Heads up – In Search Of Speed BBC2 Sunday

I assume that this is an American series modified slightly for showing in the UK. Many aviation documentaries seem to fall into this category these days. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the BBC or ITV willing to fund aviation documentaries with a British (or even European) slant.

Since the retirement of people like Raymond Baxter, British TV seems to have lost any interest or enthusiasm for British achievements in science and technology. All we ever get is a constant litany of mistakes, failures and disaster (both actual and financial). Is there a plot out there to destroy our souls?

Paul it would be very interesting to know the exact dates. Im sure we could nit pick this programme all day if we wanted to but i do agree these series seems heavily leaning on the american side of the development.

Eric Brown is scheduled to give a lecture to a local aviation society early next year – (Jan or Feb) and will be well worth attending. I can post the exact date + location if people would be interested in attending.

Eric Brown is still with us (and appeared in yesterday’s programme). He is a great source for first hand details and has written a few books on these subjects himself.

FD-2

Back in 1988, one reader in Flight magazine complained similarly about a BBC program which simply overlooked British achievements in supersonic flight. My FD-2/BAC.221 book and the others is intended to make sure that those who want to learn the honest details of our X-planes history will not be disappointed.
When I produced my DH.108 book, exactly 50 years after first flight, thanks to the help and material of many former project personnel, I realized that had I waited for a few more years the book would have been impossible to produce. Just imagine, the DH.108 was our first supersonic aircraft and the first and still-only book about it (by me) appeared 50 years after first flight.
It makes me wonder how much of our experimental aviation history can still be saved.

Henry

and who invented fixed horizontal stabiliser……. certainly not the X team. Miles aircraft did it first. AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH

I’ve recorded this, I dare say I will watch it even if saddened by the one sided portrayal it sounds like. The land speed programme mildly annoyed me (though I was more confused really) that D. Campbell had been completely written out of the story, and no mention was made of Breedlove’s first ‘record’ being unratified because the jet car was not recognised as a car at the time… However, this is perhaps understandable as the Brits weren’t really around for the massive explosion in speed and that generation really did belong to Breedlove and Arfons (though Breedlove’s latest car was trounced by Thrust SSC, another fact the programme makers seem to have forgotten when mentioning CB’s latest attempt at the record).

…However, writing the DH108, Miles M52 and Fairey FD2 really is a piece of revisionism worthy of Hollywood. Who wrote these documentaries? Was it the same team that did ‘U51’??

Well, two can play at that game …Going home to watch David Lean’s ‘The Sound Barrier’ on continuous loop.

The non-mentioning of the Miles project got on my nerves the most, as did other mentions about british failures and not successes. The episode last week about the land speed record was basically the same, american ‘we’re the best, screw the brits’.

I thought the best bit was the footage of the Ryan Fireball formation shutting down their prop engines and flying on the jets! Yes, what happened to Peter Twiss? I well remember his FD2 record when I was a young lad.

It was insinuated that one of the engineers at Muroc invented the flying tailplane. IIRC, it was a feature of the M.52.

I did watch the entire programme, gently simmering throughout.

Good stuff. What film footage exists of the French aircraft? I’d certainly buy a relevant DVD of British and French projects.

Leduc ramjet X-Planes

The French built and flew two Leduc 010, one Leduc 016, two Leduc 021 and two Leduc 022 in the 1940s and 1950s, as detailed in my magazine World X-Planes in a three-part article on the Leducs.

The French also flew the Griffon II which was ramjet powered and set speed records in the 1950s.

One project which was not built would have resulted in a VTOL Griffon which took off and landed in a vertical attitude.

The Griffon will be covered in my French-language series on French X-Planes, beginning with the Dassault Balzac, which flew with Rolls Royce engines.

Henry Matthews

HPM Publications

FD-2/DH.108

Hello,
As writer of the only book ever produced on the DH.108 (published in May 1996 and now out of print), and the FD-2/BAC.221 book soon to print, I can only marvel at this denigration of British achievements.
The DH.108 was the first British supersonic aircraft. Three built. The first, TG283, first flew on 15 May 1946 (pilot: G de Havilland). It crashed on 1 May 1950 killing RAE pilot Eric Genders. The second, TG306, first flew on 23 August 1946 (pilot: G de Havilland). It crashed killed the same pilot on its Flight 17 on 27 September 1946.
The third, VW120, was first flown on 24 July 1947 by John Cunningham. It crashed killing RAE pilot Stuart Muller-Rowland on 15 February 1950.
Roughly 600 flights in all were logged by the three aircraft.

The FD-2s not only set a speed record in 1956, but the flying of the two airframes WG774 and WG777 extended from 1954 to 1973 — ALMOST 20 YEARS!!

If only I had the means. I would have produced books and DVDs on all British research aircraft.

Henry Matthews

HPM Publications

www.HPMPublications.com (Books)

www.worldx-planes.com (Magazine)

Yes i noticed they totaly ignored the french attempts with their Leduc aeroplane. Did that actualy fly or was it like our m52 and was scrapped before it flew.

Not often?

Often enough in that we tend to see them to the exclusion of everything else.

It would be nice to see more stuff on the British research aircraft of the period of which there were many (too many, probably) and also the French, who built stuff that made the American and British aircraft look relatively conservative in comparison.

I got bored of it after 15mins or so….thought was way too biased towards the Americans. Didnt seem to recollect any mention of the Miles M.52 (perhaps did when I was flicking channels!), but it made us look like the underdogs when with that aeroplane, if we were allowed to have done, we would have been the first throught the sound barrier!

I thought it was very interesting

not often do we get to see all the early X-1, X-1A, X-2 stuff

good IMO

That peeved me to.

I started watching it but turned off about 15-20 mins in as it seemed to be just another USA flag waving exercise.
No mention as has been pointed out above of the positive UK contribution to the whole high speed flight problems or triumphs. No mention either of the Miles project that “may” have contributed data to the X-1 programme.

I was hoping to see more on the fd project as well and some on the piston engined record. All they did show of that was some footage of the italian thing that holds it. I also noticed they got their swallow footage mixed up. They showed footage of the 3rd prototype when taking about the crash of the second and again for the crash of the 3rd one and also got the order wrong if i remember correctly. If i remember correctly jeffory dehaviland juniour was killed in the crash of the 3rd prototype and they said he was killed in the second one.