Aviation shite

[John F]

Bah, these jets and STOL things are all a bit new for my taste

 

This piece of aviation Scheiße was the fastest piston-engined aircraft of WWII - the Dornier Do-335 "Pfeil".

 

 

Probably due to its large cruciform tail and rear engine, it was one of the first production aircraft to be fitted with a rudimentary ejector seat. There's a persistent rumour that a number of early development models were found crashed with the pilot, minus his arms, still on board due to a two-stage ejection process causing the pilot's arms to be ripped out of their sockets when the canopy was jettisoned

 

Again, I wouldn't class that as shite. In fact, i think we can be thankful they arrived too late to see combat

 

Agreed, but I felt it could be included because of the ejector story / myth.

[CreepingJesus]

Shame it was the electrics and engines that let it down, 'cos they should've been the reliable bits.

 

Been thinking about that since then, 'cos something about that statement was nagging away at me. The engine control systems and/or power electrics may well have had 'Lucas' stamped on them. Yup, you'd have to barking mad to fly anything with the Prince Of Darkness's stamp on it!

Still, as long as XH558's howling and shaking the ground at air displays, all will be well!

 

I'll take the point about Concorde profitability, at least as far as the arrangement you mentioned is concerned. The last few years of their service weren't too clever tho', and rising fuel prices in the last few years would've done for them for sure.

While it's a matter of record that the CAAC had pre-orders for 2 or 3 Concordes, my supposition is that Tupolev would've offered them 144's at a really good price (even tho' at 1973 prices the 144 was $30m cheaper), in order to get them into America. CKD's wouldn't have been out of the question either, I'd think. And while the American carriers went all patriotic, after forcing the issue by pre-ordering Concordes, plenty of other orders went missing too, in the wake of the oil crisis. Saudi, Israel, Japan and Pakistan spring to mind, in no particular order. In reply to Pakistan, the Indians might have bought a 144 or two; but it's hard to see where the 144's customer base was, outside of the Bloc.

What is the 4th crash you mention? Paris and Yegoryevsk we know about officially. I thought there was another crash in the early days, which seems to be hard to find now. It wouldn't have been hard for the numbers to be fudged, as at least 2 or 3 were quietly 'scrapped' after '85. Never mind the paucity of Aeroflot operational information.

 

That Bev's the last one in existence! They were widely laughed at, for their comical appearance, but they were damn handy things to have.

Ditto for...

...the Short Skyvan. Odd little thing, but undeniably practical.

I wouldn't bet against any horror stories about early ejection seats - even Martin-Baker, in their early days had some grisly failures. Fancy death by crashing, or death by spinal detachment? Hmmm, let me see...

Any truth in the story that Igor Sikorsky tried to develop a helicopter ejection seat? I've heard the story a few times, but it sounds fairly unlikely, doesn't it? It's a tough choice: death by crashing, or death by rotor blades? Hmmm, let me see....

[Wilko220]

^ Looks like a '70s caravan with wings!

[TagoraGL]

Igor Sikorsky was a hero, doing test flights in his safety headgear.

 

[CreepingJesus]

^ Looks like a '70s caravan with wings!

 

Pretty much. I used to stand on the balcony of my gran's flat in Clydebank and watch planes go into Glasgow Airport. The Skyvans always looked like they'd get there eventually, without any great sense of urgency.

 

About that time, I remember seeing this pass overhead, on its' tour of the UK:

Albeit, that the Shuttle was firmly bolted on. (I couldn't find another picture with the 747 in it's shite-tastic 1980 livery!) Luckily it was during our playtime, and a bunch of kids stood slack-jawed and pointing at the sky. Awesome.

[Negative Creep]

The Bonney Gull. Clearly those aviation pioneer who buy that point had flown across the Atlantic knew nothing about avionics. The way to fly is to replicate a bird as closely as possible

 

 

 

Well that went well

 

 

 

Christmas Strutlees. Because BRACING IZ 4 GAYS. 2 flights, 2 crashes, 2 deaths

 

 

 

 

Caproni Stipa OM NOM NOM TIGER MOTH

 

 

 

Republic XF-84H - resonance from the turboprop made groundcrew physically sick

 

 

 

 

Kalinin K7 - one of the biggest pre jet aircraft and the symbol of Soviet power over those bourgeois capitalist scum. So much so that it fell apart in midair and Stalin had the creator shot on trumped up espionage charges

[morris_ital_lover]

Still, as long as XH558's howling and shaking the ground at air displays, all will be well!

...

Any truth in the story that Igor Sikorsky tried to develop a helicopter ejection seat? I've heard the story a few times, but it sounds fairly unlikely, doesn't it? It's a tough choice: death by crashing, or death by rotor blades? Hmmm, let me see....

 

IIRC XH558 only has another year left before it'll be forced to retire unfortunately due to engine/airframes hours or somesuch....

 

As for helicopter ejector seats, they are actually out there and do work I suspect that they were a bit too young for Sikorsky to have suceeded with back then.

 

My contribution to the thread shall be:

 

BAC 1-11, pretty decent bit of kit but it was British and built back then so automatically qualifies for being shite.

[John F]

Wow... 5 pages about aviation shite and not a single mention yet of the De Havilland Comet and its OMG METAL FATEEG

[morris_ital_lover]

I hear your Comet and raise you Nimrod, more precisely MRA4. Surely the single worst British military development. The Nimrod that broke up over Afghanistan did so because of serious design flaws but BAE in their wisdom didn't decide to update the new Nimrod that was coming in whilst it was on the production line it would be done upon request at extra cost once they had been handed over IIRC. So not only was it a project that took so long the equipment was allegedly out of date, it took many billions and wasn't even fit to fly.

 

[Craig the Princess]

 

Yours for just £52,500 - less than a new BMW X5!

 

http://www.globalplanesearch.com/mcdonn ... e/dc_3.htm

 

Or for auction - http://flightplanet.com/airplane-for-sa ... __1541.php

[John F]

^ nice use of moccasins there...

[messerschmitt owner]

I bring this to the party!

[Ross_K]

I wouldn't bet against any horror stories about early ejection seats - even Martin-Baker, in their early days had some grisly failures. Fancy death by crashing, or death by spinal detachment? Hmmm, let me see...

Any truth in the story that Igor Sikorsky tried to develop a helicopter ejection seat? I've heard the story a few times, but it sounds fairly unlikely, doesn't it? It's a tough choice: death by crashing, or death by rotor blades? Hmmm, let me see....

 

The B-58 Hustler had an ejection capsule. Imagine a snail's shell that would roll closed with the pilot inside. I read a story of a pilot having his arms taken off because he was too slow getting them back inside the capsule before ejecting.

 

On the subject of helicopter ejector seats - they exist. The Russian KA-52 Alligator has them - explosive bolts blow the blades off before ejection obviously. Bailing out would still a bit of a leap of faith though.

 

These two planes are comedy gold. I love the use of the mattress to cushion the wing.

 

Moar

 

 

Caproni Stipa OM NOM NOM TIGER MOTH

[dieselnutjob]

^ Looks like a '70s caravan with wings!

 

Pretty much. I used to stand on the balcony of my gran's flat in Clydebank and watch planes go into Glasgow Airport. The Skyvans always looked like they'd get there eventually, without any great sense of urgency.

 

About that time, I remember seeing this pass overhead, on its' tour of the UK:

Albeit, that the Shuttle was firmly bolted on. (I couldn't find another picture with the 747 in it's shite-tastic 1980 livery!) Luckily it was during our playtime, and a bunch of kids stood slack-jawed and pointing at the sky. Awesome.

 

I remember being taken on a school trip to Stansted airport to see it. I had totally forgotten about that.

[Lankytim]

http://www.luft46.com/

 

This website is great for the weird and wonderful aircraft that were created on the Nazi Germany drawing board. Here are a couple of my favourites:

 

 

 

That site is great, many of the aurokrautdevelopmentalshite aircraft look just like later Soviet designs... I can see that much of this excellent engineering wasn't wasted!

 

 

DH Vampire, anyone?

 

I could spend hours on this site. Excellent!!

[Betaphile]

Not that Concorde was really a success either: it suffered many of the same problems as the Charger. Frames constantly cracked, the cabin wasn't what it could've been either, and the running costs were astronomical while profitability was poor.

More than this, neither plane was ever really 'in production' 'cos the overseas orders never materialised.

 

Don't agree. Concorde was pretty successful for a first-gen SST. Profitability was good when it was run properly (by BA under King/Marshall as an "airline within an airline") and safety was excellent. Shoddy Air France maintenance and aircrew error caused the Gonesse crash. Tu-144 losses are not confirmed, but at least four are believed to have been lost.

 

The only reason overseas Concorde orders never materialised was American politics, as the US had screwed up on its own SST programme, so resorted to protectionism, as it usually does. Most major carriers had ordered Concordes, but it looked likely that the aircraft would not be allowed to land in the US. The 70s oil crisis gave them an excuse to cancel.

 

 

(As an aside, the Chinese were interested in buying Concordes. If they'd bought them, and the Charger had been usable, there could've been a situation where the rivals would be head-to-head in one fleet. Interesting...)

 

Unlikely the Chinese would have bought Tu-144. Concorde was definitely on order - China was a good customer of the UK, having bought Viscounts and Tridents.

 

 

Even the Americans had the good sense to abandon their contenders for the fight. Funnily enough, the American proposals were bigger, faster and longer of range than Concorde or Charger! Talk about patriotic dogma?

 

 

And utter shite! The Boeing 2707 would simply have been too heavy - it was made of Titanium, and the original version had swing-wings.

Rather than pursuing the "bigger Concorde" 220-seat Lockheed L2000 proposal, America had to have a bigger, faster plane and chose the Boeing 2707 with its 270 seats and Mach 3 capability, which was not achievable with an aluminium structure. Hence Titanium, which could handle the heat but was way too heavy. Boeing had to redesign the 2707 to fixed wing, by which tme the project was running late and the US government withdrew funding. Hence Plan B - block Concorde.

 

If they'd gone with Lockheed, they'd probably have beaten Concorde into service...

 

The SST story is one of the most shameful in the history of human technological development. We have actually taken a stepp backwards, rather than developing second and third-gen SSTs that would have brought supersonic transport within the reach of all travellers, while matching the environmental performance of today's slow widebodies. The technology is there to do it, but idiocy prevails.

Er, no.

 

Concorde was an amazing technical achievement but it made absolutely zero sense on any remotely sane economic analysis. It is completely untrue to say that American politics were responsible for the sales failure of Concorde, the 747 did that more than adequately on its own. The Americans don't always get it right, but cancelling the 2707 was absolutely the right call, and not just because it was nowhere near production - like all SSTs, the sums just never added up. Eventually, Congress saw sense, despite a huge lobbying effort from the aero industry to keep it.

 

The truth of it is that if BOAC and Air France weren't quite literally forced to buy Concorde, it would have had exactly zero orders. And don't be in any doubt they were forced - neither AF nor BOAC wanted it. The Brits in particular were happy to junk Concorde entirely and buy 747s. In fact, having been explicitly told to buy Concorde, BOAC/BA pretty much held the British government to ransom - the British taxpayer underwrote Concorde's (large) operational losses for more than a decade, not to mention the heavily-subsidised purchase price in the first place.

 

The '74 options' figure that gets bandied around overstates the amount of genuine interest in the plane - back then, airlines used to take out option orders as a cheap form of publicity, and Concorde's specs were revised so frequently that there was no cost to cancel the option (due to the signed-for specs being voided). The real story is laid out in Andrew Wilson's "The Concorde Fiasco" - Pan Am and TWA, the first two American airlines to place options on Concorde, lost interest pretty quickly even using VERY favourable operational projections, because it cost so much to operate and just didn't carry enough passengers at a sufficient premium to make up the difference. The remainder of the options vaporised shortly afterwards, and for much the same reasons. The reality is that SSTs were always a dead end commercially, that's why (excluding Tu-144) Concorde was the one and only, and why the British and French taxpayer lost an absolute fortune on it. Reading Wilson's book, it becomes very apparent that Concorde was not an engineering project so much as a political one - the price necessary to buy Britain entry to the EEC. That, plus the desire to get even (again) with the Yanks. It was never a commercially-minded venture and frankly the amount spent on it reflects that.

[TagoraGL]

 

That looks remarkably similar to the Saab Tunnan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_29_Tunnan

 

[gricer]

The real story is laid out in Andrew Wilson's "The Concorde Fiasco" -

 

etc etc

 

I'm always amazed at how many people simply take the anti-Concorde lobby's dreadful, revisionist, wise-after-the-event books as gospel.

 

It's like arguing that we should have stuck with piston-engined airliners beacuse the Comet 1 had a safety issue.

 

Concorde was a first-generation SST. It did what it was intended to do. It was a success. If the concept had been developed (eg the BAE AST concept of the early '90s) we'd think nothing of supersonic travel. The politicians and accountants who didn't pursue the SST concept are the failures, not Concorde or the brilliant engineers that created it.

 

2707 would not have been able to deliver the stated performance. It wasn't just about money. The concept was flawed in the way Concorde was not.

 

747 and Concorde were not mutually exclusive. You coulld have high-capacity subsonic and lower-capacity SST and provide a broader range of service options than the shite we have to put up with these days.

[Betaphile]

For the record, Wilson's book was published before Concorde even entered service, not quite 'wise after the event' as you assert. But leaving that to one side...

 

747 and Concorde were not mutually exclusive. You coulld have high-capacity subsonic and lower-capacity SST and provide a broader range of service options than the shite we have to put up with these days.

 

I did not say that the 747's role overlapped exactly with Concorde's, it didn't. What it did do, however, was rewrite aviation economics (and soak up a whole bunch of capital the world's airlines had set aside for equipment procurement). The effect was to render Concorde an even more unappealing proposition than it already was in economic terms. The reality is that, even at the peak of the options placed on Concorde (at this point, there were still NO confirmed orders), and assuming every single option was converted into a firm order (a ridiculous assumption), it was still less than a fifth of the way towards its sales target of 400-500 aircraft - with no sign that any further orders were forthcoming.

 

I'm not going to try to convince you since you fairly obviously have a firm opinion on the matter, but I think the facts speak for themselves - that excluding a vainglorious project by a communist state, Concorde remains the only SST that made it beyond a few sketches and plastic models. The economics of commercial supersonic travel haven't fundamentally changed since the 1960s, nor have the attitudes of airlines, and these are the objective reasons why there has never been a follow-up. As I said, it is an impressive piece of engineering and aesthetics. That is about as far as my admiration for it goes since I really don't buy into the 'step backwards' guff that tends to get bandied about as fact rather than what it actually is, opinion. It is undeniable that given the amount of public money that went into its creation, it was never a commercial proposition. In particular, this idea that it provides a 'broader range of service options' is irrelevant unless you can afford to fly it. And if you're lucky enough to be in that position, then I'm certainly not convinced it's a desirable state of affairs that your travel should be subsidised by those who aren't so fortunate. I know upper-class welfare is a way of life these days but supersonic flights are still a pretty discretionary expense in my book.

[dollywobbler]

Concorde is nothing more than a wonderful failure. It's like the Citroen SM of the plane world. I'm glad it happened, but you have to wonder who thought it made commercial sense. The running costs must have been horrific, yet you could barely get any passengers on board. This applies to both car and plane.

[Albert Ross]

 

My contribution to the thread shall be:

 

BAC 1-11, pretty decent bit of kit but it was British and built back then so automatically qualifies for being shite.

 

My Dad managed to ground one of these at Elmdon back in the 1970s. Due to fly out somewhere (Amsterdam I think), he was boarding, and at 6'7", he bashed his head on the upper cabin trim, cracking it into many pieces, which fell about his feet. Nobody would give clearance with the damage, and everyone had to get off.....

I think they made the journey in a "Reserve" Bristol Britannia (Edit.. it might have been a Vickers Viscount or Vanguard).... he wasn't too popular. But he told me that he received "special attention" from the Cabin Crew in the form of Scotch.

[barefoot]

We've got one of these parked just up the road from us,

 

 

I say one of these, we've actually got the ONLY one of these ever.

It's a bit shite though...

 

"The Britten Sheriff was a light aircraft .. stopped up on the death of the designer John Britten in 1977"

 

East Midlands Aeropark - there's a Vulcan there too, but despite what I've read above, it's not as shite as the Sheriff!

[TagoraGL]

The Edgley Optica was another great British success story with many..... oh, hang on.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgley_Optica

[Negative Creep]

It has just occurred to me that we've gone 6 pages without mentioning possibly the worst warplane ever to see service - the Breda B88 Lince

 

 

Looked nice and set pre war speed records, but in combat was so underpowered it could barely make operational altitude. With sand filters fitted they made half their claimed speed and could not maintain formation. Were later used as runway decoys

[Craig the Princess]

 

Many of the early school accidents were related to spin-training. Once the AA-1 entered a fully developed spin and exceeded three turns, it was usually not recoverable. The AA-1 had been spin-tested as part of its certification, but in 1973 the FAA issued Airworthiness Directive 73-13-07 ordering the aircraft placarded against spins.

 

£19,999 - no offers. If a pilot is know as a Captain, the the seller must be (almost)

http://www.afors.com/index.php?page=adv ... 752&imid=3

[Stixy]

 

Looks like this now

 

[oman5]

Not really shite, but an interesting story.

 

The Keebird was a B-29 superfortress that was forced to make an emergency landing in remote,frozen northern Greenland in 1947 while engaged on a cold war spying mission. The crew were rescued after 3 days, but the plane was abandoned, unable to take off again. It remained there, a snapshot of late 1940s, until 1994, when a rescue mission was attempted. the plane was untouched and still in good condition. The team borrowed some engines from a remaining B29 and got the Keebird going again, planning to take off on a frozen lake. whilst taxiing for takeoff, a jury-rigged petrol feed for an APU came adrift, spilt everywhere and the plane caught fire and was catastrophically damaged. the remains are still there, only now in no way salvageable.

Before, in as found condition..

during..

..and after

 

a bloody tragedy. it originally only crash landed after getting lost and running out of fuel. it was in pretty much pristine condition

[Waderider]

 

Literally!

[Quintus]

I can recommend the book 'Empire of the Clouds' to anyone interested in aircraft. It's a fascinating tale of Britain's aircraft industry immediately after WWII when jet aircraft were still a very recent, and somewhat dangerous, invention.

[VC10dan]

I have had the pleasure to have worked on many a dodgy/shite old aircraft in my relatively short time in the RAF. Since joining, i learnt my trade on jet provosts, sepecat jaguars, a harrier gr3 and a tornado GR1.

 

After trade training i got sent to work on the mighty Harrier GR7/9. I absolutley loved them to bits, they took me all round the world to some beautiful places but also to some places that were not so nice.

Throughout my time with them my allocated jet was a/c no.79 and i'm not affraid to say when i heard her pegasus engine shut down for the very last time i shed a tear. She was then dragged into the hanger and stripped of her engine, packed up and sent to America

 

Here she is in happier times

 

And now

 

Then i worked on VC10's, sadly these beasts are no longer long for this world. They have amassed more flying hours than the starship enterprise. Their replacement is now in service, so they are now ending up like this......

 

And now i'm at Marham lloking after the Tornado fleet. They are also a dying breed.