Meh been there done that..

If there’s a couple of data plates in there you’ve got a couple of perfectly preserved aircraft – well that’s the way it works isn’t it? Find a data plate and magically it morphs into the perfectly preserved original aircraft. What a shoddy exercise this digging for scrap metal is. 🙁

Sheer power alone doesn’t really mean anything…power to weight ratio is already an indicator or something.

Helwan HA-300 went mach 2.1 with just 48 kN. Folland Gnat exceed mach 1 in a dive an had just 20.9 kN thrust.

SS1 went mach 3+ at 70-80 kN. Best of all D-21 went mach 3.5 with 6.67 kN.

Aaaah… yes but did the wings stay on? 😀

I suspect that (and I may be wrong) it was a matter of ground clearance combined with the lower placing of the pilot’s seat compared with a Hurricane. This may have resulted in there being insufficient space under the cockpit to take the required plumbing.

Lovely, always good to see another Lanc come to life.

As one of the legion of people banned by TIGHAR I took that latest claim with the mandatory grain of salt that is required. As is standard for TIGHAR this is the latest in a series of claims that something may be evidence of Earhart’s Electra, or Earhart’s freckle cream, shoes, flight jacket, skeleton, finger etc. etc. etc. and if no firm correlation is found, again as usual, it will be added to the ever growing list of circumstantial evidence that is claimed, when it is all combined, to confirm TIGHAR’s theory about Nikumaroro. The problem with this latest claim is that in all the hype (generated by TIGHAR press releases) everyone is conveniently asked to forget that just a few hundred metres to the south there is a honking great debris field from the wreck of the Norwich City any part of which given the intensity of tropical storms in that part of the world could have been swept up and deposited where the “object” which is subject of that sonar image is located.

Before the July 2012 trip to the sunny shores of Nikumaroro the big publicity item used to raise money was the “Bevington Object”. A speck in a grainy enlargement of a very small snapshot taken by Eric Bevington in 1937 which was massaged by TIGHAR’s image analyst into a claim to be the leg of the Electra’s undercarriage. Mr Gillespie claimed that the US State Department had confirmed that – however the truth as he has admitted on his forum is that there is nothing in writing only that they said it was possible. Possible is not certainty but few people understand that. Then we had more hype about the freckle cream jar which has been shown to be of a type long out of production before the Earhart disappearance which leaves us to ask “If Earhart hated her freckles why was she carrying around a jar of freckle cream nearly 20 years old”. That question is unanswerable as are many of the TIGHAR’s claims because to accept them one is required to make a leap of faith, like those who accept that the famous Betty Notebook which purports to be a garbled record of a radio message from Earhart received on an unlikely harmonic of the original transmission frequency. A record which had been already offered to Fred Goerner years before by the owner and rejected by him as either a fake or the imaginative ramblings of a 14 year old girl.

The TIGHAR circus goes on – the trained lions are getting old and arthritic, the magician’s tricks are becoming a little transparent and the show is haemorrhaging money. So what is one more claim in this long long saga? just more of the old time rock and roll. Enjoy the show but don’t take it too seriously.

So, dare one say – the Thunderbirds are not go. 😀

Hang on, if he could control the direction of the flight through using the throttles then surely that is a form of flight control – he was controlling the flight, he was not out of control and he was able to point the aircraft where he wanted and it went there. So just because he didn’t have some bits that came along later to control flight doesn’t mean he wasn’t controlling his flight, surely?

Well you could say that letting the hot air out of a hot air balloon allows a descent but I would suggest that is far removed from hot air balloons being capable of controlled flight except in the most rudimentary way. Now as far as Whitehead is concerned the accounts published here are conflicting. The main reference by the OP suggests that he used moveable control surfaces in the form of wing warping.

Yet the one you quoted says he was able to turn only by adjusting the speed of the prop on one side – if I may be permitted to quote again –

He asserts that he made a complete circuit in the air, covering an area of about a quarter of a mile, returning to within 50 feet of the starting point, when the machine descended and dropped lightly to the sandy shore. “The flights were a complete success,” said Whitehead. “I had a kerosene motor, which worked perfectly. I steered the machine by running one propeller faster than the other, and there was not a hitch of any kind.”

The Wrights were able to fly their aircraft simply by using wing warping, elevators and a rudder – they didn’t make rough turns using differential prop speed. So I suggest that puts Whitehead more in the category of the French favourite Clement Ader who got off the ground but once up there was committed to a very limited flight regime, as was Sir Hiram Maxim’s monster of the 1880s or to go further back Sir George Cayley’s hapless coachman. Also it seems to me that the Wrights took the time to learn to fly, with gliders, before they took the powered step – again the mark of serious pioneers.

But it is no skin off my nose as to who made the first flight, the important achievement is who was able to capitalise on that hop and take it the next step further and that history tells us was the Wrights. It was they who got the first aeroplane contract issued by the US Government in 1908, and when they got to Europe they flew rings around the European pioneers. I have long known about the Whitehead claims but advancing his case using a computer enhanced photo is to my mind similar to the efforts of TIGHAR to claim than a sand grain sized blob on a photo is the undercarriage of an Electra.