BeermatHave you met any of the current crop of Eton’s finest? I have, I live and work in Cambridge. And they are ones clever enough to be passed off as undergraduates, God knows what the rest are like! Fortunately they won’t find themselves in charge of anything important in the forces any time soon. Unfortunately they may find themselves in charge of banks. Or national budgets.
I am not a class warrior.. if I was I’d be a mercenary as I belong to a class not generally at war with anyone. I’ve just been around a bit, in all kinds of circles. One can’t help making observations.
While your attack on the left seems to involve accusing all those who don’t want to take from the poor to give to the rich of wearing sandals, you accuse me of ‘archaic stereotyping’ when I point to a phenomenon we are watching before our very eyes as Gideon’s budget falls apart.
Bingo? Blew me Giro. Felt like a bit of a merchant banker*, to tell you the truth.
BeermatThis is a wind-up, right?
The ‘playing fields of Eton’ were, if anything, intended to produce senior officers. Not soldiers.
The world knows the results alright. I don’t disagree with you there. Some found the incompetence funny, most found it inexplicable. Fortunately the British armed forces developed into more of a meritocracy over time, and in time to fight a war that wasn’t about feuding knobs or shooting/bombing people who didn’t accept our natural superiority and right to their resources (they’d only waste it on um-bongo)
Man management – look it up.. http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/man-management
To spell it out – it’s what you have to do as an officer, or a leader of any kind. Results are usually disastrous in the long term if you think superiority by virtue of birth will get you through. Unfortunately, people who end up at Eton are apparently still vulnerable to this misunderstanding.
I’m off to play bingo. Or roulette. Or the stock market.
BeermatThis is a wind-up, right?
The ‘playing fields of Eton’ were, if anything, intended to produce senior officers. Not soldiers.
The world knows the results alright. I don’t disagree with you there. Some found the incompetence funny, most found it inexplicable. Fortunately the British armed forces developed into more of a meritocracy over time, and in time to fight a war that wasn’t about feuding knobs or shooting/bombing people who didn’t accept our natural superiority and right to their resources (they’d only waste it on um-bongo)
Man management – look it up.. http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/man-management
To spell it out – it’s what you have to do as an officer, or a leader of any kind. Results are usually disastrous in the long term if you think superiority by virtue of birth will get you through. Unfortunately, people who end up at Eton are apparently still vulnerable to this misunderstanding.
I’m off to play bingo. Or roulette. Or the stock market.
BeermatIt’s a daydream, though, isn’t it? The real world is different. Enjoy your chips, and your little dreams.
Truth is to get where he got in a political party IDS needed a self-interest driven aptitude for low cunning. That is not the same as intelligence. Some politicians like to tell themselves its the same thing (“I’ll show them who’s Thickie Osborne..”). I believe it was Gideon who called him ‘not clever enough’ when, if you look at the context, he meant ‘not cunning enough’..
However, the budget the chancellor produced was so clearly an attempt to move money away from the poor and vulnerable and towards rich people like the Chancellor that IBS was handed a watertight pretext on a plate when he wanted to make his pro-Boris move. He was also annoyed at being treated in something of a high-handed way. Being an ex-military man yourself, John, you will know that the playing fields of Eton produce some of the worst man-managers in the world.
BeermatIt’s a daydream, though, isn’t it? The real world is different. Enjoy your chips, and your little dreams.
Truth is to get where he got in a political party IDS needed a self-interest driven aptitude for low cunning. That is not the same as intelligence. Some politicians like to tell themselves its the same thing (“I’ll show them who’s Thickie Osborne..”). I believe it was Gideon who called him ‘not clever enough’ when, if you look at the context, he meant ‘not cunning enough’..
However, the budget the chancellor produced was so clearly an attempt to move money away from the poor and vulnerable and towards rich people like the Chancellor that IBS was handed a watertight pretext on a plate when he wanted to make his pro-Boris move. He was also annoyed at being treated in something of a high-handed way. Being an ex-military man yourself, John, you will know that the playing fields of Eton produce some of the worst man-managers in the world.
BeermatHi Graham – I stand corrected on the more common prop on a Spit V. Yes, that was the reason to use Hydromatics.. though it would, I think, require a mod. The Hydros as standard would cycle to ‘feathered’ at extreme coarse, while fine limits were roughly the same as bracket CS types. I reckon it needed the blades moved round a few stops from ‘factory’ settings to get a finer ‘max fine’. They wouldn’t fully feather any more, but then that functionality on a single-engined aircraft won’t make much difference, compared to on a multi-engine (where it could get you home), which they were designed for.
Visual differences.. there might be none at all. The DH/Rotol difference was largely down to the difference in lateral position of the blades (the Rotol blades were further forward), while between bracket and hydro there was none. The spinner front section would attach slightly differently, so the spinner would have a different drawing number, there might have been tiny differences in profile but as shape (lateral position of blades aside) was largely dictated by an aerodynamic matching with the cowl behind, not much.
Keith, it might be worth looking at air temperature parameters if altitude isn’t there.. .though that surprised me.
BeermatPerhaps more importantly the Hydromatic range was also greater than that of the (by then) more standard Rotol unit.
BeermatYes 🙂
BeermatYes, with a manually-controlled 2-position variable-pitch prop that’s absolutely the case. It was only a way to get around the increasing disparity in appropriate pitch between take-off and max flight speeds, it was never going to be a way of optimising engine speed in all conditions of flight. That’s why constant-speed units were developed, initially either ‘working’ that balance point in the case of the Spit conversion, or designed from scratch as a complete system, like the Hydromatic.
The DH conversion is feasible because it’s a very narrow rpm range that things are being kept in. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works when you work through all the forces.
Regarding the experimentation with pitch and its effects on rpm – once again, that is not the action of a constant speed prop you are describing – the fact there even was a pitch control in the cockpit makes it peculiar, and the fact that operation of it had an effect on rpm also says that rpm was not being regulated.
As an addendum, the range of the Spit prop was also increased by 5 degrees via a mod at the same time as the CSU’s were fitted. Actual complete underspeeding was thus avoided. This was overlooked on the Whirlwind. Another story. Actual overspeeding was not really an issue. The main reason was compressibility massively increased load, in the region just slightly faster than normal tip speeds in the 30’s and 40’s. It became an issue later when blades got thinner.
BeermatHow a controller works depends in part on how the prop works. So for example the DH original VP was indeed two-position, fine or coarse. Coarse was attained by letting the counterweights under centrifugal force pull the blade around (sometimes, on larger props, assisted by a spring), fine relied on a mechanical push from oil pressure in a cylinder. It was difficult but possible to balance it such that the two forces were equal and the blade sat somewhere in the middle, and if you then increased the revs the centrifugal force increased and the blades moved in the coarse direction, reduce the revs and it went finer again. One story, put about by Hamilton Standard, was that it was a pilot doing this who had a light-bulb moment and the constant speed prop was born. Doubtful. Other VP’s were designed to be constantly variable, but the pilot workload was heavy if indeed he attempted to use it as such, and always maintain a constant RPM though manual variations in pitch! It was only really feasible with a CSU/governor. The same 2-position DH VP prop on the Spit I became constant speed with the addition of such a thing, while maintaining the counterweight system.
Keith, have you got to the bottom of what was happening with the Proctor?
BeermatYes, it is. Ultimately I am looking for someone who ‘gets’ all of this (and that article, Sycamore, covers some of it nicely) as well as an understanding of compressible flow (more fun) to model the props on a Westland Whirlwind. In a very small way a wrong might be righted.
Beermat..and not used in the BoB for two reasons, neither of which appear in the ‘established’ history. One, horrible fat prop blades kept its operational ceiling below what Dowding thought critical to take on the 109 and two, Dowding was instead keeping his few delivered Whirlwinds up North in reserve as the only ‘tank buster’ we had in the event of an invasion.
BeermatNow let me see ask a question which I’ll gladly concede I don’t have the answer to…by late 1943 (when the Mustang was introduced) was the Spitfire capable of doing bomber escort over Germany? If it (or the Thunderbolt or P-38) was then we can say that it’s appearance did not “win the war”…the war would have been won using other fighters.
This pre-supposes that the strategic long-range bombing of Germany by the USAAF was in fact a war-winning strategy, and not a colossal waste of men and materiel that would have been better employed elsewhere, certainly after June 1944. Not saying it was, but focussing on the P-51’s ability to make each long-range mission a little less dangerous for the bomber crews might be taking the eye off the ball when it comes to effective ways to win wars, and might lend more weight to the ‘war winning aircraft’ claim than is strictly due.
Still, the P-38 with drop tanks could reach Berlin by November 43. Not sure if that helps.
BeermatThe history of engineering around props gets one that way 😉 Of no interest until you start thinking about it, then very quickly fascinating when you do.
What you might have there is the blades ‘hitting the stops’. If they are genuinely at full fine already, and at high revs, decreasing throttle would make the revs drop as the blades can’t go any finer to compensate. I know that the Yak prop had a very narrow pitch range for an aircraft of its performance.
Is it possible to get it into a condition where revs are lower and the lever is still at the extreme end? Try low altitude cruise. You might find a speed range where the CSU still has authority- ie not physically against the stops at ‘fully fine’. Alternatively, it might be some kind of override..
Or it may just have been modelled without as great a degree of detailed reference to reality as we are attempting here!
Certainly the aim of fully fine IRL as described earlier by someone who had RTFM was to lock the revs at 2,700 via some kind of internal governor override, not to create a variable-speed throttle override.
The plot thickens indeed. As an aside, the most intelligent discussions of the physics and mechanisms of flight are coming from the gaming community. Unfortunately, so are some of the stupidest! Glad to be having the former.
BeermatFunnily enough, I have an opinion on this.
That aside, two facts – one, the engine was no more prone to failure than a Merlin. A curious myth has grown here. Two – the small number built did a great deal of damage to transport, shipping, and enemy aircraft in their ‘short career’ (three years).
The archive shows that the programme was cancelled because it was generally agreed that RR shouldn’t go on making two Peregrines (or Merlins – it was seriously discussed) for every aircraft. The rest of the nonsense about type ‘failure’ just grew up afterwards, not helped by records remaining classified until the seventies, by which time many ‘histories’ had been written.
Not necessarily underrated, but largely unrecognised.
Sign In
