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Aviation History
1945
1945 - 0279.PDF
FEBIUTARY 8TH, 1945 THE writer of this article has been designing, building, operating and selling aircraft since the last war. At times—os he says—he hos even descended to writing about them, assisted, of course, by Horace, his Tame Stressman. He has made a study of freight aircraft and their problems in many countries, notably New Guinea and Canada. Four of the five Ford tri-motored machines which were in this country were bought by him for Guinea Airways, Ltd. They were adapted for carrying freight by stripping the furnishings and fitting a large hatch in the roof During 1940-41, as consultant to M.A.P., Mr. Shackleton was associated with Dr. Roxbee Cox in the development of large transport gliders. Since then, as consultant to the great Tata group of companies, he has taken a great interest in aviation developments in India. Compared with other forms of transport it will be very fast, anyway. To make a given aircraft go twice as fast would require something like eight times the power and, there- fore, about four times the petrol per mile. Let us make it cruise at 145 m.p.h. just for the sake of argument. That means a low wing loading and a low- landing speed. In turn these make for greater safety ^ during take-off and landing, smaller and cheaper landing • fields and less wear and tear on tyres and brakes. At such ; a speed we /heed not bother to fit a retractable under- carriage. The saving in weight, cost and maintenance, and the added safety and reliability, would more than compensate for the extra few miles an hour to be gained by retracting. With a fixed undercarriage it is easier to convert to skis or floats. You get a shorter take-off. Built-in Headwinds "But," some readers will argue, "145 miles an hour, slab sides and a fixed undercarriage! Isn't that a return to the days of wood and string and built-in head winds? Why not 290 miles^an hour, beautiful curves and a retractable ttndercarriage ? " . Well, the answer is that such a machine could be designed now and some day will be designed, but bearing in mind present-day demands and economic conditions, and exist- ing pdwer plants, it would fail in certain essen- tial requirements. It would cost more to buy and to maintain. It would require bigger and better airfields, and it would cost more to carry one ton for one mile, even if it travelled that mile in half the time. You have to COSTLY BALES (right) : A Mackenzie AirService Fokker with a 1,840 lb. load of furs flown out of the North West Territory of Canada.This cargo was worth 125,000 dollars. (Below) : Four jeeps line up to drive on board a freightversion of the Avro York. load and unload a tramp aircraft and during that time it is-earning nothing indeed, it is eating its head oil. A big slab-sided freighter can be loaded in less time than a highly curved and streamlined machine. Ai least that seems a reasonable thought to us. As our Horace says:' "What is the use of spending thirty minutes (or so) more on the ground in loading and unloading and then saving half an hour (or so) in the air.'' " High speed is expensive largely because it requires heavy and'costly canines using enormous quantities of expensive fuel. The annual petrol bill alone can easily t xt eed tin- first cost of the aircraft. lake a well known and very efficient twin-engined aircraft which we may assume will cost about £.27,500. In 4,000 hours of operation at 100 gallons per hour am! at is. (>d. per gallon it will 1 on sume £30,000 worth of fuel as well as some thousands of pounds' worth of oil. As soon as we' have lij^ht and powerful jet engines capable of burning ships' nil with the thermal Hriciency of a . modem piston engine, then the 400 m.p.h. freighter will become a practical design proposition ! The Prodigal Doodle Incidentally, the jet-reaction engine of the Vi Hying bomb is lighter for its power than any piston engine. It. weighs about 350 lb. for 575 thrust: horse-power. How- ever, it consumes petrol at the rate ol (ho gallons per hour, which means that its thermal efficiency is only 3 per cent. The average distances to be covered by freight aircraft, will not be great. For every journey from Kamchatka, to London there will be some thousands of flights from, say, Dover to Calais or from London to Brussels or to Amsterdam. In New Guinea, where hundreds of thou- sands of tons of freight have been flown from the coast up to the goldfields, the average distance to be covered is only about 50 miles. If goods are very urgent, then they must be sent by jgai| plane or passenger, plane fast \
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