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What's this got to do with Mr. Spock? (:>

Reply to
Count DeMoney

If the groundcrew went about their bfs in a logical manner, they wouldn't have these problems. ;-)

Reply to
Enzo Matrix

mr spock wishes he could fly in one. i'm glad they got the old girl airborn. wish i had some spare cash to donate.

Reply to
someone

to quote mr spock, the universe tends to the perverse. it may not be logical, but it is true.

Reply to
someone

we canna continue th flight captain we do nah have th powerrrr

Reply to
eyeball

I do love the Vulcan but not trying to create a Hornets nest, I do believe there is an original Lancaster that pre-datates the BBMF one but which is allowed to taxi but not fly??

As long as the type meets current flying conditions/legislation I do not foresee any problems, & even then are there not enough original WW2 aircraft flying around under company/personal ownership to display the great care & responsibility organisers make before undertaking public displays?

I just thank all those dedicated individuals for allowing me to view such historical aircraft within there natural environment rather than the normal museum piece (which I still admire but nothing compares to hearing engines & such actually flying)

Hopefully I'll make a Duxford Flying Legends show again in the next few years.

Cheers, Stephen

Reply to
SL

Hi there.

There is a museum just outside of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (Mt. Hope Airport) that has a flying Lancaster "Minarski's Lancaster".

Cheers from Peter

Reply to
TankBuilder2

I also have my reservations about keeping this Vulcan flying. I can see it turning into a huge money pit. The owners already reckon that they will require a million pounds to pay for it throughout the airshow season. After the season is over, how much will they require to pay for maintenance? This will repeat every year until the aircraft requires major maintenance, when no doubt they will be looking for ten million quid.

Because the aircraft is so high-profile, not doubt they will get the moeny they require. Some of it will probably come from lottery funding. However, that money could be used for dozens of smaller but no less important restiration projects that will now languish away in dusty hangars somewhere.

I think the owners should try to find some way of making the Vulcan pay for itself. Maybe they could offer flights in the aircraft, similar to the Lightnings, Buccaneers and Hunters of Thunder City.

Reply to
Enzo Matrix

Hire themselves out to small governments?

(Delivery; you give us the package, we drop it off where you want. No questions asked.)

Reply to
Jack Bohn

This brings up the other problem in relation to doing this; if it crashes, there's one less Vulcan that could have been preserved in a museum collection for people to see for many years into the future.

50 skydivers at a time in the bomb-bay; that's the key. ;-)

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

That's two times work commitments have prevented me making the very short trip to Brunty to watch the Vulcan take to the skies then. Bugger. Hopefully I can catch it at the shows this year, assuming it makes it. Fingers crossed. One Bruntingthorpe resident that won't be making it is the airworthy Lightning F6 that regularly makes very loud anti det runs. The CAA (Campaign Against Aviation) won't allow it to fly as it represents a fire hazard. (Shakes head in disbelief).

Reply to
flak monkey

Well, when you're flying at twenty feet under full afterburner.... ;-) Seriously, trying to get replacement parts for the Vulcan must be a real pain. Does Britain have anything like our Davis-Monthan AFB with old aircraft hulks lying around? I always assumed that the older aircraft were scraped, sent to museums, or used as gunnery targets. Neither the Vulcan or Lightning were considered "simple" and low maintenance aircraft (like the Vampire or Canberra for example), and one suspects they both need a fair amount of upkeep and parts replacement from time-to-time, particularly the Vulcan. I'd love to see a Vulcan takeoff; the design was a classic, and one of the most striking aircraft designs that was ever put into service anywhere in the world. Even by today's standards, it would look modern (stick a "V" tail on it and it would look like a stealth bomber). In fact, a model of a Vulcan follow-on redesigned for stealth would be fun to do. I may do a three-view drawing of that concept. AVRO Vigilant? AVRO Vanquisher?

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

Ah, 30 year old Vulcans converted in the 1980s to the BAe Veritas. (Very Expensive, Refurbished Inside, The Airframe's Shot). There's a what-if project.

Reply to
flak monkey

In theory, there should be plentiful spares available for the engines. Afterburning versions of the Olympus were used by Concorde and there are numerous ships in the Royal Navy which use marine turbine versions of the engine.

We look at a Vulcan, and we always hink that it is huge. Nowever, that's not so. During the final week of Vulcan Display Flight operations in 1992, XH558 toured pretty much ever RAF unit in the country, giving a display at each. It made the tour in company with a C-130 Hercules. On arrival, the two aircraft would fly past in formation. I was surprised to see that the C-130 dwarfed the Vulcan. Both aircraft are almost identical in length, but the Herc has a greater wingspan and is so much bulkier that it makes the Vulcan look like a toy in comparison.

The Vulcan actually had stealth features, although they were a purely inadvertant result of the design. When flying at altitide, the vertical tail was masked by the wing and the aircraft presented a surprisingly low RCS. The ECM systems were very effective as well. In October 1961, NORAD decided to test its air defences with Exercise Skyshield II. Nos 27 and 83 Sqn Vulcans took part, penetrating from Lossiemouth in the north and Kindley AFB, Bermuda from the south. The Vulcan forces caused consternation at NORAD. The northern force flew too high to be intercepted by the defending F-101s and even is the F-101s had been able to fly that high, they couldn't have locked on. The first Vulcan in the stream reported a transient lock but the remainder sailed through unscathed.

The southern wave played things sneaky. They penetrated on a broad front using full ECM jamming. Then just before contact with the defending F-102s, the southernmost aircraft turned north and flew along the East Coast. Having overflown Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York and Boston - all completely undetected - it eventually landed at Plattsburgh AFB.

Reply to
Enzo Matrix

LOL

In the days when Tornado was called MRCA, people used to say that the acronym stood for "Must Refurbish Canberra Again".

Reply to
Enzo Matrix

flak monkey wrote:

I'm trying to figure out how to do this...you aren't going to get F-117/B-2 levels of stealth, but you might be able to match the B-1B. Vertical tail has to go in favor of the butterfly tail of composite construction (given the small area of the original fin, these two fins could each be quite small in overall area). Wing leading and trailing edges need the pie-slice type of radar absorbers added, like the A-12/SR-71. The four individual engine exhausts need to be replaced by two wide engine exhausts with a lot of exterior air added via NACA scoops atop the aircraft to lower exhaust temperature, and extensions under their lower trailing edges to hide them from IR detection from below (this ties in with the pie-slice extension to the wing's trailing edge nicely). Engines replaced by high-bypass turbofans to lower exhaust temperature and up range (maybe just two engines?). Forward fuselage has to be flattened and blended into the wing leading edge. Same with wing trailing edges and blending of junction of the front and rear of the butterfly tail to the fuselage. Cockpit forms into upper fuselage, has gold-plated windscreen panels of triangular shape. Nose navigation radar goes bye-bye, gets replaced by a inertial navigation system and downward-facing radar for final targeting navigation. Wing kink gets smoothed out into a smooth leading edge curve, or return to original un-kinked wing. RAM "Ironball" paint over entire exterior. All access doors and landing gear doors on the underside get F-117 style "sawtooth" edges. Intakes need to have radar-blocking RAM/radar reflecting inserts, ala the B-1B (since the design is subsonic, internal F-117 style intake grids are usable also). Commonality with a stock Vulcan structure would be around 50%; stock structure being primarily internal (new structure would be a sort of "glove" fitted over the main Vulcan airframe structural members with the exception of nose, engine exhausts, and rear fuselage, and primarily made of low-weight composites). Increase in wing area, new turbofan engines, and smoother aerodynamic form should result in significantly increased range or weapons weight capacity. This would be one spectacular looking aircraft, cruising towards its target at around 40-50,000 feet at around Mach .9 and descending to fairly low altitude once enemy territory was approached and it came within radar range. With the modern turbofans taken into account, unrefueled range could be increased by 1/2 to nearly doubled if fuel was carried in the bomb-bay. Although capable of carrying a extremely large nuclear weapon or cruise missile payload, it would likely use most of its bomb-bay for extra fuel capacity unless on a "Black Buck" type conventional bombing strike. About the time these things that looked like giant black Manta Rays started coming out of the sky at them over Goose Green, the Argentinian junta's troops would have been rethinking any further aggressions against any British-controlled territory. :-) Speaking of Manta Rays, retractable canards on the forward fuselage would significantly reduce takeoff runs or allow greater takeoff weights. They could also help deal with low level flight in gusty or high thermal bump air conditions.

Right now, the shades of my Irish ancestors are cursing me... "Did you raise him as a damned Orangeman or what? Oh, his mother was a _Episcopalian_, was she? That explains a lot, doesn't it? Back to Purgatory for you, son." :-D

Reply to
Pat Flannery

I'd be more concerned about cockpit instrumentation, avionics, or hydraulics and what-not. A lot of the internal systems on the aircraft would no longer be in production, as they are obsolete by today's standards.

It's still a fairly large aircraft, not a B-52 by any means, but at least a B-58.

You'd think that given its "delta flying-wing" design. Though not as capable or stealthy, I've always had a soft spot for the HP Victor in my heart also, because it's fuselage has a "Flash Gordon" rocketship look about it, particularly the windscreen fairing into the fuselage. Ah, I remember those Lindberg models of both as a kid. One thing about the Lindberg kits; they may not have been the most detailed or accurate models you ever built, but boy did they go together well and easily, and always gave a good-looking model when finished. They also avoided the curse of the giant rivets in most cases, and were pretty consistent in quality....which is more than one could say about Aurora... In fact, I remember Lindberg having better fit and fewer sink marks than most kits of that vintage.

That's why SPECTRE wanted one in "Thunderball". That was the first time I ever saw one, and fell head-over-heels in love with the plane at first sight. The RAF never came up with the perfect plane in the looks department to escort the Vulcan. They should have bought Saab Drakens...those would have looked _great_ escorting Vulcans. That would have put the commies off on attacking Britain right from the get-go. "Comrade! Flying wings escorted by supersonic lifting bodies! These degenerate imperialists have stolen even more Nazi secrets than we did!" ;-)

Anyway, I'm having a ball turning one into a stealth bomber. I don't know if I'll build a model of one, but I've _got_ to do some plans of one just to see how the thing would look. Hell of a lot easier than the stealth B-52 version I came up with around two decades back on a very drunken night in regards to a bet. That thing looked _hideous_. That was one of the most horrible looking planes imaginable.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

Not a good idea. Both operational versions of the Vulcan had kinked wings. The B1 had a "Phase 2" wing that allowed it to actually manoeuvre without suffering buffetting. The Vulcan prototypes which had a straight leading edge were dangerous in a high speed turn. The wing kink on the B2 was more pronounced than that of the B1 to allow major redesign of the engine bays without reducing the wing area.

Reply to
Enzo Matrix

Remember those God-awful smoky engines on the first ones? It looked like they were burning crude oil. It's a horrible thing to blame that design on Barnes Wallis' influence, but it's very close to some of his late 1950's-early 1960's VG designs as shown in the "Project Canceled" book. Ah, that Canberra; now that was a _great_ plane. They actually did manage to make a jet-powered equivalent to the Mosquito. Considering its great success both in RAF and foreign service, it's been surprisingly under-represented in model kits. Very rare thing when the USAF purchases a foreign aircraft design for licensed production, but the Canberra was a world-beater from the word go. You just take one look at that design, and you can tell that it's going to handle like a dream. Put Sidewinders and a Vulcan cannon on it in a stripped down B-57 variant, and NV MiG-17s might have had to watch out. :-)

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

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