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Tizer
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21/12/2007
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11:56
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I have uploaded my first picture to the Barlick site I hope to be able to add it in this thread if/when it gets approval from Doc. It is a postcard from the 1940s entitled Winged Heroes and showing Hawker Hurricanes. (The picture is in the next post if you are on page 1 of the thread; if you are on another page you need to go back tp page 1 to see it.)
Please feel free to add your own stories, pictures or comments regarding everything to do with aeroplanes and their pilots, both past and present.
Edited by - Tizer on 11/11/2010 15:11:42
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 09/08/2010 : 06:42
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tfn9l
I saw this last night about a Focke Wulf 190 that landed on an airfield in Wales during the war.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk  |
thomo
Barlick Born Old Salt
2021 Posts
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Posted - 09/08/2010 : 10:38
Probably the easiest bit of maths I have ever come across. One Lancaster = 4 x Merlins, One Hurricane = 1 x Merlin, 4+1 = 5 merlins. Add any one of these three Spitfires, MK II, MK V or MK IX all of which have Merlin engines and you have a grand total of 6 merlins, however if the Spitfire was either of the two MK XIXs you would then have this, 5 X Merlins + 1 X Griffon, Simples. The only way to achieve 8 X Merlins would be to fly all of the first five aircraft mentioned above. Catgates times put the Lancaster at least half an hour behind the other two aircraft, this suggests some kind of problem somewhere as all three can fly together quite comfortably given that the top speed of a Lancaster in good conditions is around 280 MPH.
thomo |
catgate
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Posted - 09/08/2010 : 16:03
We see them over here regularly and as a rule they fly over together. Usually slightly higher tha the Lancaster was but never as high as the preceding two were.
I wondered if for some reason the Lancaster had put down at Elvington. But that would not have caused the other two to be so high .
Every silver lining has a cloud.
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tripps
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Posted - 10/08/2010 : 11:28
Interesting post on Jim, Greenhalf's blog yesterday. (author of Salt and Silver, and reporter on the Bradford Telegraph and Argus) concerning Battle of Britain in general, and Merlin engines. Any expert care to comment?
http://jimgreenhalf.blogspot.com/
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Tizer
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Posted - 10/08/2010 : 11:51
I don't know about the carburettor problem but the Spitfire's undercarriage was a disadvantage compared with the Hurricane when landing or taking off on grass. The Spitfire's wheels were closer together which made it less stable on a bumpy strip. This showed up most when they were flying from French airfields (mostly grass strips) at the start of the war. (The Spitfire's wheels were closer together because they lifted into the wing outwards whereas the Hurricane's lifted inwards (i.e. towards the fuselage).
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 10/08/2010 : 17:53
I like sidelong views like that. The man was right about the part wartime propaganda still plays in modern times. The Spitfire gets all the glamour as opposed to the Hurricane. Look at the video of the FW 190 I flagged up above. The undercarriage legs folded inwards and the wheels were very wide apart. Nobody ever told me during the war that they were a better fighter than the spitfire but evidently they caused a big rethink in the design. The American bomber pilots were never told that the reason their 'little friends' the Mustangs suddenly got the legs to fly with them at their altitude all the way to the target and back, it was because they were re-equipped with the Merlin engine. My mate Bob Jacobsen had never heard of the Grand Slam because the US air force didn't like to admit that the Lancaster could carry a ten ton bomb and the B17s couldn't, that's why they never used it. I was given some tapes made by a man called John Howlett who founded Wellworthy piston rings. One of the things on the tapes which never got into the book was the time when he worked for the Ministry of Aircraft Production and had to defend a young pilot who when asked about his plane said that it would be fine if the engine didn't sieze up after about twenty hours flying. Not what the minister wanted to hear. Howlett defended the lad because he knew that what he said was true, I think it was an Armstrong Siddely Cheetah engine, whatever, it had sleeve valves and the lad was right, they were lethal.
On a similar note, I started re-reading Norman Davies' 'Europe' today and he said something that grabbed me. We always see the two world wars as a struggle between gallant little Britain and the might of Germany in WW1 and the Axis Powers' during WW2. In Europe both wars are usually seen as Germany versus Russia, just as true and a different way of looking at it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Fw_190
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Tizer
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Posted - 10/08/2010 : 19:55
There is also the excellent technical innovation and development carried out by the Germans before and during the war. Most people know about the VI flying bombs and the V2 rockets; and others know about the jet fighters; but there is lots more that is less well-known and could have won the war for them if Hitler hadn't been so pig-headed and demanded either that the funds and staff were placed on other projects or made the Luftwaffe use the newly-developed aircraft for the wrong purposes.
Talking about the Fw 190, there is an example of what I mean. Late in the war there was a much better version which got the prefix Ta instead of Fw after its designer Herr Tank (can't remember his first name offhand, might have been Kurt). The Ta was very fast and would have given the Typhoons and Tempests a fright. But it didn't get the priority from the top brass and was too late.
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 11/08/2010 : 06:27
I saw a mention that one of the Fw 190 versions had the first known instance of a modern engine management system. In the Wikipedia article?
I always remember what an old Wermacht man told me when I asked him how the hell they managed to lose the war, he said 'It was Hitler!' Lots of these veterans got jobs with the BIB in Berlin as border guards and that was where we met them while we were having a break from Border Patrol. Good men and they all agreed that we should never have been fighting each other. Mind you, they were probably employed on the basis that they had that view.
Think of the quality of German armour and how they used Blitzkreig tactics. They had taken notice of the debates in the British military after WW1 while our Colonel Blimps filed the reports and ignored them because they were largely the work of a man who was a disciple of Crowley, the Beast 666. See 'Tank' by Patrick Wright for the full story, best source I have ever found for the history of the tank. Think about the Krupps 88mm Anti aircraft/tank gun. Better than anything we had including the 17 Pounder.Remember that right through WW1 we were using Krupps pattern fuses because we had nothing to match them, we even paid Krupps royalities after the Armistice!
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Tizer
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Posted - 11/08/2010 : 11:29
A bit of furtling shows that Kurt Tank's late model Fw was called the Ta 152. The Fw Wikipedia page shows:-
"After the "D," later variants of the 190 were named "Ta", after Kurt Tank, when the RLM changed their naming conventions to reflect the chief designer instead of the company he represented. This was a singularly rare honorific, and Tank was the first engineer to be so honoured. The aircraft developed into something quite different from the earlier Fw 190 models. The most promising design was the Ta 152H; the "H" model used the liquid-cooled Jumo 213E engine and possessed a much greater wing area for better high-altitude performance — to attack the expected B-29s. It was capable of speeds in excess of 750 km/h (470 mph) and had a service ceiling of around 15,000 m (49,200 ft)....it was highly promising, but manufacturing problems, materials shortages and the disruption towards the end of the war resulted in very few Ta 152s of all types being built (no more than 150 in total)...However, as the last days of the war dawned, the rushed construction of the Ta 152 H and its engines became its undoing, as failures and lack of spare parts affected the aircraft seriously enough to ground all H models, leaving only the two constructed C models flying at the end of the war."
The Typhoons and Tempests of the time would not have been able to keep up with the Ta152 and Britain only had a small number of Meteor jets.
On a different note, have a look at this web page for the P-47 Thunderbolt which I happened upon. It has a brilliant photo of four in flight and a lot on the mechanicals of this massive fighter.
http://www.aviation-history.com/republic/p47.html
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thomo
Barlick Born Old Salt
2021 Posts
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Posted - 22/08/2010 : 11:30
The BBMF could be here again later, area flight is Cumnock to Lytham for 1200 return Lytham 1400 then to Whitby en route to Skegness, the Lytham/Whitby leg could put them near here app 1415 or soon after.
thomo |
panbiker
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Posted - 22/08/2010 : 12:19
The full schedule shows Hurricane, Spitfire and Dakota in Display at Whitby. The latest update though only shows the Spitfire at Whitby which will start it's run from Coningsby via Lytham and then return to Lincolnshire after it's display at Whitby and a flypast down the coast at Skegness. The Dakota will depart Kinloss, flypast at Cumnock and then land at Blackpool. The latest update does not show any further display or flypast info for the Dakota for today.
I agree though that 1415 should be about right for the Spit over Barlick if he swings this way.
Ian |
thomo
Barlick Born Old Salt
2021 Posts
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Posted - 22/08/2010 : 16:13
Well Ian, I didnt see it and I certainly would not have heard it, with the noise levels here today you would not have heard Concord at 100' over the deck let alone a Spitfire at over a 1000'. The mighty agricultural brigade have been going flat out all day, add to this the usual Sunday speed morons, no chance! better luck next time.
thomo |
panbiker
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Posted - 22/08/2010 : 17:05
Been in front garden most of afternoon ferrying garden waste to the skips. Only thing I saw was a commercial jet at about 30,000 and a small helicopter on the outskirts of Barlick. Was playing my 40's music in the car in an effort to attract but no luck!
Ian |
Tizer
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Posted - 23/08/2010 : 11:18
A Radio 4 presenter was taken up in a two-seater Spitfire and we got to hear the engine sound - but would it have been a Merlin or a Griffon engine? I would guess it's the only two-seater in the UK so perhaps someone knows which it is. The noise didn't sound like Merlin to me but then it was being recorded inside the plane and I'm not familar with the sound from that direction!
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thomo
Barlick Born Old Salt
2021 Posts
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Posted - 23/08/2010 : 12:06
Hello Tizer, More of these aircraft have survived than one might expect, there are at least two in the UK and a good many more in the US, the prototype was built around the MKVIII most of the remainder were basically MKIX and all had Merlin engines, you can buy flights in at least one of these in UK at around £300. I have pics of the two I know of and will post them shortly.
thomo |
Winged Heroes
