By the last year of World War I, the major combatants had made significant contributions to the aeronautical state of the art.
America created the Liberty engine. Germany produced the advanced Fokker D.VII biplane fighter. France gave the Allies the sturdy and fast SPAD XIII. And England, after a bit of a rough start, produced one of the finest fighters of the war, the S.E. 5A.
[Read more…]Before jet-age stretches of transport aircraft fuselage designs became commonplace, in World War II the Consolidated Aircraft Company demonstrated how it is done with the famed B-24 Liberator heavy bomber.
In 1941, ahead of America’s entry into the war, Consolidated made a design change to the Liberator that added nearly 3′ — 2′, 7″, to be exact — to the nose of the aircraft ahead of the cockpit. This gave all subsequent Liberators a longer, less pug-nosed appearance and provided greater space where the navigator and bombardier worked.
[Read more…]Charles Lindbergh’s May 1927 transatlantic flight is credited with stoking an unprecedented national sense of airmindedness.
A friend of Lindbergh’s, Oliver Parks, established Parks Air College that December and embarked on a mission to educate pilots and aeronautical engineers to meet the demands of industry.
Parks’ bag of tricks included having students build aircraft that were used in the college’s flight training program. The first of these was the P-1, a very conventional biplane powered by an OX-5 engine, its radiator placed between and just ahead of the main landing gear struts extending from the belly of the forward fuselage.
[Read more…]The big Curtiss C-46 Commando transport of World War II was a milestone in air transport. With a wingspan greater than that of a four-engine B-17, the C-46 used a pair of R-2800 radial engines to get it aloft at a gross weight of 56,000 pounds. It was the largest twin-engine aircraft in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II.
Military Commandos hauled troops and carried vehicles and light aircraft, loaded through a large aperture in the left side of the fuselage.
The C-46 in popular literature has been viewed as a maintenance-prone airlifter when compared with the smaller Douglas C-47. And yet the Commando’s weight-lifting and altitude performance made it the star of the ongoing Allied airlift over the Himalayas in the China-Burma-India theater of operations.
Peace in 1945 cut short the production of C-46s after more than 3,000 were built. The War Assets Administration (WAA) worked with the Air Force to make C-46s available to civilian operators.
[Read more…]Aircraft manufacturers have long been adept at leveraging designs to gain as much utility — and production — as possible.
The dual tracks of commercial transport and military airlift had more in common in the 1940s than today. It was an era before low-sitting, end-loading, and air-dropping cargo behemoths defined military transport procurement. The need for moving large numbers of troops and large numbers of airline passengers over long distances had some commonality back then.
World War II blunted the development of pure civilian transports for the duration, but big players in the airline business, including Pan American Airways, had important wartime transport duties. Pan American also had enough clout to influence the development of a super transport for the Navy that might one day also be an ocean-spanning airliner.
[Read more…]As the fledgling U.S. Army Air Service was still figuring things out, in 1924 it created the C-Class of aircraft to include cargo and personnel transport, doing away with an earlier T-series that indicated Transport.
And C-Cargo it has been ever since, starting with the original Douglas C-1 biplane, introduced in 1925.
[Read more…]The McDonnell Aircraft Company expressed a fondness for paranormal or spooky aircraft names.
This may date back to the company’s ambitious XP-67 fighter design during World War II occasionally referred to as the Bat or Moonbat, although the official nature of such a moniker is unclear.
Nonetheless, McDonnell — later McDonnell-Douglas and now part of the mega Boeing holdings — ran through a list of names with its ensuing jet fighters, including Phantom, Banshee, Goblin, and the F3H Demon.
[Read more…]A lot of moving parts characterized the development of aeronautics from 1941 to the end of World War II in 1945.
For the U.S. Navy, the creation of the twin-engine XF7F-1 Tigercat design in the summer of 1941 was a blend of technology and tradition.
A century ago in May 1919, three huge seaplanes set out to be the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic, albeit with stops en route in Canada and the Azores. One of the three, designated NC-4, completed the journey, reaching the final destination of Plymouth, England, on May 31.
The aircraft that proved capable of crossing the Atlantic in 1919 was born in desperate times during World War I. The German navy had perfected its U-boats in that war, and Allied shipping paid a terrible price. The U.S. Navy sought a far-ranging flying boat to combat the enemy submarines at sea.
Designed by Glenn Curtiss in collaboration with Navy engineers and pilots in the fall of 1917, the resulting seaplane was too late for wartime service. But its great range made this aircraft a natural for long overwater flights.
[Read more…]General Aviation News reader Jack Handy recently sent in a batch of U.S. Air Force photos that were gathered by Wilber Clouser, an Air Force Systems Command technical editor of handbooks after World War II.
One interesting subset of these photos shows aircraft from several manufacturers that were efforts to meet the needs of the oncoming jet age. Some designs shunned jets, using more economical piston engines as stopgap powerplants until jet developments rendered those aircraft obsolete in the early 1950s.
The problems facing the Air Force, and designers, revolved around jet engine developments and the need for range and speed unheard of during the recently concluded World War II.
In an era when cutting and bending aluminum was the mainstay of airframe builders, it was relatively easy for contractors to build a few prototypes. Designs proliferated in the last half of the 1940s, but not all bore the fruit of long-term production.
