GENERALLY SPEAKING, I will fly pretty well anything offered to me so long as I can work out how to close the canopy. In 2011, this is a fairly safe statement.
There are aeroplanes – good aeroplanes, mediocre aeroplanes and some whose major threat to life is sheer boredom. Some are wonderfully agile, some even mildly tricky. But there are practically no aeroplanes which you take one look at and suddenly remember an urgent appointment in Botswana even as someone tries to hand you the keys. It was not always thus. Aviation spans just 108 years, making it far-and-away the fastest-moving endeavour in the history of mankind. And in the course of this there have inevitably been some aircraft, accepted in their own times, which in fact were – shall we say, ill-conceived; meaning utterly bloody dangerous. Passing over such obviously undesirable types as the Ohka – a specialised Japanese Kamikaze dive-bomber, and therefore unsuited to hours-building – I often wonder which aircraft in history I might have wished to walk away from….
NEW FIGHTER
It is the year 1916 and pilots of the Royal Flying Corps are being issued with a new fighter – the FE2b. ‘FE’ means ‘Farman Experimental’, which is the sobriquet applied by the Royal Aircraft Factory to any machine with an engine which pushes rather than pulls. The FE2b has a short stubby two-seat nacelle with the gunner in the front cockpit, the pilot behind him, and the engine at the back with the propeller just behind the wings. This obviously renders a rear fuselage impossible, so the tail feathers are mounted on four flimsy-looking booms braced with a cats-cradle of struts and wires. The more experienced RFC pilots – some as old as 20 and with as much as 200 hours – regard the ‘Fee’ with suspicion, because in these “modern times” it is well known that pushers have more wind-resistance than tractors.
However, the Fee does have two undeniable assets. One is that the engine is a 17-litre liquid-cooled straight-six Beardmore reputed to produce an unheardof 160 hp. And the other is that it positively bristles with machine guns. Well, bristles with two machine guns, anyway. One of which fires forwards. The invention of air combat has rapidly shown that the ability to fire forwards is vital – providing, of course, that you don’t shoot your own propeller off. The Germans have an interrupter gear which allows a machine gun to fire through the propeller, while the Allies, as yet, do not. So if you want to fire forwards the only solution is to put the gun at the front and the engine at the back….
So now you have a fighter.
For a short while it was even a moderately successful fighter. But as aircraft design progressed with war-time urgency the Fee’s 300 fpm climb and 75 mph cruise became hopelessly outclassed, there being little point in having a front-firing gun if you can never get anything in front of you. The FE is demoted to other roles and in 1917 withdrawn altogether from daylight operations over France. There were some 2000 FE’s produced, a large number of which are now extinct. So what do you do with the rest? Well, you turn them into night-bombers… Hmmm…
If you have a night engine failure over wartorn France – or if you simply run out of petrol trying to find your home airfield – it’s going to be awfully black down there, and your re-union with the ground destined to be nasty unless you have a most zealous Guardian Angel. And if you run into even a mild obstruction in an FE2b you stand a good chance of collecting your observer in the face – which isn’t going to improve him a lot either – shortly followed by 690 lbs of Beardmore plus radiator arriving in the small of your back. The mythical Lt Lecomber would like to walk away. Except that he has to fly what he’s bloody well told to fly…
DORNIER Do X
The year is 1929. On a lake half in Germany and half in Switzerland, an enormous shape emerges from an enormous factory, said factory being German, but in Swiss territory so as to be beyond the reach of the Versailles Treaty.
The towering shape, now floating placidly on the lake, is the largest flying boat ever built. It is called the Dornier Do X. Visitors are awestruck. The behemoth has a wingspan of 157 feet, a design grossweight of 55 tons, and is powered by no less than 12 – count them, twelve – Siemens Jupiter engines housed in six push-pull nacelles arrayed across the top of the thick monoplane wing. The visitors are similarly impressed by the engine room, which faintly resembles that of a U-boat. As the Do X embarks on test flying, informed observers note that while, yes, it does fly, it doesn’t actually seem to fly all that well.
Teutonically incensed, Claudius Dornier orders 160 Dornier employees to file on board for the 70th test flight. For reasons known only to themselves, nine stowaways sneak on with them. The test pilot takes a deep breath and rings down for full power. The Do X flies for about 45 minutes with this record passenger load. History is remarkably reticent about how much fuel it had on board – fuel of course meaning weight – but the smart money is on about an hour’s worth. But fly it does. It leaves the lake and soars up like an oven-ready turkey to it’s service ceiling…. of 650 feet. Aah… problem.
In a more realistic weight configuration the ceiling improves – to a whole 1 400 feet. The Do X is re-engined with more powerful American engines – much to the irritation of the German hierarchy – and things improve. Now the service ceiling becomes 1 650 feet….
Which is deemed enough to despatch the Do X on a world sales tour. The good part of this lunacy is that the Do X is a sort of flying photo-opportunity, and so gains a lot of publicity. The bad part is that it keeps going wrong, has ‘minor’ accidents of varying severity, runs out of funds at times, and ends up taking 18 months over what was planned as a brisk world tour. Oh… and nobody wants to buy it. Because quite simply this symbol of Teutonic extravaganza is a crap aeroplane, despite its 12 engines it is woefully underpowered for its weight. And the very presence of those engines with all their struts and supports interrupts the airflow just exactly over the most important part of the wing. The Do X is in fact a perfect example of exactly how not to do it…. Herr Kapitan Lecomber would have walked away from the Do X.
Me 163
The year is 1944. The Third Reich may be crumbling, but has remarkable engineers. They have designed the V1 and V2 missiles – the forerunners of future warfare. And now, faced with incoming bomber streams of quite appalling numbers, they have come up with a completely revolutionary fighter. It is called the Messerschmitt 163, or ‘Komet’. It is the first rocket-powered fighter in the world.
The Komet is invincible. It can power itself up to 40 000 feet in three minutes and wind up to nearly 700 mph in level flight. It therefore whacks up through the bomberstream, taking a quick pot-shot as it goes, then descends on it at nearly three times their speed. The fighter escorts can do nothing about it. What can go wrong? Well, actually, a number of things, starting with the fact that passing through the bomber-stream at that velocity doesn’t give you enough time to aim your canon, so most of the time you just simply miss. And having done so you now have certain problems all of your own.
Such as that the 163 carries only seven minutes fuel, and thereafter becomes a rather attention-grabbing high-speed glider. This the elite Luftwaffe pilots assigned to Komets can cope with to a degree…. But what really drives them to the Schnapps of an evening is the 163’s unique propensity for blowing up. The Komet’s Walter engine is a liquid fuel rocket, which means you have fuel (C-stoff) in one tank, oxidiser (T-stoff) in another, and when the two come together in the combustion chamber they instantly combust, producing your thrust. But these fuels are highly corrosive. And highly toxic. And not, as you might say, stable. Let even a tiny amount of T-stoff and C-stoff come together outside the engine and they also combust.…
A notable number of Me 163s have already blown up during re-fuelling – causing a certain sullenness among the surviving fuel crews – and you, the pilot, are careful to watch the fuelling process from afar. However, when you scramble into the cockpit you are aware that the fuel pipes are notoriously prone to cracking and that you are sitting right between the T-stoff and Cstoff tanks – not that that’ll make much difference if the thing blows up on take-off, which is also not unknown. They will also blow up on landing if the few remaining dregs of fuel are jiggled about too much.
Which is particularly disheartening because the Komet takes off on a wheeled dolly which you drop after leaving the ground, and subsequently lands on a skid under the fuselage – a crudity which undeniably tends to promote jiggling. As, of course, does getting the glide approach slightly wrong and whacking the thing through a hedge. Apart from these small matters it is true, oddly enough, that the Me 163 is actually quite a nice-handling aeroplane to fly.But, in 1944, it is the prospect of detonation which is causing the shake in Oberleutnant Lecomber’s hand around the Schnapps glass….
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