It Wasn't Like That in My Day! But These Wonderful Flying Machines Bring it All Back

Resident Veteran Chuck Unsworth looks back at some veteran aircraft, and he's not talking about the Nimrod! This wonderful contraption is an Avro triplane, the first all-British aircraft.

Last weekend the Shuttleworth Collection, based at Old Warden airfield in Bedfordshire, held one of its regular ‘Flying Days’. The Collection is a splendid display of vintage and veteran aircraft, in excellent condition.  Many have been restored to perfect flying condition.  The sight and sound of these aged aeroplanes as they taxi, take off and land is exhilarating.  The next Flying Day is on 3rd of August and promises to be a fine day out, but to me the static display, where you can get close to the magnificent craft and really scrutinise them, is the most interesting part.  Beautiful engineering and craftsmanship is everywhere.  Wood skeletons and canvas, steel wires, bronze, manganese, perspex, paper-thin sheet metal, machined steel, cast iron, copper, brass and so on.  It’s the sheer engineering and design effort that has gone into getting a man off the ground and, albeit precariously, into the air.

The salutary aspect of these planes is the flimsiness or delicacy of the envelope - the barrier between pilot, crews and the open atmosphere. It’s not something one particularly wishes to contemplate in these days of mass air travel.  Of course these machines are the fore-runners to today’s immensely complex aircraft with their multitudinous controls, computers, air-conditioning, fly-by-wire systems and, in the case of military craft, all the weaponry, surveillance and defence paraphernalia too.  Nonetheless, cockpit walls are still very thin and mostly unarmoured.

Peering into the driving seat of, say, a modern Typhoon or Jaguar or a Harrier jump jet, it’s striking how cramped everything is - there’s rather less room than that of the average saloon car.  Pilots are encased in a tight cocoon of technology, sitting on the front end of immensely powerful jet engines and flying at astounding speeds.  Apart from keeping the whole shebang safely aloft they have to deal with threats, identify and attack targets, and so on.  The work rate is huge – a bit like my occasional low-level reconnaisance and raiding missions to Sainsbury’s.

Hawker Hind - The RAF's light bomber in the late 1930s.

One has to admire the technical skills and abilities of today’s pilots.  But when you consider the risks involved they are certainly comparable with those of the earliest aeronauts, and the job continues to be somewhat similar, although making machines ever more complex does equate to building in more opportunities for things to go wrong - in my jaundiced view.  I’m reminded of an early astronaut describing the whole process of getting into space as one of being strapped to the tip of what amounted to a giant firework, with virtually no control over one’s destiny. Getting safely back to earth was even more fraught, Gravity being what it is.

The whole lesson of the Apollo mission disaster was that even the tiniest, simplest, component can be the root cause of major trouble.  A moment’s inattention to detail can prove fatal.

So aircraft designers and manufacturers need to have tremendous breadth of vision and real personal integrity. If you’re going to send people up in flying machines which you have designed and built, you need to have a care as to the consequences of your work, even though that work may be on a computer far away from the sharp end.  And certainly you should have fully understood the thinking and lessons of your illustrious predecessors.  Old Warden is a good place to start.

Hawker Tomtit, the RAF trainer during the 1920s.

Comments

[William29]

Good to see the Avro - this replica was designed by Ray Hilborne of Winchester. Ray designed many replicas, Supermarine S5 (1927 Schnieder winner) and the prototype Spitfire replica. I made many components on the S5. My admiration for the pilots of the high speed flight went up somewhat when sitting in the pilots seat one day I realised he had very little forward vision his head behind the top row of cylinders on a W configured engine ! The test pilot of the replica, over the beach at Calshot leaned over to see forward over the side bank of cylinders, the slipstream removed his bone dome, we watched in horror as it fell bouncing along the shingle not a million miles from the crowd that had formed. Beautiful machine, in Supermarine blue and silver. Sadly a later owner lost his life when it piled in.

[William29]

Posting the above - I checked up on Ray Hilborne - sadly I find he has passed on. Ray was one of those born teachers, who could explain the most complex subject, with enthusiasm, especially with a pint of real ale in hand. Always drinking from the pewter tankard presented to him by the design office of Handley Page, The inscription still raises a chuckle-
"It gives us great pleasure, too"