Ben, I’ve only two words to say to you, “g*ft a*d” !! ;but where was the “Dr” this morning on the news clip? ,only Dave Thomas was present, so things are looking up from that point of view as well!

Just back from my constitutional bike ride and have been batting a few ideas about on my travels to while away an hour or so.

In 1930’s/40’s terms, if we consider a prosthesis for say an amputation between the knee and the hip. Rotation control on the stump will either be by friction material or by nesting into the groin. Detachment control, to keep the prosthesis in place, will be by a strapping device. Although a full body harness could be custom designed for dual amputation, for the sake of this discussion, for a right leg, let us consider a single strap passing over the left shoulder and attaching to the prosthesis at two points.

Let us now consider the basic materials available to make the prosthesis – wood, aluminium, early generation phenolic, early plastics and for the strap, leather or canvas webbing. So quite a heavy item, with no high tech aerospace carbon fibre, composites and titanium available then.

For comfort, the strap, with its adjustment device, is unlikely to be less than 2 inches wide.

The main loads on the prosthesis mechanism are ones of compression on the stump and those associated with walking on the ‘heel’ and ‘toe’. Under normal high stress design conditions the load on the strap and its attachment points reduce and are minimal.

Let us consider the abnormal high stress conditions as in the Bader bail out. The weakest part of the mechanism will almost certainly be the attachment point area of the cleats, buckles or whatever presumed to be at two points at the top of the prosthesis.

We are conditioned to seeing the Kenneth Moore footage in ‘Reach for Sky’, with the prosthesis trapped under the pedals. Those pedals now slack due to the empennage separation, but as first one cable broke followed by the second cable, those pedals must have have snapped back and forth.

Let us consider the forces required to free Douglas Bader from the ‘trapped’ prosthesis. Tensile failure of a 2 inch wide strap by Bader’s use of his arms as leverage/purchase is unlikely. Using his other leg to generate purchase is possible but hard to conceive. The negative G bunt that caused his reported blood shot eyes could well generate the appropriate forces on the attachment points but the bunt happened at considerable altitude, with main seat harness in place and the tail-less fighter plummeted many thousands of feet before separation of man and machine just above the clouds.

I have certainly read of pilots losing boots during a parachute descent in WWII. The arresting forces as the chute snaps open are considerable as has been stated earlier. I cannot imagine that Bader, with his character, would have had special and stronger fixings for such an eventuality for his prosthesis and for sure a parachute descent would not have been on the manufacturers design brief.

Maybe the ‘tin leg’ got caught under the pedal, maybe it didn’t. Understandingly, in the spinning, tumbling, buffeting and confusing world of the descent, separation was inevitably going to take longer than a fully able bodied pilot.

For my money I suspect that Douglas Bader exited his Spitfire with both of his ‘tin legs’ attached, having disengaged with the pedals or no and precisely eight seconds later the heavier of the two prostheses detached, the two fixings to the straps neatly sheared by the forces generated by the parachute arrest.

This might well account for the conflicting position and reports of said detached item.

Mark

Just wondering whether this insight of prosthesisology came about in a typically freudian manner,i.e the chafing associated with certain types of saddle!!

Incidently, I would have thought it just as likely the DB may of got his foot caught in the rudder pedal (rather than under) ,its possible in a steep dive that the toe part of his boot hooked under the top bar of the two tier pedal, and his orientation, together with his minimal control of said foot, made it very hard to extract it.

Possibly with the Dornier ,the impact of the Hurricane caused it to go into a flat spin , whereas an A/C that had it’s tail severed by cannon fire, would not be subject to such lateral forces.

Did the pilot not die of injuries sustained in the mid air crash, because he refused medical attention? Its perfectly possible he was also “roughed up ” by the locals (if they could reach him) ; my mother remembers an occasion when an angry mob had caught up with a downed pilot, the crowd were screaming “kill him” she doesn’t know his fate, but it doesn’t sound a good scenario.

I think it is clear in one of Dilip Sarkar’s earlier posts that the Bostock plane location was known about at least two years before the programme because a French researcher found surface or near surface, remains and sent them to Mrs Bostock. If that is the case then this plane did not need to be excavated.

As Malcolm said earlier, what is the point of digging up yet another Spitfire? We have flying examples of Mark IX aircraft and plenty of other substantial pieces of Mk IX wreckage in aviation recovery museums. It is not really telling us anything new that can advance the field of aviation archaeology.

When you say “we have plenty of substantial pieces of mkIX wreckage in Aviation recovery museums” does that take into account there are a large number of Spitfire projects on the go in this country alone ,that might benefit from items recovered from digs.

Most people want cockpit stuff, and unfortunately that is the area that survives least well, but engine parts, prop hubs, U/C legs ,etc can be reused, (although predominantly not for flying); thus you could argue that these digs are spares recovery, rather than straight forward archaeology.

Could it be the reason that Wildfire was so wrong about the big wing theory,is that they really aren’t that bothered about preserving the accuracy of this part of our history; after all the main theme of the programme was revision,wasn’t it?

One question that came to mind watching the programme, was Bader’s spit a clipped wing mkV? obviously I’ve seen pictures depicting it as a standard wing plane, but it did make me wonder whether that might be the reason why it was “mistaken” for a 109.

Regarding the argument as to how a dig should procede ,it seems to me that an average A/C dig (always asuming that exists) shifts more mud than a whole series of Time team type digs, where most of the finds seem to be about 2ft down ; scraping away with a tea spoon, Phil’s whiskers would be around his ankles before he found anything!

James, what a disappointment it must be for you to respond to someone with such poor punctuation, especially as this forum has such high standards with respect to grammar, but please bare with me;

The first point worth addressing is that Hawkers didn’t build a fighter capable of being modified to keep pace with german A/C design; the Typhoon, in the main differed little with the hurricane the forward fuselage was of tubular construction, bolted together with plates,it was wholly unsuccessful as a fighter primarily because of the thick wing (like the Hurricane), and was adopted for ground attack in which role it excelled (as long as you didn’t mind the tail coming off), but was a failure in its intended role; replacing the entire wing was not a modification, it was a redesign and appropriately it was given a new name (tempest).

A hypothetical question as it was, that would be an accurate answer, had they not have built the hurricane, in large numbers their next “fighter” would not have aquitted itself at all well in the BoB.

Returning to the main theme of the guns, I mentioned in my first post (all those pages ago) that gun harmonisation at the out break of war was a spread pattern, and yes the accepted idea at that time was that there would be sufficient lead in the air to cause substancial damage; this was an assumption made by the air ministry not A/C designers; it is also worth bearing in mind that at the out break of war there was no armour plate fitted.

If we look at the wing flex issue ,neither you or I have figures to show the measured amount of flex, to hand (although I do have some original wing stress calculations ,and may be able to work it out from that) the amount of flex toward the wing tip may be sufficient to alter the trajectory of the bullets, but it is worth remembering that it would only affect the two outer guns, and then only under high g .

Having read Sailor Malan’s biography, there is no mention of any problems with the Spitfire not staying on target, and indeed with over thirty confirmed kills to his credit I think his achievements speak for themselves (as did Beurlings in the malta campaign).

No you didn’t understand correctly what I was trying to say regarding gun harmonisation , and yes I do realise that invariably the man facing the firing squad remained reasonably stationary, as opposed to a fighter A/C moving around the sky in excess of two hundred mph, but the principle of harmonisation to a pin point remains the same.

I’m not sure that you are fully able to quantify your statements by adding the word “fact” to the end of each sentence, but it makes you feel better, please carry on; one thing I will say is, in a previous exchange of views, you said to me; “Bluntly I know more about this than you” you were wrong then,as you are now, I won’t bore you with my qualifications on the subject, but I’ve been doing it for thirty odd years;

And finally (hopefully you’ll forgive the starting of a sentence with “and”) I don’t have a Spitfire “replica nose”, what I do have is a Spitfire project that is 50% original (and I don’t mean by weight either) what you might have seen is a photo of the assembled forward fuselage, but I assure you the rest is there.

With regard to my obvious bias towards the Spitfire ,I can say only this, that I have looked long and hard for a project that would provide me with a challenge to test my abilities, the spitfire is that and more (one need only look at the wing spar construction to see the genius of the man),the hurricane is mechano by comparison and as good a robust fighter as it was ,it was an old man (in 1940)whereas the Spitfire had just been born.

I would add just one thing to this, and that is a quote from Joe Smith; ” no other man in my experience has produced anything like the number of new and practical fundamental ideas, the whole hearted and continuous application of this genius was an inspiration to all who worked with him”.

JDK, James,looking and thinking eh ? so many points to take issue with so little time… alright my first question what would we think of the Hurricane if it were out numbered by the spitfire by the same ratio, your answer ;”Err what most people actually think about the battle,i.e the spitfire won it ” etc, isn’t actually an answer to the question . Heres an example of an answer ; “we might have thought that in the relatively small numbers the Hurricane, was in service,that Hawkers would have been better off tooling up to build something that could see out the war and could be modified many times over to keep pace with German A/C development. It might not be the answer that you had in mind, but it does at least address the question. The rest of your post seems to be your attempt to rubish what I am saying, by breaking whole an comprehensible sentances down to “sound bites “that are easier to snipe at, but to address some of these in brief; if you are involved in something on a day to day basis and you haven’t heard a bad report about the item in question ,it isn’t such a silly idea to think that if your peers aren’t aware of a specific problem , and consequently haven’t comunicated the absence of said problem to you ,that it may not exist. If we look at a firing squad as an example , the spread of the squad is roughly that of the guns in a Spitfire, their point of aim was obviously the chap against the brick wall , that would roughly speaking be a definition of “pin point” as opposed to a “spread” ; are you saying that if the firing squad climbed on top of each other that their accuracy would be greatly improved? how far out in the wings do you think the outer guns are? yes the wings flex, all wings do ;how much flexing do you think they do? its not a B52….Finally just looked at you last post, about gun harmonisation why would you think that the guns can only be harmonised at one distance? get a piece of paper , put eight dots at one edge one dot at the other edge then another dot slightly behind that ,and, with a ruler, draw a series of lines ,and you can clearly see that the outer guns can be harmonised ahead of the inner guns without any intersection of bullets that effectively is a “string” of bullets, when attacking from the rear ,(by far the best way) and as a former clay pigeon shooter I understand deflection (lead) spread patterns ,shot strings, etc,etc