Piloting Rules

Below are the top rules that should be obeyed when flying:

1. Every takeoff is optional. Every landing is mandatory.
2. If you push the stick forward, the houses get bigger. If you pull the stick back, they get smaller. That is, unless you keep pulling the stick all the way back, then they get bigger again.

3. Flying isn't dangerous. Crashing is what's dangerous.

4. It’s always better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there wishing you were down here.

5. The ONLY time you have too much fuel is when you're on fire.

6. The propeller is just a big fan in front of the plane used to keep the pilot cool. When it stops, you can actually watch the pilot start sweating.

7. When in doubt, hold on to your altitude. No one has ever collided with the sky.

8. A 'good' landing is one from which you can walk away. A 'great' landing is one after which they can use the plane again.

9. Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make all of them yourself.

10. You know you've landed with the wheels up if it takes full power to taxi to the ramp.

11. The probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.

12. Never let an aircraft take you somewhere your brain didn't get to five minutes earlier.

13. Stay out of clouds. The silver lining everyone keeps talking about might be another airplane going in the opposite direction. Reliable sources also report that mountains have been known to hide out in clouds.

14. Always try to keep the number of landings you make equal to the number of take offs you've made.

15. There are three simple rules for making a smooth landing. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

16. You start with a bag full of luck and an empty bag of experience. The trick is to fill the bag of experience before you empty the bag of luck.

17. Helicopters can't fly; they're just so ugly the earth repels them.

18. If all you can see out of the window is ground that's going round and round and all you can hear is commotion coming from the passenger compartment, things are not at all as they should be.

19. In the ongoing battle between objects made of aluminium going hundreds of miles per hour and the ground going zero miles per hour, the ground has yet to lose.

20. Good judgment comes from experience. Unfortunately, the experience usually comes from bad judgment.

21. It's always a good idea to keep the pointy end going forward as much as possible.

22. Keep looking around. There's always something you've missed.

23. Remember, gravity is not just a good idea. It's the law. And it's not subject to repeal.

24. The three most useless things to a pilot in the air are the altitude above you, runway behind you and all the fuel at the airport.

25. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots. There are, however, no old, bold pilots.

26. A male pilot is a confused soul who talks about women when he's flying, and about flying when he's with a woman.

Advertising break

BBC were at Saab, Reasonably well featured, and as they say: All attention is good!

Read the article here.

One Trilion Dollars

From the ARES blog,  "Carter says estimated $1 trillion sustainment cost "is unbelievable for two reasons: it's huge, and you should not believe it, it's a parametric forecast based on the information available. We have not begun to manage it. No-one is going to pay that cost"

The F-35 fanatics claimed that the numbers were unjust, that he were comparing some twothousand F-35:s against less F-18:s or about the same number (? at least I think it's like that, don't bet on it though) of F-16.
Perhaps right, but what caught my eye were the words "No-one is going to pay that cost"
Is this the first sign that USA will reduce the buy of F-35? Or, more likely, that the pressure is on Lockheed Martin to really really prove their claim that an airplane three times as complex and 50% bigger that the predecessor is cheaper to operate and maintain?

Just askin'

Photo from Lockheed Martin

/RAF

PS
"three times as complex and 50% bigger" is just an lazy estimation, if you have better numbers feel free to share them
DS

To stirr a bowl.

One thing is certain, if you are an airplane geek and wants attention on the internet you shall write about the F-35. Unfortunately it is not the balanced comments like "I wounder if it is wise to pack all the equipment inside the airplane due to costs and performance?" that will give you the attention. It is comments like "F-35 is a piece of garbage" or "F-35 is the best thing since lady Godiva" that will give you the attention. Or personal attacks on the persons stating their love/dislike to the plane.
As much as I want my voice to be heard, I'm not sure I'm in for that kind of attention, so I think I'll just stick to my low profile commenting.

But I'll stick my neck out on this one, the most beutiful 35 is not manufactured by Lockheed Martin, nor Sukhoi. This is the beauty queen of all 35:s

Troubleshooting

How was he thinking?

ELP has blooged and tries to convince everyone that the F-35 is inferior to everything out there.
What a load of jalabalou.
or?

Charts like these are popular among marketing people because they can be correct, if you make assumptions and only use special context. Context that favours your own baby, of course.
So, is it possible to find a context where this chart actually is correct? Yes, probably. Will it be the truth the whole truth and nothing etc… Probably, not.

Why can for instance the F-35 be inferior to the Euro canards in A2A against the SU-family?
Well, they have all got or will have the Meteor missile, and most of the F-35 customers have not, so if your simulations show that the SU-3x can outmanoeuvre the AMRAAM but not the Meteor you will get this result.

How can the F-35 be worse than the 4-th generation fighters in a DEAD mission against a legacy SAM system?
Again, maybe the other planes have more advanced missiles and therefore can attack stand off in a better way than the F-35, but I can’t think of how, on top of my head. But it is not I who shall defend this chart, I’m only trying to figure out how he was thinking.

The cost is again hard to analyse, I for one does not agree that the Gripen is more expensive than the SH, it is half the size and built to be cost effective! But if you leave out fuel economy, and look at hauling instead of mission rate, than perhaps you can twist the numbers to make this assumption.

Go on like this and voíla you have a chart that makes the F-35 worthless and everything else shiny and golden.

The thing is that even how much I hate to admit it, it is not the fighter airplane that is in center of the victory, it is the whole force and how it is connected.
My 5 cent.

The odd ones.. Chance Vought V-173 and XF5U-1 Flying pancakes

Sometimes there comes along an engineer who thinks out of the box and designs a concept that catches the attention. Charles Zimmerman is one of these guys. In the 1930:s he was thinking about ways to cancel the end effect of the wing, to eliminate, or reduce the lift vortex that substantially contributes to the airplanes drag. His idea was to put two huge propellers on the tip of the wing, rotating in opposite direction to the lift vortex and thereby cancel most of the drag. (At least that was his idea) and to minimise drag, a flying wing concept was preferred. It did not need to have a huge span because of the vortex cancelling, so the plane ended up looking like a pancake. Since it had huge propellers, it almost worked like a helicopter, and the idea was born for a vertical take off.

I can not go trough all the ideas and details here, but there is a book that describes the airplane in detail: “Naval fighters number twenty one Chance Vought V-173 and XF5U-1 Flying Pancakes” ISBN 0-942612-21-3 It is a short book, and the prints are not all that good, but as a sum up of an interesting airplane, it is OK.
I’ll end up with a quote from the book: “It is probably just as well that the F5U program was terminated when it was. The concept will live on as an unfulfilled dream rather than as the disappointment it would have probably become. The performance projections were undoubtedly optimistic and the actual and prospective shortcomings of the concept and design were being overlooked or minimized.”

The odd ones.. Westland P-12

Every now and then you come across airplanes that looks a bit... Unconventional. The reasoning behind the choosen design is always facinating, if you can come across it. Othervise you can speculate, and that is perhaps equally fun. There is all those "artists concept" were there isn't much engineering behind the design, but there are others that are genually designed and flown.

I'll present a few of my favourites.

Westland P-12:

It was supposed to be a strafing airplane, to shoot at the German troops when they landed at the shores of England. The origin is the Lysander with a shortened the rear fuselage. At the end they put a large turret. To balance the airplane with the heavy turret way back the tail plane had to be very large, hence the odd looks. Apparently it flew very well, and had good manoeuvrability but since the threat of a German invasion declined in the autumn of 1939 the development were stopped.

Six phases

After working with airplane deveopment for more than a decade I have been trough all phases and I  realise that it is best to only work in phase one....

Saab LO Figther Study

Can not really say anything about this, but if you want to have a theory about future fighters this is a movie as good as any.



The official information about this is here, but I warn you, it is in political Swedish, one of the toughest languages on this planet. (joke) "http://www.riksdagen.se/webbnav/?nid=3777&doktyp=rfr&rm=2007/08&bet=RFR8&dok_id=GV0WRFR8"

Low and Fast. Mirage F1.

Low and fast, better check the map... Nice Work, I'm impressed.

HO IX

This is some info on one of my favourite airplanes, the first "stealth" airplane, from 1944. The sources are various, and I can not guarantee the rightness of it all, but here is the story anyway:

Horten IXor the
Gota go 229

In 1943, Richsmarsalk Goering held a speech to representatives of the Aircraft Industry and announced that a contract would be issued to the manufacturers who could build an aircraft that could carry 1000 kg of bombs 1000 km at a speed of 1,000 km/h.

Fighter divisions also requested that the plane should be armed with 30 mm cannons.

Horten, led by the brothers Reimar and Walter, began construction without obtaining any contract. Their design was a shell structure of wood. From the outset the intention was that the plane would have wet wings. But Horten could not find an existing fuel-resistant adhesive, thus the fuel load had to be reduced with the result that the operating radius decreased to 800 km.

This meant, however, that the bomb load could be doubled. This proposal was accepted by the German authorities, provided that the plane could be flight ready in six months!

Since there were no engines available it was decided that the first aircraft would be a glider. There were several good reasons to choose wood as a construction material. At the end of WW2, it was great energy shortage in Germany and the wood was much less energy intensive to produce. Aluminium required more than 3000 kWh, while wood was less than 3 kWh. In addition, the wood was less labuor intensive to process, 200 hours per ton compared to 5,000 hours per ton of dural.

For example, a nose frame was produced by a triangular piece of pine that was glued between two plywood boards. Production time: ten minutes. When the glue had dried the frame were stretched out along a template and in were ready in less than 5 minutes. The entire wing was built in the same simple way.

Rudder Cables, electrical and hydraulic lines were inside the wing spar, a box construction, so that the rest of the wing could be used as a fuel tank when a fuel resistant glue was available.

The adhesive was also supposed to be able to attach to already glued surfaces, in order to simplify production.

The skin plywood on the prototypes were very thick, 17 mm, three times as much as was needed. On the production aircraft it would be replaced by a sandwich material consisting of two 1.5 mm thick plywood boards with a 12 mm spacer material containing of mixed sawdust, charcoal and glue. This material was not only much lighter, it also worked as a Radar Absorbent Material and thereby reducing the radar cross section.

Moreover, the sandwich material should be more resistant to battle damage than a conventional stressed skin structure.

The wings angle of attack varied between nil at the root to minus 3 degrees geometric and 1.5 degrees aerodynamic at the tip, all to give the desired bell shape of the lift distribution over the wing. The elevons were initially of the Frise-type but proved to be inadequate, so blunt nosed rudder was used instead.

Since the aerodynamics were rather unproven, ant no engines were yet available, the first prototypes were built as gliders to test stability and different configurations, mainly of the rudder and elevators.

First flight were on the first of march 1944, but the tow plane, a He 45 were too small, and it could only tow it in ground effect. Five days later an He 111 were assigned as a tower, and it easily towed the plane in to the air. At 12000 ft the pilot, Scheid Hauer, released the cable and made an uneventful flight back to the airstrip. Unfortunately the brake parachute did not deploy at landing, so he retracted the nose gear to stop the airplane. Despite this, the damages to the airplane were small.

The second aircraft were to fly three months later but the engines which would come in March were late. It took several weeks and when the engines finally arrived, they were too big. They had added an extra section to the motor housing, thereby increasing the diameter 60-80 cm without informing Horten.

Since the engine would go through the wing box, where the hole was only 60 cm, it was obvious that it would not work. In addition, they were only six weeks away from the promised first flight.

If one were to maintain the shape of the aircraft Horten would be forced to increase the span from 16 to 21.3 m and the wing area from 42 to 75 m2.

This would make it impossible to achieve the promised performance, although the engine were more powerful than promised. The only possibility left were to modify the basic form.

An additional frame was installed 40 cm outside the original, thus the centre section became 80 cm wider. The outer wing remained unchanged. The new centre section airfoil was 13% thicker than the old one. The greater thickness of the middle section made to the critical Mach number decreased to 0.75, giving a maximum speed of 920 km / h.

The rudder, which consisted of small air brakes on the wings, was supplemented by larger air brakes, which dropped out as soon as the small was fully extended. To save time, several parts were taken from existing aircraft. Nose wheel was the tail wheel from a He 177, They could even use parts of retract mechanism!

Horten worked hard to get the plane ready by the end of the 1944. According to Horten the first flight was around December 18, but the pilot is Lt. Erwin Ziller wrote in his logbook that the first flight was the second February 1945.

It was probably not only his first flight in this airplane, but also his first flight in a jet.

Air Ministry were satisfied with the tests, and ordered Gota Wagonfactory to build 40 aircraft under the designation 8 -229.

H IX V-2 flew probably three or four times before the accident on February 18.

There are many versions of what happened, and they do not have much in common.

The weather was marginal for the test flight and the ground was soft and muddy. But Lt. Ziller started, retracted the landing gear and climbed through the clouds. According to a report one engine stopped, and Ziller diverted against Oranineburg for an emergency landing.

Since it was a low cloud base he made a flat approach to the airfield. The hydraulic pump was on the dead engine, so the landing gear and flaps were extended with the emergency system. This meant that they could not be retracted again.

To maintain the rate of descent, despite the extra drag, Lt. Ziller opened the throttle, but the asymmetrical thrust made the plane yaw. He found that he could not maintain the course, despite giving full rudder. To maintain control of the aircraft he throttled back on the remaining engine and decided to do a minus landing instead. He landed the plane in a field, it slid into a barrier flipped over and crushed the pilot.

The American third army corps took Gota factory April 14. They found the H IX V-3 intact and almost complete. In addition, they found the V-4, V 5 and V-6 in various stages of completion. The ninth armoured corps found H IX V-1 in good condition, near Leipzig.

What happened next to this plane is unknown.

V-3 was shipped later to the U.S.

HE 162

Are we running too fast?

Sometimes you feel like the projects you are working with are too tight on the scedule. But then you just have to see this, the HE-162A, the JSF of the third rich, ment to be the low airplane in the HI-LO mix of ME 262 and HE-162 .



HEINKEL 162A-2
“VOLKSJÄGER”

Schedule:
TTM issued by RLM: 1944-09-08
Specification written: 1944-09-15
Mock up ready: 1944-09-23
Start detail design: 1944-09-23
Start detail manufacturing prototype: 1944-09-24
Heinkel design chosen: 1944-09-30
Ready copy of production drawings: 1944-10-29
Prototype V1 flies: 1944-12-06
Prototype V1 crashes (adhesive failure): 1944-12-10
V2 flies: 1944-12-22
V4 flies: 1945-01-16
V18 flies 1945-01-24
V30 flies: 1945-02-24
1:st division assembled: 1945-02-06
1:st division combat ready: 1945-04-14
50 He 162 combat ready: 1945-05-04
>100 He 162 delivered: 1945-05-08
~800 He 162 in production: 1945-05-08

And it was not the simplest airplane of its time, quite a lot of equipment in it compared to contemporary airplanes (but not the most advanced):

Fuselage: Body and tail: Aluminium.

Wing, rudders and doors: wood
Systems: Ejection seat. Trimable stabilizer, Manual rudders.
Electronic: Radio, DF, IFF, gyro sight.
Armament: 2 x 20 mm gun, 120 rounds/gun.
Engine: BMW 003E-1 920 kp static thrust.
Weights: Equipped exclusive pilot and fuel: 1758 kg.

Take of weight: 2805 kg.

Performance:
Take off to 15 meter: 980 m
Landing distance from 15 meter: 950 m
Climb speed at H=0: 21,5 m/s
Max service altitude: 11700m
Max ferry range: 975 km
Max speed H=0: M=0,73
Max speed H=6km: M=0,79