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Just out of curiosity - Airplane Guys
- Thread starter Downeaster
- Start date
Yeah, we get them around here sometimes, up from Syracuse Hancock Airport and the 174th Fighter Squadron...
Actually, I was taking pictures of an opossum in our back yard, when this bird swooped in, and spooked the 'possum back into the woods... 
Blimey that looks scary!
"The Day the Music Died."
2-3-59
2-3-59
You Canadians aren't THAT bad Pete.
How's the trucking industry up there?
Sorry - I wasn't talking about neighbours across borders - I was referring to neighbours across backyard fences.
....and we feel the same way about you folks too Gary!
Now....to the trucking industry....well, the fact is that more than 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated and the US and Canada have enacted identical vaccine mandates for truckers crossing the border - so nobody I know really understands why these people are protesting against our government. They are Canadian citizens so they can always get back into Canada - vaccinated or not - but they cannot cross the border into the US - but that is not a decision by our government.
One thing is for sure - when they p!ssed and sh!tted on the National War Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, hung obscene signs on a statue of the late Terry Fox (a revered national hero up here) - and then swastika and confederate flags started appearing in their "freedom convoy" - they lost a bag-load of support from average people. Then, when a bunch of them raided a downtown soup kitchen for the homeless - demanding food and assaulting the volunteers working there - that sure didn't help either.
Isn't it amazing what a small group of selfish, thoughtless @ssholes can accomplish in just a few days?
Pete
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Cheers gggGary did not know that.
Very cool - the Douglas Skyrocket! In many respects, the Skyrocket was much more advanced than the better known Bell X1 but it was just as important historically.
….Lindbergh….now he had some quirks. Like Henry Ford, he initially expressed support for Hitler and was pretty anti-Semitic.
Anyone care to guess what the largest and heaviest airplane ever built by Republic Aircraft might have been? How about a variant of the formidable P47 Thunderbolt or perhaps of the mighty F105 Thunderchief…..?
Nope. It was an aircraft called the “XR12 Rainbow” and in this one, Chief Designer Alexander Kartveli really abandoned his customary "big and burley" style and went for "sleek and beautiful".
Check it out!
Nope. It was an aircraft called the “XR12 Rainbow” and in this one, Chief Designer Alexander Kartveli really abandoned his customary "big and burley" style and went for "sleek and beautiful".
Check it out!
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…and speaking of Republic’s Russian-born designer Alexander Kartveli, how about this very good expose of the Century Series aircraft from the F100 Super Sabre to the F110 Spectre and even the F111 Aardvark. While some minor details may not be quite right, I feel that author Mike Machat did a really good job on a big and complex topic and he even relates these remarkable 1950s-60s airplanes to the present-day F35.
The Century Series airplanes were designed and built during an incredible period in aeronautical engineering when there seemed to be no limit to the capacity for the companies in the US aircraft industry to learn from each other and innovate quickly. The problem faced by all of these companies was that the analytical tools, computer modelling and even advanced wind tunnel tests simply didn’t exist to show design engineers the best configurations. They just had to build full-scale airplanes and fly them to find out what would work. This cost a lot of money and risked a lot of lives, but that is how it was done.
My late friend Sam Smyth (of Lockheed California ADP / Skunkworks) told me how, while working on their XF104, the Lockheed, North American and Convair folks would watch Republic engineers mess with the air intakes on the XF105 - trying to get just the ideal geometry to allow that big P&W J75 to breath at high angles of attack. Republic tried the intake lip swept back parallel to the wing leading edge, at right angles to the LE and finally, swept forward - and that’s the shape that proved to do the job. Frankly, they were more successful than General Dynamics with their F111 which had continual problems with compressor stalls on the TF30 that powered that aircraft.
Similarly, the earlier XF102 from Convair was really not a supersonic airplane - no matter how steeply the test pilots dove it - until the engineers figured out how to optimize the total cross-sectional area of the airframe from nose-to tail (including the cross-sectional area of the wing) using what was called the “area rule”. Going from the nose back toward the tail, as the airplane wing increased in span - the fuselage had to decrease in area to compensate - and this “waist-pinching” effect resulted in the “coke bottle” shape best seen on the F104 and F105.
Once Convair employed that shaping technique on the fuselage of the F102, that airplane jumped to M1.3-1.4 without any increase in power.
Pete
The Century Series airplanes were designed and built during an incredible period in aeronautical engineering when there seemed to be no limit to the capacity for the companies in the US aircraft industry to learn from each other and innovate quickly. The problem faced by all of these companies was that the analytical tools, computer modelling and even advanced wind tunnel tests simply didn’t exist to show design engineers the best configurations. They just had to build full-scale airplanes and fly them to find out what would work. This cost a lot of money and risked a lot of lives, but that is how it was done.
My late friend Sam Smyth (of Lockheed California ADP / Skunkworks) told me how, while working on their XF104, the Lockheed, North American and Convair folks would watch Republic engineers mess with the air intakes on the XF105 - trying to get just the ideal geometry to allow that big P&W J75 to breath at high angles of attack. Republic tried the intake lip swept back parallel to the wing leading edge, at right angles to the LE and finally, swept forward - and that’s the shape that proved to do the job. Frankly, they were more successful than General Dynamics with their F111 which had continual problems with compressor stalls on the TF30 that powered that aircraft.
Similarly, the earlier XF102 from Convair was really not a supersonic airplane - no matter how steeply the test pilots dove it - until the engineers figured out how to optimize the total cross-sectional area of the airframe from nose-to tail (including the cross-sectional area of the wing) using what was called the “area rule”. Going from the nose back toward the tail, as the airplane wing increased in span - the fuselage had to decrease in area to compensate - and this “waist-pinching” effect resulted in the “coke bottle” shape best seen on the F104 and F105.
Once Convair employed that shaping technique on the fuselage of the F102, that airplane jumped to M1.3-1.4 without any increase in power.
Pete
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Thats just sadSorry - I wasn't talking about neighbours across borders - I was referring to neighbours across backyard fences.
....and we feel the same way about you folks too Gary!
Now....to the trucking industry....well, the fact is that more than 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated and the US and Canada have enacted identical vaccine mandates for truckers crossing the border - so nobody I know really understands why these people are protesting against our government. They are Canadian citizens so they can always get back into Canada - vaccinated or not - but they cannot cross the border into the US - but that is not a decision by our government.
One thing is for sure - when they p!ssed and sh!tted on the National War Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, hung obscene signs on a statue of the late Terry Fox (a revered national hero up here) - and then swastika and confederate flags started appearing in their "freedom convoy" - they lost a bag-load of support from average people. Then, when a bunch of them raided a downtown soup kitchen for the homeless demanding food and assaulted the volunteers working there - that sure didn't help either.
Isn't it amazing what a small group of selfish, thoughtless @ssholes can accomplish in just a few days?
Pete
It is Mike.
The group - which did have some legitimate points to raise - seems to have been taken over by a bunch of racists, neo-Nazis and far-out fruitcakes. Their "demonstration" has evolved into a full-on occupation of the Ottawa downtown and the parliamentary precinct. The big-rigs have parked all over the place blocking major streets and they blow their horns 24 hours/day. The "freedom demonstrators" have been assaulting people who live in the area if they wear a mask (which nearly everyone does when going into stores here) and they have been harrassing health care workers like nurses and doctors going to work in clinics and hospitals. They have made life miserable for citizens of Ottawa (a city of about 1 million people).
Even GoFundMe has frozen their funds (more than $6M to date) and is returning the money to donors or sending it on to worthy charities.
But, as I said, one of the most unforgivable things is that they have desecrated the national war memorial and statues of revered public figures like Terry Fox. Fox was a young man who had lost a leg to cancer as a child and then ran across Canada (using an artificial leg - more than 5000 miles) to raise money for cancer research. He contracted another case of cancer part-way through his journey and died shortly afterward.
Stupid vandalism like that has completely blown their case with the general public and so the cops are now moving-in to end the occupation.
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…..and back to aircraft stuff…..once again from author Mike Machat, the story of a truly remarkable aircraft engine: the Pratt & Whitney R4360 Wasp Major (I’ll bet it was fun changing all of those 56 spark plugs):
Nah... figurin' out which one was missfiring was the fun part....
Didn't the flight engineer have an ociliscope to monitior the plugs on those big radial engined aircraft?Nah... figurin' out which one was missfiring was the fun part....
As for changing the 56 plugs per engine on the R-4360's...a friend of mine told me story about his SAC days on B-36's and C-124's. He was an electrician and the '124 needed a plug change to complete the journey. So it lands and the crew chief opens cowles as the rest of the TDYcrew goes to the barracks or whereever. The A/C crewdogs puts out the word that the more hands that help, the quicker they will get out of there. Help and lots of it arrived and tool boxes were open and it was amazine how quick 224 plugs got changed...
Yes, the F/E had a scope and about 4 rotary switches. He could select plugs (the HT leads actually) individually and look at their trace.
