P38 airplane-why isn't this configuration used anymore?

My fuzzy memory recalls the British Vampire Jet fighter.

Steve Rayner.

Not 16... more than a couple, maybe a few couples. ( ;)

Yeah, I was gonna say..

Tim

-- In the immortal words of Ned Flanders: "No foot longs!" Website @

What about P factor? Depending on which one quits and if they spin the same direction and so on...

Tim

-- In the immortal words of Ned Flanders: "No foot longs!" Website @

There have been quite a few twin-boom aircraft over the years. One of the earliest jet-age examples was the de Havilland Vampire, a single engine jet fighter. One of the larger twin-booms was the Fairchild C-119, a twin prop cargo plane. Perhaps the latest production twin-boom is the Sukhoi S-80, a twin turboprop regional transport that made its debut a couple of years ago. A google search on "twin boom" airplane turns up some very odd birds.

Bert

Fred Fowler wrote:

Yes, there's still P-factor in a climb. But that just requires a little rudder pressure during a climb, and goes away in cruise.

With any twin, you've got to figure out which engine died, stop it, and feather the prop. A windmilling dead engine can cause so much drag that the maximum possible rate of climb is negative. On the other hand, you'd better be damned sure you're shutting down the dead engine, not the good one, for obvious reasons. Once the dead engine is secured and the good one is producing maximum power, you still have to fly the plane at a fairly low airspeed (probably near maximum rate of climb speed) to get a positive rate of climb. Either faster or slower and you sink.

With a Skymaster, that should be about all you need to do. It will basically fly straight. But with a conventional twin, it may turn out that at this optimum rate of climb speed you don't have enough rudder authority to fly the plane in a straight line, since the thrust is so asymmetric. Since flying in circles is often not very useful (particularly if there are buildings or mountains nearby), you may have to hold a gentle bank as well as full rudder to fly in a straight line. The Skymaster avoids this.

Dave

The one that flew out to Kwaj wasn't that little ! - 2500 N miles is a little long for the rage for that baby!

Martin

What the Skymaster didn't avoid was drag. With the rear engine operating, the propeller sucked air around the rather abrupt aft part of the fuselage. When the engine quit, the airflow seperated from the aft fuselage causing drag. The climb rate with only the front engine operating is not, shall we say, awe inspiring.

D.

a >Nissan V6 though using few

Those engines also caused the tragic crash that ended the program.

D.

harder to >control when the engines are spaced so far apart if an engine fails. Things

If the props on the P-38 were any closer together, they would have been hitting something besides air. Twin engine airplanes aren't harder to control so long as the engineers did their job properly.

D.

Embraer in Brazil makes (made?) a counter-insurgency fighter with the same lay-out. It resembles the OV-10 Bronco. Adam Aircraft in the US is certificating a twin boom design, although with center-line thrust. Excepting for center-line thrust designs, twin booms don't make economic sense. They require more materials, more man-hours, and have more drag inducing intersections than traditional twin engine designs.

D.

Jeffrey Ethell, the author of those great color photo books of WWII aviation, died in a P-38.

P-38's tended to snap inverted on loss of an engine, especially on takeoff (low airspeed, high power). The only antidote was to chop power immediately. Ironically, Jeff Ethell wrote of this behavior in an article I read in Flying, IIRC, shortly before his death.

Pete Keillor

yes, i have seen both the History Channel and "Black Sheep" versions of the incident. this a long thread, i may have missed some, but no one has mentioned the range of the P38.

Lindberg is credited with discovering how to lean out the fuel mix safely, adding 50% to the range spec'd by the manufacturer. his efforts resulted in the Yamamoto score. sez here, anyway.

--Loren

Someone already mentioned the P-61:

There's an interesting article in todays (Aug 24, 2003) "Dayton Daily News" about the T-82. That plane was based on using two P-51H models and joining them together at the wong and horizontal stabilizer. There is a static model on display at the Air Force Museum at Wright Patternson:

The article mentions that 282 of the P-82's were built, and only 5 were known to have survived into the 1990's. There is some controversy about one of the aircraft. In 1966 the aircraft was a static display at a Texas air base, and when it was supposed to be re-inventoried at Wright-Patternson the Confederate Air Force asked and was given permission to restore the plane to flying status. It was the only one of it's kind in flying status. Since the the Confederate Air Force sold the plane which was against the agreement they had in place with US Air Force Musuem at Wright-Patternson (main location). Actually there are two pages of articles, a lot of stuff is gone, mussing from the museum inventories around the nation. It seems there was sloppy bookeeping and artifacts could easily get into the hands of private collectors. That's what the article alleges, anyway. One interesting item missing was the original wood pattern used by the foundry that cast the alumium block for the Wright 1903 machine.

Mark Fields

Anybody remember the movie "The flight of the Phoenix", which featured the C-119?

I seem to remember in the book, that the P-38 was chosen because of it's range. The distance that had to be covered was large. The Lightnings sortied before The Bettys took off. The Japanese squadron were flying quite low, and the P-38s dove on them. They took out the Zeros and wrecked one of the two Bettys, the one with Isoroku aboard. He was on a "rally the troops" tour to bolster the morale.

I can't remember the name of the book, but it was a definitive narration of the War in the Pacific.

Leo (pearland, tx)

I used to hear them refered to as "Mix-Masters".

I seem to recall that it was normal to taxi a skymaster on the rear engine alone, which looked a little weird when you saw the plane comming at you on the taxiway!

What about the moskeeto?

IIRC, the P-38 had a terrible fuel-consumption rate, and they had to equip them with special drop tanks for that mission. But there were no P-51Ds around at the time.

They also had a reputation for skidding badly in turns and had to use their speed to compete with ME-109s in Europe. Otherwise they were dead ducks.

Or so said some former P-38 pilot on TV a decade or two ago.

Ed Huntress