Plane Tales

With the arrival of jet powered airliners, commercial pilots entered a new world of high altitude flying in large swept wing aircraft at velocities approaching the speed of sound. They were often unprepared for the challenge and before long unexpected and unexplained loss of control events began to worry the world of aviation. These events initially occurred when an aircraft was upset from its normal benign straight and level environment and ended up in a high speed dive, something that was rare in the earlier days of straight winged, piston powered airliners. Hence, they became known as Jet Upsets.

Coffin Corner!

Upsets involve extreme attitudes

Less than perfect cockpit design often contributes to upsets

A Pan Am B707

China Airlines A300

The tragic result of the China Airlines upset

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Boeing Company, Geni, the NTSB/CAB, Guido Allieri and the JTSB.

In the world of Slavic folk tales there are giants in Ukraine but as aviators the ones we are interested are the giants that the fabled aircraft designer Oleg Antonov designed. This is his story.

The OKA1 glider

Antonov at the Leningrad Polytechnic

The OKA38 Stork

The An-2

The An-12 Cub

The An-24 Coke

The vast An-22 Cock

The huge An-124 Condor

The flight deck of the An-124

The mighty Mryia, An-225, carrying a Buran project space shuttle

The destruction of a dream, the Mryia was a victim of the Russian invaders who recently attacked Ukraine

Oleg Antonov

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the Antonov Design Bureau, the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, the Central Design Bureau for Gliders, Arpingstone, Igor Dvurekov, Dmitriy Pichugin, Toshi Aoki, Yevgeny Pashnin, Vasiliy Kob and Дизайнер: А.Безменов.

It’s logbook time again and you may recall that I was as freshly a minted A1 QFI as there could be and I had just left the training world to return to the front line on my old Squadron, the Fighting Cocks. I had been in Wales for

The Q Shed

Additional armed aircraft ready to go onto QRA

The F4 tank limiting speeds

A Soviet Badger trying to sneak past at low level

An F4 tanking from a converted Victor V Bomber

Decimomannu Air Base

How the ACMI Air Combat Manoeuvering Instrumentation worked

The Men of Harlech near Llanbedr

The Jindavik target drone

A frame from the Jindavik cameras showing a Sidewinder about to impact the towed flare target

My new navigator, Coolhand

A 43(F) Sqn Phantom

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the RAF, the USAF, RuthAS and Mike Freer.

It was a grand sight to see another German aircraft there, a Junkers W33 with its distinctive corrugated metal skin and stylish enclosed cockpit, a far cry from his own flimsy machine. The German pilots greeted each other and marvelled at how, in 1928, they should have met in such a remote place… some 3,300 miles, 5,300 km, from the Fatherland. It is doubtful that the Junkers pilot knew much about the young 22 year old airman with his flimsy little aircraft, but the gaunt and weathered Baron was well known to von Koenig-Warthausen!

The Junkers W33

Ehrenfried Günther Freiherr von Hünefeld

Alcock and Brown preparing for their transatlantic flight

Posing in front of the W33 named Bremen

The Bremen damaged but safely across the Atlantic

The flimsy, lightweight Klemm L20B

The Klemm airborne

Baron Freidrich Carl von König-Warthausen

The Baron renamed his aircraft after his countryman Hünefeld

Images under a Creative Commons licence with thanks to Monika Hoerath, Tomas Mellies, MIKAN, The Bundesarchiv, Edward N. Jackson, L’Aéronautique magazine, John Underwood plus images in the Public Domain.

Instead of a cargo of bored business men and excited holiday makers, this aged DC-10 was carrying 12,000 gallons, thats 45,000 ltrs of bright red liquid in a huge tank attached to the centre of the fuselage. This is the story of the fire fighting water bombers.

A vast DC10 converted to flying tanker operations

A forest fire

Mixing fire retardant

A fire lookout

The Morton Lake hotshots

The dangers of a wildfire are considerable, even during an evacuation

The dangers of manoeuvring a big aircraft at low level are considerable

Other aircraft are converted into water bombers like this PBY-6A Catalina

Helicopters deliver water from buckets

One of the few purpose built water bombers, the Canadair Superscooper

The magnificent Mars water bomber

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the USAF, John McColgan, signal mirror, DarrenRD, Tim Peterson, the USN, SSgt Ed Drew, Pierre Bona and Alex Juorio.

On the last tale, Sidewinders and Sparrows we talked a little about the history of rockets and missiles but it’s a big subject so this week I thought I’d expand on the theme a little and as I’m going to mention lots of rattlesnakes and sparrows, I should probably use the correct collective nouns… rhumbas and quarrels!

Rules of Engagement

JTIDS

The result of a Blue on Blue engagement

An AIM 54 Phoenix launch

An AIM7 Sparrow in flight

The APG63 radar

Radar discrimination

AIM7 Sparrow missiles on an F15 Eagle

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the USAF, USN, Daderot and the DOD Media.

Despite their obvious differences, Sidewinders and Sparrows often went together because they aren’t just the names of flying creatures and slithering serpents… they are weapons of war.

The Sidewinder

House Sparrows

The Rapier missile system

Chinese Fire Arrows

The Tipu Sultan’s artillery rockets

The RS-28 rockets fired by the Polikarpov I-16

The German R4M unguided air to air rocket

The nuclear AIR-2 Genie missile

A Genie launch

The AIM9 Sidewinder

The rotating reticule

The rolleron

Guidance

The warhead

An AIM 9 warhead effect demonstration

The AIM7 Sparrow

A QF4B killed by a Sparrow missile

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to images in the Public Domain, UK Defence Imagery, Wubei Zhi, NASA, Juergen Schiffmann, the USAF, David Monniaux, RoyKabanlit, U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation and the USN.

It was New Year’s Day, 2007 and the 96 passengers booked on Adam Air Flight 574 from Java to Sulawesi boarded their Boeing 737-4Q8 for their 2 hour trip. The Indonesian government had adopted a policy of deregulation in the country’s aviation industry which had resulted in a boom of start-up airlines, many of which were low cost carriers. This decision wasn’t matched with an equivalent ramp up of government supervision and control… the result was fierce commercial competition amongst the new airlines with little or no oversight.

Competition amongst the many start up low cost airlines was fierce.

The incident Adam Air Boeing 737, ready for boarding.

An Adam Air B737 taxies out.

Debris from the flight is washed up.

The USN ship Mary Sears.

Adam Air flight 172.

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to FLasset for logo, marlborotosca, Dmitriy Pichugin. the NTSB, the USN, the NTSC and ERRORHUNT.

Another installment of tales from my RAF logbook. I’m about halfway through my 4 year sentence at RAF Valley instructing those RAF pilots destined for the fast jet world. The first couple of years had been far from without incident and I should probably mention that I nearly lost my greatest friend to an accident but someone was watching over him that day and he survived.

Our great friend, Glen, a USAF exchange pilot.

Flying in the Hawk

The laying on of hands by Central Flying School

The Hawk T1 trainer

The horrible Spinning explanation

The laziest A1 QFI in existence

How do you get a pilot going? Well, in the old days it started with a hand crank!

The Hucks Starter

… Cowboy Land!

The Coffman Starter

A cartridge starter on the RB-57A

The DHC1 Chipmunk

The Arnold Benz Velo

The cycle of a jet engine

RN Seahawks simultaneous use of their cartridge starters

RAF Lightnings of No56 “Chicken in the Basket” Sqn at RAF Akrotiri

The SR71 Blackbird

The Riedelanlasser starter for German BMW 003 and Jumo 004 turbojet engines

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the Library of Congress, Jeff Dahl, NACA, US Patent Office, bomberpilot, Jeff Dahl, the IMW, the RAF, the USAF and Kogo. Attribution not possible for some images.