It would be interesting to see how much extra performance could have been wrung from biplane designs with the 1,000hp plus engines in single seated machines such as the Fury, Gladiator and Falco. Then the Handley Page HP 45 could have had a massive range and load boost with better engines. All of these machines could have probably almost equalled the performance of early monoplane designs just as the last generation of piston engined machines did with early jets.
AH Challange -> Biplane Evermore
- Thread starter DuQuense
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Is there many people who want a alternate Railway TL?. I mean , ive studied the GWR like a fanatic , and i essentialy did a century long TL based on its survival as an indipendent company. I did it because i was an avid graphic designer at the time , and i enjoyed doing semi-engeniring "exploded" diagrams , and i wanted a back story , a project. So I did a GWR 200 , with a new generation of trains every 10-15 years , coming up with a drawing and backstory.
Sounds fun, yeah... maybe you and The Dean should combine your efforts
Sounds fun, yeah... maybe you and The Dean should combine your efforts
Way ahead of you, see my thread on the Great Western
If your listening Dean , id love to have any kind of contribution.
The biplane Hurricane was meant as a convoy fighter that would only be able to be used once in most circumstances (I can't recall if the Landing gear were to be removed). The pilot would either have to ditch or bailout into the sea. Not a pleasant prospect on say the Murmansk convoys. The Hurricane would of been launched off of a frighter from a catapult like on a cruiser or BB
The idea of a 1000 or 2000 HP engine in a biplane is silly IMO. To reduce drag you need to go with cantilevered wings and if you do that you just might as well go monoplane.
The idea of a 1000 or 2000 HP engine in a biplane is silly IMO. To reduce drag you need to go with cantilevered wings and if you do that you just might as well go monoplane.
Those existed, certainly, but they used fairly standard monoplane Sea Hurricanes, launched from a rocket-powered catapult on the bow of a freighter- see the attached image. I think the landing gear was replaced by a rocket-powered trolley that was jettisoned on takeoff.
Some notes:
The catapult appears to be about 4 times the length of the Hurricane, so about 40 m long.
A Hurricane takes off at 80 mph. That works out, in the length of the catapult, to just under 2G of acceleration.
The ship carrying the catapult also carries a full cargo.
There were 9 combat launches of Sea Hurricanes from freighters, resulting in a total of 9 kills, 1 enemy aircraft damaged and 3 enemy aircraft chased away. In 7 cases, the pilots ditched and were picked back up (once after being shot down). One pilot landed his aircraft at a Russian airfield, and one was killed by enemy fire.
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There, ah, there is no attached image.
Not at my end, anyway.
The rest is interesting, and I remember reading a novel about the pilot of a plane in this role... difference being, it was one of the string bag ones. Probably the Swordfish.
Most of the roles i can imagine a biplane being useful in are already filled by helicopters, mainly anti-insurgency and ground attack, also spotting (i mean seeing where the enemy is).
I think that a biplane would require much less maintenance than a helicopter, which is a small edge.
So, two PoDs, delay adoption of helicopters or have someone design and build a small, tough, adaptable biplane (something like this) for export.
Umm, the pictures that I got were of the Cessna 337 Skymaster, the USAF O-2, which is a tandam engined high-wing monoplane.
There was however, a nice photo of one adapted into a jet-powered craft. Thanks for that one, I don't think I've ever seen it before.
As usual, the Russians have an imaginative solution: A series of experimental fighters capable of converting from a biplane to a high-wing monoplane in flight. The plane pictured is the Nikitin-Shevchenko IS-1, which was followed by the aerodynamically more advanced IS-2. The idea was to have a plane which could take off and land as a biplane and be able to switch at will between biplane and monoplane configuration as tactical combat situations dictated. Prototypes flew, but the type was never accepted for series production.
In fact, a Fiat CR 42 was experimentally fitted with a 1,010 hp Daimler Benz DB 601A
in-line V12 engine. See this Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_CR.42
I could imagine, however, that the estimate of its top speed is too high at 518 km/h (323 mph).
One possibility to combine the advantages of the biplane and monoplane, at least in theory, is to take off with the lower wing load of the biplane and then jettison one set of wings to have the reduced air resistance of the monoplane.
This was the idea of the Bi-Mono of F. Hills and Sons LTD shown on these photos. The name of the manufacturer is also given as HILLSON. The idea was to use the Bi-Mono as a reduced scale-prototype for a light fighter. The only time the upper wing was actually jettisoned or 'slipped', this seemed to have worked quite smoothly, the pilot did not even have to retrim the aircraft, according to this
http://www.nurflugel.com/Nurflugel/n_o_d/weird_05.htm source.
See also here: http://www.jaapteeuwen.com/ww2aircraft/html pages/HILLSON BI-MONO.htm
This was the idea of the Bi-Mono of F. Hills and Sons LTD shown on these photos. The name of the manufacturer is also given as HILLSON. The idea was to use the Bi-Mono as a reduced scale-prototype for a light fighter. The only time the upper wing was actually jettisoned or 'slipped', this seemed to have worked quite smoothly, the pilot did not even have to retrim the aircraft, according to this
http://www.nurflugel.com/Nurflugel/n_o_d/weird_05.htm source.
See also here: http://www.jaapteeuwen.com/ww2aircraft/html pages/HILLSON BI-MONO.htm
While the upper wing of the Hills and Sons Bi-Mono was expendable, there were also plans for aeroplanes where the upper, detachable wings had a light engine and a pilot of its own and could be flown back to an airbase. This was the concept of several high-speed bomber projects of Noel Pemberton-Billing. See these links:
http://airminded.org/2007/04/18/a-sister-to-assist-er/
http://www.nurflugel.com/Nurflugel/n_o_d/weird_05.htm
http://airminded.org/2007/04/18/a-sister-to-assist-er/
http://www.nurflugel.com/Nurflugel/n_o_d/weird_05.htm
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I meant that the O2 is a monoplane similar in size/role/layout to what i had in mind for a successful biplane. The Pterodactyl V pictured above is similar in appearance to what i was thinking.