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Aviation History
1945
1945 - 2076.PDF
OCTOBER I8TH, 1945 CIVIL AVIATION FLIGHT 429 Pre-Service Testing B.O*A.C.'s Development Flight : Preparing Civil Equipment and Prototypes for Service THE fact that any new civil transport has passed itsnormal tests does not mean that the aircraft is readyfor immediate operation. Not only may there be troubles of a kind peculiar to long-distance day-by-day fly- ing, which must be cleared up before later types are put into service, but a great- mass of necessary information must be obtained in order thut the aircraft may be flown to best advantage on the different sections of the routes and so that the maintenance personnel may be au fait with the various servicing problems. Furthermore, new ancil- ! lary items and engines, as they appear, must be tested* under conditions comparable to line flying before they ana stage aero; chosen not only for their technical qualifications but also for their wide experience on the routes, and that the test work is, where necessary, actually carried out over the different routes. The Lancaster, for instance, acted as a flying test-bed for the civil Merlin '' hundred '' series which was standard in the Yorks then beingjl^iyered, and in the Lancastrian, and would, in developed forrk, be duly fitted to the Tudors. Extensivp^flight tests we/e carried out to determine the specific fjfel dpnsumptiop under all condi- tions—information whic/i was the Lancastrian wen; :he Ind put into regular service. j*h An dialysis t\ New fl it niLu xcguidi seivitc. I was now In the old days, of course, both Imperial Airways andIV G^bfarta British Airways had "de-snagging" branches, and, after \\/ Again, te merger, the two branches were included in a Depart- \ icani ent of Technical Development and Production. This *^>ack to department, during the past few years, has been respoit_. sible for military-civil conversions, for the tests of the resulting types—including Liberators, Sunderlands, Hud- sons, Mosquitoes and Curtiss-Wright 20s.—and for the clearing of defects. Later on, after discussions with the D.G.C.A. and M.A.P., an entirely separate branch was formed by the Corporation. This was known as the Development Flight and it came into official being in April last year, its first aircraft, a Lancaster for engine tests, having been taken over from R.A.F. Bomber Command several months previously. In those days the only full-time members of the Flight were Capt. R. G. Buck, in charge of the flying, and Mr. Haigh, in charge of the engineering side. It was obvious that a very great deal of work would need to be done, and that this work would rapidly increase as and when new types came into being. More recently, therefore, a Project Branch was formed under Mr. C. H. Jackson, with the Development Flight, under Group Capt. E. L. Mole, as a complementary. At present there are four full-time crews, under Captains Buck, Reid, Farnsworth and Satchwell, carrying out development testing for the Corporation. It should be stressed here that these crews have been Next on the list for operational test by B.O.A.C.'s development Flight will be the Avro Tudor. The fully tropicalised " circular " Merlin 100 series engines have been undergoing thorough development tests in the Flight's Lancaster. e of immense value when e and £aced,the 3,100-mile test the1 Lancaster as occupied, round miles non-stop, bcastrian, the Flight performance tests at Cairo, flew it _ for necessary modifications and test and then, with a duplicate crew, flew this machine ealand, landing there 3^ days later. The actual le for the trip was 53 hr. 13 min.—giving an aveVagefspeed of 250 m.p.h. Cruising Control The questions involved in what is known as "cruising control''—in other words, the required boost and revolu- tions to be maintained in different conditions for maxi- mum efficiency—were particularly important for the service which was later to be operated by the Lancastrians. Dur- ing the initial tests it was decided that a very fast schedule would be possible on certain stages without prejudice to the payload. It was known that extreme accuracy in engine control would be absolutely essential on the stage between Ceylon and Exmouth Gulf, in Australia. Though still not definite, experience with the Lancastrian suggested that the use of higher power outputs might even increase engine life and the experiments are now continuing in actual service with the Yo,rks. Again, investigations have been made to pin down the relationship between induction charge and intake temperatures in an effort to reduce the amount of trouble caused by tetra-ethyl-lead attack when using high octane fuels. At the moment, intensive test flights are being made with Bristol Centaurus engines installed in a Warwick and, at the time of writing, this aircraft is in South Africa. An interesting feature of this test-bed Warwick is the fitting of torque meters. Centaurus engines are, of course, fitted to the new Short Shetland boats and will no doubt be fitted to other aircraft put into service by B.O.A.C. In due course, there- fore, the Development Flight will have garnered all the necessary information about the handling and maintenance of these engines, thus reducing the time taken up in pre-service trials with the later aircraft. Liaison between manufacturers and the Corporation must necessarily be more and more important, and it is in- teresting to know that, on the Lan- castrian tests, representatives of A. V. Roe, Rolls-Royce, the Asiatic Petro- leum Company and M.A.P. were car- ried. During both the Lancaster and Lancastrian trials a number of ancil- lary items were tested from time to
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