Whirlwind Fighter Project July Newsletter

Very sorry to read about the recent death of Johnny Shellard. A true gent. Condolences to his wife Helen.

Rear fuse frame parts fabricated and ‘trial assembled’, Nothing done since last year while Mike moves his entire operation to Fishburn, purpose-builds a new workshop there and founds a museum! But the project remains together, funded and poised to continue when there’s somewhere ready to continue in!

Errm, what’s the current state of construction?
Cees

At the risk of thread drift, and knowing that anyone who hasn’t read the newsletter won’t have a clue what I’m on about…

..it looks like Lockheed caught up in 1943. I can’t find the original test reports in the usual places online, but hearsay evidence is that pilots ‘liked it’s performance in a dive’. Previously, the P-38 had terrible problems with turbulent flow over the tail at high speeds.. and just look at the original design’s wing/fuselage junction in plan – horrible. Now look how straight this one (on the ‘Swordfish’ high-speed test-bed) now is (again, only makes sense if you read my bit in the newsletter)..
[ATTACH=CONFIG]238849[/ATTACH]
(Lockheed Photo, my line).

Oh, and Lockheed were in correspondence with the Air Ministry and Petter about the Whirlwind, in relation to these problems with the P-38, back in 1941.

EDIT: If anyone can be bothered, please read this http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a800790.pdf (especially the conclusion, taken with Fig.7). It completely re-writes the conventional history of the P-38. Those ‘dive brakes’ were a quick and dirty change, Lockheed knew full well from the actual experimentation done here that the real problem of dive controllability due to compressive effects was due to the interaction of a very dodgy fuselage pod /wing intersection geometry, even if they hadn’t quite had the wing-root light-bulb moment.

Of course, if they had listened to Petter when he commented to the Lockheed team via the Air Ministry that he’d ‘Invariably had trouble when they had required that the air expand simultaneously in two planes, as for instance when a body is mounted on a wing’ they’d have known a couple of years earlier. I get the feeling there was a degree of arrogance engendered by the undeniable abilities of the Lockheed team, to the point where even when they did have a quiet light-bulb moment they applied the ‘not invented here’ filter to it, and chose to go with a lower-key work-around in the face of there being a more effective long term one, as clearly evidenced by this somewhat buried document and what they did with their own high-speed research aircraft.

Indeed.. the Hornet had a curve the ‘other’ way, which on the face of it probably ain’t so bad. The fuselage is pear-shaped, by the look of it – so although a significant amount of wing sits ‘low’, the root doesn’t encounter adverse curvature, the sum total of the geometry making the join similar to the mosquito in that respect, reducing/negating the need for a fairing, maybe.

All this is from published 3-views, though, and I know how unreliable they can be. Particularly in this very area, it seems.

😀 Hi All.

The July newsletter is now up and running and can be found here…http://whirlwindfighter.blogspot.co.uk/

Chris.

Excellent newsletter and very interesting explaination.

The hornet was also a low-wing monoplane that didnt use wing root fairings, and was good for speeds approaching 500mph. Coupled with long range, low weight and low drag.
DH also challenged the accepted aerodynamic conventions, and bettered them too.