Looking at the funny U-tube, one understands that a degree in aeronautical engeneering takes at least some 5 years!

Re Post 39 captain dart thanks for thr clarification about the B36 and reactors, amazing what peopel would try in the 50s. Even the B36 itself with its ten engines split between prop and pure jet power almost qualifies but I think there were other hybrid engine aircraft (not counting rocket take offs and the like)

A fantastic amazing machine though even if pretty useless by the time it entered service, single wheel main gear ona plane that size awesome.

While writing this another contender comes to mind, take off only boost engines a la Trident 3 , any other airliners ever enter service with sucha configuration?

A nice interestign thread and yes as someone pointed out it is abit harsh to blame UK manufacturers when they were only allowed to build what was specified leading to such disasters as Tudors, Brabazons etc. More fun to be aircraft afficiando in tho e days though when you consider that a trip to LHR might see ten A320s in succesion landing

An amazing time, pax, all mainly achieved by engineers with slide rules. Only the prototype B-36 had the huge single main wheels, operational ones had 4 wheel bogies. The type was actually quite successful in service and lived up to its name 'Peacemaker' or 'The Big Stick' and was the mainstay of SAC until the B-47 came along.

However they did trial a B-36 with 'caterpillar' landing gear. Unsurprisingly, it was not a success!

You mean apart from the fact that with only 43 sold and two customers it never got close to breaking even, and that by the early 70's practically everyone else was flying jets ?

Personally, I loved the Vanguard, but in common with most British airliners, it could never be described as a commercial success.

Capt Dart
I never got to see a B36 but like the B52 and Vulcan it just looks awesome .

I find it very hard to scale aircraft from the 50s because you so seldom see a piston prop say alongside a jet and when you do it is a shock that what was a once might DC6 say is not much bigger if at all than an ATR.

PB

Or even hybrid aircraft engines such as the Napier Nomad (piston/jet compound) which incidentally is my favourite exhibit at the Museum of Flight, East Fortune.

I was at a meeting yesterday and someone passed me this.. and asked me what it was. I was stumped - to me it resembled something built in the immediate post-war years..
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d3...pslzx16hys.jpg
After a minute or two's googling, I found the answer. This airframe had an interesting history..

FlightlessParrot, according to the book you might say perhaps Hollywood accounting. When Douglas management was taken over by Douglas Jr., after the Sr. retired, he introduced the policy of not showing development costs as current expenditure, to be written off gradually and in harmony with receipts. Rolls Royce and Lockheed did the same. Boeing on the other hand absorbed developmental costs as they arose. The result for Douglas was they were facing bankruptcy within a year had McDonnell not pulled them out of the mire by taking Douglas over.

Adding to Douglas cost was the production of too many models of the -8 and -9, which resulted in confusion and production delays, the 9 was selling faster than they could build them, with delivery schedules falling apart as a result, airlines sued successfully for the late deliveries, and to top it all off, the Vietnam war created a shortage of parts and skilled labour. All the time they were struggling financially and the large cash flow created by the 9 did not cover the cost of building them.

I know that - but my comment was really that exactly the same could be said about the Electra and Britannia - except that the Electra made commercial sense after it morphed into the P-3 Orion!

Thurston Tawny Owl .....

Ensign always look pretty advanced for when it was built. That one certainly moved around a bit

David

Thank you for the verdict on the Vanguard...I'd left that hanging for a bit of fun! I also loved the sight and sound of the old bird, particularly in its BEA/BA hey day.

However, the late, great, Mr Trubshaw summed it up well. "The Vanguard, like most Vickers products, had many attributes but the timing of the aircraft was wrong as far as a number of airlines were concerned, who saw it in the minds of the travelling public as somewhat unfashionable and slow turbo-prop when compared to jetliners like the Caravelle"

The Vanguard's only appeal was to extremely academic bean counters who only looked at seat-mile costs. And there were even less of them around at the time than nowadays. A 140-seat short haul aircraft was just too large in 1960, and all 140 of those seats just could not be consistently sold at sensible prices all day long. Of course, those were the days of fixed and regulated fares, so no cheaper offerings (apart from night flights) to encourage demand, so they did a lot of either flying half empty or sitting around between peaks. It was another 10 years before BEA got jets of even the same capacity.

Quite a bit of an aircraft operating cost is crew, of course, and if they are paid by the flying hour (as someone on an x hr/month contract effectively is) then an aircraft which is notably slower will end up with greater crew costs, to an extent that offsets other operating costs.

It was also a thoroughly uncomfortable aircraft, not only seated high density but well known for vibration, inside and out, and was a very bad noise neighbour. You could hear them taxying miles away (someone wrote that taxying at Ringway was audible in the centre of Stockport), and having lived at the time at the midpoint on their London-Belfast run, they were plainly audible from the ground. I believe the key noise issue was with the propellers. I don't know how De Havilland (who made the props) could have got it so wrong while Dowty (who made the Britannia props, which must have needed to absorb around the same horsepower) managed to get it right at the same time.

Plus it was propellers, not jets. When all the European competitors started moving to jets, starting with the Caravelle (introduced before the Vanguard), it was just commercially uncompetitive. Sure the Vanguard had a lesser seat mile cost, but overall aircraft cost for the smaller Caravelle would be around the same. And it was faster, and A JET. This was the jet age.

Going back a few posts, I feel this picture sums up the B-36:

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c3...sq9utkaxu.jpeg

Note there are two FE seats!

With 10 engines I'm not surprised! Haven't managed to see one yet, must go State-side again.... Love to have seen one flying.

Interesting that the F/E(s) only appear to have instrumentation for the six R-4360s, whereas that for the four J47s is on the pilots' panel.

Great 360° view of the B-36 cockpit here: Cockpit360

"You want us to add controls and instruments for four more engines? Really? There's no room. Stick 'em in the pilot's panel!"

It's hard to comprehend how big the B-36 was until you see a comparison:

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c3...sip48d8mh.jpeg

Sorry for dragging off topic with the B36 comments- I love the two FE seats -do you think one was a Chief Engineer in best B Movie/Star trek tradition telling the captain-'the engines will never take it-Sir'

And that picture alongside the B29 is the same scale jump that you see in the pics of 707 and 747s together on the Boeing ramp. It really was a big beast especially for the time.

One wing of the B-36 looks roughly the same as the entire span of the -29.

B-36 - span 230 feet, B-29 - 141.25 feet