I occasionally hear about airliners landing in the frozen when the encounter problems flying from Europe or Japan. I've read about ski planes in Alaska and I've posted a couple of pictures of airplanes flying into Antarctica, but this is the first time I've seen an airplane up here.
A Basler-BT67 is essentially a DC-3 equipped with turboprop engines.
The Beaver is known these days for being a workhorse of the Alaskan bush, but the U.S. Air Force helped put them on the map:
The United States Army purchased several hundred aircraft; nine DHC-2s are still in service with the U.S. Air Force Auxiliary (Civil Air Patrol) for search and rescue. - Wikipedia
This particular airplane is kind of special:
N682AF was built in 1954 and is owned by Bill Anders’ Apogee Flight. It was restored by Col Frank Borman, Apollo 8 Commander. It is regularly displayed at shows with museum aircraft and was winner of the 2001 EAA Arlington “Best L Bird” award. Though Beavers are usually seen on floats, this wheeled Beaver is painted in USAF rescue colors like the Beaver Bill Anders flew occasionally in Iceland. - Heritage Flight Museum
Huh, when you are finished with your career of piloting moon rockets you can retire to a quiet life of restoring antique aircraft.
De HAVILLAND HYDROMATIC AIRSCREW PROPELLER AIRCRAFT BRITISH EDUCATIONAL FILM 75764
PeriscopeFilm
The video combines two short films. The first one is assembly and installation and runs about 16 minutes. I found it totally engrossing. The second one is about testing. Not so interesting, though a few bits were a little confusing. Evidently when the engine is running it provides the oil to operate the hub, but when it is not there is an electric pump that supplies the oil to turn the blades into their feathered position.
At the end of the first film (at the 15 minute mark) there is a brief shot of the some of the parts that go into this device and you can see the cylindrical cam that is used to control the pitch of the propeller blades.
The sign on the side of this airplane bothers me. Is it illogical to dislike it? Isn't better that the authorities tell you when they are watching you? Or maybe I have become so suspicious of the government that when they do something like this, I am even more suspicious. What do you mean by telling me you are watching me? Are you trying to goad me into doing something I shouldn't? It's weird, man.
The de Havilland Vampire first flew in 1946. The USCGC Shearwater is a Marine Protector-class patrol boat. The Vampire is tiny compared to modern jet fighters - it is only 30 feet long. The Shearwater is nearly 90 feet long.
The DH.83 Fox Moth was a successful small biplane passenger aircraft from the 1930s . . . Many components including the engine, tailplane, fin, rudder and wings were identical to those being used for the de Havilland DH.82 Tiger Moth then being built in large quantities as a military trainer. These were fitted to the purpose-built wooden, plywood-covered fuselage . . . - Wikipedia
An airplane made of plywood, haven't run across one of those lately. When was plywood invented? Wikipedia knows, or at least has an opinion:
The ancient Egyptians and Greeks cut wood thinly and glued it together in layers with the grain in perpendicular directions, making a versatile building material. In 1797 Samuel Bentham applied for patents covering several machines to produce veneers. In his patent applications, he described the concept of laminating several layers of veneer with glue to form a thicker piece – the first description of what we now call plywood. Bentham was a British naval engineer with many shipbuilding inventions to his credit. Veneers at the time of Bentham were flat sawn, rift sawn or quarter sawn; i.e. cut along or across the log manually in different angles to the grain and thus limited in width and length.
About fifty years later Immanuel Nobel, father of Alfred Nobel, realized that several thinner layers of wood bonded together would be stronger than a single thick layer of wood. Understanding the industrial potential of laminated wood, he invented the rotary lathe.
There is little record of the early implementation of the rotary lathe and the subsequent commercialization of plywood as we know it today, but in its 1870 edition, the French dictionary Robert describes the process of rotary lathe veneer manufacturing in its entry Déroulage. One can thus presume that rotary lathe plywood manufacturer was an established process in France in the 1860s. Plywood was introduced into the United States in 1865 and industrial production started shortly after. In 1928, the first standard-sized 4 ft by 8 ft plywood sheets were introduced in the United States for use as a general building material.
Artists use plywood as a support for easel paintings to replace traditional canvas or cardboard. Ready-made artist boards for oil painting in three-layered plywood (3-ply) were produced and sold in New York as early as 1880.
The idea has been around for a very long time, but it took the invention of the rotary lathe to make it commonplace.
Flight Aware's weekly newsletter always includes a bunch of photos. Most of them are usually airliners which don't hold much interest for me, but occasionally there are other things in there as well and today we got a bunch.
North American F-100 Super Sabre at Oshkosh This one is a real blast from the past. I had toy model of one when I was a kid, and it will always be my ideal of what a jet fighter should look like.
We've been watching Season 5 of Detective Harry Bosch on Amazon Prime. It's entertaining. We've got multiple story arcs all winding through the season. Some are serious, some are funny, the characters are all well settled in their roles. A couple of airplanes make an appearance.
The Otter plays a continuing role ferrying shills from Los Angeles to an encampment in the desert. The bad guys are running a scam collecting prescription opioids from a pill mill. The purported reason for using an airplane is so that Russian mobsters won't find out where their base is, which is important because they are stock piling supplies to make fentanyl. So they are using the pill mill scam to finance the stock piling. Once that is complete, they can break into the big time!
Songs about machines seldom make the top 40. This one makes up for not being top-of-the-chart material by listing a bunch of airplanes made by DeHavilland named after animals. Note this is the Canadian offshoot of the original British company.
If I was going to own an airplane, I would want something at least as capable as a Beaver.
A couple of weeks ago there was a story in the WSJ about snowmobiles that mentioned some of technical advances that have been made, and one of them was turbochargers. Turbochargers have been around for a while, you can buy a production car right off the showroom floor that is equipped with a turbocharger or even two. Hot rodders have been putting them on all kinds of machines, but as far as I know no one has put a turbocharger on a small, mass production engine, like those found in motorcycles or snowmobiles, until now.
Anyway this started me musing on the subject and the turbochargers from the WW2 P-38 fighter aircraft popped into my head, so I went digging, and some strange stuff surfaced.
First of all, almost all WW2 aircraft engines were supercharged, which gave them enough boost that they were able to reach altitudes of 25,000 feet (five miles high). When engines were equipped with turbochargers, the turbochargers were added to the existing supercharger arrangement so the engine now had two stage supercharging. The turbo provided the first stage. This moderately compressed air was fed to the supercharger, which compressed it to the point that is was as dense as the air you find at sea level, and fed it to the engine. This two stage compression gave the aircraft enough power to reach 40,000 feet (eight miles high), more or less.
The General Electric turbocharger (it is always referred to as the General Electric turbocharger) was a bit of a beast. It was also secret, kind of like the Norden bombsight or RADAR. Early on in the war, we sent some P-38's to Britain, but for some reason (perhaps because we didn't trust the Brits to be able to keep a secret), they weren't equipped with General Electric turbochargers, which had a sizable impact on their performance. I imagine the Brits weren't too happy about this, but beggars can't be choosers, so they took them anyway.
The P-47 was also equipped with a General Electric turbocharger. The P-47 always looked a little plump, but I figured the designers knew what they were doing, and who knows what kind of complicated stuff was buried in the fuselage. Well, now I know. It was puffed up to accommodate all the duct work needed to connect the engine in the nose with the turbocharger and intercooler in the tail.
The De Havilland Mosquito
Now I'm watching a YouTube video about the De Haviland Mosquito which seems to have been quite an aircraft. It is a British aircraft, so it was not equipped with a General Electric turbocharger, but it still managed to get to high altitudes. How did it do that without a turbocharger? It had a two-stage supercharger, that's how.
The two-stage superchargers on the Merlin engine were driven by gears. General Electric turbochargers are driven by exhaust gas from the engine. Gears are dense and compact. The duct work needed to connect the engine to the turbo is bulky, but not dense. The weight penalty is probably similar. Duct work is easy to fabricate out of sheet metal. Gears require machine tools and castings to hold them alignment, which means the drive mechanism for a supercharger is going to be more expensive than the duct work for the turbo. On the other hand, the turbo needs to be made from unobtanium in order to withstand the heat from the exhaust gas. Superchargers can be made from regular old metal like aluminum or even iron, if you don't mind the extra mass. I think it is safe to say that the General Electric turbocharger was the forerunner of the General Electric jet engine program.
de Haviland Mosquitowas an all wood airplane, and it you believe everything in the video, you might conclude that it was vastly superior to all of the big, heavy, four-engined bombers (like the Flying Fortress, the Liberator and the Lancaster) that the Allies used for the majority of their bombing raids on Europe. That superior performance was entirely the result of its high speed (fastest WW2 military aircraft), which it was able to attain because of its light weight. It was light because it didn't carry any armor, or gunners or gun turrets. Originally it did not have any guns at all, but once they found out what it could do, they mounted a bunch of guns in the nose.
Twelve O'Clock High
I suppose it was 12 O'Clock High, and my dad's role as a gunner in a B-24, that locked the heavy bomber into the leading role (in my mind) in our war against the Axis. I remember quite vividly how the Japan's Mitsubishi Zero was a light weight, high-performance aircraft whose Achilles' heel was its lack of armor. What all this illustrates is the 'design by committee' syndrome. When the enemy builds a high performance aircraft without any armor, it's because they are not concerned about their pilot's well being, but when we do it and the aircraft is hugely successful, we shove it under the rug because it doesn't fit the narrative that the military industrial complex is trying to sell us.
There are advantages to this approach. The story is vital in order to garner popular support, which you really need in order to win. And building big, heavy airplanes means you need a big, heavy, industrial machine to produce them. And if push comes to shove, you can drop a lot of weight by getting rid of the armor, which is going to make your aircraft perform better, which is what you really need in combat. It's kind of like sandbagging. You carry a bunch of extra weight around with you which makes you look slow and cumbersome, but it makes you stronger, and when it comes to crunch time, you can drop those sandbags and really drop the hammer on your enemies.
The de Havilland DH.89 Dragon Rapide was a 1930s British short-haul biplane airliner for 6–8 passengers. It proved an economical and durable craft, despite its relatively primitive plywood construction. - Wikipedia
Super refers to Superalloys, and creep is what Superalloys do when they get really hot, like in a jet engine, which is where you need superalloys, the lack of which was one of the main stumbling blocks in developing the first jet engines, and which are still giving engineers fits.
Nimonic was the original high temperature alloy. A person by the name of L. B. Pfeil, working at the Henry Wiggin company came up with it when they were first trying to build jet engines back in 1941 in England. It was 50% nickel. It has evolved over the years and is still being used in the latest Rolls Royce hi-bypass turbofans and for the valves in your ordinary automobile engine. Henry founded the Wiggin company, on Wiggins Street, in Hereford, England. He eventually sold out to Inco, which used to be called International Nickel, and which used to be an important company in it's own right: Paraphrased from Wikipedia:
Prior to 2006, Inco was the world's second largest producer of nickel. It was also a charter member of the 30-stock Dow Jones Industrial Average formed on October 1, 1928. It is now part of the Brazilian mining company Vale.
Inco sold their foundary business to Special Metals, which was recently acquired by Precision Castparts. Precision Castparts is an Oregon company that has been making great strides making parts out of exotic alloys, much of which is going into military hardware. Union organizers are trying to organize the workers at Precision. I don't know how much luck they are having.
Update: Stu challenges us to identify the five aircraft shown in silhouette in the Nimonic ad above. Only two of them looked familiar, and even after spending some time with Google and Wikipedia, I only managed to identify four of them. Stu supplied the last one, #4. Highlight to read, or click to follow the link. From left to right:
Ever notice how solid feeling a 2 liter plastic soda bottle feels before it is opened? It is like rock hard. That is because of the internal air pressure. After it has been opened and the pressure has been released it is much more malleable.
Once upon a time I read that the aluminum skin of a jet airliner is proportionally thinner than that of an aluminum beer can, and you know how fragile an empty beer can is. Doesn't bode well for the airliner.
Yesterday I was reading about aircraft and I came across a bit about the ill-fated de Havilland Comet, the first jet airliner. Two of them crashed. Eventually they figured out it was because of metal fatigue around the square windows. The planes would be pressurized when flying, and then when they landed, the pressure would be equalized. This caused the metal to flex, and around the windows it flexed too much and it started cracking, and that's all it took. The cracking led to failure which led to the window being blown out which led to explosive decompression.
So I just realized that a jet airliner flying at 40,000 feet is going to be a lot like that brand-new, never before opened, two liter soda bottle. Rigid as a board.
I chose this picture because it clearly shows the intakes for the jet engines embedded in the leading edge of the wing. I don't think any jet aircraft, except for fighters, has done that since.
Update June 2015: Replaced the photo that Blogger lost.
Oookay, Joe, you're going to be alright, just sit down and take a deep breath. Everything is going to be alright.
Fortunately no one offered Joe this bit of advice when he started on this project, or if they did he ignored them.
"We aren't really all about mission statements around here; too often, they are phony and superfluous. That said, here is ours. We are building a high-performance, mid-engined super car from wood composites as a graduate project at North Carolina State University. Wood will be used where ever possible, including the chassis, body, and large percentages of the suspension components and wheels. The car has a target weight of 2500lbs and a power goal of over 600 horsepower. We aren't trying to sell anything; we aren't trying to save the world, and we aren't advocating that everyone should drive a wooden car. This project is a scholastic endeavor in which we are simply trying to explore materials, learn, teach, share ideas, and stimulate creativity."
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