As a slight aside from the main question, the Hawker Typhoon appears to have had an extremely bad reputation for serious accidents resulting from undercarriage/tyre problems. The wide track undercart and short nose pretty much guaranteed that the thing would turn turtle if a tyre was punctured or a leg collapsed if travelling at any decent speed. I’ve been reading ‘Lost Voices of the RAF’ by Max Arthur, who appears to have been in touch with several 609 Sqn veterans, including the squadron MO. Thier recollections make frequent mention of serious and often fatal accidents resulting from U/C problems, the MO’s recollections being particularly chilling.

If I remember rightly, there’s something in the SeaFury (similar U/C geometry to Typhoon) pilots notes instructing pilots to bail-out rather than try to attempt to land on the one good leg.

The Titanic had a “Cellular Double Bottom” which was flooded with water when most of the coal had been fired to make up for the “lost” weight to maintain the ship’s stability. This had nothing to do with the watertight compartments. It makes no difference: if only one or two compartments had been breached she wouldn’t have sunk.

BTW: an elderly gentlemen told me a few years ago that it wasn’t the Titanic that sank but her sistership the Olympic! 😮
He said he read it in a book!:eek:

The idea of the Titanic/Olympic identity swap was first floated (pardon the awful pun) several years ago, but it has apparently since been disproved by items recovered from the Titanic wreck which bear marks confirming she was indeed Titanic, and a vsual inspection of certain parts still on the seabed. I think the clincher was something to do with Titanic’s propellors being slightly different to Olympic’s.

Does anyone know the exact retirement date for BA’s 757’s?

Love this colour scheme, I wish they’d revert back to it for the entire fleet.

Going by memory, there is mention in Alex Henshaw’s “Sigh for a Merlin” of a pair of workers from Castle Bromwich who were found to have been sabotaging magneto’s by putting split pins across the contacts, causing a serious loss of engine power on take-off. The pair were identified and arrested.

My copy is in deep storage, so perhaps someone else might be kind enough to look it up in more detail…

Thanks for the info chaps, I asked about it possibly being a later mod as I thought the usual location of the flare chute on wartime Lancs was a tube just behind the bomb bay?

AdlerTag
Rank 4 Registered User

Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 300
Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham Adlam
I doubt the skill to make them would be an issue considering that aircraft right up until 1939 were nearly all made of wood. The Spitfire was a very difficult aircraft to build and they managed to turn out 20K plus of those.
Although the Mossie was made of wood, it wasn’t exactly your standard wooden aircraft. There’s always the suggestion that the Mossie was made of wood and so would have been easy to build, but the truth is that it was a complex beastie that used all sorts of cutting edge moulding and bonding techniques.

I built a very high-performance airplane–a Falco F8L–of wood, and in fact I used the very same glue that was used in the Mosquito: Resorcinol. My Falco also used the same “cutting-edge moulding and bonding techniques” that were used on the Mosquito, mainly substantial scarfing of wood panels and steam bending of same.

I doubt I could have built a Spitfire in my barn in New York.

First and foremost, congratulations on your Falco! While I’d love to talk Falco’s, we have trouble with thread drift on these forums, so I better stick to Mosquito’s!

Although the Falco is an impressive piece of wood work, it’s still nothing like as labour intensive as a Mosquito. By cutting edge, what I meant was that the moulding of the fuselage shells was something new, and something which had to be extensively tooled up for, and the workforce newly trained. The wing also is a very complex bit of work, and there were an enormous number of metal fittings used in the aircraft’s overall construction. We have a forum moderator here who is heavily involved with the Mosquito Museum at London Colney, so hopefully he’ll be able to fill in the technical details better than I can, but the basic point is that the Mosquito’s wooden construction didn’t necessarily equate to simplicity.

Have you made a will???

Seek and ye shall find- an interior shot of VP-BHM from 2005:

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Brisair/McDonnell-Douglas-DC-8-62H/0871214/L/&sid=088c38add0562458edadcd21256dc177