Cool/Rare Plane Spotters thread.....

To wit, the old WWII saying "you can fly an Allison farther than you can ship a Merlin"

 

I know some Merlin owners that agree. Allison was a simple robust design. Had much stronger rods too. Many of the big time unlimiteds run Allison rods. The Rolls rods cut blocks in 2 from time to time. Have a picture of one with light showing through from the oil pan to the heads. Allison had better rocker arm design too. Much like the difference between a Lampredi and an early Colombo motor. In fact an Allison with the valve cover off bears a striking resemblance to a Lampredi if you can get over the shortage of valves in the Ferrari.

Inspecting and servicing rocker arms is a regular inspection item in a Rolls.

One of the contributors here says you can fix an Allison with a crescent wrench and a screw driver.

 

B guns laid on their side, about 45 degrees so the wing was thinner. The D needed the guns to stand up for space for the extra Ma Duce, hence the thicker wing. Standing them up solved a feed problem causing stoppages as well.

 

I may have posted this before but in the late 40's I had many talks with Paul Mantz about his race days in his P-51B. He said that it was a faster airplane then the D with its bubble canopy. This was due to the Fastback design and the thinner wing. I capitalized the Fastback because that is what they were called. The "Razorback" appellation was only used for the early P-47's because the fuselage actually had a sharp spine'd shape behind the cockpit. Our chats with Mantz were absolutely fascinating when he told us about the frustrations of trying to deal with Amelia Earhart and her reluctance to follow her technical advisor and her navigator's advice. He said that she made poor decisions in planning and executing a flight plan and that she wasn't the best pilot either. Her demise was most likely was aided by her off-loading critical LF radio and antenna before leaving for the leg to Howland Island. He had a lot of insider stories about some of the movie stars with whom he worked...a good book that will never be written.

 

Mantz was the real deal. So was Pancho Barnes. Amelia was just a publicity stunt.

 

At the end of war, Allison finally made two-stage superchargers for the V-1710, and these engines were fitted to some versions of the P-82 Twin Mustang, for a good financial reason: when the war ended, Rolls-Royce began insisting on a royalty fee for each new Merlin built by Packard; I believe it was $6000 per engine! The new Allisons had two exhaust stacks for each cylinder, thus twelve on each side.

In spite of this, many Twin Mustangs continued to use Merlins, apparently because the new superchargers on the Allisons were troublesome and caused reliability problems. The only model kits I've ever seen for the Twin Mustang are for Merlin-powered variants.

 

That's what Richard Petty said about Danica Patrick.....

 

He's right.

 

I love this section...

 

I knew several unlimited hydro guys who related to me that the Merlin, for cubic inch displacement produced more torque and power than the Allison and they did not suffer from valve float at high RPM's. Most all of the successful hydros ran Merlins. The induction system also was much more efficient than than the Allison. And most important, they barked louder and had a better sound than the Allisons. Think back about the Mustang, it became the success that it was when the Merlin was installed.

 

Northrop Flying Wing from the Planes of Fame Museum in Chino - seen at the LA County Airshow last weekend. Only one remaining. Very cool to see it in flight.
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

So there is one still around!! Very cool!

 

Wow yes..

How odd no tail and rudder.. but I guess hang gliders do ok without them!

Is there a reason we don't see "flying wings" like this generally? is there a design or other performance issue with them?

 

Touchy pitch stability .

 

Odd??? Not totatlly odd.

Seems as though you're not familiar with this plane...

How about the Northrop YB-35? A 4 piston engine bomber?

and the Northrop YB-49? A 4 engine Turbojet bomber that flew coast to coast?

Or... the current flying Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit bomber? (Jack Northrop actually saw it before he passed.)



None of these are/were very stable... B-2 requires computer input for stability...

 

Wow that wasn't very Cricket. In Art Herman's great book 'Freedom's Forge,' he describes how Packard bailed out the Brits by mass producing the Merlin on a scale England could never achieve, after first re-writing all the engineering documents to conform to the latest assembly line production standards.

An interesting sidebar: Bill Knudson went first to Ford to make the engines, got a handshake deal in Detroit with Edsel. By the time he got back to DC, there was a telegram waiting saying that Henry had nixed the deal: he didn't support the US effort to aid GB. His sympathies lay with... the other guys. So Knudson went to Packard.

 

I admit lack of extensive knowledge seeps from every pore .. now that you mention it I DO remember the B2. Thanks for the others.. I'll look them up.

 

To expand on the tailless configuration. Without a tail arm on which to hang a horizontal stabilizer, the wing would need something to control the pitching moment. So, it is twisted in such a manner that it would have a nose up force to stabilize it. It must be twisted to put the tip in a negative angle of incident to act like "up elevator" and neutralize the downward pitching moment. An excellent visual example is the ME163, you can see about 3 degrees or more of twist at the wing tip. If this angular difference between the wing root and the tip isn't accurately calculated, the wing will constantly be oscillating between a stall and level flight. Not good for a bombing platform unless there is a computer that makes constant micro inputs to the elevons. I was told that this is why the original Northrop wing was not accepted as a bomber. Rudder action is effected by simply splitting the elevons at the tip to increases the drag at that point.
Some more junque that I just made up.

 

I meant to mention that Capt(?) Glen Edwards, for whom Edwards AFB (Muroc Dry Lake) was named posthumously...

...was killed in a crash of a YB-49 flying wing bomber at the lake. Stability issues.

 

Wonder who wrote the headline...

GIANT??? Seriously???

It's about he size of a DC-3... ain't no Spruce Goose.

 

Odd one I saw last December in a small airfield near Te Anau New Zealand.
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Big angle between thrust and chord, I suspect as part of the overall pitch sensitivity, but I have to think power changes might induce more pitch changes than a conventional aircraft.