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Aviation History
1950
1950 - 0841.PDF
FLIGHT. 4 May 1950 547 tbe pilot who ran into some high-altitude turbulence just as he was making an attack; it might even be that dangerous turbulence would be met in any stern attack, as several American fighters have been broken up by turbu- lence behind large bombers. As though these high-altitude problems were not enough, nature has added another in the form of a very dark blue sky which makes it difficult to spot an aircraft even at a mile or two off. That means all fighters would have to carry radar to find the target, as they would need to '' see " it at a minimum range of somewhere about six miles to give them time to get in position for a successful attack. So far we have dealt only with mechanical problems. Aircrew conditions produce fresh complications in the form of pressure cabins, heating, escape facilities, etc., all of which seem to be only partly solved at the moment. There is one other point I have not seen mentioned, and that is a psychological one: to date there are no published reports on the effect of cannon shells on atom bombs, but I do not think it would take much imagination to make a pilot think twice before he fired at a bomber. This may turn out to be an important factor, as it would change a normal attack into rather a suicidal sort of affair, reminiscent of the Japanese Kamikaze attacks. Problem for the Guns That may be rather a pessimistic summary of the problems facing the conventional intercepter fighter; but it is, perhaps, accurate enough to show that, even if there was a great improvement, 100 per cent interception could not be guaranteed. At ,the moment the only other alter- native is A.A. fire, and here the 100 per cent figure is even less likely to be obtained. Right from the start it involves the disadvantage that most of the bombers shot down will fall on land—our own. This applies to other methods as well, but not in quite such a pronounced degree. Apart from this, the accuracy is not great enough, even though radar gunlaying and proximity fuses of much greater accuracy than the present types would be used. Operating against the flying bombs, on two weeks towards the end of the attack, the guns were able to destroy 74 per cent of the targets. This is quite a good figure, but now we nave to compare a fairly slow-speed robot (flying at a constant height and fairly low down) with a high-speed jet bomber taking avoiding action at 50,000 feet. Against the flying bomb another point in favour of the guns was the fact that all the targets were coming in over a narrow front in roughly the same direction. On the other hand, jet bombers would be coming in all over the place, giving no chance for the guns to concentrate. Thus it seems that normal A.A. will have nothing like the accuracy we are looking for, apart from its waste of manpower. Having written-off normal fighters and A.A. as not being certain enough, the only alternative is the guided missile. Fortunately, this looks like filling the bill more completely. It is really the logical development of the fighter, with a little A.A. thrown in for good measure if it is ground- launched. In the modern high-speed fighter the pilot is little more than the means of interpreting the readings on all his instruments and of then pressing the right button; so, if we replace him by an electronic computer we finish up with a guided missile. This is a much more efficient way of doing things, as all the responses can be calculated and set permanently, whereas the pilot's judgment and reflexes depend quite a lot on what he had for breakfast, or on how good the party was the night before. A whole host of troubles disappear with the removal of the pilot; to mention only a few, there is no pressure cabin, no wind- screen, no need for landing facilities—in fact, none of the odd gadgets needed to keep a human being comfortable in body and mind. This leads to quite a saving in weight and drag, but perhaps the greatest saving comes in the expend- ability of the whole thing: there is no need for landing gear, and everything needs only to last one trip. A life of only one operational flight may seem wasteful, but one lias to remember that the present highly expensive fighters are designed for a life of only 200 hours, and that the still costlier bomber is usually intended for no more than 50 operations. Taking guided missiles in general, the most expensiveitem would be radio, with airframe and power plant far behind as far as cost and labour were concerned. As theradio equipment will be identical for several hundreds of thousands of units, it should be possible to make it bymass-production methods as already used in commercial radio-set production. The power plant would almost cer-tainly be a simple type of liquid-fuel rocket rather like those the Germans were working on towards the end ofthe war. Apart from the aerodynamic design, the airframe should present no trouble, as sizes would be small and simple types of monocoque construction could be used, possibly using moulded plastics with metal reinforcement moulded in. Mass-produced missiles like this would work out at only a fraction of the cost of a fighter—say, £4,000 each, not that actual cost matters much in a war, but it is a measure of productive effort, and that does matter. In the recent conflict, when the fighter was on top one fighter was lost for approximately every five bombers shot down, so we could say that it took a fifth of a fighter to destroy one bomber. The figure of 500,000 dollars has been quoted as the price of an F-86, so that even allowing for a 50 per cent error in this figure we could have 30 missiles for one • F-86, with each missile having a better chance of success than would the fighter. Production engineers may not agree with all these statements, but they are probably near enough to the truth for the purposes of this survey. So much for " produceability " ; now for the actual mis- siles themselves, and the way in which they would have to be used. Very high speed—Mach 2 at least—seems to be indicated, both to give the bomber less chance of taking evasive action and to enable the missile to manoeuvre on to the target. It would be fitted with a homing device, effective in, say, a 30 deg cone at a couple of miles, so that extreme accuracy would not be needed in the initial aiming. This would mean that turns would have to be made at up to 6 or 7 g to keep on the target, but here the missile's high speed would enable it to get sufficient lift from its stub wings in spite of the low C/L max. at the high Mach number. Thrust and Parry The bomber may try to dodge by flying in a continuous zig-zag as it neared the coast, so the missile may have to have some sort of analyser fitted to work out the target's course and lay off to allow for it. This would probably be possible, as the bomber would be on an autopilot flying along a fixed sine wave, as a human pilot could not cork- screw and still fly an accurate course. If a homing device were fitted to the missile the bomber would probably try radar jamming, but this snag would crop up with a fighter's set, so we would be no worse off; in both cases better radar would be needed. To allow for the small area of actual target a proximity fuze would probably have to be incorporated in the homing device, so a direct hit would not be essential. Using this idea, the warhead would have to be of the fragmentation type, as blast would not have the same effect on the thick skins of a supersonic bomber as it would on present-day types. It may be argued that control surfaces would be vulnerable, but we have to cater for the use of spoiler types of control surfaces, where the construction would be much stronger due to the hight-r loads imposed or. that type of surface. The missiles would be launched either from the ground, using a powder booster-rocket, or from an aircraft cruising high up about 50 miles off the coast. The air launching would be merely an attempt to dispose of as many raiders as possible before the coast was reached, the ground- launched missiles being the main defence. The missiles would be sent off in groups of two or three, and at intervals sufficient to prevent one homing on the other, thus giving a better chance of a hit. Air launching might involve exchanges of missiles, with the bomber sending out smaller defending missiles; but, since the defending aircraft would specialize in the duty it should come off best. If these arguments are accepted, it seems fairly obvious that the best defence against atomic bombers is the guided missile—apart, ol course, from political methods.
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