Flying Legends Airshow at Duxford is over.

Attended several times while I was on exchange to the RAF. Fantastic show and historic venue. Sad to lose it.

 

looks like greedy bean counters got in the way as usual. As my dad always used to say, " takes many years of higher education to become that stupid"

 

Enjoyed watching their original Sopwith Triplane in the 80s while at RAF Lakenheath. Hopefully she is still around and gets a place of honor. Original Clerget rotary back then.

 

Your recollections opened up my wonderful experience at the Bicentennial show at Abottsford when they had the WW1 antiques from the Canadian museum there. I'm certain that I mentioned this before but they arrived the day before the show in a RCAFC-130. A Nieuport 17, Avro 504K, and a Sopwith Tripe "Black Maria". Ernest Gann's Pup was there as well as a 1917 Thomas Morse Scout . My partner and I had the privilege of helping to assemble them that early evening and then to operate them during the show. Hand propping rotary engines was not a common activity at most airports but where we flew at Thun Field there were two examples that "trained " a few of us. The late evening before the show and after their assembly and rigging was complete, the test flights in that golden light was something that I'll never forget. The Canadian test pilot flew the Avro 504K in a beautiful ballet that finished with a Falling Leaf back -lit by a low sun that high-lighted the bursts of castor oil in the exhaust when he hit the power button. His masterful control of the airplane as he worked his way down was absolutely beautiful. Worth the hour of cleaning the oil off the airplane after he landed. The immense torque of the rotary engines is something to behold when they swing a very big propellor and it is really important to avoid getting entangled when starting one of them. Difficult on the Avro because of all the anti-nose over skids and wires in front of the airplane. But once those engines start, one can hear the rush of air going past the airplane . Something that the modern engines do not produce until they are at speed. Such wonderful memories.

 

I used to do Falling Leafs in the Stearman. They are a test of speed control and maneuvering. They start with a shallow dive to build up airspeed and then pull up into near stall, add right rudder and a bit of aileron with power back to idle, and let the nose fall through a point on the horizon. Add power and climb up to a near stall , left rudder and some aileron and some back stick, power at idle, let the nose fall and pass through the established point, add power, climb up to the point of origin and the repeat it again to the right , making sure that the nose passes through the established point on the horizon and power up to the apex on the right and repeat. Some times a loop to finish off the last part. More good memories that never go away.

 

Bob- A large amount of the lift generated by WW-I aircraft, especially those powered by rotaries, was from the prop blast. On the ground with no brakes and only a sprung tailskid, the prop blast got enough air over the rudder to enable ground maneuvering. On many close coupled rotary fighters, wing walkers were also used to get the aircraft pointed where you wanted them.

Most folks do not even recognize that rotary engines were total oil loss engines, with all lubricating oil passing out through the rocker arms into the slip stream. Endurance was as often a function of how much oil you had as how much gasoline. Rotaries used castor oil for compatibility with gasoline in the intake mixture, which left that wonderful smell we associate so much with WW-I aircraft. The British blockade of Germany cut off their supply of castor oil, and the synthetic mix the Germans developed was never as effective as the real thing.

 

The cowlings on front-engined rotary aircraft were not put there for aerodynamic purposes, but rather to keep as much of that castor oil as possible from just flying all over the place and into the pilot's face! (You'll notice that rear-engined (pusher) rotaries were never cowled.) In spite of that, it is said that pilots sitting behind rotaries never needed to use laxatives!

Once the switch was made to fixed radial engines, they did not get cowlings until the late '20s, once the aerodynamic advantage of cowlings had been realized.

 

Having worked with a few WW1 replicas powered by high revving smaller modern engines, the lack of that big prop and high air mass was an obvious short coming. The original Boeing B&W had a 100HP Hall-Scott. The replica had a 260HP Lyc. and it still wasn't really enough.

 

WW1 Aerodromes didn't have runways marked by compass headings either because they had to "weather cock" to the prevailing wind. We saw an example of that at Abottsford when the pilot/owner of a Sopwith Pup tried to take off parallel to the show line in a crosswind and ground looped. No damage but after that he took off and landed with the windsock heading.

 

If one is fortunate to see a rotary powered airplane fly overhead in bright sunlight they can see the vivid white trail of castor oil behind the airplane. Castor oil was the only lubricant that wasn't diluted by gasoline, so it could be mixed with the fuel as it entered the engine crankcase. All rotary powered airplanes had that oil insinuated into any and all crevices forever. They never lost the smell.