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Aviation History
1943
1943 - 1317.PDF
MAY 2OTH, 1943 Topics of the Day FLIGHT 533 Whither the Flying Machine? "Indicator" Suggests That Aircraft Design May Have Taken the Wrong Turning : Essential Simplification in Peacetime Use : The Lost Art of the Rigger : Jet Propulsion Again THERE are moments—whether rationalistic oridealistic—when one is inclined to look at aircraftand wonder where designers and manufacturers are really going. Just as one sometimes looks at the world of people and wonders, with the same cynical suspicion, where the people are going. Aircraft must, I feel, return to a somewhat simpler shape if they are not to become intolerably expensive vehicles, both in initial cost and maintenance. Yet it is difficult to see how any sort of simplicity is to be obtained without the loss of the performance for which designers have struggled so hard. Such a return must involve not so much a simplification as a complete change of heart. The flying machine must become something entirely different if it is not to over-complicate itself into extinction like so many of its living counterparts. In the world of the mechanical it will be the survival of the simple rather than the survival of the fittest. Anyone who has had anything to do with the main- tenance of the modern aircraft will know just how many man-hours must be expended in the mere business of keep- ing them airworthy. Leave any aircraft to its own devices for a couple of weeks or so in a field, duly inhibited, and see how many little things have gone quietly and inex- plicably wrong with the thing. For no very obvious reason the rate-of-climb indicator will have developed the most prodigious leak, the directional gyro will have become un- reliable, one of the motors will have provided itself with the sort of mag. drop which cannot be cleared in a normal run-up (and that means hours of work on cowlings which won't go back properly and on plugs which cannot be reached without a very patent spanner), and the brake- pressure system will have a mysterious leak. In addition, some unfortunate sparrow may have made its nest in the exhaust manifold o£ the port engine. Complex Reliability Yet when one looks at the stuff that goes into the modern flying machine one is amazed that so little has gone wrong in the time. And it must be admitted that any aircraft which is flown day by day tends to be a good deal more reliable than one which is left to itself. Now that the Great Public has heard all about Gremlins the word has become taboo in knowledgeable circles, but it is quite easy to understand how the myth originated—or, rather, why it originated. How else was it possible to explain the fact that an aircraft which, on its last flight, was absolutely perfect has gone to seed so badly? One day some person must make the simple experiment of parking an aircraft bang over a "fain" circle" for a few days just to see what the Little Men get up to. Gremlins are, after all, only an aeronautically minded branch of the Gnome, or Little Men, or Poltergeist family—and the aeronautically electrically minded Poltergeists must have the best fun of all thinking of the fitter who, on the next day, will press the starter button and produce, not a smart movement of the airscrew (or aircrew), but a painfully strong smell of burning. That is, if the "ace. barrow" hasn't gone mysteriously flat during an all-too-short night in which both the barrow and the aircraft have been continuously wratched by a bored and hungry dog. Flying machines having reached the absolute limit of complication, some bright fellow will eventually act on the perfectly rational idea that it is worse than stupid to make a lot of little explosions to drive millions of mechanical things (and eventually a large fan) when one large explosion, suitably controlled, could quite well do the whole job, leaving the ancillaries to the mercies of a small and simple engine—or even to a little windmill which is driven by the large explosion. And I may add that there is no reason why an explosion should be a sudden one or why its power should not be controlled as accurately as an engine. Then designers will find that jet propulsion doesn't fit in very well with the present-day shape of aircraft; the thrusts will be in all the wrong places. They may even find that a great deal of the work of controlling can be done by either directing the main jet or by having subsidiary jets blowing off in different directions. It may then be possible to produce something like the ideal " flying wing " so ably visualised by Mr. Geoffrey Smith in last week's issue. On visual judgment alone I'm inclined to think that the flying wing is bound to be an unstable and difficult device so long as an aircraft is driven by a lot of separate engines, but the basic alterations in design which will be inevitable on the introduction of some kind of jet pro- pulsion may make this shape a much more practical one. Back to Pushers The tailless or back-to-front type is only possible with pusher arrangements, and at present the cooling and other difficulties are far too great to make this practical. It's all very pretty to have "flat" engines buried in a wing and to have airscrews working in more or less free air, but the plumbing and shafting problems make this an imprac- tical scheme at the present time, whereas a jet would necessarily be pushed out somewhere behind the aircraft. Another little point which is often overlooked by the pusher exponents is, at least in wartime, that the unfor- tunate crew stand at least a fifty-fifty chance of being cut to pieces by the screws when and if they have to bale out; the Japanese may like that sort of hari-kiri ending, but not the palefaces. Long ago, at the Paris Aero Show, I remember looking, I think, at the Fokker fighter and wondering how on earth the pilot was expected to leave the thing in the air. Talking about parachute departures, the Americans have yet to consider this point as seriously as they should in all their types. Like their ideas of armament and, par- ticularly armour-plating, in the earlier days of the war, this failure was the result of peacetime thinking. Although we were behind in a lot of ways, our military aircraft, even in peacetime, were severely practical in such respects. We learnt a whole lot about armour and bullet-proof tanks in the first six months of the war, but " get-outability" was always considered by our designers. In one or two first-line American types the pilot, at least, can have very little chance unless the aircraft is hit when flying at some stratospheric altitude. Simplicity is all the more important in civil machines flying in peace, because no firm—except one of the inter- national thousand-million-pound affairs—could possibly afford the cost of maintenance and replacement in some present-day aircraft. Nobody takes very much notice now if a machine has to be belly-landed because a hydraulic pipe-line has gone, or if an engine is wrecked through the effect of " hydraulicing " following the failure to turn it round by hand during a rush start. I remember watching a gang of particularly dim fitters, in the early days of the war, starting an American engine for the first time; accus- tomed to starting British engines, they proceeded according
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