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Aviation History
1948
1948 - 0991.PDF
July ist, 1948 BALLIOL First Airscrew-Turbine Powered Trainer in the World to Fly : Three-seater Trainer With. Excellent Design for Maintenance THE march forward which has taken place in the de-velopment of aircraft during the past decade has beensuch that, not only have the numerous ancillary fieldsbeen affected, the fundamental business of flying has itself undergone a change. This is not to say that the handling of a Tiger Moth to-day is any different from what it was in 1938 : flying is still flying—nevertheless the manner of it has altered somewhat, and modern military- aircraft do demand a pilot ability rather different from that required in those spacious days of ten years ago. Necessarily, this must have its effect all the way- down the line, and the general training policy now seems to be that, right from the ab initio stage, a pupil pilot should be made familiar with the controls, instruments, services and broad flying characteristics with which he will find himself in operational maturity. Obviously, an elementary training aircraft will not embody the complexities which bedevil the front-line types, but, nevertheless, the general sense and atmosphere of the elementary trainer (from the pupil pilot's viewpoint) should provide him with an intro- duction in familiarity to the more advanced types he will, in due course, encounter. Standardization of instruments, primary and auxiliary controls, etc., afford some help in this regard, although it is exceedingly difficult to carry cockpit standardization much beyond this. As far as cockpit layout is concerned, the policy of employing the three-seat, clover-leaf plan, in which the pupil sits in the port seat with the instructor by his side in the starboard seat, and the centrally placed rear seat occupied by a second pupil '' sitting in '' and watching points or, per- haps, doing some useful navigating work, has much to commend it. This form of accommodation layout was called for in Specification T7/45, to which the Boulton Paul Balliol Advanced Trainer was designed, as a logical extension to the specification which resulted in the Percival Prentice elementary trainer, which also features a clover-leaf seat- ing plan. The Balliol is intended to provide a natural transition for the pupil pilot advancing from the Prentice and, on examination, there can be little doubt that to this end the design of the Balliol is considerably success- ful. The specification was not a particularly difficult one to fulfil, but had it been even simpler than, in fact, it was, the design would still command approbation, par- ticularly for the ingenuity exercised in evolving an aircraft in which considerations for maintenance accessibility have been given a higher place than, perhaps, that given in any other aircraft yet built. In addition to these basic qualities of design, the Balliol must also be accorded the palm for having been the first turboprop trainer ever to have flown, the first successful flight having been made on May 17th, this year, from Bitteswell, with S/L. Price-Owen, chief test pilot of Armstrong Siddeley's engine flight develop- ment section, at the controls. Work on the Balliol was first started in the early part of 1946, and approximately twelve months later the first flight of the aircraft took place. At that time, the air- frame was much more advanced than the Mamba airscrew- turbine, and, solely in order to allow some air experience to be obtained, Boulton Paul's installed a Bristol Mer- cury engine, and it was in this guise that the aircraft first flew. These initial flight trials showed up very few snags (and all of these were minor ones),, and thus it was that, by the time the Mamba was ready for installa- tion, the aircraft per se had already received some de- velopment. Present flight trials, with the Mamba Balliol, are con- cerned chiefly with establishing a handling technique. An airscrew turbine cannot be controlled in the same manner as that used for a piston engine: the fundamentally dif- ferent principle of operation makes this readily understand- able, and although the Mamba is now operating with a considerable degree of reliability, the final details of hand- ling procedure have yet to be crystallized. This is neither the time nor place to go into the niceties of airscrew tur- bine control, and we must content ourselves with stating
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