Samizdata

I was just checking in at Xcor to see what they’ve been up to the last week or two. No new flights listed, but they are selling this really neat poster. Go for the signed copies. If they manage the next step – suborbital – it will be like having the autographs of the Mercury 7 team from 1960.

Besides – all you old net heads from the days of Space Digest know at least three of the people in the photograph besides Dick Rutan: Jeff Greason, Doug Jones and Aleta Jackson.

By buying one you’ll help fund the research program which will let you to go up some day soon.

Yes, I do have an interest in this. I know and like some of these people, I want them to succeed… and I want to go myself.

Sgt Stryker reports on an idea batted around ten years ago in the Spring ’91 Air Power Journal: fill obsolete aircraft with explosives and use them as remote controlled flying bombs.

It’s been done. The earliest I can think of off the top of my head was the secret mission in which Joe Kennedy Jr. died in WWII. He volunteered to pilot a B-24 Liberator packed with 20,000 pounds of plastic explosives from takeoff to altitude. He and the co-pilot were then to bail out. The Liberator was then to be flown by remote control from another aircraft… and crashed into its’ target. Unfortuneately the aircraft exploded before Kennedy and his co-pilot bailed out.

This month’s Aeroplane carries a story about “A Cat With Nine Lives” which mentions in passing that a number of Grumman Hellcats were flown into North Korean targets with a less than 50% success rate. Between August 28th and September 2, 1952 six drone Hellcats carrying 1000lb bombs were flown into a power station, a bridge, a railway tunnel and other targets. The Hellcats were controlled by AD-4N Skyraiders of VC-35.

Guess there is nothing new under the sun…

erratum: I realized this morning that I’d said Flypast instead of Aeroplane, as both new issues were sitting on my desk and I confused which one I’d just read which article in… I’ve corrected this above.

Addendum: a reader in Traverse City, Michigan pointed out a secret robot bomber project from WWII that I was completely unaware of. Information can be found here and here.

Steven Den Beste has replied to my remarks about World War Two aircraft. Tally ho!

Perry’s British sensibilities do not need to be defensive about that, because the British contributed nearly as much to the success of the Mustang as did the Americans.

It has nothing to do with my ‘British sensibilities’ but I do know a thing or two about aerocraft of the era.

As a Brit, it was inevitable that Perry should be nostalgic about the Spitfire. In 1940 there was no better air defense fighter in existence, and the UK damned well needed it. Twice as many Hurricanes fought in the Battle of Britain than Spitfires, but it was the Spitfires which made the difference because the Hurricanes were not really able to stand up to the 109’s. That said, it has to be recognized that as an all-around fighter, the Spitfire had major weaknesses, especially compared to later designs. Its airframe wasn’t as rugged as those the Americans built, and for most of the war it was undergunned (because it relied on .30 caliber machine guns). And its biggest weakness all through the war was short legs; it simply could not carry enough fuel for anything except defense.

I will try not to get too irked that Steven seems to imply that my presumed nationality somehow skews my historical judgement. He also should have read my article more carefully. I said I was talking about mid-to-late war piston engined fighters (the P-51 was not around in the early war period), and what Steven is describing is a 1940 Battle of Britain era Spitfire I. By 1941 all (non-PR) Spitfires, from the Spit V onwards, were armed with two 20mm cannon as well as (usually) four .303 machine guns. It is the lack of cannon armament in the P-51 to which I was referring. More importantly all the Luftwaffe fighters which the USAAF were facing were cannon armed aerocraft. Of course it was not a decisive flaw because the six 50 cal HMGs favoured by the USAAF were good enough.

When most aficionados of WWII aircraft speak of “the best”, it mainly becomes a question of sending 8 of each into the air to duke it out and see how many of each come back. On that basis, the Spitfire would not have rated against the Mustang because of the Spit’s final drawback: it wasn’t as fast. In combat, speed is life. Which doesn’t take anything away from the Spitfire’s designers; North American designed the Mustang six years later and had learned much.

Quite incorrect. Stephen seem to be again comparing the 1940 Spitfire I with the 1943+ Mustangs, rather than the Spits that were flying at the same time as the various marks of Mustang (such as the Spit IX or the formidable Spit XIV or Spit XIX). In fact, there was never really anything to choose between the two fighters in terms of speed because as the newer versions of Mustang came out, so did the newer versions of Spitfire. There were many versions of the P-51 and even more of the Spitfire and the Spits in particular had many sub-variants optimised for certain altitudes making the comparisions even harder. In fact the late war Griffon engined Spitfires were generally both faster, better armed and more heavily armoured than the directly contemporary Mustang versions. But this also goes to show the fallacy of comparing them at all: the Mustang was fighting most of its battles at very high altitude over Germany, for which it was optimised and handled beautifully, whilst the Spitfires were fighting at low to medium altitude over the battlefront or defensively over Britain, neither of which required long range. Certainly Spitfire LF variants would be able to outfly a Mustang of equal era at low altitude by a significant margin, but that is not really what Mustangs were for, even if they were occasionally used that way, so is it even a useful comparison?

Perry brings up night-fighters. They were important (especially to the RAF, which did most of its bombing at night) but most people don’t consider them to be the same kind of thing. Night fighters had to be larger because they had to carry radar. There was much less emphasis on maneuver because night fighters didn’t tangle with each other, so most of the emphasis was on simple ability to carry weight. The Mosquito made a decent night fighter, but it could never have competed during the day. (It is noteworthy that the ME-110 was meat on the table during the day but ended up being a pretty decent night fighter.)

The fact is RAF nightfighters did indeed operate against Luftwaffe nightfighters. For much of the war, hunting German nightfighters was the primary RAF nightfighter mission, both as escorts to the RAF night bomber streams and as night counter-air intruders over German airfields. If you want to know more about that I strongly recommend History of the German Night Fighter Force by Gebhard Aders. It is written from the German point of view and is a superb book, pretty much the definitive work on the subject of the night air war in WW2.

Also to compare a Mosquito (of any mark) with an Bf.110 is like comparing a Ferrari with a Pinto. Mosquitos did indeed operate against single engined day fighters in a way that would have been suicide for a Bf.110. There are a host of books on the history of the Mosquito, but I would recommend Mosquito by C. Martin Sharp & Michael J. F. Bowyer, if you want to see a very broad range of information and statistics of all versions. By day, what it could not outfight it could outrun (until the jets arrived of course). Mosquito day fighter-bombers (mostly the FBVI version) regularly clashed with high performance single seat fighters like the formidable Fw. 190 and were quite capable of holding their own. For some excellent accounts of Mosquito tactical day and night operations, I recommend 2 Group RAF: a compete history. 1936-1945 by Michael J. F. Bowyer, which I have just finished re-reading.

[…] If one really wants to open up all the stops and say what the best fighter of the war, anyplace, anytime was on the basis of “send 8 up and see how many come back” then there is no question of the choice: it would be the pure fighter version of the ME-262. With a hundred mph edge in speed and a decent weapons load, it was deadly. It is fortunate for us that Hitler had his head wedged and ordered the majority of ME-262’s to be equipped as fighter-bombers.

Maybe, maybe not. There are many historians who disagree with that widely held view and contend it was production problems, not the so called ‘bomber directive’ that was actually the reason so few Me-262’s ever became operational.

Update: As a couple people have asked me to recommend some sources regarding my remarks about the Mosquito, I have edited the article to include two in the text above.

16 Years ago today, 7 honoured members of the space community gave their lives for the dream we all share. I and others in that community pledge to carry their names to the stars.

Dick Scobee
Mike Smith
Judy Resnick
Ron McNair
Ellison Onizuka
Greg Jarvis
Crista McAuliffe

I raise my glass. We will never forget you.

Congratulations to Steve Bennett on the unmanned test flight over Britain of his 38 foot (11 metre) Starchaser rocket. The launch took place at Morecambe Bay in Cumbria.

Bennett described the launch as being “85% successful” due to the fact that two of the three parachutes became entangled, causing the expended reusable rocket main body to return to the mud flats of Morecambe Bay rather faster than hoped for. The unmanned passenger capsule detached and landed perfectly however. Despite having many detractors, Bennett intends to be the first passenger once the rocket is ready for its maiden manned flight.

This is yet another indication that privately built and funded manned spaceflight is drawing ever closer. I wish Bennett and all the other pioneers of non-governmental spaceflight the very best of luck… for they are the very best of us. Per Ardua ad Astra

There is not a lot of information to go on yet on the crash in Queens. That said, I am just as capable of making a fool of myself as the next pundit, so I will proceed to do so.

My instructor once told me, “What is the most dangerous part of a flight? Takeoff. The runway is behind you.” What was true of a single engine Cessna is biblical for a heavy multiengine transport. Losing an engine on takeoff means a loss of power just when you need it the most. You are trying to climb out in a high angle noise-abatement attitude. Suddenly you don’t have the power to sustain that and you are heading for a stall. Even worse, you have an asynchronous thrust and a torque that even full opposing rudder might not be able to counteract. This is especially true for a plane with two very powerful wing pylon mounted engines. When one engine stops running, your airplane wants to stop climbing and do a wingover. That’s probably what happened at O’Hare a decade or more ago when a DC-10 did just that. A DC-10 has 4 engines so one would think it might have been able to recover. But there is yet a third problem in a case like today.

Engines do fall off airplanes from time to time. Pylons are designed to break away in the worst case. But that only helps in a more normal failure, not a catastrophic failure. There is every chance that at the very instant your airplane wants to do a wingover and head straight for the ground, you will have lost all or most of your hydraulics on one side. Airplanes that size are controlled by hydraulics; the hydraulic pressure is supplied by a smaller jet engine called an Auxiliary Power Unit. I’m sure you’ve heard of APU’s on the space shuttle. Well, airliners have them too. They supply the high pressure required to move ailerons and such. If you lose pressure, you can’t control the airplane. There is redundancy, but if you’ve just lost a big chunk of aeroplane… you are toast.

It’s doubtful even a computer fly-by-wire system could have dealt with it. You can fly an airplane with control surfaces and no power or with power and no control surfaces. But if you’ve lost both?

This all begs the real question. Was it or wasn’t it? There was certainly no terrorist inside the airplane. Believe me, there is no button that says “Jettison Engine”. If reports of fire on one side during takeoff were true, then it is either a terrible accident or sabotage before the takeoff. If the problems did not show until the aircraft was off the runway, it is either a engine fault, ingestion of a Pterosaur-sized avian, sabotage… or a Stinger up the exhaust pipe.

I’m sure that someone in high places will know very soon. Personally I think it was an accident. We’ll know soon enough. The signs of a Stinger induced failure should be rather unmistakeable if present.