Recent content by Shortround6

Sort of, the British had gap in the power range offered by domestic engines. A-S had the 300-340hp 7 cylinder Lynx engines and jumped to the 700hp + Puma (twin Lynx) and Napier was offering the 395hp H-16 Rapier and the 780-805hp H-24 cylinder Dagger III. RR-Kestrel was being phased out. Not...

The Gipsy Twelve was an expensive and complicated way to get 500-525hp, except that the Cylinders, heads, valve gear, pistons and piston rods were already in production for the in-line 6 cylinder and in-line 4 cylinder engines. This was a common way for the 4/6 cylinder air cooled engine...

Transport aircraft are all over the place when it comes to cruise speeds and ranges. DC-3 is especially bad in this regard because they used two different basic engines, the 9-cylinder R-1820 and the 14-cylinder R-1830 but they used different models of each engine depending on when they were...

I would too, but 70 miles out 3300 miles could be the difference between a couple of bad spark plugs ;) Thank you for all the work you did in scanning and posting those pages. A sort of structural problem for the Albatross is that they never used the wing structure for fuel storage. All fuel...

1938 "Janes" describes fuel capacity for the trans-Atlantic mail role as four 330 imp gal tanks (1500l) in the fuselage, two on each side of the central gangway. As passenger carriers they were given two tanks in the bottom of the fuselage. A 270imp gal tank (1277l) forward of the wing and...

I am not sure that any large British airliner of the 1930s ever actually made money for the company that built them. There were 23 different designs including the DH Dragons and Dragon Rapides, and only 4 designs were built numbers exceeding 22 planes. DH made money with the Dragon (202 built)...

Not sure it would have reached 660hp before WW II. Perhaps 575-600hp on 87 octane? DH did a pretty good job with the Albatross but Douglas had really shifted the landscape. Comparing the Albatross shows late 30s French 3 and 4 engine airliners were comparable in installed power and size/weight...

Renault 12R engine 19.0 liters. 500hp Isotta-Fraschini Gama 19.2 liters 580hp (?) Isotta-Fraschini Delta 26.7 liters 750hp (?) Lycoming 0-1230 was liquid cooled and had a relation to only one other engine in the Lycoming 'catalogue'. The XH-2470 24 cylinder engine. No relation to the Lycoming...

Americans were fond of tri-motors in the 20s and early 30s in order to handle engine out situation. But design philosophy changed over the years due to changes in technology, higher power to weight engines, better propellers, better construction and airfoils/flaps. A lot of the US did have...

In the 1930s there were several other things going on and sometimes the 4 engined aircraft gave an illusion of safety. 1933 (?) with fixed pitch props. Not too bad because cruise speed was only about twice take-off speed. Airliner with a cruise speed 3 times take off speed is either throttling...

Quite possibly. Trouble is it would not be competing with a DC-3 in original form. DC-3s used both Wright and P&W engines and went through several different engines of each type. Numbers I have used are for the 1937-38 versions. Yanking the DH-Gypsy King engines and replacing them with...

What is the point of a four-engine transport? By that I mean why use 4 engines instead of 3 or two engines? Does the four-engine transport carry more passengers per flight? Will the four-engine transport carry the same number of passengers further? Will the four-engine transport carry the same...

Thank you for doing this research and for the perspective. Many aircraft needed either minor or major tweaking/modifications from early versions to later versions. French officials tended to go hot and cold. The PTB (powers that BE) sometimes wanted to swap plane designs instead of fixing...

Source please. eight 250kg bombs = 2000kg I have made plenty of typos myself Do 215 was a Do-17 with new engines. Faster yes but everything else was the same. Do 217 had the new airframe. While much better it suffered from too much ambition and too little power, small wing did not help...

A lot depends on your engines. Four 920hp engines in a 40,000lb plane or two 1200hp engines in a 30,000lb plane or something else? you can save a lot of powerplant weight and structural weight if you have engines with better power weight ratios. We have been over this before. The LeO 451 fuel...