The Planes that never were

[Idris2002]

The last attempt to keep the Mustang alive, as a counter-insurgency platform:

Piper PA-48 Enforcer - Wikipedia

 

[gosub]

The last attempt to keep the Mustang alive, as a counter-insurgency platform:

Piper PA-48 Enforcer - Wikipedia

Remember seeing Mustangs at Blackbushe in the 80's that had been used operationally in Africa that decade (and seen action)

 

[Idris2002]

Remember seeing Mustangs at Blackbushe in the 80's that had been used operationally in Africa that decade (and seen action)

I suppose you can't remember what bit of Africa?

 

[gosub]

I suppose you can't remember what bit of Africa?

Not immediately, but they were picking bits of bullets out of the engine I saw them, that I though from WW2, to be told the damage was far more recent

 

[Idris2002]

Not immediately, but they were picking bits of bullets out of the engine I saw them, that I though from WW2, to be told the damage was far more recent

Google says that Sath Efrica swapped its Mustangs for Sabres in the early '50s, and that Somalia also operated the type (but doesn't say 'til when).

 

[DownwardDog]

Mustangs and Corsairs (F-4U not F-8) both saw combat in the 1969 'Football War' between Honduras and El Salvador. I think that would be the last combat operations by a WW2 type. Although somebody in Africa or the Middle East has probably flung hand grenades out of a Texan/Harvard since.

 

[TheHoodedClaw]

Mustangs and Corsairs (F-4U not F-8) both saw combat in the 1969 'Football War' between Honduras and El Salvador. I think that would be the last combat operations by a WW2 type. Although somebody in Africa or the Middle East has probably flung hand grenades out of a Texan/Harvard since.

Someone's bound to have moved troops around in a DC-3 variant since 1969.

 

[Idris2002]

Someone's bound to have moved troops around in a DC-3 variant since 1969.

Yes, Richard Burton & co. did in The Wild Geese.

 

[Idris2002]

This link, apparently, displays the only surviving footage of the Kyushu J7W, a canard fighter intended to stop the B-29s.

Before it could enter service, a B-29 visited Hiroshima.

The Only Film Of Japan's B-29 Killing Interceptor

 

[Lancman]

It'd be an "interesting" beast to keep straight on take-off with all that power, a non-contra rotating propellor,and very little airflow over the rudder. Nosewheel steering would help a bit I suppose, but still a hand (or boot) full.

 

[ferrelhadley]

The Soviet BURAN orbiter. Only flew once (unmanned), before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Project abbondened in 1993

Only one that was built ever flew, got destroyed when the hanger it was stored in collapsed. Another one that never flew remains derelict in a hanger somewhere.

Came across some photos of these.

В спальне бога

There is a certain air to atmosphere photos.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Blohm und Voss P170 Schnellbomber. This was probably a decent concept from the ever fertile mind of Doktor Vogt but the design was overlooked by Ehard Milch's (Luftwaffe head of aircraft production) increasingly manic obsession with jet engines.

Charming historical footnote: At the end of the war Feldmarschall Milch surrended his marshal's baton with great ceremony to a British army Brigadier who duly accepted the baton and broke it over the Nazi's head.

Sorry just reading through the thread so an old post but of the top of my head...
Lethal to land as you have no visibility over the nose.
It will roll like a like a square wheel because of the weight of the engines being so far out board
One engine fails and you have a totally uncontrollable plane that will yaw heavily and likely pull you into a spin.
You are going to need an excessive amount of structural strength in the wing for those engines compared with a conventional layout so going to be heavier.
And the BMW engines were radials. Torque with that much lever arm?
In the Me 310\410 they tried to get the engines as close together so they gained manoeuvrability.

Finally not a critical flaw but if you have 3 landing gear then getting shot of the tail dragger would have been a obvious choice?

 

[Idris2002]

I got this one off the pinterest CANCELLED page.

"The Hawker Siddeley HS.141 was a 1970s design study and submission for a British V/STOL airliner requirement.[1] Designed by Hawker Siddeley Aviation and tested in wind tunnels neither prototypes nor production aircraft were produced."

I can only ask. . . why a civilian V/STOL project? What's the point?

 

[The Boy]

I can only ask. . . why a civilian V/STOL project? What's the point?

Less runway, more wetherspoons and duty free?

 

[DownwardDog]

What's the point?

You could ask that about almost every British post war civil aviation project. I'm struggling to think of many that were commercially relevant. Viscount? Maybe... for a bit.

 

[DotCommunist]

rich mans toys?

 

[Idris2002]

You could ask that about almost every British post war civil aviation project. I'm struggling to think of many that were commercially relevant. Viscount? Maybe... for a bit.

That Empire of the Clouds book did paint a picture of a post-war Brit aircraft industry that was utterly dysfunctional, and rendered so by its management cadre of old buffers from the old boy network.

 

[Idris2002]

Less runway, more wetherspoons and duty free?

For inner city airports, maybe?

 

[hot air baboon]

paging Boris Johnson...

 

[The Boy]

For inner city airports, maybe?

Was what I was thinking. Save the hour commute between the airport and anywhere people might want to actually be.

 

[Idris2002]

Was what I was thinking. Save the hour commute between the airport and anywhere people might want to actually be.

Noise abatement laws might have something to say about that.

 

[The Boy]

Noise abatement laws might have something to say about that.

Yeah, well Brexit might have something to say about noise abatement laws

 

[Idris2002]

Yeah, well Brexit might have something to say about noise abatement laws

"Hold my beer", going on past experience.

 

[Chz]

Less runway, more wetherspoons and duty free?

It looks a helluva lot larger than what City Airport opened with - Dash 7s and Dorniers. Of course, LCY wasn't even a notion in someone's head in the early 70s so you do still have to wonder what they were smoking.

 

[DownwardDog]

That Empire of the Clouds book did paint a picture of a post-war Brit aircraft industry that was utterly dysfunctional, and rendered so by its management cadre of old buffers from the old boy network.

Also, for most of the postwar period the British taxpayer was lucky enough to own two airlines who could be directed by government to buy British aircraft. Thus the manufacturers could design and build aircraft without much thought to the value proposition for the customer as BOAC/BEA were going to be ordered to buy them anyway.

 

[Idris2002]

Also, for most of the postwar period the British taxpayer was lucky enough to own two airlines who could be directed by government to buy British aircraft. Thus the manufacturers could design and build aircraft without much thought to the value proposition for the customer as BOAC/BEA were going to be ordered to buy them anyway.

Was that all there was to it, though?

Didn't the disaster of the Comet mean that the initial head start in passenger jets was lost? And didn't BOAC, at least, fly 747s a lot? And wasn't the VC-10 that they were ordered to buy actually pretty good?

 

[DownwardDog]

Was that all there was to it, though?

Didn't the disaster of the Comet mean that the initial head start in passenger jets was lost? And didn't BOAC, at least, fly 747s a lot? And wasn't the VC-10 that they were ordered to buy actually pretty good?

It wasn't all there was to it. There were many reasons for the death of the British civil aircraft business of which the management complacency and government protectionism were just two.

The hull losses didn't kill the Comet although they certainly didn't help. After all, it was still in production five years later as the Comet 4 with the flaws remedied. The 707 would just fly more people further, faster and cheaper so that's what airlines bought.

The VC-10 was a deeply strange aircraft that should have never made if off the drawing board. It was optimised for the Empire routes such as Nairobi and Karachi. This meant it had incredible T/O performance for hot and high runways. Almost no airlines needed or were willing to pay for such performance. By the time it got into production the Empire routes had receded into irrelevance compared to the new transatlantic routes on which the VC-10 was a prohibitively expensive proposition.

By the late 60s there were simply no viable wide body British aircraft available and BA began to fill the fleet with Tristars and then 747s. I think it wasn't until 1960 that non state owned airlines were allowed to buy foreign (ie US) aircraft. There were a some exceptions made for BOAC before then including Stratocruisers in the 40s and a special dispensation to buy DC-7s when the Bristol Britannia project got fucked up.

 

[Idris2002]

It wasn't all there was to it. There were many reasons for the death of the British civil aircraft business of which the management complacency and government protectionism were just two.

The hull losses didn't kill the Comet although they certainly didn't help. After all, it was still in production five years later as the Comet 4 with the flaws remedied. The 707 would just fly more people further, faster and cheaper so that's what airlines bought.

The VC-10 was a deeply strange aircraft that should have never made if off the drawing board. It was optimised for the Empire routes such as Nairobi and Karachi. This meant it had incredible T/O performance for hot and high runways. Almost no airlines needed or were willing to pay for such performance. By the time it got into production the Empire routes had receded into irrelevance compared to the new transatlantic routes on which the VC-10 was a prohibitively expensive proposition.

By the late 60s there were simply no viable wide body British aircraft available and BA began to fill the fleet with Tristars and then 747s. I think it wasn't until 1960 that non state owned airlines were allowed to buy foreign (ie US) aircraft. There were a some exceptions made for BOAC before then including Stratocruisers in the 40s and a special dispensation to buy DC-7s when the Bristol Britannia project got fucked up.

OK - but take the Empire routes thing. How could anyone in management (or on the shop floor, even) have the vision in the 1950s to realise that the sun was setting at the rate of knots? Look at the propaganda they used to turn out for the Central African Federation - it was assumed that this lash-up of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland was going to be an African Canada, that would experience rapid take-off (but it failed because the African majority weren't mugs, and the white settlers in Southern Rhodesian were a bunch of loonies). Asking people not to base their long-term plans or their short-range procurements not on that sort of idiocy, but instead on the realisation that the game was up was surely not going to happen? And wouldn't that have been true regardless of whether or not the public or private sector was in the driving seat?

E2A: and re: the Comet. The point is not that they couldn't fix the problems (because they did) but because having that problem meant that they lost so many years at a crucial point in time?

 

[DownwardDog]

The story of the VC-10 and Comet are strangely intertwined. Vickers original proposal was the V-1000/VC-7 which was a more adaptable design. The government cancelled it to protect the Comet due to the previously discussed difficulties and it was only at that point that Vickers retreated to the Empire route optimised VC-10. The government was ready to die on a cross for the Comet as, at that point, there was the prospect of a second assembly line in Northern Ireland - a political and economic prize that was considered worth the premature death of the V-1000/VC-7. The NI factory never happened so it was all for nothing. The V-1000/VC-7 would have been a much more credible 707 competitor than the Comet could ever have been so it was a tragically missed opportunity. It was the prospect of the V-1000/VC-7 that caused Boeing to widen the 707 fuselage to 3+3 seating.

There's no doubt that DH lost a lot of time and commercial momentum with the Comet but ultimately what could they have done with that time? It was still fundamentally too small and its performance was limited by its archaic wing design. The only way to fix these was to design a different airframe.

 

[Idris2002]

Two Saunders Roe thingies: