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Aviation History
1946
1946 - 1385.PDF
JULY I8TH, ic.46 y| Flight " )pAot«jf»p/i. In spite of its comparatively large span, the nTifUla Tifm quite a surprisingly handleable aircraft. the appearance of complete engine failure. However, one soon became accustomed to this, and tqcthe extraordinary arrangement of the undercarriage lights which, in a very real sense, shouted " wheels " at the driver in unmistakable terms. Elevator and rudder trimming »work was completed with the aid of a couple of little cranles'.t'en* the left afid moving in the same plane. These must have given tha one-armed hero opportunity for ingenuity on a very advanced scale. The airfield on which I landed one of the last Battles to be flown—to its break-up yard—was probably at least as big as that from which I had originally taken off, shakily enough, in 1939. Yet four or five years of steadily increasing airfield size and runway length had so upset my unconscious calculations that I had the greatest possible difficulty in keep- ing within its boundary on landing. - An area which would have been considered quite normal in 1939 looked, in 1945, very little larger than a cricket pitch—and the break-up Battle (being delivered by the R.A.F. because it wasn't fit to be ferried even by the professional drivers of worn out horrors) could not offer more than a feeble half flap and had nothing very much in the way of braking urge We ended up with a wing-tip over the edge of a bank, after a deliberately fostered ground-loop. Oh, I know it was going to be broken up anyway—but not that way, and if I'd gone over that edge there would still have been 765C action to be taken, and a rocket to be avoided il possible. I believe that the Hawker Henley was designed to the same specification as the Battle, but, as Hawkers were, at that time, busy enough with the production of Hurricanes and the Battle could be quantity-produced easily, it be- came the accepted light bomber of the period. Which was not to say that the Henley—later relegated to target- towing duties—was not, for its time, a very good aircraft. Shad many of the familiar characteristics of the Hurri- ne, with a wider-track undercarriage and the most im- mense capacity for taking rough treatment on the ground and in the air. As in the case of the earlier Hurricanes, the undercarriage and flap operation demanded the use of more hands than were naturally available, since, after undercarriage selection, a power-valve lever had to be de- pressed and held down until the particular action had been completed. Turret Fighter Except for a somewhat pronounced tendency to beat its rudder control, even with full right bias, during take-off, the Boulton-Paul Defiant was without any rememberable curiosities, though I believe that the aileron and shroud settings involved the production test pilots in a good deal of hard work. The difficulty, as far as I remember, was to arrange things so that excessive upfloat would not appear at higher air speeds on one side or the other. The Defiant was an interesting, not to say exciting, experiment in the way of night fighters, though the im- mense four-gun turret—complete with retracting fairings— made surprisingly little difference to the handling. Theo- retically, of course, a large turret in such a position should have upset all airflow calculations and produced very queer results to the elevator and rudder control. The only strange disturbances of this kind, in my own small experience of the type, were caused by something quite different. By one of those most unlikely coincidences, the failure of a single faulty cowling button support caused all the other buttons on the same side to shear during a dive and left the entire engine half-cowling flapping vertically upwards in the slipstream. Luckily the cowling did not remove itself entirely, but remained poised more or less vertical until the moment of landing. In addition to blank iiig out a great deal of the forward field of view, the effec1 of this obstruction on the elevator and rudder control reactions was unpredictably absurd. The following is a list of the aircraft which have already appeared in " Flight " as part of the " In the Air " series. Beaufighter ... ..•. September 20th, 19-45 Oxford & Anson October 18th, 1945 Fortress & Liberator November 1st, 1945 Blenheim ?. „ 15th, 1945 Airacobra & Kittihawk „ 29th, 1945 Hampden & Hereford ... ... December 13th, 1945 Gladiator & Gauntlet „ 27th, 1945 Wellington ... January 3rd, 1946 Spitfire I—IX „ 24th, 1946 Spitfire IX—XXII 31st, 1946 Boston & Havoc February 28th, 1946 Lysander March 21st, 1946 Whitley & Albemarle April 4th, 1946 Master & Martinet ,, llth, 1946 Mosquito May 2nd, 1946 Hudson & Ventura „ 16th, 1946 PARLIAMENTARY IRRELEVANCE PR the second time within the last few weeks there hasbeen a question in the House about the allocation ofpetrol for air charter work as compared with the grant for taxi cabs. As the Minister of Fuel and £>ower, Mr. Shinwell,pointed out, the allowance of fuel for charter or taxi flights is limited to the amount required to provide a maximum of 60flying hours for each aircraft per month. The petrol allowance for provincial taxi cabs varies between 66 and 106 gallons permonth according to the horse power of the vehicle, while there is a monthly allowance for a metropolitan taxi cab of 120gallons. We find it very difficult to follow the reasoning of the Mem-ber of Parliament who tries- to compare the one allocation with the other, and even goes so fafSs to suggest that theallocation to charter aircraft should be cut down so as to increase the taxi cab petrol allowance.
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