Ahah, I can help you with this one. When my Girlfriend’s dad was clearing out the spare room a few weeks back he found a copy of the WW2 publication ‘Planes Explained’ by Roger Tennant, and on the front one of the ‘Why…?”s is ‘WHY does the Whitley fly nose down?’, which i’d always wondered myself, and helped fill in a boring train journey back down to London.
Basically, it’s because of the angle of incidence (the angle at which the wing meets the air flow). Instead of trying to put it in my own words i’ll just copy it directly from the book.
“In landing with a conventional type of undercarriage, the pilot will have the angle of attack as high as possible, as this corresponds to the lowest flying speed, but if the aircraft has a very short undercarriage and a long fuselage, the ”ground angle,” as it is called, will be very flat, so that it will not be possible to land with the wing at a high angle of attack.
The Whitley is an example of an aircraft with a short undercarriage in which this difficulty is met with. In the case of the Whitley the problem was solved by setting the wing at a fairly high angle of incidence, giving it good initial ground angle. Unfortunately, the angle of attack in level flight is not as great as the initial incidence, and consequently the Whitley flies in the rather comical nose-down attitude that makes it so easily recognisable.”
On the opposite page there’s a nice drawing of a Whitley on the ground and in flight showing the wing and the angle of attack
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