XN923There is no such animal as a “best” aircraft in anything…..
😮
Sacrilege!
😀
XN923You are dead on the target. (Well, after I figured what you said)
There are always those who beat their skinny chests and boast about their military. So be it.
I was attempting to start a discussion, since there are often one or two knowledgeable posts here and there. And, they attach a pic or URL to an informative site.
No, you’re absolutely right. It just wears me out wading through all the dross you get on the Modern Military forum to find the few gems.
(You may have guessed, I much prefer Historic!)
XN923No need, I can give you a potted version of how the ‘discussion’ will go.
Mig29dontbestupidF15(quotesloadsofsdubiousstatisticstobackupcase)areyou
*******me?Su47wipesthefloorwiththatEaglerubbishF15isthebestyoujustcant
takeitthatAmericanplanesarethebestSonowyouresorttopersonalinsult(quotes
loadsmorestatistics)butMiGhas(quotesloadsofimpenetrablejargon)andSu47
canttouch(somemorejargon)postslinktoblogsomewhereThat’sjustyouropinion
andyourquotingitasfactHowaboutTyphoon(devilsmiley)cueloadsofEUbashing
…and so on. I beg you, please, just research the issue!
XN923….dont panic Mr Mainwaring, i’ve heard theres another slow boat on its way from China 😮 😀
And in approx 12 months time they’ll be a ‘What-if’ issue release.
And there was me thinking Airfix had missed a trick. Most of the ‘what if’ schemes I’ve seen aren’t nearly ludicrous enough though. What about a Red Arrows scheme? A BOAC scheme?? A celebratory World-air-speed-record-winning scheme???
XN923That’ll be a “no” on the V1 question then?
Depends whether you count V1s as pilotless aircraft or unguided missiles. Also depends on whether there were any shot down using onboard weapons, or just tipped out of control using the wash from the wingtip (though I can’t imagine all V1s shot down by Meteors were done so by this method).
Either way, it probably wasn’t what Royzee617 had in mind!
XN923I think there are some valid points here, though I cannot comment on the behaviour of moderators (this doesn’t seem like the place to discuss such things) the few trips I’ve made over the the ‘modern military’ fora (fori? forii?) disappoint me as it seems very difficult to have any kind of discussion without things descending very quickly into political bias, nation-bashing and personal insult. Attempts to level things out often get ignored in favour of taking another swipe. The Historical Aviation forum is very much more civilised. Thankyou, ladies and gentlemen all.
XN923The twin boom P.1216 is a very interesting design but it makes the the Boeing X-32 look normal :dev2:
But show me a design that makes the X-32 look attractive :diablo:
XN923Some convincing concepts here. I think that the UK would do well to adopt an idea similar to this and pull out of the JSF altogether.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to go it alone on something like this?
I love the twin boom design, fantastic, except that would have to be called Sea Vixen II instead of Harrier III, STOVL or no.
I think for ease of design and build I’d go for a high subsonic, pure fleet-defence fighter but with development potential for a strike option. For the time being we can live with GR9s in the strike role and nothing simplifies a programme like purity of purpose.
I haven’t the technical knowledge to talk about weights, performance, avionics in any detail.
Or how about a rethinking of the concept… Say, a return to the 50s idea of the vertical ‘rack’ mounted fleet defence fighter (like a Bachem ‘Natter’). Launched vertically with the aid of disposable rocket motor, more-or-less conventional landing. No need for catapults or ski-jumps… (or sanity?)
XN923Well the Toy shop delivered (bought the lady a box of chocolates as a thankyou) and just now my local model shop has phoned to say that they are having another delivery of 6 this week and I’m down for one of those too.
Martin
Glad to hear you’ve managed to get hold of a couple. I think there are a few out there if you know where to look. I saw one in the gift shop of the FAA museum last weekend. Similarly, there’s a shop in the local town that sells everything from christmas tree lights to furniture and they have a moderately extensive model section – and three TSR2s sitting there for £2 less than the RRP. I couldn’t resist picking one of these up. Ebay prices now reaching £30 BTW… Wonder what it will be like with the Nimrod?
XN923Not sure if this link has been posted before but the MOD in their press release that sparked this off a few days ago don’t seem as pessimistic as some of our contributors on here.
“We have no reason to believe that our discussions with the administration will not be successful ” etc
They also seem to think that the second engine is not necessarily dead
…True, but this is a press release and (take it from someone who writes them for a living) press releases are always couched in terms try to keep as many people happy as possible. This bit:
‘…but without the technology transfer to give us the confidence to deliver an aircraft fit to fight on our terms we will not be able to buy these aircraft. I am spelling this out because it is so important to make our intentions clear’
…is actually very strongly worded for a document like this – the media know how to read between the lines of statements like these (they also know how to blow them out of all proportion). If you only got your information from press releases you would think that everything was rosy with the world all the time. I think there are some signals in this one that represent a line in the sand.
If it was me writing it, and I thought everything was basically OK, I would have written it as something like ‘there are many issues with technology transfer that remain to be established before the MoU can be signed, but these negotiations are necessary to ensure that the UK’s best interests are represented’ or something lie that. Unequivocal statements are quite rare.
XN9233. It has NOTHING to do with manufacturing our own F-35s for sale to other nations, nor even with having the right for the UK to compete for integration, upgrade, support and sustainment work on other people’s JSFs.
Sure it does you guys sold the Spey jet engine to the Russians
I don’t normally post on this part of the forum, but it saddens me deeply to read things like this. As has been pointed out, I suspect you mean the Rolls Royce Nene which was used in the MiG 15. You may recall that the F86 Sabre was also engined with a development of a jet that had come from the UK, the de Havilland Ghost. The swept wing on the F86 came from German research which I suspect was gained for free – in other words, without European tech freely given (and freely taken) the US may have had a different time in Korea. (Quite apart from the fact that the technology for the Nene came from the UK and not the US, so this is not a fair comparison anyway.)
To hear the UK being accused with a straight face of lining up foreign, enemy markets to sell US tech to probably explains some of the problems in this deal. I expect things would be rather simpler if the UK bought Rafales for the carriers and more Typhoons for the RAF.
XN923YES XN IT WAS A GREAT EVENT APART FROM THE PA SYSTEM THAT CAME FROM A CAR BOOT SALE.
MANAGED TO GET BOTH MY BOOKS SIGNED, AND WAS IMPRESSED BY THE LACK OF FUEL IN THE MACHINE ON RETURN TO BOSCOMBE (10 GALLS)
SADLY A REMINDER OF WHAT GB WAS CAPABLE OF, AND HOW WE CHUCKED IT ALL AWAY.
THE FRENCH SAW THE POTENTIAL AND ITS STILL IN USE!!
WE DID IT AGAIN WITH TSR2, AND PROVED WE DO NOT LEARN BY PAST ERRORS.
BE INTERESTING TO SEE WHETHER THE HARRIER REPLACEMENT GIVES AS GOOD AS SERVICE AS THE ORIGINAL!!
Yes, for a celebration of technology, the audio-visual was more RE8 than FD2.
Pics developed now, just waiting for me to scan them.
XN923I’m very glad about this! It saddened me greatly to read the post in November, now my day is made. Still waiting for Taffy’s full report to be made on this thread though!
XN923According to a C47 driver I spoke to at North Weald a couple of weeks ago.
He’d been on the Arnhem drops and was insistent that he’d been much happier to have flown two missions per day, but the plan only scheduled one.
Whether the Market Garden operation would have fared any better had we got airborne strength on the ground more quickly is another of life’s inponderables.
Moggy
From the history I have read, the plan would in an ideal world have got everyone down on the same day. However, all the available aircraft and crews meant the drops could not have been done in less than three days. As it turned out, adverse weather conditions meant that it took more than a week to get everyone down. By the time the third wave was dropped, the Germans had substantially bolstered their defences and overrun many of the drop zones, leading to massive losses with, particularly, the Polish divisions.
I had not heard that more than one drop per day would have been possible, although your C47 driver may well be correct. The accusations of ‘stopping for tea’ were mainly aimed at XXX Corps tanks who parked up and waited for infantry after US airborne units won the bridge at Nijmegen at huge cost. In fact, it was necessary to wait for infantry cover because on the single track raised road from Nijmegen to Arnhem, tanks would have been sitting ducks and it would have only taken one knocked out tank to block the whole road. Though given that a wait was necessary I don’t see what stopped the attempt on the bridge waiting until nightfall. There are a good many ifs and buts about the Arnhem operation.
But now we are seriously off topic!
XN923A comprehensive and convincing response by NiallC, to which I will add a couple of points and clarify some of my earlier ones.
1) The chief point I wished to make was that the relentless development of aircraft, and particularly fighter technology between 1934 and 1940 meant that it was not impossible for any air force to find itself a generation or half-a-generation behind. The Regia Aeronautica started the war with its chief fighter being the Fiat CR42, a fixed-undercarriage, open cockpit biplane. The Armee De l’Air had potent fighters in the form of the Dewoitine D520, but had started too late to get enough of them. The Morane Saulnier 406 was ‘modern’ in concept but outclassed.
2) The chief weapons – most effective and numerous – Britain had at its disposal were the result of private ventures, springing from Specification F7.30 designs, both of which had later Specs written around them. The RR Merlin was also a Private Venture. Far from suggesting that the little men saved Britain from the suits in government, the Air Ministry was very quick to recognise the potential – but had F7.30 succeeded to provide anything more than a tidied up Gauntlet, there might not have been the will or the perceived necessity to invest in large numbers of Hurricanes and Spitfires until it was too late.
3) My apologies if the AM favouring Goshawk was incorrect, it has been quoted so often recently I unwisely took it for fact. However, had the Goshawk succeeded (difficult to see how, the concept was flawed not the execution) or Rolls decided to buttress the failure of the Goshawk with an incremental improvement of the Kestrel instead of a more radical fusion of Kestrel and ‘R’, it’s shocking to consider what 1940 might have looked like.
4) See 2 above, I didn’t mean to suggest that had Mitchell and Camm not seen beyond the potential of the 224 and the Super Fury we would have fought the BofB with Gladiators. I did mean to suggest however that had the winner of F7.30 been more what the AM was looking for – say a monoplane with flaps, the decision to back the Hurricane and Spitfire might have been made in a more leisurely fashion. As I understand it F5.34 was both written around the ‘Fury Monoplane’, a concept already in existence and offered to the AM, and insurance against the failure of the Fury. Even so, the Fury Monoplane had to lose its fixed spatted undercarriage before it became the Hurricane.
The point I was intending to make, in terms of technology, was that Britain had to work incredibly hard to get to a position in 1940 where it had the aircraft to match those of the Luftwaffe – which had been built from the ground up and with worrying determination. Had things not gone entirely to plan instead of the Spitfire and Hurricane, Britain might have fought with Fury Monoplane and Supermarine Type something-between-224-and-300. Or the AM might have been swayed by the development of new concepts and ordered large numbers of Defiants instead of Hurricanes and Spitfires. In conclusion, that Britain was able to keep up with the technological developments of the 1930s enabled it to survive the 1940s, and give it a platform to fight back. The thought that Britain might have had to fight with fighters of the capability of the CR42 or the MS406 makes me go hot and cold. It’s a testament to both design and procurement policies keeping up with technology that we didn’t.
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