Pusher Props

The Mig-8 was a pusher propeller, that also had a swept wing and canard nose mounted foreplanes. It was an experimental configuration and only about 8 were made to explore making a stall proof plane. (basically with a swept main wing at the rear and canards at the front the canards stalled first which lowered the nose which increased speed and helped recover from the stall. Conventional designs with the “canards” at the rear make the nose climb and make the stall worse till the main wing stalls and the plane falls from the sky. The Mig-8 was a very easy aircraft to fly and with a tricycle undercarriage was easy to land and take off with too.

As I recall, the disaster was economic only… they performed well as airplanes, but few people wanted a propellor-driven (and therefore speed-limited) plane that cost nearly what a jet did!

Lots of allied “pusher” aircraft in early W.W.1 – Farmans (and derivatives), Caudrons, Voisins but German and Austro-Hungarian “pusher” designs seem to be restricted to a couple of single-engined flying boats and twin-engined bombers. Then, when “tractor” types were becoming ascendant, there was a brief resurgence of “pushers” to overcome the problem of firing fixed forward facing (Fhew – 4 x fs) machine guns through the propellor. F.E.2 (not the B.E.2), Vickers Gunbus, D.H.2, etc.

Piaggio must hold the record for longest association with the “pusher” with their P.136 (earlier design from which the P.166 in Albert’s first photo was developed) first flying in 1948. The P.166 first flew in 1957 and the P.180 Avanti (Albert’s second photo) 1986 – is it still in production?

The Beech Starship – VERY similar in appearance to the Avanti and also first flying in 1986 – turned out a bit of a disaster. If I remember correctly they only built 53 and ended up buying them back so as not to have to maintain a spares holding. A number of them went to selected museums, the others destroyed?

Roger Smith.

Cessna O-2A Skymaster:

“VH-OII Military S/N: 67-21407
History: The Cessna O-2A in the Temora Aviation Collection is one of only two O-2A’s flown in Australia.

In 1966, the United States Air Force (USAF) realised it needed a replacement for its O-1 Bird Dogs in Vietnam. The Cessna 337 was selected and, with relatively minor modifications to incorporate under wing weapons mounts and weapon release systems, was sent to war in Vietnam designated O-2A. The Cessna O-2A is an all metal, high wing, retractable gear aircraft incorporating twin tail booms and an engine mounted at the front and rear of its fuselage pod. A total of 501 Cessna O-2A’s were delivered to the USAF.

The Temora Aviation Museum’s O-2A was manufactured in 1967 and assigned Serial Number 67-21407. In August of that year it was flown across the Pacific to Vietnam. The aircraft was based at Pleiku and served in a combat environment until April 1971. During that service, the aircraft was struck by enemy fire on many occasions and was retired from the USAF in January 1980. After being stored at Davis-Monthan Air force Base in Arizona for 14 years, the aircraft was restored and placed on the US civil register in 1994.

Upon being purchased by David Lowy in August 2000 the aircraft was transported to Temora and donated to the Temora Aviation Museum in December 2000.

The Museum’s Cessna O-2A has been remarked to resemble the one flown by Australian FAC pilot David Robson. As Jade 07, Flying Officer David Robson flew over 240 missions in the O-2A and controlled over 80 air strikes in support of the Australian troops.

The Museum uses the Cessna O-2A to ferry pilots, engineers and equipment around the country as well as displaying it’s capabilities at their flying days.”

Bell Airacuda

There’s a first person account of flying the Bell XFM-1 Airacuda here:

http://yarchive.net/mil/bell_yfm1_horrors.html

Harald

shinden

Ascender??

The RC world has seen a surgence of pusher-prop models, mainly with the improvement in electric performance, model jets can have a pusher prop providing thrust at the designed jet efflux point for more realistic flight characteristics, with the Battery placement addressing the rearward CofG issue. (I have an Electric Aero L39 with this config),

Trying to do RC glow pushers adds a layer of complexity regarding fuel tanks/flow and control (the clunks/feeds have to face the same way as a tractor installation in order to maintain consistent flow)

As for 1:1 scale aircraft, the Dornier DoX, Focke Wulfe thingy, Horton flying wing, Northrop flying wing, and Beech starship spring to mind

Influences the whole design because of CoG shift towards the rear. That plus ground clearance makes it hard to use on a taildragger configuration.

On the plus side you have less drag since the air from the propeller doesn’t go over the wing.
On the minus side problems with (air)cooling, with corroding exhaust gases over the propeller, often vibrations when turbulent air from over the wing hits the propellers, plus you can’t use the propellers for STOL-effects.

Dornier and seaplanes quite often had a pusher-tractor configuration, that was to be able to handle engine-out conditions better and to keep the engines over the fuselage away from the waves in rough sea.
Plus the Horten flying wings were pushers.

Seems the debate still goes on as to which is best, as these two designs don’t seem to have suffered any adverse affects.

Surely engines mounted in the wing would’nt affect the tail, or would it have to be larger to counter balance additional forces. I have a surreal vision in my head of Mosquito’s with rear mounted Merlins and huge tails closing in on Amiens prison.

😀 It’s a sight! I put it badly – I meant single-engined types.

The Walrus was the last pusher in a long list of flying boats and amphibians from Supermarine who never seemed sure if tractor or pusher was best (andthere were two subiquent tractor designs of course…).

Talking to an aero-engineer recently he pointed out that modern small props moving at high speeds are inneficient on a slow pusher aircraft (think of the Shuttleworth Boxkite) against a slower bigger pusher prop.

Pedantically all ‘propellers’ are ‘pushers’ as the pulling variety are really ‘airscrews’ or ‘tractor airscrews’ – but that’s a rule in abeyance.

There’s a lot more than you think, if you have a cruise around up to the 1950s. I guess one answer to your question is you’ve got to figure out how to keep the tail on, or find another means of stabilising the aircraft with a pusher aircraft.

I’m currently banging my head on the wall trying to find my 1945 edition of Janes, the 1952 Observers book of Aircraft is the only old publication I can find at the moment and the only pushers in there are the SAAB and Piaggio flying boat.
Surely engines mounted in the wing would’nt affect the tail, or would it have to be larger to counter balance additional forces. I have a surreal vision in my head of Mosquito’s with rear mounted Merlins and huge tails closing in on Amiens prison.

Pros & Cons – tractors give you the benefits of prop wash over the wing enhancing lift to some extent, but this wash promotes an early turbulent boundary layer which is a bit more ‘draggy’. With the design of the B-36, one of the primary requirements was a very long range, which was the reason why the pusher configuration was chosen – to keep the boundary layer on the wing laminar as long as possible reducing drag.

Pedantically all ‘propellers’ are ‘pushers’ as the pulling variety are really ‘airscrews’ or ‘tractor airscrews’ – but that’s a rule in abeyance.

There’s a lot more than you think, if you have a cruise around up to the 1950s. I guess one answer to your question is you’ve got to figure out how to keep the tail on, or find another means of stabilising the aircraft with a pusher aircraft.