Winged Heroes

[Stanley]

Does this request need bumping back into current topics?

[Tizer]

Am I right in thinking this is one of my mate Bob's 'Little Friends'. The improved Mustang with the Merlin engine?

Yes, I think that must be right. It has the dorsal fin (in front of the rudder) which was absent on the early Allison engine models, and the early frame cockpit before they got the bubble canopy. The photo at the top of this web site (link below) shows an early Allison engine Mustang and there's some discussion also about the models. As well as the old canopy and no fin, it has a characteristic air scoop behind the propeller. It's interesting to read that some Mustang pilots shot down Me262 jet fighters!
http://www.shorpy.com/p-51-mustang

The web page also mentions the guns, with a claim that only the British Mustangs had cannon, so the photo on their page shows not only an early Allison plane but one that was destined for the RAF.

[Tizer]

Although the RAF Hercules were supposed to have moved north from Brize Norton we've started seeing them again flying their usual low level route from Chivenor to BN. The RAF MOD Hercules web page says that 47 Squadron is still at BN. That's OK by me - we love to see them cruising over at what seems like roof height, banking and turning like a much smaller aircraft, and with the lovely sound of 4 Allison turboprop engines.

http://www.raf.mod.uk/equipment/herculesc1c3.cfm

http://www.raf.mod.uk/equipment/herculesc4c5.cfm

[Stanley]

They always look to be flying too slowly to stay in the air. 747s look like that when coming in to land.

[Whyperion]

I'm off to Keighley Model Railway Club Show at Victoria Hall this weekend, oddly selling new books about Aircraft etc as well as Railways.
If anyones interested I can reserve some items. British Military Aircraft Serials 1878-1987 , A listing with a few b/w pictures of all flying things acquired by British Services since 1878. A5 thick Hardback , was £10.95 , delivered BB18 £6,15 UK £7.18 and world wide £10.95.
Always useful to know about the opposition, so Messerschmitt Bf109 in the West, 1937-40 (Luftwaffe at War) . A4ish paperback , plenty of pictures and narrative delivered BB18 £6,15 UK £7.18 and world wide £9.92; Wolseley Radial Aero Engines: Lord Nuffield's Thwarted Venture delivered BB18 £7.49 UK £7.99 and world wide £9.99 - detailed A5ish thickish paperback. And finally United States Air Force Unit Designations Since 1978 , Large A4+ sized floppy paperback delivered BB18 £9,39 UK £11.22 and world wide £19.97
Hope of interest, I have other titles but these are in BB18 until the morning at least.

[Tizer]

Good luck with selling them Whippy and enjoy the show - mind you don't spend too much!

[Stanley]

There aren't many pics in Air Power but some interesting ones. Lots of references to early planes. the Vickers Vernon is one I haven't come across before. See this LINK and mention of its role in RAF colonial policing missions in the 1920s, the subject of the book. (You'd love this book Tiz. Lots of surprising examples of the early use of mechanised warfare.)

[Tizer]

A lovely aeroplane, related to the Vickers Victoria:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_Victoria
For me, the inter-war years had the most interesting aircraft.

[Stanley]

The book gets better. Many examples of the problems they faced. At one point, pilots were carrying so many spares with them, including spare wheels and material for desert landing strips in case they were forced down that some small planes were 1,000lbs over weight. Fascinating stuff!

[Stanley]

[Tizer]

...and getting fuel wherever possible. The pic shows an Imperial Airways Handley Page HP42, named `Hanno', refuelling in the desert between the wars. Note the Arab watching.

[Stanley]

Omissi's book on Air Power tells the story of how the later Imperial Airways routes developed from the RAF developing transport routes across the Empire. Refuelling depots were an integral part of the network.
Watched the programme on Claude Graham White at Hendon last night and it fitted in exactly with my recent readings about air power. It was plagued with infighting between the Army and Navy and indecision on the part of the politicians. It's a wonder we had any Air Force at all in 1939! I have two books on the genesis of the Wellworthy piston ring company which tell exactly the same story of government mismanagement. We had marvellous manufacturing capability and good designers but hadn't cracked sensible management of resources. It was WW2 that dragged us into reality with the formation of the air ministry and sensible planning throughout manufacturing for defence because politics went on the back burner due to the necessity to survive.

[Stanley]

LINK

I came across this while reading about the NSA. Carried a bigger bomb load than a B17.

[Tizer]

The Wiki link says it all: "..the largest single-seat, single-engine combat aircraft in history..".

We mentioned the Vickers Vernon and Victoria up above and the carrying of lots of spares. Another similar one was the Vickers Valentia. Almost all these aircraft were used overseas and mostly in the desert under awful conditions of heat, sand and dust and therefore often breaking down. I've just read that the Valentia had fixings on the lower port wing to carry a spare engine!

As you noted Stanley, the programme on Claude Grahame-White's Hendon building was interesting but it's a pity they named almost none of the aircraft shown. I photographed a couple of the unusual ones (we record programmes, which gives the opportunity to do this) and tracked down their identity and I'll put the pics here soon with some information.

[Stanley]

Round about the end of the war (WW2!) I was given a book on the history of Flight for Xmas. It was like the 'Boy's Books of Engineering' books and was brilliant. I can remember it covered men like Stringfellow and an eccentric peer, Yorkshireman I think. The fact that I can remember many of the images shows how good the book was. There were many publications like this full of images that have been lost. Often bad reproduction but well worth looking out for.

Here's an example, I found this rare image in Chatterbox Annual for 1908. I knew bricks were made from slag, I've seen them in walls, but in all my reading have never found another image or mention of the process.

[Tizer]

A wonderful picture! In Hayle, Cornwall, there are still many old houses that appear to be built out of black stone. Anyone without knowledge of local history might think there had been a volcano near Hayle spewing out black lava but it's all slag from the Holman foundry copper smelters. It looks like black treacle toffee ands splits in a similar way, giving very sharp edges a bit like black flint. It must he tougher and more impermeable to water than granite. A lot of the old dock structures are made from the slag too.

[Tizer]

As mentioned above, I recorded `Brick by Brick: Rebuilding Our Past' showing the rebuilding of the Hendon watchtower of aircraft designer Claude Grahame-White and photographed a couple of the unusual aircraft. Three photos are shown here. The first shows a poster being painted on an aircraft advertising the Grahame-White Aviation Co Ltd. The second is a photo of the Grahame-White GWE7 and the third is an artist's impression of a projected Grahame-White triplane.



The GWE7 has a brief entry in Wikipedia as follows: "The G.W.E.7 was a luxury transport biplane with folding wings, it seated four passengers in a cabin in the nose with the pilot behind. Powered by two 320 hp (239 kW) Rolls-Royce Eagle V piston engines. The only G.W.E.7, registered G-EALR was first flown in 1919. It was damaged beyond repair in a forced landing at Hendon in the same year. The damaged remains were burned in 1920." Further details are: crew: 2, passengers: 4, length: 39ft, wingspan 60ft, max speed: 116mph. Note that the picture shows the passenger cabin at the front and the pilot's cabin is above and behind. It would have been one of the few enclosed cabin aircraft of the time.
]


The triplane is a twin boom design and was described in a lecture in 1919 by Grahame-White as follows: "Mr. Grahame-White then gave a description of a passenger aeroplance for the London-Paris air service. This machine is shown in Fig. 1. It is to carry, the lecturer said, 24 passengers housed in comfortable compartments, and a crew of five, comprising a pilot, a navigator and directional wireless operator, a motor mechanic, and an attendant in each of the passenger cars. In addition, there will be room for 500 lbs of express parcels. The engines are to be installed in the central nacelle, where it will be possible to attend them carefully during the journey and to effect minor adjustments en route. The two engines placed transversely, will drive, through hollow steel shafting and gearing the tractors on the middle wing, while the third engine will drive a pusher screw placed at the rear of the engine nacelle. Each of the engines is to be of 600 h.p." (This quote is from a web forum which also allows download of a copy of this part of the lecture.)



Note the unusual combination of two tractor props on the wings and one pusher prop behind the fuselage nacelle. However the tractor props are driven by engines inside the central fuselage. Grahame-White seemed to have a passion for pushers, twin booms and multiple rudders and was obviously very innovative. The 24 passengers were divided between two passenger cabins, one in each boom nacelle. Grahame-White was interested in airliners and in his 1919 lecture he predicted that high speeds would be attained at "great altitudes, and the passengers will be acommodated in totally enclosed saloons in which the air supply can be made independent of the changes in atmospheric pressure outside."

Grahame-White lost interest in aviation in the 1920s and moved into property development, a great loss to aviation. It seems that British military and defence officials were pleased to have his help when his factory was building aircraft during the Great War but when peace came they took away his Hendon aerodrome and ditched him, probably because they didn't understand a man with such creative skills. If they had kept and nurtured Grahame-White, Britain would have been much better prepared for World War 2 when it began.

[Stanley]

Here's a story for you about a Winged Hero! It's from Bob Baer's book 'See No Evil' and as people are named and the book was vetted by the CIA before publication I think we can be pretty confident that whilst incredible, it is true.
It concerns a pilot called Allan who flew re-supply missions in the Vietnam war. He was a pilot in Baer's training and one evening while they were having a drink in a bar near Fort Bragg and they were in the company of a Vietnam veteran who told the story about being in a forward position near the Laos border that was too close to 'Charlie' to be serviced by helicopters. It was decided that a fixed wing plane coming in low and fast could make it, they chose a De Havilland Caribou. (LINK. Baer doesn't mention it but in Vietnam it was used by the notorious Air America.)
The mission was approved and the sergeant said that two hours later the Caribou came in so low it was clipping the tops of the tress and the propellers were scattering twigs and branches everywhere. When the plane landed the pilot told the marines to unload the ordnance while he fitted two new propellers to replace the ones damaged by the trees. The pilot flew these missions, two a day, for a week and saved the day. Each time he came in he replaced the damaged props. At this point 'Allan' told the sergeant the name of the forward position and the sergeant knew that this meant that Allan was the pilot.
What you might call extreme flying!

[Tizer]

He must have been related to those Lysander pilots who flew into French fields in WW2 to land or collect SOE agents, and the Dakota pilots who land on ice floes in Antarctica!

[Stanley]

I had a mate who got involved in diamond smuggling in Guiana(?) and he came back to UK to learn to fly so he could join the merry band of nutters who landed on sloping pocket handkerchiefs in the mountains. Never heard from him since he went back!

[Tizer]

It sounds like you mix among interesting people Stanley! Talking of that, have you noticed it's only you and I posting in this thread? I wonder what's going on - have we lost members with this type of interest? Or is it that these topics don't appear, or don't survive for long, in the Home Page (Portal) listing?

I posted the above para then loaded the Portal page and the forum listing at the bottom was about 40% Newshound whereas Winged Heroes wasn't anywhere to be seen even though I'd just posted into it. Winged Heroes is in the Min of Defence subforum so perhaps that doesn't appear at all in the Home Page list. On the other hand, my post into the LTP topic did appear, at the very top.

[Whyperion]

You have 15 readers , which is a good ratio for the site of 6.5 to a topic poster at the present time. But like all things theres a bit of mix of subject matter, aircraft , in which I have a passing interest, pilots and air crew , which I have a less so as I could not emulate them in any way. Had an ancestor relative in the RAF killed in WW2..... He was some kind of despatch rider and was knocked off his m/c in the black out , en route back to base after an unauthorised visit to his mistress. His wife was not impressed.

[Stanley]

Peter, The same thought has crossed my mind and I think part of the problem is that the 'active topics' list is actually the most recently active topics. I think on the old site the list was 'the most active topics' and topics came up even though they hadn't been looked at for a couple of days. Perhaps what we need is a list of the * most active topics.
However, you and I can keep it going, the old posters will eventually join in. Early days as yet, we've only been up three months and there is little doubt that traffic in terms of posts and pics is what massages a topic and gets it up the list.
Lets post some pics!
As for interesting people, the bloke was John Garnett and I used to work with him at West Marton Dairies. His first idea was to go crocodile hunting in Guiana and he told me one day that he needed to find someone who had done it. I told him to have a word with my father and they spent a couple of hours in close conversation. Evidently one of the tricks is to get a wire noose onto the crocodile before you shoot it because when they die they sink. He went off to do this but I think when he got there he found that there was more money in diamond smuggling. Last time I saw him he was back here driving for Bell's Transport to finance flying lessons. I often wonder what befell him!

[Tizer]

In 2007/8 in the old Winged Heroes thread, now archived LINK, I posted a photo (obtained from my ex-RAF father) of an aeroplane for which we did not know the identity, together with this text:
"This unidentified RAF twin-engine aeroplane is from a photo dated 1936. It has just taken off from an aerodrome but little else can be seen in the original picture other than distant trees and a biplane in the distance. The back of the photo has been "rubber stamped" Royal Air Force Office" and has only the handwritten notes "26 AC SQDN 6-10-36" and "NEG. No. H332G" (see also the photo of the Gloster Gauntlet earlier in this thread which bears the same date and squadron and "NEG. No. H330G")." The serial number is K4049.

Members of the OG forum subsequently identified this aircraft and I thought it would be helpful for others if I posted the information here once again now that the original is archived. The aeroplane was finally identified on OGFB as the Vickers Wellington prototype B.9/32 with RAF serial number K4049 which first flew on 15 June 1936 and, after changes to the design, was accepted for production on 15 August 1936.

On 21/1/2008 I posted:
K4049 is the same number as the prototype designed to satisfy Ministry specification B.9/32. It first flew as a Type 271 (and initially named Crecy) from Brooklands on 15 June 1936 with J. Summers as pilot. After many changes to the design, it was accepted on 15 August 1936 for production with the name Vickers Wellington.

On the web page http://www.miniplane.cn/Contributions/Braas/4041.htm (site no longer active) there is a picture of K4049 on 30th June 1936 during a display day at Brooklands. The nose and tail gun positions are still covered with fabric but the aircraft has RAF roundels. The same aircraft but showing the nose uncovered is here: http://www.sonsofdamien.co.uk/wellington%201.htm. Unfortunately, the aircraft crashed in April 1937.

I also gleaned this from a web forum discussion of Vickers test pilot Joseph "Mutt" Summers: "The Wellington was designed to meet Spec. B.9/32 and the first flight of the prototype, K4049, was made by Mutt, accompanied by Messrs. Wallis and Westbrook, designer and factory manager respectively, at Brooklands on 15 June, 1936. It was to have been called the Crecy, but the change to Wellington (to commemorate the Iron Duke), started the practice of using the initial letter W for Vickers aircraft that employed Barnes Wallis geodetic structures. Of course the first Wellington Mk I L4212 was also first flown by Mutt, on 23 December, 1937, as was the first Mk III, L4251, on 19 May, 1939." The forum thread is here: http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=59536
and it has lots more about Mutt Summers and the aircraft he flew.

The following is our photo:



The next is the photo from the sons of Damien web site:



And I think this was the one from the Miniplane web site:

[Stanley]

Peter, re archive. Try this LINK

Nice pics. I think it was a Wellington that used to fly from Woodford with a jet in its bum.