There would be outrage if members of the Liberal Democrats or the SNP were banned from certain jobs…

Isn’t the SNP a racist party? :diablo:

The ski jump has a pronounced curve and actually does put quite a load on the landing gear as the a/c enters.
If it was more a flat plate then it would not launch the a/c as effectively.

Are you sure? I know that a large part of the ski-jump is curved but the last part of it seems pretty ‘flat’ to me. I could be wrong but I seem to remember that the idea is that the landing-gear is compressed as the Harrier enters the curved part of the ski-jump but over the last flat part the landing-gear springs back past the ‘static’ position and then the Harrier goes off the end.

Yep, I knew I’d screw up somewhere…..you haven’t got an M3 Stuart have you? 🙂

Not sure it is such an unusual use for aero-engines but many have been used to power tanks and other armoured vehicles.

The US M4 Sherman, M3 Lee/Grant, M3 Stuart (Honey) all carried Continental R-975 9-cylinder radial engines at some point (amongst other engines).

The British Cruiser III, Cruiser IV, Crusader, Centuar and Cavalier all used modified Liberty V-12 engines as did the World War One Mark VIII (Liberty) tank.

British Cromwell, Comet, Conqueror and Centurion tanks carried the Meteor V-12 engine based on some obscure aero-engine known as the Merlin (:diablo:). Centurion AVRE tanks fitted with the Meteor were certainly used during the first Gulf War in 1990-1991!

Even the horribly troublesome L60 engine used in the British Chieftain tank was a multi-fuel opposed-piston engine that bears a striking similarity to the Junkers Jumo 205 diesel aero-engine.

The Swedish S-Tank carried a gas-turbine in addition to a diesel engine and the current American M-1 Abrams tank has a gas-turbine as its only power source. The first tank to be powered by a gas-turbine though was probably a prototype British Conqueror but the engine selected for production was the well-tried Meteor.

I’m not sure the ski-jump is all curved, although there is a generous ‘radius’ between the flat deck and the straight end portion of the ski-jump. The ski-jumps on the three Invincible class carriers are described by a single angle of 12° or 13° (HMS Invincible was 7° originally).

No moonlight that I can remember as we could not see any aircraft nor any formation lights. Certainly the night of June 5/6 1944 was not a moonlit night…

According to the British Meteorological Office “D-Day should be within one day before, to four days after a full moon” and in the book Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose it is stated that when the C-47 aircraft carrying the 101st Airborne Division “reached 1000 feet, they began to circle, getting into a V of Vs formation” and that that formation was intended to be maintained over the drop-zone but that it was dispersed by cloud over the continent.

There was also a large exercise on May 11th 1944 in which the whole 101st Airborne Division was dropped after dark over England after a two-and-a-half hour flight to simulate to duration of the actual mission. There would also have been moonlight on this night.

There were no navigation lights visible from the ground so I assume that they had ‘station keeping’ lights.

Correct, according to this first hand account, transport C-47 aircraft used on D-Day did carry formation keeping lights.

http://www.amcmuseum.org/history/wwii/troop_carrier_d-day_3.html

Of course this doesn’t apply to Bomber Command operations which, later in the war at least, avoided moonlit nights like the plague!

I can remember reading an account by the mid-upper gunner of a Lancaster that spotted, and flew in formation with, another Lancaster during the disastrous Nuremberg bombing raid that was carried out in moonlight on March 1944.

Neither Lancaster would have had any formation-keeping lights and the gunner found it ‘very comforting’ to be in formation but unfortunately a German night-fighter was able to locate them (initially with radar) and shot them both down with two quick ‘Schräge Musik’ attacks. The fighter was not seen by either crew and tragically the gunner was the only survivor.

It was the only way to get the first wave of the Airborne troops in a tight enough grouping on the ground.

Except that the plan became a shambles and paratroops ended up scattered miles from their intended drop-zones…

…but the end results were not as bad as could have been expected as the scattered paratroops appeared as a much larger force to the German defenders and so many objectives were apparently being targeted that the real objectives were masked for much longer than expected.