Is there a general, no frills 1/48 Ju-88 out there?

True, I hadn't thought of that, but I can't see any reason why a commercial plane would need it either if a military one didn't Upswept outer wings seemed to be fairly common on 1930's designs, I don't know it it's stability related or has something to do with preventing the wingtips from hitting the ground during bad weather take-offs and landings or colliding with underbrush on poor grass strips. Now this, on the other hand is just asking for a wingtip to hit the ground:

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any major model company ever do a model of that?

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery
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I think it goes back to how they could do the math for the structural design at the time - it was probably easier to design a straight (flat) load bearing carry-though, but they still needed the outer panels angled for some lateral stability. If you've ever seen a T-6 wing disassembled into it's three component sections it's also similarly constructed.

When I was as GE there were guys there that had been around long enough to remember doing calculations using real splines and spline weights - some of them still had spline weights sitting on their desks as souvenirs of the old days...not to mention slide rules.

It's hard even for a pre-PC, mainframe kiddie like me to imagine doing computational fluid dynamics or structural analysis using sticks, weights, and slide rules, but that's how it was done before computers...and where modern computational spline function mechanics hails from.

Reply to
Rufus

That is a highly undesirable characteristic in a trainer*. Someone should have spotted that in the wind tunnel test stage.

*Although it has a interesting Darwinian touch to it. This way you can save money by weeding out the trainee pilots that aren't on their toes early in training via attrition or simple pure terror as they pull out of a stall-induced dive at ten feet off the ground... while at the same time encouraging the rest of the trainees to get their wings as quickly as possible, so they can move onto something safe, like a FA-18. :-) Were you around in the old Buckeye days? I've never had a chance to talk to a pilot of one of those, (oddly enough, in North Dakota we don't get many Navy aircraft) how did they handle?

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

The problem with wind tunnels and computational aero is that neither of them do a very good job of predicting dynamic behavior - that's why there'll always be flight test...and that's where this trait was discovered, in advance of Fleet intro. By the time the jet got to the ramp the trippers were fairly well configured.

I did manage to get the T-45 sim to depart once...but I had to "break it" to do so...recovered at about 1500 AGL...but that's another story...

I was part of the Fleet intro team for the T-45A...and since the sim was standing up and there were no students in the pipeline to put hours on it, I sort of became the local "test-student/test pilot" for the sim folks. I spent an average of a couple hours a week flying the sim, and giving them feedback on the flight model updates, but tried not to become proficient enough at any one task to more than "student proficient". I do have to say that of all the military jet sims I've flown, the T-45A was the most tasking...but any Cessna pilot could still fly the jet, IMO. Since I didn't have much armament to play with, I spent most of my time shooting carrier approaches and landings...got pretty good at them, considering I was just spotting the deck without a velocity vector. In fact, I was better at hitting the boat tan I was at hitting the FCLP spot ashore...scarred the crap out of me to try it at night though, even in the sim. I always diverted to shore and did night bounces whenever they turned the sun off on me...hey, I can dial up a TACAN even after dark.

VT-21 was standing up with the T-45 (they were the first), the initial IP Cadre had six T-45s when I left. There were still T-2s and TA-4s around and operating...and VT-21 was actually considering qualling me in the jet, seeing as I was getting so much sim time, was already a licensed civilian pilot, and knew more than they did about the jet from an engineering standpoint and might have been a help to them in the air. But I got another opportunity and moved on before that could happen.

I did manage to see a guy shell out of a T-2 on about a 1/4 mile final at 1200 AGL during a single engine emergency...turned out he secured the good engine on approach and just shelled. I was later told that you don't want to actually give students the option to eject too early in the training program - he could have made the runway dead-stick from where he was...man, talk about a fireball...

I also took a student out to dinner that had DOR'd for having "no apparent fear of death", as he put it. He had been doing well through T-2's, but his first trip to the boat in the TA-4 scared the snot out of him because of the added speed, and his attention in the cockpit had begun to wander - particularly in the landing pattern...he'd break and just start a spiral into the ground and the IPs were having to snatch the jet from him. Some of the other students that knew me suggested that I talk to him about civilian careers in Naval aviation, seeing as I had one and he didn't want to completely separate from the Navy...so I joined him and his wife for dinner one night, and we had some conversation. They were a nice young couple...I hope things worked out for them.

I had to watch out while I was working with the Training Command...word got around pretty quick that I had some gouge, and I was always careful not to spend much time with the students lest I interfered with their instruction - I was there to instruct the Instructors, not the students.

Reply to
Rufus

Rufus wrote:

Imagine in the days when they had to figure out the structural loads on wooden aircraft frames... and had a situation where no two pieces of wood used on the aircraft were ever going to be identical in physical characteristics or mass-for-volume. In his book "Giants Of The Sky", Bill Gunston has the strange story of this behemoth:

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Tarrant Tabor, built by Mr.W.G. Tarrant of Byfleet, Surrey. Up till this point, Mr. Tarrant had specialized in building large wooden buildings (and it shows, doesn't it?). When Mr. Tarrant wanted to get someone who could handle the structural mathematics and stress loads for his giant wooden triplane bomber/flying building, he knew right where to go - The Admiralty Air Department - and they knew right who to send him: Letitia Chitty, who at 19 years old had done her bit in The Big One for King and Country when dragged away from Newnham College, Cambridge, by a RN press gang to design airplanes for them and ended up working a year later on the largest aircraft ever built. Ms. Chitty must have been aghast at what was being asked of her, but she was the Bulldog Breed and went right to work on it. Things were going okay on the Tabor project, until all the Grade A Spruce ran out and they had to build it out of American White Wood. Ms. Chitty knew there were problems here, as White Wood was only good for 3,500 lbs per square inch, as opposed to the 5,500 lbs per square inch of Grade A Spruce. So it was going to be _way_ overweight. But they got the thing built, and in May of 1919 it went proudly rolling down the runway, revved its engines up to full power, and as the thrust line on the upper ones was above the center of mass of the aircraft, drove the aircraft's nose into the ground and hurling the pilot and copilot to their deaths as the aircraft ended up sticking tail-first into the air with its forward fuselage smashed clean up to the leading edge of the wings. Well, Ms. Chitty wasn't responsible for the aircraft's overall design, just getting it stressed right. And it did stay amazingly intact despite never getting airborne:
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Tarrant quit the aircraft business, but Ms. Chitty went on to great things:
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"1937 - Letitia Chitty (1897-1982) During WWI, Letitia Chitty worked for the Air Ministry where she met Pippard. Inspired by him she returned to Cambridge and changed course from the mathematics to engineering, graduating with first class honours in the Mechanical Sciences Tripos in 1921, the first woman to do so. Her career was unusual for a woman at this period. Continuing at the Air Ministry, she worked with Richard Southwell (Imperial College Rector

1942-1948) and Pippard and then joined Imperial as Research Assistant in 1934. She and Pippard worked on aircraft structures, she undertaking much of the mathematical work and on stresses in arches of the voussoir type particularly and loading of wheels. Later she undertook major work on stresses of large dams in the middle east. WWII work included research into submarine hulls under shell attack, stresses in extensible cables and pulley blocks for barrage balloons, for the Director of Scientific Research of the Admiralty and the Ministry of Supply. Chitty became Lecturer in 1937. She retired in 1962 the 1st (of 2) Lady Fellows of Royal Aeronautical Society, the 3rd Woman Corporate Member of Institute of Civil Engineers and the 1st woman to be appointed to a technical Committee of Institute of Civil Engineers 1958. She was awarded 4 Telford Premiums for papers written in collaboration with Pippard. Besides engineering and mathematical writing she produced a book called An Alphabet of Flowers containing plant drawings and notes on her holidays. In retirement she continued to attend College and continued to work until she was over 80. In her later years, she was even interviewed by Vogue magazine."

Yes, she was interviewed by Vogue Magazine; she also has a engineering award at Cambridge named after her...The Bulldog Breed...backbone of the nation! And although many thought her "Alphabet of Flowers" was a bit odd in that it had around a page of differential calculus regarding the structural strength of each part of the flower in question, it never-the-less was not without a peculiar charm in its presentation. :-D

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

...smacks of "A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown"...in wich it turns out that much of the same math involve in designing a bra can be used to design the forward sections of helos.

Reply to
Rufus

Ah, the ancient ancestor of the Airbus Cattlecar! ;)

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Reply to
Mad-Modeller

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