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Aviation History
1939
1939 - 1593.PDF
b FLIGHT. May 25, 193(3. frankly admits that he forgot all about the petrol. The flight had to be abandoned, but the experience had served to convince Sir Alan that he was on the right track. Up till this time (viz., December, 1934) the theory had been that the '' tanker '' should fly steadily during the operation, while the air craft to be fuelled should do all the '' format ing." By now Sir Alan began to change his mind about that. He reasoned that logically all the skill required, and all the special equip ment, should be on board the tanker, so that all the pilot of the receiving aircraft would have to do would be to fly steadily and straight. And that has been the basis of all subsequent development. Ever since 1934 Sir Alan Cobham has de voted all his unbounded energy, and a great deal of ready cash, to the development of fuelling. The company was reorganised a few years later, and the premises at Ford Aero drome, Yapton, near Arundel, have had to oe extended from time to time. The staff has also gradually grown, until now there is a very competent technical staff, drawing office and workshops. The latter are very well equipped so that the company is independent of outside help in most of its development work. That this has been difficult is not surprising. First of all, it has been necessary to convert aircraft not initially designed with air fuel ling in view. That takes some time. Then the necessary knowledge has had to be accumu lated laboriously from actual test flights and experiments. So many of the factors which enter into the problem cannot be calculated in the drawing office but have to be discovered by trial and error methods (in the earlier stages perhaps "hit and miss" would have been a more apt description). Fuelling Practical But Sir Alan's enthusiasm and organising ability have carried him through, and fuelling in the air has now reached, from the point of view of the tanker aircraft, a stage when it can justly be claimed to be a perfectly prac tical operation. That is not to say that it has reached the end of its development. Far from it; there are many directions in which the de tails can be improved; but the main scheme is there, ready and working. The operation of fuelling one aircraft from another in flight may be divided into four stages : making contact; getting the hose-pipe across; transferring the fuel; and the break away when the tanks are full. It is, of course, quite obvious that there are many possible ways in which a cable can be passed from one aircraft to the other. Most of them have been tried out at Ford. The one finally selected for fuelling the flying boats for this year's Atlantic experimental flights is known as the wing-tip method. Some of the others have been discarded and others are still in the experimental stage and not considered sufficiently proved to be used at the moment, although one or two show great promise and /•' n Sequence of making contact : In the upper picture the tanker's grapnel has caught the hauling line of the receiving aircraft. In the middle photograph the weighted grapnel on the end of the hauling line has nearly reached the winch in the tanker. In the lower picture the end of the hauling line has been attached to the nozzle of the hose, which is, beginning to emerge from the reel on the tanker. The cable is shown slightly thicker to make it discernible.
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