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Aviation History
1976
1976 - 0088.PDF
4 Flight Internationa! Supplement, w/e 17 January 1976 powerful elevons were to be another way. The D.H. 108 broke up and killed its test pilot in September 1946 during practice over the Thames estuary for an attempt on the world air speed record, then held by a straight-winged Meteor at just over 600 m.p.h. or not quite 1,000 km/hr. There is a plaque at Hatfield to the effect that the test pilot, Geoffrey de Havilland, "died while flying at a speed greater than had previously been attained by man." It is possible that he had been the victim of the then unexplored part of the flight envelope in which the formation and movement of shock waves at the critical Mach number cause strong pitch-down. Nobody was yet talking about supersonic passenger flying. Even subsonic jets were further away than many aeronautical engineers imagined. The race to develop military supersonics was now on. The United States was first through the speed of sound with the Bell XS-1. Six years later, in were at the front of the European stage in the mid-fifties. One was the Fairey FD.2; the other was the Griffon turbo-ramjet by Nord, an antecedent of Aerospatiale. Both these aircraft, in their different ways, contributed to the progress made by the parents of Concorde towards life at Mach 2. Each coun try was to follow different paths again—France with her Mirage and Britain with her Lightning— towards operational supersonic air craft. The supersonic hours were build ing up. The Americans were the first to gain operational supersonic experience, with the 1953 F-100 Super Sabre—to which goes the distinction of being the world's first level-supersonic operational fighter. It was a worthy successor to the classic F-86 Sabre which fought Russia's MiG-15 in Korea and gave so many air forces their first experience of high-subsonic flight. In the Soviet Union the MiGs 17 and 19 followed the MiG 15 into supersonic service. Though they the ogive delta which had been chosen for Concorde. Known in its new guise as the BAC-221, it veri fied the plan-form which has been one of the foundations of Con corde's aerodynamic success. The choice was not then as obviously right as it may seem now. Even when the FD. 2 was winning records and the French were putting a delta wing on their Mystere fighter—a prototype that was to develop into the celebrated Mirage — straight wings, swing wings and even "M" wings were Mia L* in 1953, the Douglas Skyrocket became the first manned aircraft to exceed Mach 2—twice the speed of sound—in level flight. The American industry was drawing ahead. The French, hav ing lost their aircraft industry in the war, were at least as deter mined as the British to prove their technology. With hindsight we can now see how the Anglo-French rivalry of the 'fifties laid the foundations of Concorde. One of the first French experi mental supersonic aircraft was the SO 9050 Trident II, which had a very thin wing of rectangular plan- form and was powered by wingtip- mounted jet and a rocket motor in stalled in the rear fuselage. The Trident set several speed records, reaching Mach 1-8 in December 1956 and Mach 1 -9 in the following January. Two delta-wing Mach 2 research aircraft, one British and one French, were from a different design bur eau, these types contributed to the formidable Russian aerospace capability which produced a rival for Concorde, the Tupolev Tu-144. The Fairey FD.2 had a major in fluence on Concorde. In 1956—in the days before space flight made such records meaningless—it won for Britain the world air speed record at over 1,000 m.p.h. (1,600 km/hr). The FD.2 was one of the first supersonic aircraft to explore and develop the delta formula, and to come up with the "droop snoot" answer to the pilot-visibility prob lem at high angles of attack. To gether with the H.P. 115 low-speed narrow delta, it explored the whole range of stability and control from below 100 m.p.ih. (160 km/hr) up to the kinetic-heating regime of over Mach 2. The FD.2 contributed even more directly to Concorde. The little angular delta was remodelled with Top: first through Mach 2 was the 1953 American Douglas Skyrocket; above, the first squadron-service super sonic aircraft (1953) was the F-100 Super Sabre; opposite, top left, the BAC-221 was in effect a flying scale supersonic model of Concorde. The 221 was developed from the Britain's record-breaking FD.2 for Concorde research (complete with droop-snoot); top right, the Mirage, France's "cheval de bataille", shows its Concorde aero dynamic ancestry; right, slow-speed research by Britain's H.P.115 narrow delta sought and captured the usually unseen vortex flow which helps low- speed lifting qualities being seriously considered for supersonic transport. The very thin straight wing of the Lockheed F-104, which was adopted and manufactured by leading European members of Nato as their standard supersonic fighter, was very different from the deltas—and it worked. The
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