As a Belgian myself AND an aviation enthusiast to boot, I have known about the Renard designs for a long time, but for most of my followers I guess it will come as a surprise that in the late thirties, several sleek fighter prototypes represented an interesting 'what if' for Belgian military aviation. Unfortunately, the promising R36 lost its attractiveness for both the BAF and potential foreign buyers after the prototype crashed. And the R37 and R38 simply came too late to even be considered for purchase, as Belgium had alreay bought Hawker Hurricanes, Fiat CR42s and Brewster Buffaloes. Still, it's an interesting story, told well by Ed Nash:





A Renard type that DID make it in active BAF service was the R31, a parasol monoplane used for recce. In the event, during the so-called 18-Day Campaign in May 1940, it even performed some ground attacks. The type was Remi Van Lierde's mount.



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Truly an interesting YouTube channel! Well, uh, for aviation geeks at least!



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Did you ever hear about the Lavochkin-250 Anakonda? Well, I didn't - until this evening.


Here is its story:




It was quite a beast, almost 27 m long, with a wingspan of 13.9m and a height of 6.5m, and powered by 2 Lyulka AL-7F-1 afterburning turbojet engines, 73.55 kN (16,535 lbf) thrust each dry, 98.06 kN (22,045 lbf) with afterburner. More here.



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A marvellous video by Blue Paw Print:





And while I'm at it, you might want to check out Dan Sharp's "ME262 - Development and Politics":





Nite.



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A truly enlightening and fun to watch video about a legendary aircraft...






...that, thanks to the movie Devotion (such a shame it tanked), finds itself in the spotlights again!






Some more info here. Good night.



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Devotion tells the story of the first US Navy black pilot, Jesse Leroy Brown, and his wingman and pal Thomas Hudner. I first learned about their extraordinary comradeship in David Sears' excellent Such Men As These - The story of the Navy pilots who flew the deadly skies over Korea. Recommended reading, btw.


In 1950, Brown and Hudner flew missions in obsolete F4U Corsairs over Korea from USS Leyte, which was part of Task Force 77. On the 4th of December, during or after a mission to support USMC troops near the infamous Chosin Reservoir, Browns Corsair suffered either a ruptured fuel or oil line, possibly as a result of Chinese small arms fire, and not long after he was forced to crash-land...





The crash deformed Browns crate in such a way that he got stuck in his cockpit, and possibly wounded too, so that he was unable to get out of the wreckage without aid. Hudner, observing the crash site and noticing a fire starting in the engine, feared that his friend would die in the flames and did the unthinkable: he deliberately crashed his F4U also, knowing full well that he wouldn't be able to take off again. He rushed over to where Browns mount had come to a standstill, and tried to get his friend out of the wreck. Alas, it was not to be. Even after a rescue helicopter had landed and its crew assisted, it proved impossible to free Brown, whose condition worsened by the minute. In the gathering dark and with the trapped Corsair pilot now unconscious, the helicopter was forced to leave, with Hudner on board. Some days later and with Brown now for certain dead, his squadron mates returned to give him a Viking funeral - bombing the stricken plane with its deceased pilot inside with napalm, so as to prevent North Korean or Chinese troops from defaming the body.






A welcome addition to an altogether meagre score of movies about an almost forgotten war. Directed by J.D. Dillard and starring Jonathan Majors as Jesse Brown and Glen Powell as Tom Hudner.



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I have always had a soft spot for the B-58:





B-58 appearances in movies are rare. Here's a short vid from Fail Safe (1964), starring a.o. Walter Matthau and Henry Fonda; although the bombers are the fictitious 'Vindicators', Hustler footage was used.





Nite.



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A working one, to be sure, because there is at least one historic predecessor (John Barber, 1731) which could not be realised for a variety of scientific and technological reasons, chief among them probably the metallurgical challenges of developing a jet engine.





The Whittle W.1X, which in April 1941 powered the first UK jet, the Gloster E.28/39:





Whittle was a tremendous genius allright, and yet I cannot fathom why he stubbornly clung to reverse flow combustion? How could a man who engineered such a groundbreaking novelty keep incorporating this feature which instantly 'feels' wrong even for the less engineer-minded? It's clear that the penalty of it is thrust loss, and this for a powerplant in its infancy, which de facto was already weak in output to begin with: its maximum thrust was a mere 850 lbf (3.8 kN) at 16,500 rpm.





A highly recommended book on early jet engines btw is Hermione Giffard's Making Jet Engines in World War 2:





And therein it is detailed, amongst others, that subsequent designers right away dispensed with reverse flow combustion:





A very noteworthy desing was the Halford H1, designed by the legendary Frank Halford (father of the Napier Sabre), and which was a short while later renamed the de Havilland Goblin:





It was such a brilliant design from the start that, although it was conceived in 1941, its basic form remained unchanged until 1954, by which time it had evolved to the Mk. 35 export version. Pictured is the de Havilland Goblin II, which powered the de Havilland Vampire:






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A legendary intercontinental bomber caught between two eras.





We've shown this clip from the movie Strategic Air Command, starring James Stewart, before:





Nite.



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Spending more time on Twitter has, through getting acquainted there with aviation enthusiasts, rekindled the fascination of my youth for anything that flies. This evening's topic is the Handley Page Heyford, a curious early thirties bomber design:





Nite.



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Arthur Williams is a former Royal Marine who lost the use of his legs in an accident, took up flying, and is now a successful TV reporter! To get a taste of his work, watch this fascinating video:





As Winston once said: "Never, never, never give up!".



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From the BBC documentary "When Britain ruled the skies", on the astounding performance of the British aeronautical industry in churning out breathtaking an innovative aircraft in the first decades of the Cold War:





The same theme is explored in Empire of the Clouds, an excellent book by James Hamilton-Paterson. Highly recommended!



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OTD, or rather, On This Night in 1943, 19 Lancasters under the command of Wing Commander Guy Gibson took off from RAF Scampton to attack several Ruhr dams which were crucial for hydro-electric power. It was the beginning of Operation Chastise;





Check out this exerpt from the 1955 movie The Dambusters:





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I'm currently reading Rowland White's latest, Harrier 809.

It's essentially the story of 809NAS (Naval Air Squadron) during its deployment in the Falklands War.

And it hammers home just how special the little Jump Jet was - and is.

Watch this great documentary on how Great Britain's perhaps greatest aerodynamic design came into being:





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July 10, 1940, marks the start of the Battle of Britain.

After having swept before them the combined armies of Britain, France, Belgium and The Netherlands, and either chased them across the Channel or else forced their surrender, the Nazis ruled firmly over Western Europe. Only Britain remained defiant. To be sure, they had the advantage of the most impressive anti-tank ditch in the world. But with the BEF having lost all its matériel in the previous months, and the land forces in the UK either in hopeless disarray or else woefully unprepared to face Hitlers panzers, it was absolutely imperative that this barrier not be crossed.

Hitler counted on the Luftwaffe to neutralize the RAF. Once this task accomplished, his victorious armies would be able to cross the Channel at will, and when on the other side, the British Army and Home Guard would be no match for them.

It was therefore imperative that the RAF retained the upper hand. For two months, a fierce air battle raged, a battle of which the outcome would determine whether Nazi rule would stretch over all of Western Europe and plunge the continent in another dark era.

In the end, the RAF won, a feat which gave birth to perhaps Winston Churchill's most famous quote:

'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.'

In 1970 the movie The Battle of Britain was released. When it was made, the real Battle only lay three decades in the past. A further half-century separates us from Michael Caine and fellow actors re-enacting the glorious deeds of the 'Few' in that long, hot summer of 1940 so fraught with danger and angst. But to this day, no better picture has been made honoring the young RAF pilots:







Essential info here.



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OK the video was shamelessly stolen from the good CDR, I didn't even bother to ask, but what's he gonna do huh, with 5,000 kloms of Atlantic between us?

Anyway, watch this marvellous video in Technicolor of take offs and landings on the USS Shangri-La (CV 38), somewhere in the Med in 1962.





My personal favorite is the Skyhawk. For some reason I have always liked this tough little delta-winged attack plane. I had a model as a kid - although I almost always built my models myself, that one was a diecast. And of course, the Skyhawk featured prominently in the middle batch of my numerous Buck Danny cartoons:





Yes, there once was a USS Shangri-La (CV/CVA/CVS-38), prolly the carrier with the most incongruous name ever. One of 24 Essex-class aircraft carriers commissioned during or right after WWII for the United States Navy, the inspiration for her name came from President Roosevelt himself. You may or may not know that on the heels of Pearl Harbor, a Lt Col by the name of James H. Doolittle took off with sixteen B25 Mitchell bombers from the deck of the carrier Hornet and bombed Tokyo, a feat that caused little structural damage but of which the psychological impact was enormous (both for the Japanese and the Americans). When shortly after the raid a reporter asked the President whence the raid had been carried out, the President, apparently choosing to let the enemy in the dark about US carriers being able to launch twin engined bombers, replied that it had been from Shangri-La, which is a fictional, mystical land in the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton. Two years later, when it came time to name a long hull Essex carrier, someone remembered the anecdote and voilà.

USS Shangri-La, commissioned in 1944, took part in several campaigns in the Pacific, earning two battle stars. Decommissioned shortly after war's end, she was modernized and recommissioned in the early 50s, and redesignated a CVA, an attack carrier. Operating in both the Pacific and Atlantic/Mediterranean, she was refitted with an angled deck and towards the end of her career took part in the Vietnam War, where she added another three battle stars to her combat record. Shangri-La was decommissioned in 1971, and sold for scrap in 1988. Here she is on her last deployment in 1970:






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A refurbished Supermarine Spitfire Mark IX from 1943 started its flight around the world today. This afternoon, August 5 at 1.30pm, the iconic Spit departed from Goodwood Aerodrome:





Two pilots, Matt Jones and Steve Brooks, will alternate behind the controls:

On the 5th of August at 1.30pm, Matt Jones & Steve Brooks will depart from Goodwood Aerodrome in an attempt to climb "a pilot's Everest". Flying a 1943 #Spitfire around the 🌎. The dream is about to take flight. https://t.co/sOXz3wMJMt #SilverSpitfire #LongestFlight pic.twitter.com/ZMNKTlistc

— Silver Spitfire (@LongestFlight) July 25, 2019

This is their site.


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On this day in 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in level flight. Via Space.com:





His Bell X-1 was a rocket engine–powered aircraft, first conceived in 1944, and designed and built in 1945. In his successful attempt to break the sound barrier, he reached Mach 1.06 (700 miles per hour, or 1,100 km/h), but by no means had the X1 reached its limits, because a year after, it achieved a speed of nearly 1,000 miles per hour (1,600 km/h).

It should be noted that some sources list another man to first break the sound barrier: German test pilot Heini Dittmar, who on 6 July 1944 in Messerschmitt Komet Me 163B V18 would have reached an even higher speed than Yeager, 1,130 km/h (700 mph), but whether he flew high enough to make the flight supersonic is unclear. The speed of sound, commonly referred to as Mach 1, varies with altitude (actually, rather the temperature at particular altitude) and is highest at sea level, where Mach 1.0 equals about 1225 km/h (761 mph). At 30000 ft Mach 1.0 is reached much faster, at 1091 km/h (678 mph). However, German records do not mention a sonic boom during Dittmar's flight, and in any case by that time in the war they probably weren't interested in breaking records.


You can get some idea of what it must have been for Yeager and colleagues to attain hitherto unmatched (manned) speeds in this video clip from the movie The Right Stuff:





The Bell X1's engine was Reaction Motors's XLR11, company designation RMI 6000C4, the first liquid-propellant rocket engine developed in the US. It used ethylalcohol and liquid oxygen as propellants and generated a maximum thrust of 6,000 lbf (27 kN). Each of the four combustion chambers produced 1,500 lbf (6.7 kN) of thrust. The XLR11 was not throttleable but each chamber could be turned on and off individually. At the 0:18 mark in the video above you see the character playing Yeager turning all four of them on simultaneously. One wonders about the shocks to the structure and the implications of the asymmetrical thrust in case of individual turning on and off. I suppose that when using only two of the four, pilots were advised to use either the horizontally arranged thrusters or else the vertical ones. (It should be noted that the engine powering the Me163, the Walter HWK 509, could be throttled).







Pending development of a more powerful engine, in 1959 and 1960, a pair of XLR11-RM-13's mounted on top of one another were used as an interim power plant for the first X-15's. These XLR11's were boosted to 2,000 lbf (8.9 kN) of thrust per chamber for a total of 16,000 lbf (71 kN = 2 x 4 x 8.9kN).




In NOV 1960, the combination was replaced by a single XLR99 engine, but at 67kN it produced actually less thrust than the 8 combustion chambers of the two XLR11's:




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Today, April 1st 2018, the Royal Air Force celebrates its 100th birthday. Indeed, on April 1, 1918, the RAF was designated an independent force (independent of any other branch, that is) and as such it is now the world's oldest air force.


The RAF's most important operation was the Battle of Britain, in which the immortal Spitfire, designed by Reginald Mitchell, played a pivotal role:





There are many competitors for the RAF's next iconic aircraft but the Handley Page Victor is a noteworthy candidate:





Most beautiful plane imho? The Hawker Hunter:





For sheer muscle, no contest: the English Electric Lightning!







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I actually wanted to write about the appalling violence of our muslim friends in Brussels this weekend (22 police officers wounded, cars torched, windows smashed) and about the dhimmi Mass in Oostnieuwkerke (West Flanders) for Ann-Laure Decadt, the 31-year old mother of two who was murdered in NYC by an Uzbek muslim on 31 October.

Crucial info I learned on both events however, a.) that police was forbidden to intervene because engaging the Moroccans "would only make it worse" and b.) not one of the 1,700 participants for the funeral of Mrs. Decadt dared to use the dreaded JIM acronym ergo she died because of "senseless violence"...

... made me so sick I couldn't go on.

So it's gonna be a topic of an altogether different nature, the Leduc planes with their ramjets.


A ramjet aka athodyd for nerds (athodyd = aero thermodynamic duct), is jet engine that uses the engine's forward motion to compress incoming air, thus elminating the need for an axial compressor. It follows that at takeoff, ramjets do not produce thrust since the plane stands still, so that the plane either has to be carried in the air by a mother plane or else use booster rockets to acquire the minimum speed for the ramjet to start working. Ramjets function best at around Mach 3 (2,300 mph or 3,700 km/h), and can propel planes to speeds of up to Mach 6 (4,600 mph; 7,400 km/h).





So not only is there no compressor, but it follows there's no turbine either, because it's raison d'être is precisely to propel the compressor. In fact, theoretically you can look straight through a ramjet!


The concept is from French inventor André Lorin, who patented the design in 1913 already. Of course, lack of proper materials plus the fact that aerodynamics was a field in its infancy prevented him from building a ramjet.

But 25 years later René Leduc designed such a plane. Building started at the Breguet Aviation factory in 1938, but due to the war, during which the French were able to hide the project from the Germans, it was only completed in 1947. The Leduc 0.10 featured a double-walled fuselage, with the pilot controlling the plane from within the inner shell. The thin wings nevertheless held 1,000 litres of fuel. The carriage could only come out at landing.


Here's the Leduc 010, which had to be carried in the air first:





And this is the Leduc 0.22, which could take off under its own power:





A short video, sorry, but it's entirely in Fwench:






And yes, the Lockheed SR71 Blackbird is the best known example of a plane powered by ramjets.


Nite.



MFBB.