Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnews!military From: fiddler@concertina.Eng.Sun.COM (Steve Hix) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: The Dam Busters (was Re: Strategic targets in Iraq) Message-ID: <1990Sep13.012203.16544@cbnews.att.com> Date: 13 Sep 90 01:22:03 GMT References: <1990Sep11.024301.14007@cbnews.att.com> Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 66 Approved: military@att.att.com From: fiddler@concertina.Eng.Sun.COM (Steve Hix) In article <1990Sep11.024301.14007@cbnews.att.com>, paj@gec-mrc.co.uk (paj) writes: > > The scientist was Barnes Wallis, previously responsible for the R101 > airship (scrapped by the Govt. after the differently designed R100 > crashed) Ah, yes! The "Capitalist Airship" vs the "Socialist Airship". In 1923 Vickers proposed to the British government that airships would be ideal for long-range passenger air service (and that Vickers should build and operate them). That particular government went down in flames (at the polls), and Ramsay MacDonald's socialist Labour government was voted in. They decided that two airships be constructed, one by Vickers and one by the government, the better of the two to base the airline on. (The government team, btw, had been responsible for the badly-designed R38 that had come apart in flight shortly after WW1. They had only calculated static loads for the R38, assuming that a safety factor of 4 would be enough to cover dynamic loads. The head designer was ignorant of high bending moments in turns at cruise.) Well, it went from bad to worse: The R101 team never tested the adhesive used to glue on reinforcing tape...it reacted with the fabric dope and made the airship's fabric covering as brittle as ten-year-old newspaper. They decided to use diesel engines (for safety reasons "in the tropics"), and didn't keep track of total weight. When they finally inflated it, they found the useful load was not 60 tons, but 35. (Vickers' R100 managed 51-tons useful load.) The R101 also turned out to be divergent in pitch. (The internal gas bags were let out to increase their volume, to get more lift, and no longer being constrained by their previous wiring cradles, could shift forward or back by as much as 14 feet! So much for center of lift...) They eventually signed the thing off and sent the new Air Minister off in it on a trip to India. In bad weather. Getting worse. It managed to get nearly 200 miles when it began to breaks up and crashed, then burned, near Beauvais in France. 48 out of 54 passengers gone. The government then gave up on airships and had Vickers' R100 scrapped. One of Vickers' engineers, working for Barnes Wallis, was a fellow named Nevil Shute Norway, better known as the writer Nevil Shute. His book "Slide Rule" goes into some detail about the whole fiasco. > [617 Squadron] also used Grand Slams and Tallboys on the Tirpitz in > Norway, along with a small spherical version of the bouncing bomb > which was dropped from a Mosquito (small 2 engine rec/bomber famous > for its Balsawood construction). Surely not *balsa*?!! Wasn't it made from plywood? One of the first applications of epoxy in aircraft construction? -- ------------ The only drawback with morning is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day. ------------