Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation Australia CA Standards

Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (CAC) operated from 1936 to 1985, designing or manufacturing aircraft and engines of Australian, American, British, Italian and French origin.
Accordingly, many CA Standards are direct adaptations of Standards applied in the manufacture of aircraft in other countries. Many CA Standards list foreign Substitute materials at the end of the document.

Materials from the United States appear in North American Aircraft designs such as Harvard (CAC Wirraway), Mustang and Sabre, Pratt & Whitney engines, Bell helicopter and F/A-18 Hornet.
Materials from Italy appear via the manufacture of the Macchi jet trainer and from France via the manufacture Dassualt Mirage and ATAR jet engine.
Materials from the United Kingdom appear from general application in WW2 and specific to the manufacture of Rolls Royce Merlin, Avon, Nene and Bristol Siddeley Viper engines.

Where CA Standards are revised, the later version will contain a sequential letter at the end of title, eg CA209, CA209B, CA209C

CA Standards are supported by two INDEX documents : Standards ‘by CA Number’ and ‘by Material’. A search through the Material index may reward a searcher looking for a substitute of similar composition.

Over 1,000 CA Standards are available, courtesy of the Australian National Aviation Museum Archives Moorabbin, Australia. I am the voluntary curator of these Archives which are now undergoing a systematic effort at cataloging so the collection will become increasingly visible via Internet searching over the next two years. A small number of CA Standards are presented here and the work of scanning the balance continues. Where you wish to secure a copy of a CA Standard not yet listed here, please get in contact.

Here it is :

A Wright mystery

Schneiderman, great find thank you.
Putting the photos all together I am not emphatically convinced that this isn’t our man…
The ‘director of the firm’ pose, by the cut of the jacket, looks 1930’s, which would make our man more aged than his 1912 self.
Same kind of receding hairline, same kind of hands, same kind of earlobes, just 20 years later. In the earlier photo, a bit of a grin that that is not there in the formal pose later. What was Mr Wright doing in the late 20’s and 30’s?

(Ahh, I can’t seem to post the pic, not uploading….)

Thanks Flight Global

Thanks Consul, Kenneth & Schneiderman. All great tips.
Flightglobal is an extraordinary resource. Thank you to the Directors of the Firm for digitizing this extraordinary material, and for using character recognition software to make it searchable.There is a lot of material on the Ewen Flying School, particularly in 1912, when it was based at Hendon. Apparently there were three machines at the school, No 1, Bleriot monoplane, No 2 Deperdussin monoplane and No 3, Caudron biplane. Here is Mr Ewen, from Flight :

[ATTACH=CONFIG]250213[/ATTACH]

There are references to Ewen taking out a a 35 HP and 60 HP Caudron, and operating an agency for the type in the UK. Here is a picture of the 35HP Ewen Caudron, from Flight :

[ATTACH=CONFIG]250214[/ATTACH]

The pictures I have posted show more engine cylinders, so I hazard this is the 60 HP Caudron. The pilot, Mr Wright, is proving harder to trace. No American Mr Wright, this. I have handy “History of British Aviation 1908 -14” by Dallas Brett, Vol II, Appendix E lists the first 863 UK qualified pilots. There are only two Wrights :

No.331 Howard T Wright, qualifying Oct 15th 1912 on a Henri Farman at the Sopwith Flying School, Brooklands
No.456 Sergeant H.C Wright, qualifying April 11th 1913 on a Short at Central Flying School, Upavon.

I suspect the pilot is Howard T White, the aircraft constructor. There are no photos I can find of him to confirm this. It is curious that a constructor of aircraft in 1909 should be seeking a licence in 1912, but I guess it was the system catching up with the inventor. The context of the field landing in Feltham, some 15 miles from Hendon, in the more powerful 60HP Caudron, suggests a confident aviator rather than a novice. Today Feltham is two miles south of Heathrow. Howard T Wright is also described in Flight as training at the Grahame-White school, and he finally takes his brevet with Tommy Sopwith at Brooklands, so it seems he was getting around. Howard T Wright build the aircraft that Tommy Sopwith first learned to fly in, and broke many records, so perhaps it was a compliment returned that he qualified at Sopwiths.

OK, to put you out of your misery, given that you are in the middle of grim, oncoming winter, there is a pencil note on the drawing saying Fairey Battle. Yes these were built in Australia, as after the bitter experience of France, most of the UK’s Battles were sent out to Australia for the Empire Air Training Scheme, and reassembled at the International Harvester Works in Geelong, Victoria. Later in 1940, the UK government sent a telegram stating that Australia could no longer rely on UK supplies of aircraft and spares, so urgent attention was directed in Australia to manufacturing things such as Cheetah engine spares and Fairey Reed props to support Avro Ansons, RR Kestrel engine bearings to support Hawker Demons and, it now looks like, props for Fairey Battles. DeHavilland Australia established a propellor manufacturing division in NSW, which held a licence from Hamilton Standard, but you might reasonably assume that the illustrated blade was an early British design for RR Merlin. It would be interesting to compare it with dH Hurricane hydromatic blade profiles. I think the Spitfire was a Rotol story, using timber blades from the outset?

To me, what is interesting, considering the other thread on ‘turning RH tractor into LH tractor blades’, which is generally grazed by the same ‘basket of deplorables’, therefore no need to post there, are the cross section dimensions at various blade stations. Obviously, it is not possible to whittle a LH tractor out of a RH tractor. But it might be possible to lay data from various blades on top of each other, and generate a symmetrical shape around the largest dimensions, that could then be machined down to any profile, LH or RH tractor. In other words a ‘master’ forging blank, upended for E shank, that could then be CNC machined down, where the cost of excess material and machining is more than offset by lower cost of a ‘standard forging’ blank.

Stay tuned for maybe more drawings. Thank God for Australia and its Archives. We may have spiders, snakes and sharks, but we also have friendly, helpful archivists.
And nice warm weather!

The Nickel Bulletin Vol 4, Jan 1931 describes the British patent granted to F Krupp AG for “Titanium and Vanadium additions to Nickel Chromium Steels for the Prevention of Weld Decay.” So it seem this alloy technology was developed by Krupps in Germany and would made its way out into the world via licencing to other firms and nations. No doubt German aircraft exhaust metallurgy would reflect this, but I have to find some old pieces of Luftwaffe exhaust to test this.

Out of curiosity the 1925 Department of Mines Bulletin from New South Wales, Australia, describes Chromium, Cobalt, Nickel Titanium and other mineral deposits, with Rutile being a natural oxide of Titanium. So certainly by 1925 there is interest in this material. The Bulletin describes Nickel as being an ‘important alloy in aircraft steels’, so the Australian prospector was not naive in 1925. Today Australia supplies about 40% of the world’s rutile, sourced from sand mining. So keep an eye on who buys up the all sand mining companies, when commodity markets are down….