Joe One Bomb, Konkordski, Atoll AAM: the West did not care to credit USSR with originality. They must be thieves. Brits claimed paternity of a lot – fecund studs: Boeing owed it all to RAE work on square windows. Sud Avn. too – they ran ads of a wide-eyed boy holding up a BAC 1-11 model, saying “Oooh! Ils ont copie Caravelle!”
Musicians know the difference between “inspire”(Stones and Bluesmen), “cover”, and “copy” (= rip-off). Aero “cover” is licence – no prob and maybe even better than the original (Fokker wing on Anson, Comet nose on Caravelle). Aero “copy” is reverse engineering (Japan, US radials; Tu-4/B-29). Put to one side patents; my question is when does fashion become theft? Is 777 a steal from A330? Does an expensive Project Team deliberately rely on plagiarism to roll past a first-mover? Or do logic/economics produce co-incident solutions to a given Spec? If you run your load-paths to give decent fatigue-life…if you design to be machined in months not years, will you “copy” the other guy. Today, I suppose, it’s CAD/CAM which clones hatchback cars and composite kitplanes. But this is the History Forum.
– B.Gunston, Aero-Engines, PSL,1986,P.133 says Royce set about beating (Fairey Felix)Curtiss D-12, as (F/Kestrel/Merlin). So: was his Empire founded on filch?
– Warplane for the World (Jack ??) has Marcel as sucking it all up from FD.2 visiting Cazaux: was the Mirage family illicitly inseminated?
I suggest there are few chunks of technology that can be “owned”, so “copied”. Dassault had the same access to Lippisch work as Fairey, SAAB, Sukhoi, not as much as Convair who employed him and were thus first with a supersonic delta. NACA/RAE were generally scientific about dissemination, say of aerofoils. It’s not what you know, but how you use it. If anyone is entitled to shout Thief! its Germany – see MCP’s 3 Vols. on their Secret Projects and tremble.
By: J Boyle - 3rd March 2006 at 14:42
There is often less in the ‘Copy” issue than meets the eye…
Often planes designed for the same mission will come out looking alike due to a third-party (airline or military) requirement.
Witness the DC-10 and Lockheed L-1011.
I believe it was American Airlines that wanted a wide body transport ideally with “more than two, but fewer than four” engines for internal U.S. use.
At another extreme (and the subject of a recent thread) …the Auster AOP 9 and the Cessna Bird Dog.
Sometimes “the state of the art” dictates design…early jet engines needed a lot of air so they had a front “open mouth” intake…combine that with swept wings and you’ll get something that looks like a F-86, MiG-15 or Mystere…and to my knowledge, nobody copied anyone (except for the MiG engine).
And just because the Germans had paper plans for the outside of advanced weapons doesn’t mean all the internal and systems designs were done…or that they had even detail designs for the fuselage. An external rendering of an aircraft doesn’t mean it’s designed. There are thousands of drawings involved to design an entire aircraft.
What the drawing do tell us is the Germans were thinking of designs and ways to solve problems when other countries/companies hadn’t even discovered there were problems to be addressed.
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March 3, 2006 at 2:00 pm