"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
11/13/2015 at 12:35 • Filed to: planelopnik, planelopnik history
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"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
11/13/2015 at 12:35 • Filed to: planelopnik, planelopnik history | 8
| 18 |
Welcome to This Date in Aviation History , getting you caught up on milestones and important historical events in aviation from November 11 through November 13.
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November 11, 1956 – The first flight of the Convair B-58 Hustler.
When the world entered the Nuclear Age following WWII, the problem facing the Air Force was how best to deliver a nuclear weapon deep into enemy territory. It was a time before the ballistic missile and the surface-to-air missile, so the conventional wisdom was that the best way to complete the mission was to fly high above enemy fighters at the highest speed possible. In 1949, the Air Research and Development Command (ARDC) issued a Generalized Bomber Study in which numerous aircraft manufacturers submitted proposals to build a new bomber for the Strategic Air Command, and the Air Force chose Boeing and Convair to proceed. By 1952, the Air Force selected Convair as the winner, and their new bomber was refined to meet the newly proposed Supersonic Aircraft Bomber (SAB-51) and Supersonic Aircraft Reconnaissance (SAR-51) requirements. Based on experience with their
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interceptor prototype, Convair’s offering was a fully delta wing aircraft with four General Electric J53 engines housed in pods beneath the wings. The Hustler was capable of carrying five nuclear weapons, with four of them carried on external pylons under the wings and a fifth housed in a large pod under the fuselage that also contained fuel. The Hustler had no internal bomb bay. The B-58 had a crew of three seated in tandem, and later models featured a clamshell-like ejection capsule that also included the control stick, meaning that the pilot could continue to fly the plane even when “turtled up.” The ejection system could safely eject the crew at 70,000 feet and at speeds as high as Mach 2, and the ejection capsule could also double as a life raft. When choosing the name for the new bomber, “Hustler” turned out to be an apt moniker, as the B-58 was the first supersonic jet bomber that could fly as fast as Mach 2, and, depending on payload, it could climb at nearly 46,000 feet per minute and set nineteen world speed records during its lifetime. But as fast as the Hustler was, it was expensive to procure, and it carried a relatively light bomb load. It also had a much shorter range than the
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. and following the introduction of Soviet surface-to-air missiles, the Hustler’s mission changed to low-level penetration, further limiting its range. And the fact that it carried no conventional weapons meant that its mission capability was limited. After a relative brief ten-year career, the Hustler was retired in favor of the
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. A total of 116 Hustlers were produced, eight of which survive as display aircraft.
(US Air Force photo)
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November 12, 2001 – The crash of American Airlines Flight 587.
If you’ve seen the movie
Top Gun
, you remember the accident that that took the life of Maverick’s friend and Radar Intercept Officer, Goose, when their F-14 flies through the “jet wash” of the plane ahead. Maverick loses control, they eject, and Goose is killed. That sort of Hollywood-contrived scenario is very real, but the phenomenon that doomed Goose is actually called
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. Jet wash just sounds cooler, though, and wouldn’t have left movie audiences scratching their head. It wasn’t until the 196os that aerodynamicists began to understand that it wasn’t the air coming out of the jet engines that was causing turbulence, it was the horizontal tornadoes of air coming from the wings that can wreak havoc on airplanes behind. All pilots are trained to deal with wake turbulence, and air traffic controllers routinely advise aircraft during landing or takeoff to be aware of wake turbulence from other aircraft. A number of crashes have been either directly caused, or suspected to have been caused, by wake turbulence, but perhaps the best known, and most tragic, was the crash of American Airlines Flight 587. AA587 was a regularly scheduled flight from New York’s JFK International Airport to the Dominican Republic. Shortly after takeoff, the
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(N14053) passed into the wake turbulence left behind by a Japan Air Lines
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, and the first officer initiated a series of very hard, complete deflections of the rudder to maintain control of the airliner. These actions placed roughly twice the amount of stress on the vertical stabilizer than Airbus had designed it for, causing the entire vertical stabilizer to break off. The plane entered a flat spin and crashed into a Queens, New York neighborhood, killing all 260 passengers and crew plus five more on the ground. Coming just two months after the
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on New York City and Washington, DC, immediate speculation was that the crash was another act of terrorism. However, investigators quickly ruled that out, and focused instead on the joint where the composite tail structure attached to the aluminum fuselage using titanium bolts. These components were found to be sufficiently strong, so attention turned to the first officer’s rudder deflections as the cause of the break up. American Airlines blamed Airbus for making the rudders too sensitive, and Airbus blamed American for faulty pilot training, but the NTSB
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into the crash found that while both parties shared some responsibility, it was the first officer’s “unnecessary and excessive rudder pedal inputs”that caused the structural failure leading to the crash.
(Photo by JetPix via
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)
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Short Take Off
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November 11, 1983 – The first flight of the CASA/ITPN CN-235 , a medium range transport and cargo aircraft developed as a joint venture between Spain and Indonesia. Powered by two turboprop engines, the CN-235 was originally designed for the military for use in maritime patrol and surveillance, but it also serves as a civilian regional airliner. Turkey is the largest international operator of the CN-235, flying 50 examples, along with the militaries of 25 other nations, including the US, where it is known as the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . (Photo by Aldo Bidini via !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! )
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November 11, 1946 – The first flight of the Sud-Ouest Triton, the first jet-powered aircraft to be built by France. Development of the Triton by !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ( Société nationale des constructions aéronautiques du sud-ouest ), which later became known as !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , began in 1943 as a clandestine program, hidden from the Germans who had occupied France. The first Triton was powered by a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! turbojet engine, and successive aircraft received the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! centrifugal compressor turbojet. Only five Tritons were produced before the project was abandoned. Note the air intake under the nose, which passed !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and between the pilots. (Photo author unknown)
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November 11, 1918 – The Armistice is signed ending World War I.
Starting just eleven years after the Wright Brothers’ famous First Flight, World War I saw the first widespread use of aircraft in battle, first as observation planes, and later as bombers and aerial dogfighters. By the end of the War, the British, French and Americans had suffered roughly 20,000 air crew casualties (killed, wounded, missing or POW), while the German Air Service suffered over 15,000.
(Photo author unknown)
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November 12, 1981 – The launch of Space Shuttle Columbia on STS-2, the second Space Shuttle mission, the second flight of Columbia , and the first time a spacecraft was reused and returned to orbit. It was also the first mission to utilize the robotic arm developed for the Shuttle by Canada. Officially called the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , it is more popularly known as the Canadarm. STS-2 was originally envisioned as a boost mission to push Skylab into a higher orbit, but delays in the Shuttle program made that impossible, and Skylab fell to earth in 1979, two years before the the launch of STS-2. (NASA photo)
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November 12, 1921 – The first air-to-air refueling is completed. While the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! aerial refueling via a long hose strung between two Airco biplanes is considered the first official aerial refueling of an airplane, a wing-walking daredevil named Wesley May lays claim to the actual first refueling, when he strapped a five-gallon can of gas weighing approximately 36 pounds onto his back and climbed from a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! biplane in flight onto a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . Certainly, this stunt was not meant to be a practical solution, but barnstorming was never about being practical. (Photo via Peter M. Bowers Collection, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! )
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November 13, 1907 – The first flight of the Cornu helicopter.
Built by French bicycle-maker Paul Cornu, the twin propeller aircraft is widely credited with the first free flight of a rotary-wing aircraft. The helicopter was controlled by a system that varied the pitch of the propellers, as well as vanes that directed the downdraft from the rotors. Cornu made several short hops, perhaps as much as six feet in the air, and each lasted less than a minute, though they gave Cornu just enough time to determine that his steering mechanism was ineffective and he soon abandoned the project.
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indicates that Cornu’s machine would likely never have flown successfully.
(Photo author unknown)
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If you enjoy these Aviation History posts, please let me know in the comments. And if you missed any of the past articles, you can find them all at
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.
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Smallbear wants a modern Syclone, local Maple Leafs spammer
> ttyymmnn
11/13/2015 at 12:45 |
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Fun fact: This arm cannot support it's own weight on the ground.
BringBackTheCommodore
> ttyymmnn
11/13/2015 at 12:47 |
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Always has been, and always will be, one of my all-time favorite aircraft. There are only two I love more: the SR-71 and the XB-70.
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ttyymmnn
> BringBackTheCommodore
11/13/2015 at 12:49 |
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In case you haven’t seen it....
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BringBackTheCommodore
> ttyymmnn
11/13/2015 at 12:51 |
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That is fantastic! I’ll finish watching it when I have the time. Thank you!
Learned something today, too, for some reason, in all the reading I’ve done on the Hustler, I never knew she only had a single seat up front.
Jcarr
> ttyymmnn
11/13/2015 at 12:52 |
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There’s an Oppositelock joke here that I feel guilty making...
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ttyymmnn
> BringBackTheCommodore
11/13/2015 at 13:03 |
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The fuselage was really quite narrow, as it didn’t require an internal bomb bay. I’m guessing that the space between the pilot and the middle crewman was for electronic gizmos, which were much bigger back in the day.
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BringBackTheCommodore
> ttyymmnn
11/13/2015 at 13:23 |
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Indeed. My dad and I had a conversation about that very subject about 20 years ago that’s stayed with me ever since. As a young Airman in the late ‘70s, when my Dad was working as a weapons mech on the F-111D, one of the computers in the plane, one of the smaller ones that I believe interfaced with the weapons, was easily 2 - 3 time larger and about 10x heavier than the Pac Bell 386 I used to own.
RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> ttyymmnn
11/13/2015 at 14:23 |
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I’m mentioning this so I don’t forget to later - the 22nd’s Aviation History would be a good time to bring up
Wiley Post
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ttyymmnn
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
11/13/2015 at 14:49 |
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http://oppositelock.kinja.com/this-date-in-a…
http://oppositelock.kinja.com/this-date-in-a…
I’ve mentioned Post twice so far, both in earlier iterations of this series. When the calendar comes around, these older posts will be updated to the format that I finally settled on. I saw that Post’s birth is coming up, but I had chosen not to write about him since I already had. But I might reconsider. I'm working on the 11/22 post right now. Thanks for the reminder.
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RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> ttyymmnn
11/13/2015 at 14:54 |
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I suspected you’d mentioned him when occasion called for it, I just had him on the brain for some reason, pulled up his bio, and went “oh, his birthday’s coming up” and thought of you. Don’t treat my once-off as any kind of mandate - though either one of us could do a much larger #planelopnik article on him. There’s a lot there.
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ttyymmnn
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
11/13/2015 at 14:56 |
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Not at all. I welcome the suggestions! He was quite a guy, a true product of his era, and a type we don't see much of any more.
user314
> ttyymmnn
11/13/2015 at 15:15 |
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The real reason the B-58 got axed:
Insufficient freedom carrying capacity.
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ttyymmnn
> user314
11/13/2015 at 15:19 |
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That, and the ICBM. With no conventional weapons capability, it was essentially obsolete.
sunnydaysam
> ttyymmnn
11/13/2015 at 17:03 |
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thanks for another great post, ttyymmnn. I never miss them and I always learn something even after all these years. btw; I remember American Airlines Flight 587 very well. We were in Mexico when that happened, so close to 9/11. I was at a bar where they had a couple of video screens going with no sound and I saw the news of that crash. Thinking it was terrorists again, I must have had a grim look on my face because the bartender came over, put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘don’t worry Sam. You’re in Cozumel. Nothing can happen to you here.’. It was actually a relief for me to hear it was an accident later.
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ttyymmnn
> sunnydaysam
11/13/2015 at 17:20 |
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Thanks for the kind words, and thanks for reading. My father was on a safari in Africa on 9/11, and they learned of the attacks from the BBC on a satellite radio. When he returned to the US a week or so later, he flew on a 777 with about 10 passengers. Sadly, I’m not so sure Cozumel is as safe now as it was 14 years ago.
The Compromiser
> Smallbear wants a modern Syclone, local Maple Leafs spammer
11/14/2015 at 18:59 |
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Follow up: To train with the arm and test them, the manufacturer has a mock up of the forward control section of the shuttle. There is a superclean room with an arm that is mounted to an air cushion carrier system behind it with the biggest glass wall I have ever seen.
There was also a dude with a robotic arm hitting golf balls. I am not judging.
Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
11/15/2015 at 19:27 |
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This guy probably doesn’t have anything better to do, especially on his birthday.
The Powershift in Steve's '12 Ford Focus killed it's TCM (under warranty!)
> ttyymmnn
11/16/2015 at 13:17 |
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This is adorable. I just want to give it a hug!
Also, great work as always. I’ve learned something new today - I’ve never heard of this thing before, so it was great to learn about its development.