Alternate Aircraft of Nations
- Thread starter Count of Crisco
- Start date
Another guest of our airshow in sunny Haiti, the Polish "Zero". Like Haiti, the Polish Commonwealth rose amid the troubles and the aftershocks of the French revolution, and like Haiti it fought alongside France for republican ideals and freedom. I think we can ignore that little authoritarian blip with the so-called "Vengeur du peuple", yes? His legislation was rolled back before the corpse got cold.
It all started with a little skirmish over the Russian border caused by a faulty compass and a misread map, thankfully the damages were rather small, if anything this little conflict showed that both nation's militaries were in no shape to mobilise for a full scale war, despite all the money poured into them so far. The Polish airforce put on a particularly shameful display, perpetually lost, attempting to attack a Russian airfield and barely managing to bomb a storage shed on the Polish side of the border.
And so, in the higher circles of the Polish government someone slammed his fist down and demanded that something be done, something big and impactful like put Poland in the vanguard of military aviation, not something merely adequate or good like manufacturing the French Brumaire under license. This led to an extensive study for the development of a revolutionary new fighter. Nicknamed "airplane number one", it would be a high performance monoplane with a very powerful engine, retractable landing gear, radio equipment, an enclosed and comfortable cockpit, everything that designers had been promising for years for a new generation of aircraft.
It would also be terribly expensive and long in development, even with French assistance, so the response from the higher circles was "Can't we cut some corners?". And so corners were cut to create a precursor to powerful and excellent "one", a first try that would serve long enough to gather practical experience and ease further developments while being impressive enough to heal Poland's pride, airplane "zero".
The Zero did deliver cutting edge performance despite some issues, the engine worked well but had a short lifespan, the aerodynamics were good enough but could have been better with more time for study and refinement. Ergonomics were passable at best and pilot comfort was something delayed to later versions in order to roll out something flyable as soon as possible. It was a hot-rod capable of outrunning practically everything aloft but requiring full attention from its pilots, being unforgiving and downright tricky to fly on some occasions.
It made quite an impression, aided by a good deal of publicity and a striking custom white and red paint scheme. Poland traditionally marked her aircraft with a red "patriotic star" ("red as the blood of our patriots"), often painted in a white band, and for the first Zeros the white was expanded to a special "vanguard squadrons" livery.
From this attention grabbing debut the Zero would go on to have a surprisingly long career, as the "One" never materialised, instead the Zero went from one revision to another, being tweaked to cure its most dangerous vices and improve pilot comfort and ergonomics.With Polish pride being soothed and military budgets shrinking as Europe headed into a era of peace and international cooperation the funds and the will for a new clean sheet design just weren't there. It was a career in the limelight, being the subject of articles, books, and movies, something natural for a high performance airplane which captured popular imagination.
This was helped by the fact that foreign rivals took a while longer to show up as other nations looked at the Zero's teething troubles and difficult handling and decided to take a cautious route with their developments. The first (and iconic) rival would be the Russian Lynx, the wild cat of the tsar.
Do you have mentioned a fixed wing MiG 23 several times before
Why do you think Soviets went for VG ?
There was an ELINT version and they also carried Harpoons for surface strike.
Tanker, Electronic warfare and COD versions were proposed. You may even be able to make an AWACS/JSTARS-lite version.
Problem with it was that it was a niche aircraft that was only made in small numbers for one navy. Hard to keep the costs down for that sort of thing due to the low numbers made.
This, if they got to sell some variant to another navies ( non navalized version to operate from air bases? ) it has more chances to survive longer. The Cold War not ending would work too, probably...
Probably for the same reasons the other people went for the VG - to much shorten the take off and landing distances, while still having the low drag aircraft once airborne.
I suppose then you hit against the other land based ASW aircraft, what would the Viking offer to make other nations pick it?
Yes and no.
At the time - yes. The F-14 for example, had an excellent range thanks to VG wings, as well as an outstanding instantaneous turn rate. The whole thing about the F-14 not being agile is down to the shite engines and a problematic flight control system, not the airframe. When those two issues were sorted by the D model, it was a match with most other aircraft. The Tornado squeezed in excellent performance, good short field ability and range into a compact airframe. Likewise the F-111.
The problem with VG is extra weight, complexity, maintenance burden and cost. In the 60s/70s it was worth the cost to gain the performance.
As technology advanced, no, they were no longer worth it, as fixed wings could be designed with the same properties. (hence why VG fell out of fashion in the 80s)
Difficult, even Lockheed's other option, the P3 Orion, is better at mostly everything except price, 27 to 34 million (which is not that big of a difference compared to the fact that you can keep an Orion flying without refueling for several hours) . IIRC the Koreans almost bought them, but it was cheap because it was the old Navy ones.
Nothing.
The S-3 was expensive for its size, due to having to cram a lot of capability into a small airframe, and was limited to 2 pilots and 2 aircrew. If you do not need to land it on a carrier deck, then full up ASW aircraft (P-3s, Atlantics, Nimrods et al) are much more cost effective.
The only way to sell more S-3s is for the US to screw the UK over less in WW2 so it can still be wealthy enough to afford a decent sized carrier fleet with a fixed wing ASW aircraft requirement, where the S-3 is cheaper than the UK trying to make its own.
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Sukhoi seems to have had better luck (plus a better job done?) with the VG a/c they made. But then again, their VG a/c were not fighters trying to pull great G load.
On the MiG-23, the wing box was redesigned twice, since the aircraft were disintegrating in mid-air under very high G loads that fighters with 'normal' wings were still capable to sustain. We can recall that Grumman made the wing box with a good % of titanium, and still was not rated for 9G loads.
That’s one take on things, but frankly ignores the plenty of structural and political positions that were all U.K. in how the U.K. economy developed post war and the shape of the RN, it also ignores things like how much Marshall funding the U.K. got for example.