Havilland DH 110s. They were not disappointed, and there were gasps and cheers as Derry screamed over the airfield, followed by the characteristic triple boom that marked a plane going supersonic, the “violent music of a new technological era”. And then the announcer shouted: “Oh my God, this was never meant to happen!” and they realised something had gone horribly wrong.
The horrific scenes that afternoon at Farnborough, where Derry’s plane broke up in mid-air, its engines spinning into the crowd and killing 29 people, now feel like memories of a bygone age. Almost unbelievably, not only did the air show go on after the bodies had been cleared away, but a further 140,000 people turned up to watch the show the next day, undeterred by the headlines. This was a time, as Hamilton-Paterson remarks, when the excitement of risk-taking trumped the strictures of health and safety, and when the conquest of the skies seemed to mark a new chapter in Britain’s glorious history. The reaction of Derry’s wife, watching in horror from the pilots’ enclosure, speaks volumes about the reticence and courage that contemporaries prized so highly. “There’s no hope, is there?” was all she said as the disaster unfolded. “No,” the pilot next to her said quietly. “None.”
No doubt Hamilton-Paterson’s book will surprise those who know him only as a reclusive travel writer and novelist. But even readers like me, with absolutely no interest in aeroplanes, will find it a beautifully written re-creation of a vanished cultural and technological landscape. His achievement is to capture perfectly the mood of the 10 years after the Second World War when British heroes seemed to rule the skies, and when, as the New York Times put it, “the British jet plane industry appears to be assuming the lead in the western World... and it is a comfort that it is on our side”.
Those words ring hollow now, with our aircraft industry merely a pathetic shadow of its old self. Yet for a brief shining moment, as Hamilton-Paterson recalls, “through children’s periodicals such as Eagle and Boy’s Own we were proclaimed the inheritors of a new order: a post-war Britain of amazing technological energy”, ready to lead the world into the jet age.
This was a Britain in which schoolboys such as the young Hamilton-Paterson worshipped test pilots as well as footballers, in which RAF veterans such as Derry, Neville Duke and Bill Waterton were feted as daredevils of the skies. Paid a mere £40 a week, they risked their lives on a daily basis, even though they often knew that their experimental planes were barely airworthy. Some of this book’s most compelling passages describe their almost incredible feats of derring-do, such as when, in September 1948, Derry took his DH108 into a record- breaking supersonic dive from 45,000ft above Windsor, heading towards the ground so quickly that, almost blinded by the -3 g-force, he had just seconds to pull up before his plane smashed into the town. Then there was Waterton’s skin-of-the-teeth escape from death in 1952, when his experimental Javelin suffered “two explosive cracks” and lost its elevators in mid-air, yet he somehow managed to get it down on Salisbury plain, suffering only scorched arms and singed eyebrows. “This was really flying,” he recalled later, “a joyous thrill... that made you feel clean and young and exuberantly detached.”
Perhaps it was hardly surprising that the designer and entrepreneur Geoffrey de Havilland lost both his sons to accidents, as though making ritual sacrifices to the quest for speed, while in the last seven months of 1956 the RAF lost a staggering 42 airmen to accidents, roughly one every six days. Yet hundreds of thousands of people descended on air shows every year, ready to applaud the feats of their patriotic heroes. “We went home” Hamilton-Paterson writes, “knowing that Britain was still a world leader and feeling in our bones our place in the international order.”
The cruel irony, of course, was that this was merely an illusion. In its understated, elegant way, Hamilton-Paterson’s book smoulders with anger at the arrogance and folly of the aircraft companies, the indecision and sloth of successive governments, and the litany of cock-ups and failures that condemned the dream of a British jet age to oblivion. While Britain produced some great aircraft, notably the Avro Vulcan bomber and the Harrier jump jet, it was too slow, too unresponsive and too complacent to compete with the Americans, and by the end of the 1950s the domestic industry was doomed. Those brave souls, who dared to point this out, such as Hamilton-Paterson’s test-pilot hero Waterton, were ostracised. Aircraft production became a microcosm of a nation in palpable competitive decline, and within a few years the innocent patriotism and childish hopes had turned sour.
In a way, then, this wonderful book is a study in failure, the story of swashbuckling heroes tilting at windmills while their masters frittered away Britain’s technological inheritance. And yet when I put it down, what lingered in the mind were the memories of the “golden men and golden machines that unquestionably blazed amid the dispiriting muddle” — the heroes of a lost world that now seems like ancient history.
The horrific scenes that afternoon at Farnborough, where Derry’s plane broke up in mid-air, its engines spinning into the crowd and killing 29 people, now feel like memories of a bygone age. Almost unbelievably, not only did the air show go on after the bodies had been cleared away, but a further 140,000 people turned up to watch the show the next day, undeterred by the headlines. This was a time, as Hamilton-Paterson remarks, when the excitement of risk-taking trumped the strictures of health and safety, and when the conquest of the skies seemed to mark a new chapter in Britain’s glorious history. The reaction of Derry’s wife, watching in horror from the pilots’ enclosure, speaks volumes about the reticence and courage that contemporaries prized so highly. “There’s no hope, is there?” was all she said as the disaster unfolded. “No,” the pilot next to her said quietly. “None.”
No doubt Hamilton-Paterson’s book will surprise those who know him only as a reclusive travel writer and novelist. But even readers like me, with absolutely no interest in aeroplanes, will find it a beautifully written re-creation of a vanished cultural and technological landscape. His achievement is to capture perfectly the mood of the 10 years after the Second World War when British heroes seemed to rule the skies, and when, as the New York Times put it, “the British jet plane industry appears to be assuming the lead in the western World... and it is a comfort that it is on our side”.
Those words ring hollow now, with our aircraft industry merely a pathetic shadow of its old self. Yet for a brief shining moment, as Hamilton-Paterson recalls, “through children’s periodicals such as Eagle and Boy’s Own we were proclaimed the inheritors of a new order: a post-war Britain of amazing technological energy”, ready to lead the world into the jet age.
This was a Britain in which schoolboys such as the young Hamilton-Paterson worshipped test pilots as well as footballers, in which RAF veterans such as Derry, Neville Duke and Bill Waterton were feted as daredevils of the skies. Paid a mere £40 a week, they risked their lives on a daily basis, even though they often knew that their experimental planes were barely airworthy. Some of this book’s most compelling passages describe their almost incredible feats of derring-do, such as when, in September 1948, Derry took his DH108 into a record- breaking supersonic dive from 45,000ft above Windsor, heading towards the ground so quickly that, almost blinded by the -3 g-force, he had just seconds to pull up before his plane smashed into the town. Then there was Waterton’s skin-of-the-teeth escape from death in 1952, when his experimental Javelin suffered “two explosive cracks” and lost its elevators in mid-air, yet he somehow managed to get it down on Salisbury plain, suffering only scorched arms and singed eyebrows. “This was really flying,” he recalled later, “a joyous thrill... that made you feel clean and young and exuberantly detached.”
Perhaps it was hardly surprising that the designer and entrepreneur Geoffrey de Havilland lost both his sons to accidents, as though making ritual sacrifices to the quest for speed, while in the last seven months of 1956 the RAF lost a staggering 42 airmen to accidents, roughly one every six days. Yet hundreds of thousands of people descended on air shows every year, ready to applaud the feats of their patriotic heroes. “We went home” Hamilton-Paterson writes, “knowing that Britain was still a world leader and feeling in our bones our place in the international order.”
The cruel irony, of course, was that this was merely an illusion. In its understated, elegant way, Hamilton-Paterson’s book smoulders with anger at the arrogance and folly of the aircraft companies, the indecision and sloth of successive governments, and the litany of cock-ups and failures that condemned the dream of a British jet age to oblivion. While Britain produced some great aircraft, notably the Avro Vulcan bomber and the Harrier jump jet, it was too slow, too unresponsive and too complacent to compete with the Americans, and by the end of the 1950s the domestic industry was doomed. Those brave souls, who dared to point this out, such as Hamilton-Paterson’s test-pilot hero Waterton, were ostracised. Aircraft production became a microcosm of a nation in palpable competitive decline, and within a few years the innocent patriotism and childish hopes had turned sour.
In a way, then, this wonderful book is a study in failure, the story of swashbuckling heroes tilting at windmills while their masters frittered away Britain’s technological inheritance. And yet when I put it down, what lingered in the mind were the memories of the “golden men and golden machines that unquestionably blazed amid the dispiriting muddle” — the heroes of a lost world that now seems like ancient history.
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Auckland, NZ
Age: 79
Posts: 722
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
I remember that post war time; as a schoolboy, I was probably the ideal audience.
Looking back, I remember all those wonderful prototypes: too many, of course, for a smallish and bankrupt economy.
I also remember the PR hype we were fed (though it wasn't called that, then). The jet engine, a British invention: no, though Whittle was a very important pioneer. Though A.A. Griffith was an earlier pioneer, and knew that axial flow was the way of the future. But he was denigrated as a mere bumbling civil servant because he didn't think much of Whittle's design, which was a mistake, but not a stupid one.
Not to mention radar, a British invention, we were told. Even at the time, I was a little puzzled about how the USA got to have a radar set at Pearl Harbour, which we did know about because the story of its being turned off, but we were never told how it existed in the first place. Admittedly, this wasn't all conscious misinformation. I believe the naval officers who inspected the Graf Spee were truly surprised to see radar antennae.
This is not to denigrate the courage or ingenuity of the time. But the sense Brits of my and older generations have that once Britain Ruled The Skies is a misleading myth. Lots of ingenious prototypes: too many, and too ingenious. An economy that wasn't big enough to develop that much diversity, and that was bankrupt as a result of Churchill's courageous and correct decision to fight on in 1940, in the certain knowledge that bankruptcy was a consequence.
Looking back, I remember all those wonderful prototypes: too many, of course, for a smallish and bankrupt economy.
I also remember the PR hype we were fed (though it wasn't called that, then). The jet engine, a British invention: no, though Whittle was a very important pioneer. Though A.A. Griffith was an earlier pioneer, and knew that axial flow was the way of the future. But he was denigrated as a mere bumbling civil servant because he didn't think much of Whittle's design, which was a mistake, but not a stupid one.
Not to mention radar, a British invention, we were told. Even at the time, I was a little puzzled about how the USA got to have a radar set at Pearl Harbour, which we did know about because the story of its being turned off, but we were never told how it existed in the first place. Admittedly, this wasn't all conscious misinformation. I believe the naval officers who inspected the Graf Spee were truly surprised to see radar antennae.
This is not to denigrate the courage or ingenuity of the time. But the sense Brits of my and older generations have that once Britain Ruled The Skies is a misleading myth. Lots of ingenious prototypes: too many, and too ingenious. An economy that wasn't big enough to develop that much diversity, and that was bankrupt as a result of Churchill's courageous and correct decision to fight on in 1940, in the certain knowledge that bankruptcy was a consequence.
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Surrey Hills
Posts: 1,478
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Another myth was that Watson Watt invented Radar. The Germans had a ship detector [Telemobiloskop] demonstrated in Hamburg harbour back in 1904. Rang a bell when a ship was detected in thick fog. Used a rotating parabolic dish.
"In Germany, the development of the first technologies of sonar and radar were interrelated. Following Christian Hülsmeyer's forgotten invention of the "Telemobiloskop" in 1904, two Berlin engineers, Paul Günther Erbslöh and Hans-Karl von Willisen, developed and built devices to locate targets accurately by reflections with underwater sound and radio waves. In 1934, they found their own company for this work, called Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische und Mechanische Apparate (GEMA), which became the birthplace of their famous Freya air-warning and Seetakt ocean-surveillance radars."
"In Germany, the development of the first technologies of sonar and radar were interrelated. Following Christian Hülsmeyer's forgotten invention of the "Telemobiloskop" in 1904, two Berlin engineers, Paul Günther Erbslöh and Hans-Karl von Willisen, developed and built devices to locate targets accurately by reflections with underwater sound and radio waves. In 1934, they found their own company for this work, called Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische und Mechanische Apparate (GEMA), which became the birthplace of their famous Freya air-warning and Seetakt ocean-surveillance radars."
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Auckland, NZ
Age: 79
Posts: 722
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Len Deighton, in Fighter, claims that the Brits left a portable radar set behind at Dunkirk, and there was much consternation that it hadn't been destroyed. When the Germans discovered it, they were not at all interested, it was so far behind their stuff.
Len Deighton does a lot of research, but he's also a professional story-teller. Does anybody know what, if any, actuality lies behind this anecdote?
Len Deighton does a lot of research, but he's also a professional story-teller. Does anybody know what, if any, actuality lies behind this anecdote?
Originally Posted by pasir
... It might be worth mentioning that some years after the US introduced the DOUGLAS DC3 airliner in 1933 - the DH Heron Bi-plane 'airliner' made its appearance in 1936.
BTW, the Dragon Rapide flew in 1934 and the DC3 in 1935.
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Toulouse area, France
Age: 93
Posts: 435
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Clouds of ... ?
Mr. Hamilton-Pätterson's book really is excellent reading - although some years older than he, I could almost see my young self - and as I grew older (note, I don't say "matured"), I felt much of what he describes.
Having read it right through, it leaves me with much the same regret that so much that "should" have been done, wasn't, but confirms my decision years ago now, at the "16-year point", to move to other spheres - and eventually to move back into aviation (non-flying), in a country and a company where the future was for the making, both for myself and my family.
By the Lord Harry, we worked effin' 'ard, despite the sneers from across the Channel - and the result is there for all to see. Pity, it could (???) have happened North of the White Cliffs, but Mr. H-P tells us a lot about why it didn't, and I'm grateful for his work.
Later:
And yes, it still hurts, somewhere deep down, even though life's pretty good where I am ...
Having read it right through, it leaves me with much the same regret that so much that "should" have been done, wasn't, but confirms my decision years ago now, at the "16-year point", to move to other spheres - and eventually to move back into aviation (non-flying), in a country and a company where the future was for the making, both for myself and my family.
By the Lord Harry, we worked effin' 'ard, despite the sneers from across the Channel - and the result is there for all to see. Pity, it could (???) have happened North of the White Cliffs, but Mr. H-P tells us a lot about why it didn't, and I'm grateful for his work.
Later:
And yes, it still hurts, somewhere deep down, even though life's pretty good where I am ...
Last edited by Jig Peter; 23rd Oct 2010 at 15:21. Reason: Decided after all to add final sentence
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: london
Posts: 285
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
... the reason for making references to the DC3 and the DH Rapide in relation to the decline of the British a/c industry was to point out that
while the US had seen the way forward for civil airliners (small or large) was to be monoplane construction - GB were still involved in producing
new models of Bi-plane vintage - Hence delightful as the DH Rapide may have been - it was already dated before its first flight.
This could not have been more embarrasingly made obvious when our
Jersey Airlines coach collected passengers from E. Croydon station
and on arrival at Croydon Airport the passengers upon being led out to their DH Rapide lined up on Croydons apron - REFUSED to board it !
...
while the US had seen the way forward for civil airliners (small or large) was to be monoplane construction - GB were still involved in producing
new models of Bi-plane vintage - Hence delightful as the DH Rapide may have been - it was already dated before its first flight.
This could not have been more embarrasingly made obvious when our
Jersey Airlines coach collected passengers from E. Croydon station
and on arrival at Croydon Airport the passengers upon being led out to their DH Rapide lined up on Croydons apron - REFUSED to board it !
...
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Toulouse area, France
Age: 93
Posts: 435
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
A Hatfield contender ...
Apart from the fragile "Albatross" (passenger door weakened the fuselage), I seem to remember photos of a rather elegant twin-engined, high wing design from Hatfield called the Flamingo. Now that would have been a good (re-)start after WW2, but deH's were thinking of bigger boys' toys, apart from the Dove and Heron, perhaps.
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: london
Posts: 285
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
The Croydon Dh Heron
...
By coincidence - happened to pass by the DH Heron on display at
Croydon Airport Gates - and what a sorry sight ! In its present state
being more worthy advertising a scrap yard - with several large rust spots or metal decay showing through the unwashed faded Moreton Airways livery. Capt Moreton would be in despair if still around.
...
By coincidence - happened to pass by the DH Heron on display at
Croydon Airport Gates - and what a sorry sight ! In its present state
being more worthy advertising a scrap yard - with several large rust spots or metal decay showing through the unwashed faded Moreton Airways livery. Capt Moreton would be in despair if still around.
...
The DH.95 Flamingo seemed promising to me and was a leap in technology for DH as their first all-metal aircraft. Possibly if war hadn't intervened it may have been successful.
Post-war, being only a little bigger than the Heron it was presumably considered not worth building.
Post-war, being only a little bigger than the Heron it was presumably considered not worth building.
Don't forget, though, that Rolls Royce are still making aero engines which are a byeword for safety and reliability throughout the world of aviation....
.... erm....
.... erm....