An informed study of the whys and wherefores of design philosophy as it changed over the years, especially between 1930 and 1950. Everyone knows the world went from ‘rag and stick’ to supersonic jet aircraft.. but the story of the engineers and physicists who did this is largely obscure and lost in generalisation and assumption. Why did the Spitfire REALLY have a higher limiting Mach than any other propeller aircraft, regardless of wing thickness? Why was there a sudden sprouting of root fillets in the late thirties? Why did the p-38 shake uncontrollably over 500mph? Who worked it out, and how was it fixed? The answers are surprising (not fairings or under-wing flaps), largely unpublished, and I am sure there is a lot more out there. It was a time of immense change and technical noses to the grindstone, but it seems to have gone down in history as just somehow having happened without effort or immense scientific achievement.

Can it be posted here? Not necessarily published, but may we be informed as to the content? I know next to nothing about law, but there’s something odd-smelling about the content an advisory legal letter having to remain secret on pain of legal action. Maybe in the US, but here?

I only said that this piece of halibut was good enough for J. Boyle…

For crying out loud, saying IF anyone was upset it was more likely the Americans, rather than Whitehall, is NOT a conspiracy theory. It is not the same as suggesting that ANYONE did ANYTHING. I was suggesting that some might have been upset, but I can’t see it was the British.

I am nervous about expanding on it. I do so with the massive qualification that this is NOT a conspiracy theory. There were some in the US who were nervous of anything particularly useful as a weapon being developed outside of the US, and they MIGHT have worried. Not done anything, just felt concerned about it. Probably not, but it was more likely than Whitehall worrying about it. That’s all I was suggesting. And as I said, I do not actually pretend to be able to really know what was going through peoples heads then, especially some of the more unusual thinkers of the time*. That was my point.

I held up the possibility that some people might have been concerned by something because of a world-view, against a proposition that a different set of people were upset about it for different reasons, and said in my opinion the former was less unlikely, if anything.

To be honest, the chorus of disapproval thus elicited will do more to persuade a young ‘un that something fishy happened back there (and I don’t see that it did) that if my post had been read in context and not knee-jerked at.

*Edit – Senator McCarthy launched a smear campaign against William Benton, the American owner of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He suspected he was a Communist as he had a lot of his work printed in England. This is the kind of now-unfathomable (to me) thinking I was talking about. Essentially I was saying ‘I wouldn’t put it past them to be upset by this’ about some people in power at the time, but not suggesting that it was actually the (much more ‘conspiracy theory’) case in this instance that anything untoward then happened, especially where there are completely rational reasons based on known facts.

Did say ‘if anything’.. meaning ‘if any ‘conspiricy theory’ is true’. It is even more likely to me that the mundane and logical answer Ken gives is the real explanation.

Still, as a general point I am not sure we can in fact second-guess the thoughts and feelings of US industrialists in the 1950’s. It does appear to one who was born later to have been an odd and sometimes unfathomable time in terms of the motivations and fears of some quite powerful people.

Don’t get the Aldi connection. Shopping at Aldi isn’t theft.. but it makes a lot of sense, whoever you are.

At the risk of thread drift, and knowing that anyone who hasn’t read the newsletter won’t have a clue what I’m on about…

..it looks like Lockheed caught up in 1943. I can’t find the original test reports in the usual places online, but hearsay evidence is that pilots ‘liked it’s performance in a dive’. Previously, the P-38 had terrible problems with turbulent flow over the tail at high speeds.. and just look at the original design’s wing/fuselage junction in plan – horrible. Now look how straight this one (on the ‘Swordfish’ high-speed test-bed) now is (again, only makes sense if you read my bit in the newsletter)..
[ATTACH=CONFIG]238849[/ATTACH]
(Lockheed Photo, my line).

Oh, and Lockheed were in correspondence with the Air Ministry and Petter about the Whirlwind, in relation to these problems with the P-38, back in 1941.

EDIT: If anyone can be bothered, please read this http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a800790.pdf (especially the conclusion, taken with Fig.7). It completely re-writes the conventional history of the P-38. Those ‘dive brakes’ were a quick and dirty change, Lockheed knew full well from the actual experimentation done here that the real problem of dive controllability due to compressive effects was due to the interaction of a very dodgy fuselage pod /wing intersection geometry, even if they hadn’t quite had the wing-root light-bulb moment.

Of course, if they had listened to Petter when he commented to the Lockheed team via the Air Ministry that he’d ‘Invariably had trouble when they had required that the air expand simultaneously in two planes, as for instance when a body is mounted on a wing’ they’d have known a couple of years earlier. I get the feeling there was a degree of arrogance engendered by the undeniable abilities of the Lockheed team, to the point where even when they did have a quiet light-bulb moment they applied the ‘not invented here’ filter to it, and chose to go with a lower-key work-around in the face of there being a more effective long term one, as clearly evidenced by this somewhat buried document and what they did with their own high-speed research aircraft.

Not sure that follows.. I have just seen an S-reg MkI Ford Focus, but I am fairly sure it’s not still 1998.