Friday - December 10, 2010

Flying Art

Not sure what art category to put this one in. Art Deco, Streamline Moderne? I don’t think Bauhaus or Craftsman fits, but the shape of this lovely creature is so 1930’s it has to be in one of them. Art history majors, here’s your chance to flex that 4.0 GPA.

Go back in time about 80 years. Give a boy who is nuts about “aeroplanes” a pencil and have him draw you a racing plane. After he zips out a picture of a stubby Gee Bee, specify non-radial engines and a stable fuselage. And within a minute or two, this is what you would get. Like the Supermarine Spitfire that was to come along a few years later, this is the shape that I think is genetically programmed into boy’s minds of what airplanes ought to look like. Fast. Sleek. Deadly. Possibly a bit phallic. But elegant, if not particularly practical.

The de Havilland DH.88 Comet was a twin-engined British aircraft that won the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race [England to Australia], a challenge for which it was specifically designed. It set many aviation records during the race and afterwards as a pioneer mail plane.

This Comet was one of those transition aircraft, built out of wood and covered in linen and varnish, yet equipped with powerful engines and modern flight equipment. And a gigantic gas tank: the Comet had a range of nearly 3000 miles. Sure, it only went 250mph, but it flew at that speed all day long on a tank of fuel.

The airframe consisted of a wooden skeleton clad with spruce plywood, with a final fabric covering on the wings. A long streamlined nose held the main fuel tanks, with the low set central two-seat cockpit forming an unbroken line to the tail. The engines were essentially the standard Gipsy Six used on the Express and Dragon Rapide passenger planes, tuned for best performance with a higher compression ratio. The propellers were two-position variable pitch, manually set to fine before takeoff and changed automatically to coarse by a pressure sensor. The main undercarriage retracted upwards and backwards into the engine nacelles. The DH.88 could maintain altitude up to 4,000 ft (1,200 m) on one engine.

Three Comets were built and entered in the MacRobertson race. After the Grosvenor House, the red craft shown above, won that race, two more were built. The de Havilland company tried to interest governments in the design as a fighter, but to no real avail. The airplanes were sold off and saw service as airmail carriers.

It’s a lovely plane, but the shortcomings are beyond obvious. The engines and the simple 2 angle, 2 bladed propellers are far too small. The pilot sits behind a gigantic gas tank. The nose is so long that forward visibility is just about non-existent; my guess is that flying along about 5 miles up, the pilot could only see the ground 25 miles in front of him. Takeoffs and landings would be totally blind.

But it’s gorgeous. And a few years later, when WWII broke out, the de Havilland company took that same design, stretched it out, blew out the engine nacelles and put some real horsepower in there, stuck on some proper multi-bladed variable pitch propellers, reversed the landing gear pivot, and put the pilot up in front where he ought to be. And created the Mossie, the Mosquito, one of the most effective, fast, and nimble fighter bombers of the whole war.

The plane lives these days among many friends at Shuttleworth Aerodrome, 4 miles west of the town of Biggleswade, straight up the A1 north of London.

Most source info and pics from Wikipedia. More info here.

This is one of those posts that sort of write themselves. I did not start out to cover this old plane. Initially I was going to write about how MoD (British Military) had cut the budget for the Nimrod surveillance aircraft, after spending nearly $5 billion on it. And that the dozen or so of them actually built will get cut up for scrap, even though most of them are so new that they have never even flown. Well, it turns out that the MRA4 is more than a bit of a boondoggle. It’s a bottomless money pit. The project is a decade behind schedule, and the cost overruns have more than doubled, while the original number of planes scheduled to be delivered has fallen by half. So it may be the smart move for the RAF to cut its losses, but this will leave them without much in the way of submarine hunter/long range surveillance aircraft.

Knowing that a post about airplanes would be a let down without pictures, and not really sure from the first link whether the Nimrod was a real airplane or a UAV, I Googled up some pics. It is a real airplane. But looking at the pictures, those funny looking engines set into the wings looked quite familiar. Think Drew, think! Ah ha! and a bit more net research shows that, yes indeed, the Nimrod is based on the de Havilland Comet. No, not this racing plane. DH recycled the name. The Comet was the first operational jet airliner, from 1949. You remember, the ones that broke apart in flight and crashed, because they used square windows that caused stress fractures in the aluminum skin. Oops. Rather a bad design flaw, that. And the Nimrod is based on that old thing? Maybe it’s a good thing it is being put out to pasture.

But along the way I kept seeing pictures of this little red airplane that looked like something from a comic book. So eventually I gave in and took a look. And that’s how blog posts sometimes come about.

What, you’d rather read about how Iran is putting “medium range” missiles in Venezuela that can target Washington DC while the world does utterly nothing to stop them from making nukes? What’s the fun in that?

GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

Posted by Drew458     on 12/10/2010 at 01:27 PM   
Filed Under: • Art-Photography • Eye-Candy • Fun-Stuff • planes, trains, tanks, ships, big machinery, and automobiles •  
• Comments (7) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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