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Aviation History
1939
1939 - 1760.PDF
JUNE 8, 1939 ffiffS®? 579 AFRICAN SCENE : One of Imperials' flying boats moored on the Nile beside the passengers' rest "house "- Mayflower. TOPICS of the DAY -the good ship Neiv Dangers N ECESSARY though it undoubtedly is in these days of intensive R.A.F. training for Service pilots to fly at all times, in all weathers and sometimes over thickly inhabitated urban areas, I cannot help feel ing that freedom, in some cases, is being abused. When, in the course of normal private peregrinations, a trio of Battles suddenly pop out of the clouds a hundred yards or so to the right of one's machine, no complaint can be made, since cloud flying training is so very necessary; and, in any case, I shouldn't be flying so near to the cloud- base, however low. But the pilot of a transport machine, carrying anything up to twenty paying passengers, is righteously incensed if, without any warning at all, a flight or a squadron of military machines is seen breaking the overcast on one of the normal air routes. He very reasonably wonders what is the good of all this careful traffic control (and only last week he may have spent three-quarters of an hour making blind turns just outside the controlled zone while waiting for permission to come in) if other uncontrolled machines are to plunge furiously about inside a cloud layer. Goodness knows there is a sufficient amount of trouble if an unfortunate private owner so much as touches the fringe of the zone without previously obtaining permission from the control officer at the local terminal. Even in perfectly good weather the possible dangers are not unnoticeable. A few weeks ago a Blenheim was seen (and heard) doing high-speed aerobatics over the middle of London. During the performance a Lockheed Fourteen came by, on its way back from Stockholm or Warsaw, and used precisely that part of the sky which had been covered by the Blenheim with innumerable rocket stalled turns— to invent a new aerobatic expression. Probably, the pilot of the Fourteen was "living in " at the time, and he may or may not have seen the Blenheim. Obviously, it was up to the pilot of the latter to keep a look-out, but it is not always easy to see other machines, particularly when con centrating on aerobatic elegancies. A few days previously a couple of Harts (or Audaxes or whatever) had duly frightened everybody in a suburban area by flying about, sometimes in formation and some times in mock battle, under a cloud base which could not, at the time, have been much higher than five hundred feet. Possibly to the uninitiated the performance looked more dangerous than it really was, but it has already been shown that even a comparatively small military aeroplane can have the effect of a high explosive bomb when it is accidentally stalled into a populous area. Some remarkable exhibitions, too, are put up by night fighter pilots, though in this case the lowness or otherwise of the flying can only be judged by the speed at which the navigation lights cover the visible area of sky. More than once recently I have heard what was obviously a Hurricane hurricaning about while a co-operation Rapide droned wearily along at approximately the same altitude. Possibly the pilot of the Hurricane was on the look-out, but he certainty could not have seen what is immediately below and in front of him, and one of these days a fighter is going to take the top wing off a charter machine— with an easily imagined holocaust to follow. Nor is it entirely necessary in the interests of training to fly at Mty feet or so in the middle of the night over a south coast resort. These modern high-speed fighters are not noisy and probably do not annoy the residents, since the effect of such a passage is more one of concussion than noise. Personally, I can imagine nothing more exciting than this sort of thing, especially for the pilot, but it would make such a mess if he misjudged his height by fifty feet. It is curious to discover how little room there is in the sky. Only a fortnight ago, while flying back from the Midlands, I was practically cut in half by a Blenheim four some which appeared out of an empty sky. All of us had three dimensions to move in over the whole country and we passed, our tracks at right-angles, within a hundred feet. A pleasing close-up of the type was provided for me. Stalling Curiosities WHILE on (or off) the subject of aerobatics, there seems to be a good deal of misunderstanding about stalling speeds, and so forth, during violent manoeuvres. The other day I saw some stall ing-speed curves covering turns of various degrees of steepness. The speed at which every thing falls away, even in a moderately tight turn, is quite surprisingly high. By replotting similar curves for a light aeroplane that I know, I found that it stalled at about 80 m.p.h. in a really tight turn. Some time ago I had an argument with some one who denied hotly that forced loading, in a turn or a (Concluded on page 582.)
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