In answer to your question, weeds:D:D

Looks to me a if OW is just outside the zone??

Even to just fly round and around in the zone a XPNDR is required. Not many vintage A/C have one of these.
Right in the middle of the display seaon as well:mad:

The quality of this thread is greatly enhanced by contributions from someone who has been there, and done it – many thanks.

Indeed so, invaluable information from someone with hands on experence. Experience like this needs to be passed on so its not lost forever. Thank you for sharing it with us.

I am puzzled by the Neil Williams landing episode mentioned earlier – ‘the dreaded rich mixture cut’ makes it sound like some Achilles Heel. Surely thats more to do with the power-plant than the aircraft? And I can’t say I am aware that the Merlin has a repuation for such failings. Certainly the Mercuries on the Blenheim can suffer such a problem is the throttle is opened up too quickly in a similar situation….

I think what propstrike is trying to highlight is that the fact that if you speak to those that used to fly these wonderfull beasts is the fact that on one engine in either the take off or landing phase the Mossi had a tendancy to try and kill you! One squadron comander is reputed to have banned his men from carrying out single engine approaches, if they lost an engine the took it to height on the good engine and stepped over the side.

Depends where you are, £1.79 at Sywell;)

I know that there are many types for which only a few drawings, or none at all are known to exist, not just those for the WW1 types, there are even WW2 aircraft for which this is also true “Stirling & Whitley for a start”, but as this thread is about WW1 aircraft, I thought it best to only mention them.

As for Gamecock drawings etc, if I remember rightly, wasn’t the Gamecock a descendant of the Nighthawk/Nightjar etc family of aircraft ?, if so have you checked through the SE5a or Sopwith drawings, as I believe that a number of SE5a parts were used in the Nighthawk etc, this came about because the Nieuport/Gloucestershire aircraft Co were contracted to build Sopwith & R.A.F types.

It is just possible that some of the parts used in the Gamecock were from these types, either in un-altered or slightly modified form. Bristol’s did this with their F2b, they used many standard BE2c fittings, as well as a few that were altererd slightly to suit, nearly all the internal wing fittings for instance were standard BE2c parts, as were many of the control & undercarriage parts, not only did this save a lot of design time, but also money as they already had the jigs & tooling to stamp out & make these parts. After all if you are already tooled up to make a part that will do the job, why go to the trouble & expense of designing & tooling up for a new part.

Would it be possible for you to email me the pages of the parts book etc that have the parts illustrated on them ?, & I will have a look to see if anything stands out as possibly being of either Sopwith or R.A.F origin.:)

Bob. T

Certainly the SE5 and Gamecock look very similar in alot of respects, not surprising as they were the same designer. We have the Grebe AP as well which has even more info in it than the Gamecock one. Wil copy some pages when i have a mo.

Drawings and the lack of them is cetainly the biggest hurdle for many A/C. And not just First World War. Any leads on Gamecock drawings would be most useful. Much can be reverse engieered and the AP’s that were produced contain alot of infomation that is very usefull but there is no substitute for having the original drawings.

Harvest Air did built a Fokker DVIII for Leisure Sport in 1979/1980 powered by a Warner Scarab engine. It had some bad luck, unfortunately, being turned over on landing during one of its early flights at Southend and then it was written off at White Waltham.

It certainly looked good while it was about.

The bits a bobs languished at Lands End for many years, not sure what happened to it in the end.

I have a picture of that somewhere, I’ll have to look it out.