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Aviation History
1942
1942 - 2374.PDF
532 Topics of the Day FLIGHT NOVEMBER 12TH, 1942 IMPLICATIONS OF COMPLICATION About "Backroom" Items : The Strange Effects of Oxygen Starvation : "Automatic" G as a New Hazard : Problems of Single-engined Fighter Design : False Economy AS I've remarked at least once before, the human race /-% is really the most matter-of-fact and unsurprised. •*• -^ Radio and flying machines and plastic surgery, and anything else you like to think of, are simply accepted without an idea of the amount of development work which has gone into each. All the thousands of workers in laboratories and drawing offices are merely passed by, and the public acclaims and enriches the crooners, the funny men, anti the people who fly the aircraft. Even in the days when no one made much of a fuss of fast aircraft, the spotlights were on the pilots who flew the Schneider Trophy seaplanes rather than on the remarkable people, hundreds of them, who made 400-odd m.p.h. possible. To-day the most average of average persons knows that the most manoeuvrable, most heavily armed and fastest aircraft, and those that fly highest, will win the air war. They've been taught that much by the quite intelligent articles which have appeared in the daily and weekly popu lar press. But I wonder whether many people realise the effort required to produce an extra 10 m.p.h., or to pro vide a working ceiling which is just a thousand feet higher than anything used before. Or how many even realise the amount of effort which goes into the successful pro duction of the ancillary devices which make such advances possible. j/*1 Just take a few examples: The turbo-blower, the two- speed, two-stage supercharger, the automatic mixifirejpjn- trol, the oxygen feeding equipment, and the /inojRental heating devices for everything from oxygen/j^asks to reserve oil tanks and induction systems, whicKmake high- altitude flying even possible, let alone pradyalXthe, dynamic detail work, and the advanced in power units which have provided the additional cleanliness to give the extra speed. Automatic Complexity The development of the turbo-blower has been^largely a matter of finding alloys which would stand up T»«4 heat and the centrifugal stresses imposed, but there were thousands of other Complications involved. The speeds at which two-speed superchargers revolve and the small clear ances used, can hardly be guessed by the ordinary person ; in fact, even a temporary lubrication failure in one of the bearings will cause the blades to touch the casing and the whole lot will go west with the most amazing and compli cated results. The automatic mixture control, with its barometric devices and by-passes and heaven knows what, is even more automatic than it ever was. And the use of oxygen is not just a matter of making an oxygen bottle, filling it with oxygen, and feeding it through a pipe to a sort of face-pad. There are economisers— otherwise it would be necessary to carry twice the weight of bottles; there are delicate valves to ensure that it is fed even when the pilot is not capable of sucking very vigor ously ; and means must be found of preventing the inevit able breathly condensations from stopping up the intakes when they/freeze. The oxygen outfit, which is just a small part of the equipment carried by every ordinary single- seat fighter, is complicated enough to give any one tech nically minded person ten years' work in designing it. Incidentally, the pilot doesn't just say to himself at, say, ?o,oooft., "I think I'd better have some now," or, "I'll stick around without it for a moment or two." Those days are over. If you put two pilots of equal physical stamina and reaction-speed in two identical machines and sent them up even to 20,000ft., the pilot with the proper supply of oxygen would*win the aerobatic competition. It is, in fact, most interesting to watch the reactions of an oxygen-less pilot in a decompression chamber at 25,000ft. —and interesting to experience these reactions, too. He feels almost quite normal; he doesn't know that his per formance is ludicrous when he poises his pencil over a piece of paper and makes the most abject mass of doodles when writing his own name ; and he is quite unable to do the simplest arithmetical problem. His reactions are so slow that there is a fifteen to thirty-second reaction delay on the simplest reflex movements. The awful thing is that he doesn't know that he's in capable, or that he's doodling/or that the problem would be considered a very simplp'one if he was back at ground level or fed with the right amount of oxygen. So the sturdy fellow who sajfrthat he's tough and doesn't need oxygen at this or tHat height is just asking for trouble ; because he doesn/t know that he needs it. Everything seems quite nojmal, but his reactions are just a hundrBa times slower J^an those of a man on the ground. Slow-motion Scrappers Pilots Ml the last war will tell you that they flew and fo«ghlrrf*|)io#iglk>us heights. So they did, but their adver- sariesVtoo, were^flying without oxygen ,and they never knewalhat each wasworking in slow tempo; men were no tougler in those days—though it took three or more to swhft an airscrew ; ona to swing, one to pull the swinger awjFy, and oneyfo take\the news home to mother. flojw^jpr three-puarters of an hour at 18,000ft., Itho\it OKyVenL and fell quite fit, but merely thought that wasn/t neckssary or reasonably possible to work out any 3ack-to\rac1t course ; the plain fact was that I couldn't woik out The alteration—the '' unnecessary '' and '' impos- .sih^V were mere selVjustification. I remember, too, that le oil" temperatura^auges looked vaguely but enormously funny, and I doirt think I should have noticed the iad that if the rubles had gone off the clock such an event, perhapsj^ffrald have been funnier still. speed, by itself, is not merely a matter of getting power from somewhere, raising the wing-loading, and cleaning things up generally. The most extraordinary reactions can appear at very high speeds—things that are beginning to be noticed nowadays, and which make the technical achievement of producing a really fast aircraft, whether British, American or German, a very remarkable one. I hope, for instance, that the designers of the Ju88 and the Fw 190 will not be liquidated after it is all over; even if they are working for the wrong side their efforts are, nevertheless, such that they shouldn't be wasted in a pacific world. > C.G. and Manoeuvrability The greatest possible problems are involved in the design of still faster single-engined fighters with even greater fire power. On the face of it, there is no obvious reason why any good fighter shouldn't be fitted with more guns or heavier guns, or a more powerful engine—at the, prict of an inevitably higher landing speed. But the fact is that, in a compact machine, weight must somehow be distri buted ; distribution means an alteration in the position oi the e.g. ; and that alteration can produce the most alarm ing results during manoeuvres at high speeds. In my own small experience I can quote the case of a conventional though loaded-up fighter which, between certain speed limits, tightens up its own turns, so that the stick must actually be held forward in a tight turn if something resembling a black-out is to be prevented. With the in stallation of all the extra equipment the e.g. has presum ably moved aft. Curiously enough, turns at really high speeds, and fast climbing turns, may not necessarily pro-
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