…about people who _do_ talk about secret weapons in the press? In the first instance, I’d go with a psychological explanation. These guys want to look like they’re in the know. But I can’t shake the suspicion that the Chamberlain government is leaking some things deliberately to scare the Germans. You can see the overt side of the campaign in the June “Parliamentary Air Soiree,” when the PM arranged a mass overflight of “mystery ships” for the edif…
…road northish. Nicholas Waller As for trains, thetrainline.com shows, for instance, eight no-change trains on a weekday (about every couple of hours) between Cardiff Central and Llandudno Junction, which is the station for Conwy (or you could go on to Bangor or Holyhead on the same train, and catch a jet cat for Dublin). Takes about 4 hours as it winds through the countryside (I did it the other way once, well, as far as Newport, where I was chan…
…9 miles per 1000lb gasoline carried. Indeed, it was originally intended to install long-range gas tanks in the KLM DC-2 and enter the new Fokker 36 in the race to compete for the handicap prize. (_Flight_, 1 Nov 1934: this is a PDF lift, so I’ll suggest searching for “Albury”). The figures cited above are part of a gruesome battle for sales in the early months of 1934. _Flight_ offers them in comparison with figures for the DH-86B, a biplane with…
…useum or memorial. (There are ‘bombed city’ displays in the RAF Museum for instance – tellingly of an English street in the Battle of Britain hall and the effects of bombing on a factory in the Bomber Command hall.) The virtual reality has extended to (nearly) getting shot in a trench but not (nearly) getting cooked in your home. The simple irony of Bomber Command seems to me to be that there was a drive by organisers and recruits that the W.W.II…
ErrolC There was a spot of bother with the installation in Auckland. http://rnzaf.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=Wartime&action=display&thread=7574&page=1 I’ve added a link at Flickr to a second photo that shows its (lack of) size better. It’s in a small corridor-room next to the Hall of Memories. Brett Holman Thanks, ErrolC. I was a bit quick off the mark with this post (for once) — there wasn’t anything on the RAF Museum website about the Beaco…
…ut photogrammetry; hopefully somebody has done or is doing that. The pitch instability is very obvious; it was even worse in the earlier versions of the Flyer. You can see why other aircraft designs at the time placed such an emphasis on stability. Neil: I don’t doubt the date is correct, but if we’re going to doubt the existence of the German newspaper we may as well be thorough! Ricardo Reis Correction: the intertitles are in spanish and not por…
…points there, Brett. However I think there’s a lot more aspects to it. For instance the ‘denial’ of the arrival of the Fw 190 as being ‘Curtiss 75 Hawks’ is the opposite to recognising or anticipating a new threat. The He 113 was, of course, a complete German propaganda coup, backed by what I think of as inadequate British intelligence – being able to analyse and quantify what the Luftwaffe fielded seems to have been very poor until midway into th…
…Dan Of course, ‘War’ gets in both under discussions of war and the War Office (ie the army), which might qualify your comments on other ‘military’ words. Brett Holman Good point! I hadn’t thought of that….
…is as a stability problem as such, though. JDK We tend to think of dynamic instability in aircraft design as a given, but it wasn’t always thus. In fact in the pre-Great War era, the objective was for ‘safe’ aircraft that were naturally stable. Both the BE-2 and RE-8 were ‘stable’ aircraft as a design merit; to assist with the observation role by minimising the pilot’s workload – as we now know to the detriment of the manoeuvrability and thus comb…
…x). Brett Holman Yes, it’s quite possible there’s no ebook reader software installed. Amazon makes some pretty slick, free Kindle software for MOBI, and there’s Adobe Digital Editions for EPUB, also free. Of course there are others too. jerrywarriner The PDF version refused to download, so I downloaded the document as an EPUB. I found a converter on the Web at http://www.convertfiles.com/convert/ebook/EPUB-to-PDF.html. It worked beautifully. The M…
