Fast bomber for USAAC: how would've you done it?

[GregP]

Hughes was VERY good at making one of almost anything, They weren't too good at making 1,000 identical units as a production batch. They made one Spruce Goose, one Hughes speed record plane, one big 2-blade helicopter with tip jets, etc.

They did make a production batch of two F-11's, one of which Hughes himself crashed.

About the only thing they made many of was electronic in nature ... I'm thinking radars and guidance systems.

 

[pbehn]

Wait a minute, Hughes, of Spruce Goose fame, couldn't build a Mosquito?

By the time the concept was proven it was too late, to all intents and purposes the air war was over in mid to late 44, for the USA to make significant numbers of them they would have had to make the decision before it was really operational. It was an outstanding recon plane but USA had many to choose from in that role. It was an outstanding night fighter but the USA didnt need so many it was committed to daylight bombing. It was an outstanding light medium bomber but the USA had loads of other good A/C on order... The British screwed up with the mosquito there should have been fewer wellingtons halifaxes and many orther marques then maybe we could have sent some to the USA as recon and NF planes.

 

[Shortround6]

Not angry at all. I'm a bit tired of being either misunderstood or being deliberately misinterpreted, but that goes with a forum I suspect.

Unsurprisingly I disagree with Shortround's comment on my comments. He took the route of deliberate misinterpretation.

Did I?

Futzing with the A-20 is what generated the A-26; it was an evolutionary plane, not a revolutionary one. Stand them side by side (we have that happening right across from the museum now) and the family resemblance is obvious. It's sort of like standing a P-47B next to our Seversky AT-12 ... it is just scaled up a bit and has a belly for all the air and exhaust ducts to and from the turbocharger.

Lets see, different wing structure (two spar instead of single spar), different air foil, different flap set up ( first service use of double slotted flaps?).

From the right angle a B-29 and a B-17 look a lot alike too.

B-29 was just evolutionary because it kind of looks the same?

A-26 prototype was flying with remote control turrets more than 9 months ( or a year?) before a Production A-20 got a manned turret.

next question, you work in a museum restoration shop. Could you take an A-20 airframe and turn it into an A-26? What parts would be useful aside from the instruments and few nuts, bolts and fittings?

The A-18 Shrike could easily have been improved with a different, higher-speed airfoil, general cleanup, and a complete new set of engines. It would resemble the Me 110 and some of the Japanese planes, but COULD have been made a LOT faster with suitable attention. If you did it with attention to a possible bomb load, you would have a high-speed bomber with some bomb load that I would not care to speculate on without some design work that I am not interested in doing.

Here we go again, "could easily have been improved" with a different airfoil and different wing construction (original was fabric covered from main spar back) possibly different flaps. In other words a whole new wing.

A "general cleanup" would certainly be nice considering it was slower than a Blenheim, carried less of a bomb load and used more powerful engines. Hey, you never know "with suitable attention" you might even get it to be as good as a Blenheim

And the Blenheim didn't loose a large percentage of aircraft to undercarriage collapse.

unless you go for a mostly new fuselage you are kind of stuck with a pregnant guppy type bomb bay seeing as how the original didn't have one in the fuselage.

You don't have to do a complete redesign of the B-26 to make it a lot better. Some changes have to be made, but not a complete redesign.

Maybe, and this is the closest one.

speed of early versions is in question, it may have been faster than we think or it may have had cooling problems?

Starting with the early version you only save 716.4 lbs if you leave ALL the guns and ammo on the ground and only another 400lbs if you cut the crew to 3 men ( early Version had 5 man crew).

However the weight at which those 2400rpm speed figures are given is 26,734lbs (less than some A-20s in ferry condition) and is only 4775lbs above empty weight (no guns or even turret) and 1972lbs lighter than "normal" gross load. "Normal" gross only includes four 500lb bombs and shackles ( same bomb load as an A-20), 465 gallons of fuel ( more less than some early A-20s 400-540 gals) and 42.3 gallons of oil (just over 1/2 total oil capacity), 5 men and two .30 cal guns 600rpg, the turret with two .50s and 400rpg and the single .50 in the tail with 200 rounds.
In other words even if you leave the guns, turret, and 2 men out you still need to loose 856 lbs of either bombs or fuel to get down to the weight the performance figures are for.

Stripping guns and crew out of an existing aircraft doesn't do a whole lot for the speed unless you have some pretty high drag turrets ( the British were masters at high drag dorsal turrets) which the Martin turret was not.

So we are back to a not so simple fix or tweak if you want high speed, range and bomb load (or even two out of three) out of a B-26. Even stripped it offers only a slight difference in speed and range from an A-20 while carrying the same bomb load. Granted it offers much greater range or bomb load or both but then the speed goes down hill somewhat.

I don't think there is anything that could be done to make the Airacuda into a good aircraft unless they ditched the pods. Putting in two extra crewmen was never going to help performance!

Well, something we can agree on

Minimum change for turning the Airacuda into a bomber is put the bomb bays in the front of the nacelles, just don't drop bombs while climbing steeply

 

[GregP]

Take a powder Shortround.

We'll probably never see eye to eye, but I still love ya'.

 

[wuzak]

Wait a minute, Hughes, of Spruce Goose fame, couldn't build a Mosquito?

Don't think that it was that they couldn't, more likely that the didn't want to.

 

[wuzak]

Hughes was VERY good at making one of almost anything, They weren't too good at making 1,000 identical units as a production batch. They made one Spruce Goose, one Hughes speed record plane, one big 2-blade helicopter with tip jets, etc.

They did make a production batch of two F-11's, one of which Hughes himself crashed.

About the only thing they made many of was electronic in nature ... I'm thinking radars and guidance systems.

Didn't they make components for other manufacturers?

 

[GregP]

Let's see if anyone else, aside from Shortround, can see the family resemblance. See below. They went from a single-width fuselage to side-by-side, but the airframes are remarkably similar in many ways, from the dihedral of the horizontal tail, to the lines of the nose and tail cone and a lot more. They added a lower turret and, since the fuselage was wide enough for two in the A-26, it was more shallow. To get more fin area, they went to a squared-off shape, as they did for the wings and horizontal tail, too, but the general characteristics are almost identical.

The A-26 had 16% more wing area, 17% more power, and was overall 28% heavier for slightly heavier wing loading. Top speed for the A-26 was only about 4% higher than for the A-20.

If they had done nothing more than add the R-2800 to the A-20, they would have almost exactly the same performance, speed-wise, as they got with the A-26.

 

[wuzak]

You forgot to add that they made the A-26 with laminar flow wings....

 

[Shortround6]

Nice, Tell me to take a powder and then come back with another personnel attack or insult.

I think I am done responding to you.

 

[GregP]

Wasn't a personal attack, you said you didn't see the resemblance. I just wondered if anyone else did. No insult was ever intended.

Maybe you see the resemblance now? Maybe not.

Jeez Shortround, if I want to insult you, you'll KNOW it. If I say you resemble the north end of a southbound jackass, you know you've been insulted. I haven't made a single disparaging remark about you of which I am aware. Sorry if you took it that way. Maybe you are a wee bit touchy? But there was no insult in the post nor was any intended, as stated above.

Think happy thoughts. Maybe have a beer. I will. Cheers.

 

[wuzak]

There is a resemblance.

There often is in products from the same company.

 

[GregP]

Since both involved Ed Heinemann, I'm not surprised. I have a calculus book that belonged to his brother. A lot of his work was evolutionary and built upon the last design with some changes to make it more closely meet the spec.

My favorite Ed Heinemann design is the A-4 Skyhawk. Surely a good flying jet if ever there was one. Had a ride on one once, a TA-4J. I'd go well into hock to do it again ... but it's probably not in the cards.

 

[tomo pauk]

Let's see if anyone else, aside from Shortround, can see the family resemblance. See below. They went from a single-width fuselage to side-by-side, but the airframes are remarkably similar in many ways, from the dihedral of the horizontal tail, to the lines of the nose and tail cone and a lot more. They added a lower turret and, since the fuselage was wide enough for two in the A-26, it was more shallow. To get more fin area, they went to a squared-off shape, as they did for the wings and horizontal tail, too, but the general characteristics are almost identical.

The A-26 had 16% more wing area, 17% more power, and was overall 28% heavier for slightly heavier wing loading. Top speed for the A-26 was only about 4% higher than for the A-20.

If they had done nothing more than add the R-2800 to the A-20, they would have almost exactly the same performance, speed-wise, as they got with the A-26.

When both A-20 and A-26 were carrying 4000 lbs of bombs, the A-26 carried 900 US gallons of internal fuel, vs. 400 gals in the A-20. The A-26 also carried twice the number of machine guns, even before additional ones were installed under the wings or within them.

 

[GregP]

Yeah, the A-26 was certainly more capable. And history doesn't prove that upgrading the A-20 would not have been better ... it was never done so there is no record of what might have happened.

All speculation ...

I think the A-26 was better than any development of the A-20, but could not prove it one way or the other with data available to me today.

 

[tomo pauk]

Historically, the A-20 was upgraded. It was already a redesign of the DB-7 (the one with Twin Wasps). There limits were hit with latest versions, and capability to lug around additional 3500-4000 lbs worth of fuel and tanks would've been possible only in case such A-20s were built from unobtanium.
People might want to check out Joe Baugher's series of articles about the DB-7/A-20 to see both capability and weight grow with years passing.

 

[GregP]

I was thinking of the A-20 with 5 - 6 feet more span, a 4 - 5 foot fuselage plug, a new airfoil, and R-2800's with suitable props, cleaned up for drag reduction. Of course the spar would have to be updated for the new configuration.

They did that with the U-2, making it into the TR-2. One had an 80 foot wingspan and the other has a 100 foot wingspan. It was mostly done with a wing plug, keeping the tip and the root and adding wing area in between.

I am thinking the A-20 could have VERY effectively been improved and made faster simultaneously by the R-2800's and some intelligent wing mods plus a fuselage stretch. Of course the tail would have to be adjusted, too, to cope with the new power and speed.

 

[tomo pauk]

'New airfoil' = new wing. Toss also the new undercarriage. Basically, the 80% of aircraft is new. And it still does not have a copilot, as the A-26 had, as well as B-25 and B-26.
Might as well start with a new design, as historically Ed Heinemann did.

 

[GregP]

Let's see.

Kurt Tank added a plug and changed engines to the Fw 190 and created the Ta-152. They added length to create the Spitfire 21. They changed engines from the B-29 to the B-50 or KB-50. They added a plug to so many airliners I can't count them ... and changed engines and props. The DH 7 turned into the DH 8. They changed the tail on the B-17. They stretched the Do-17 into the Do-217. They added a second fuselage to the P-51 and made the P-82, and the Germans made a twin Bf 109 and a twin He-111. They added plugs to the C-141 and Boeing 747, DC-9, DC-8, and the Piper Cherokee to create the Cherokee Six. They added plugs to the U-2 or create the TR-2. They turned the Manchester into the Lancaster with plugs and extra engines.

Many airliners have different engines and the same airframe.

The list is LONG and distinguished ... and you say they could NOT do it with the A-20?

What the heck are you thinking? And why?

Make your case. I say it was EASILY possible and quite probable that the goals could have been met.

 

[wuzak]

Greg, the questio has to be is that worth the effort vs designing a new aicraft? Considering that you aren't just extending the wings, you are changing the profile - which means a whole new design for the structure.

Also interested to know what the fuselage plug gives you?

On the Fw 190D and Ta 152 series it was to restore CoG.

I don't think that the Spitfire ever had a fuselage plug. The differences in length were due to the different length of the engine (Griffons and 2 stage Merlins being significantly longer than the early Merlins), the profile of the spinner (much more extended on Griffon types) and the increase in rudder size.

The P-82 was an almost entirely new design - it took 18 months+ to get the prototype flying.

On various transports the idea was to give more cargo/passenger space.

Do you expect that the bomb bay could be lengthened, or another installed?

 

[GregP]

Hi Wuzak,

People are telling me it can't be done.

Bullshit.

It CAN be done. You are all just trying VERY hard to find reasons why it it was impossible. It WAS possible, and not with more effort than designing an entirely new aircraft. Try thinking of how it CAN be done rather than why it can't.

You naysayers just piss me off and I would fire the lot of you rather than miss a contract for an improved aircraft. The goal is to DO it, not find reasons why you can't. In real history it wasn't done, but that doesn't stop you from postulating all sorts of "what ifs" that are WAY more unlikely than creating a fast bomber from the A-20 via modifications to a plane that was a 340 mph plane to START with.

Geez.

I'd fire you if I were the commander. Tell me how it CAN be done, not why it can't. In real life, they went with the A-26, but it certainly COULD have been done differently.

I fully realize it wasn't. If we want to talk reality only, why are there so many alternate timeline and alternate history threads?