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Vulcan at eastbourne

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Didn't Concorde use Olympus engines
 
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paul cool said:
Didn't Concorde use Olympus engines
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Yes, as did the Vulcan ... but these were all variants developed for specific aircraft. An engine can work well in one aircraft and have problems in another - for example, due to airflow round the airframe. A number of early jets had problems when firing canon or rockets, as discharge gases got in the intakes and caused surging.
 
Paul Boddie said:
Guy Parsons said:
Ah, English summers. In our recent holiday there it was warmer in Sydney's winter than it was in the UK "summer" for much of June.
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Sydney in winter didn't seem so bad when I was there last year, although I guess you could say that it was cool in the evenings. Us northern Europeans would be happy to have winters as mild as that!
Paul Boddie said:
OK, sorry to the OP for thread hijacking, but the Vulcan and TSR2 were all part of the program of the day.
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Yes, it's sad that most of us never got to see the TSR2 in flight. I personally got to see the final operational flight of the Vulcan as a child purely by coincidence: someone alerted us to it - maybe it was the noise - and we all rushed over to the windows at one side of the school hall when this huge aircraft flew over. My understanding now is that it was heading for a fly-by of one of the aircraft factories responsible for its production. I have no pictures from that occasion, understandably. ;-)
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I was lucky enough to catch a Vulcan on a terrain following exercise in the Scottish highlands - the sight of it twisting and turning through a valley below me was something else!
Paul Boddie said:
Paul Boddie said:
Found the long Youtube doco about the cancellation of the TSR2 and blame seems to rest on Australia for cancelling their 30 plane order and we went for the inferior Lockheed F-111 which also ran into huge delays and massive cost over-runs. Also the UK labour party getting into power was against the cost of the project and didn't understand the plane and its potential as it was way advanced and way ahead of its time.
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Although I can understand unease at cost overruns, I see this as another example of the penny-pinching incompetence of the political classes who would then waste huge sums not even procuring something that, as one might have expected, wouldn't be available for another decade anyway. (Not that such behaviour has changed in the slightest since, either in the UK or elsewhere, but more on that another time/place.)

As another commenter notes, the intended strike role of the TSR2 would eventually be provided by the Tornado in one of its configurations, which perhaps shows how ambitious the project was.

(The documentary also provides enthusiasts with footage where the three English Electric creations - Canberra, Lightning and TSR2 - all appear in the same shot: the Lightning is the chase plane, but you can see a Canberra taking off in the background.)
Paul Boddie said:
One thing I found is that the Cosford TSR2 is XR220 and is pretty much complete as it was the next one to start test flights. The original and only one to fly XR219 ended up in a weapons target place and then was scrapped. A tragic end to what was a magnificent project.
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As the documentary shows, the way the project was destroyed would have sat happily amongst the excesses of Stalin's Soviet Union. And people wonder why there was a "brain drain" of qualified people to the US from Britain (that is probably still going on even now).
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In fact, it's surprising the TSR-2 got as far as it did as all the major government cuts took place sometime before construction started ... for some reason the TSR-2 escaped at that time, as did the project which became the Harrier.

Although their was much resentment (quite rightly) about the way the project was cancelled, its worth noting that it had already been 10 years in development and way over budget. Furthermore at least one test pilot didn't rate it that highly - while it was fast, it was not maneuverable at low level even in lightly loaded test conditions. Fully loaded it would have been a sitting duck for MiGs or SAMs

What's often overlooked is that the RAF got the Buccaneer instead - considered by many to be one of the best ground attack aircraft ever made, and certainly better suited to the actual way global conflicts developed - there never turned out to be a need for a supersonic nuclear strike aircraft.
 
sad day today at shoreham with the crashing of the hawker hunter onto a27 ,i will certainly be thinking twice about another display for a while ,poor souls on the a27 had nothing to do with the airshow ,
 
macropaul said:
sad day today at shoreham with the crashing of the hawker hunter onto a27 ,i will certainly be thinking twice about another display for a while ,poor souls on the a27 had nothing to do with the airshow ,
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Very sad news, sounds like 7 were killed on the A27, show cancelled for Sunday.

Stark contrast to the 1952 Farnborough show when a supersonic Vampire DH110 disintegrated in the air and a loose engine killed 28 people in the crowd. They flew on with the next "act" which strangely was the Hawker Hunter doing a supersonic demo flight, and the next day they had an even bigger crowd attend.

Regards.... Guy
 
Different times ,I think the a27 will still be closed tomorrow for further investigation,s
 
Guy Parsons said:
macropaul said:
sad day today at shoreham with the crashing of the hawker hunter onto a27 ,i will certainly be thinking twice about another display for a while ,poor souls on the a27 had nothing to do with the airshow ,
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Very sad news, sounds like 7 were killed on the A27, show cancelled for Sunday.

Stark contrast to the 1952 Farnborough show when a supersonic Vampire DH110 disintegrated in the air and a loose engine killed 28 people in the crowd. They flew on with the next "act" which strangely was the Hawker Hunter doing a supersonic demo flight, and the next day they had an even bigger crowd attend.

Regards.... Guy
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Yeh its all very sad and its the second air show crash in almost as many weeks.


 
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