Mike, we should start some kind of society – I agree, props never got the attention they deserved – even during the design stage.

Enormous amounts of time and energy were spent refining engine designs to get maybe a couple more horsepower here or there with every tweak – half a mile an hour’s worth of new valve seat would be incorporated with alacrity.. and then the aircraft designer would almost chuck any old prop on the front. As long as it fell within a power range and didn’t touch the ground, it would – and usually did – do. The fact that the wrong choice could drain 100HP’s worth of thrust from the system didn’t seem worthy of consideration, and curiously only rarely has since. It is only now that Hercules propellers in Gloucestershire are showing GA users the enormous difference the right prop makes.

Serious amounts of work went into designing blade profiles and aerofoils on both sides of the pond and even more (as shown in the video) precision-engineering these within an inch (or a Thou) of their lives. This was then completely ignored – as long as it goes round the right way, it could all be forgotten.

A classic example is the Whirlwind – the bleedin obvious (when you see it) problem with the wrong blades wasn’t seen, to the point where it ‘must’ have been some unspecified and untraceable problem with the engines – and that is what passed into the record. I am uncovering several more cases like this.