by "Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
Published 09/21/2017 at 16:18
by "Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
Published 09/21/2017 at 16:18
Tags: Heinkel
; He 219
; Planelopnik
STARS: 2
Meet the Uhu.
You hoo? No, Uhu. It’s the German for owl. Onomatopoeic, you see.
Heinkel He 219, used as a night fighter in the latter years of WW2. One survives and is being restored by the Smithsonian in Washington. It was the first operational military aircraft to have ejector seats and was the first German military plane to have a tricycle undercarriage.
Heinkel were reduced to making bubble cars and scooters after the war, went on to build the F104 under licence and like much of the remaining bits of the German aerospace industry wound up as part of Airbus after a series of mergers.
"farscythe - makin da cawfee!" (farscythe)
09/21/2017 at 16:23, STARS: 0
we had a terror uhu round here a while back... made the news hilarious..
terror uhu keeps villagers indoors..
but yeah.. for some reason an owl was attacking the fuck out of people over here
"MonkeePuzzle" (monkeypuzzle)
09/21/2017 at 16:23, STARS: 0
"Yowen - not necessarily not spaghetti and meatballs" (yowen)
09/21/2017 at 16:26, STARS: 1
“German aerospace industry wound up as part of Airbus after a series of mergers.”
I hadn’t thought about this before. It’s highly likely, isn’t it, that Germany would right now have a burgeoning aviation industry if it hadn’t been for that nasty business that was WWII. But I guess... Catch 22... Aviation wouldn’t have evolved nearly as quickly if WWII hadn’t happened.
"Aremmes" (aremmes)
09/21/2017 at 16:36, STARS: 1
Uhu?
Or yoo-hoo?
"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
09/21/2017 at 16:42, STARS: 1
Maybe....or maybe not. Don’t forget that the UK ended the war with quite a number of aircraft makers all of whom were eventually nationalised as British Aerospace and then privatised again whereupon they gradually exited the civilian aerospace sector except for the manufacture of wings for Airbus. To emphasise the fact they’re now called BAE. On the other hand Airbus make fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft in Germany.
Truth be told, none of the European companies were big enough to compete with the Americans and their huge military contracts.
"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
09/21/2017 at 16:43, STARS: 0
Those as well.
"Yowen - not necessarily not spaghetti and meatballs" (yowen)
09/21/2017 at 16:48, STARS: 0
Yes, you may be right. And while Airbus is incorporated in France, I imagine they are as much a French company as they are a European company.
The UK may have been bigger in aviation today if it had a different agreement with the US back then, wasn’t it the US that was put in charge of long range bombers positioning us perfectly to take what we learned from that and apply it to commercial aviation. While the UK produced fighters, which don’t have as much of a practical application in commercial aviation.
"AuthiCooper1300" (rexrod)
09/21/2017 at 16:49, STARS: 1
What you should have asked yourself is “why has Germany such a powerful car industry?” Because for quite a while so many aerospace engineers went to work to the car sector and not to a “military-industrial complex” (which Germany was not allowed to have until later).
Famous examples are Ferdinand Piëch and Norbert Singer.
"Yowen - not necessarily not spaghetti and meatballs" (yowen)
09/21/2017 at 16:51, STARS: 0
That was the motivation for my question, given that Germany has such a large car industry, I thought it would make sense that they’d also have a large aviation industry if they hadn’t pissed off the rest of the world. Haha.
"user314" (user314)
09/21/2017 at 16:54, STARS: 1
Back in 2012 another Uhu was recovered from the waters off Denmark. They brought it up in pieces, but talked about restoring it. I haven’t been able to find anything since then, so it’s either been very slow going, or was such a wreck that they quietly gave up.
"AuthiCooper1300" (rexrod)
09/21/2017 at 17:00, STARS: 0
The US aviation industry “strangely” profited from that erosion of the British aerospace sector, don’t you think? It is a great mystery to me why Duncan Sandys decided at some stage (the Defence White Paper of 1957) that the UK did not need to develop fighters - ground-air missiles were going to be so much more effective!
Most importantly, Great Britain “won the war and lost the peace”. Postwar the situation was that the UK had to make do with old factories, old equipment, old everything, at the same time they made an astonishing national effort to pay their loans to the US (rationing did not end until 1954!) by trying to export as much as they could.
On the other hand, Germany and Japan restarted (had to) their industry from zero (new factories, new tooling, new everything) with the help of very soft loans, and the immense advantage of not having to spend any money on the defence industry, let alone huge armed forces.
"AuthiCooper1300" (rexrod)
09/21/2017 at 17:08, STARS: 0
The UK aviation industry was never going to be able to compete with the US aviation industry. First of all, the UK was piss-poor after the war; second, they had no political clout to sell their wares; and third, the US themselves were trying to sell as much as they could of their own stuff to the UK.
I am mostly talking about military aviation. To a large extent (very costly) developments in the civil aviation sector are funded by the activity in the defence sector. There was no shortage of brainpower of know-how but the UK just could not keep up.
"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
09/21/2017 at 17:11, STARS: 2
There’s not a lot left is there? I guess the money ran out when confronted by the scale of the problem.
Ideally you want to lose your planes in deep oxygen-deficient water. Norwegian fjords are ideal.
I seem to remember that there was still air in the tyres and fuel in the tanks.
"user314" (user314)
09/21/2017 at 17:31, STARS: 1
Clearly he was pinnin’ for the fjords.
"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
09/21/2017 at 17:41, STARS: 1
I took this at the Udvar-Hazy Center back in 2014. I would be interesting to see how far along the restoration has come.
"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
09/21/2017 at 17:45, STARS: 0
I don’t have anything to add to this excellent conversation. In history, context is everything. The slow death of the British aviation industry is a tragedy.
"Theropod" (theropod)
09/21/2017 at 19:16, STARS: 1
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/heinkel-he-219-2r4-uhu-eagle-owl