Qualities that made for a great aircraft that don't show up in performance stats.

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Hello PBehn,
I suppose they should have called them all Tornado and been done with it?
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Sadly the poor Tornado was a Typhoon without an engine, it was to have been the Vulture engine version. I think Hawker ran out of weather related names after Tempest. From wiki




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As mentioned in earlier posts:
We have the Spitfire Mk.I as compared to a Spitfire Mk.24.
The Wing is different, the Fuselage is different, the Tail is different, the Engine is different.
There are some obvious similarities in line but without knowing the history of the models in between, it is pretty hard to follow the evolution of one from the other.
The Mk 21 was originally to be called the Victor but cooler heads prevailed and the iconic name was retained (They must have learned their lesson after the morale sapping name change from Fighter Command to Air Defense Great Britain).
The difference between a Mk I and a PR XIX isn't really that great, from firewall to empennage its basically the same, as is the wing with some internal differences of course. The F 21 is more of a departure with a redesigned wing and longer undercarriage to support a larger diameter propeller.
Strangely the production Spiteful was the MK XIV skipping Mks I through XIII. It is speculated that this was because it was a laminar winged version of the Spitfire Mk XIV.

On the other hand the Lancaster was originally called the Manchester III, but obviously that's not a name to perpetuate
 
There was also a mention that the F6F Hellcat came from the F4F Wildcat and in that case, one has to determine what "came from" really means..
There is no doubt that the mission and environment are the same and some of the construction techniques are the same, but that seems to be just the way that Grumman built aeroplanes at the time. It would be pretty similar to saying that the P-63 came from the P-39 when the only pieces that they have in common are the doors.

I couldn't agree more with this statement. There are sources out there still that try to convey that the Hellcat was merely a further development of the Wildcat and nothing could be further from the truth. It was a totally new design for Grumman, but who could fault them for "borrowing" certain engineering concepts found in the Wildcat that didn't require a complete redesign? The Hellcat was therefore evolutionary rather than revolutionary, which in turn gave it enough family resemblance to be called the Wildcat's "bigger brother".
 
As usual its the Europeans to blame, the Dutch called a small boat a Corf and so the French made a smaller version of it, a corvette is smaller than a small boat.
 
Sorry guys, but the G-50 (XF6F) was started in 1938 as a successor to the F4F. As the design matured, several changes were made, but it started life as a follow-on.

Several design changes occurred as the design matured between 1938 and 1941: Low mounted wings, wider-track maingear, R-2800 instead of R-2600, hydraulic undercarriage, self-sealing tanks, higher cockpit, etc.

By the time the XF6F-3 flew on 30 July 1942, it looked a great deal different than it's original concept four years earlier.

The F8F was a clean sheet design, the F6F was not.
 
Until the era of Napoleon only 10% of the population spoke what would be recognised as French, on of the things he standardised was the French language itself.

The larger European countries are far less homogeneous than some suppose, and this may be more true of France than some others: as late as the First World War, fewer than half the native-born citizens of France spoke French as their first language (iTunesU; John Merriman). There were also disconnects between the language of the rulers and that of the people. In the case of England, until the 14th Century, the court and nobility of England spoke French; laws were written in French and Latin, not English. Scotland was split between English-speaking and Gaelic-speaking regions. Until the 19th Century, the court language of Austria was Italian The court language of Piedmont-Sardinia, the dynastic homeland of the Italian monarchy, the House of Savoy, was French.

Guillaume le Conquerant could probably speak comfortably with his liege lords, Henri I (King of France 1031 to 1060) and Philip I, and some of the aristocrats in France, at least those that weren't trying to kill him.
 
The larger European countries are far less homogeneous than some suppose, and this may be more true of France than some others: as late as the First World War, fewer than half the native-born citizens of France spoke French as their first language (iTunesU; John Merriman). There were also disconnects between the language of the rulers and that of the people. In the case of England, until the 14th Century, the court and nobility of England spoke French; laws were written in French and Latin, not English. Scotland was split between English-speaking and Gaelic-speaking regions. Until the 19th Century, the court language of Austria was Italian The court language of Piedmont-Sardinia, the dynastic homeland of the Italian monarchy, the House of Savoy, was French.

Guillaume le Conquerant could probably speak comfortably with his liege lords, Henri I (King of France 1031 to 1060) and Philip I, and some of the aristocrats in France, at least those that weren't trying to kill him.
Languages change with interaction, until the age of the train people didn't move very much unless there was something like a war. In England the 100years war was a kind of war of independence or at least a settlement, at the start all laws were in French at the end they were in English. I read somewhere that William Wallace wrote letters in Latin which remained in use widely in printed for until the 15th century. Young William isn't presented as a Latin scholar in Braveheart in fact he spoke quite good English.
 
Languages change with interaction, until the age of the train people didn't move very much unless there was something like a war. In England the 100years war was a kind of war of independence or at least a settlement, at the start all laws were in French at the end they were in English. I read somewhere that William Wallace wrote letters in Latin which remained in use widely in printed for until the 15th century. Young William isn't presented as a Latin scholar in Braveheart in fact he spoke quite good English.

I've read somewhere that the average people during the pre-railroad age tended to travel fewer than 20 miles from their home village. It wouldn't have helped that many countries -- including England -- limited the travel of people of the laboring classes for many years.

Certainly, until the Reformation, educated persons would be expected to read and write Latin. Indeed, this is something that complicates study of literacy during this time frame: a person who could, for example, only read and write English (to keep, say, business accounts) may not have been considered to be literate. Wallace was also, if I remember, from the part of Scotland where the first language of most people was English.
 
I've read somewhere that the average people during the pre-railroad age tended to travel fewer than 20 miles from their home village. It wouldn't have helped that many countries -- including England -- limited the travel of people of the laboring classes for many years.

Certainly, until the Reformation, educated persons would be expected to read and write Latin. Indeed, this is something that complicates study of literacy during this time frame: a person who could, for example, only read and write English (to keep, say, business accounts) may not have been considered to be literate. Wallace was also, if I remember, from the part of Scotland where the first language of most people was English.
In the post railroad age it wasn't much different, neither of my grandmothers went further than 50 miles from where they were born, same for most of their family excluding the world wars and those who worked on ships people didn't move a great deal. Middlesbrough close to where I live grew during industrial revolution, a huge number of Irish people moved there but then they were Middlesbrough residents, they didn't travel back and forth.
 
Sorry guys, but the G-50 (XF6F) was started in 1938 as a successor to the F4F. As the design matured, several changes were made, but it started life as a follow-on.

Hello GrauGeist,
To design a Successor to the F4F seems like a prudent thing to do at a time when technology was changing so quickly, but to call it even close to the same aircraft is a bit silly. A lot of paper designs get tossed about but when a real live prototype was constructed, it didn't look much like a Wildcat.

Several design changes occurred as the design matured between 1938 and 1941: Low mounted wings, wider-track maingear, R-2800 instead of R-2600, hydraulic undercarriage, self-sealing tanks, higher cockpit, etc.

I believe the R-2600 was retained with the XF6F-1 1941 prototype.

By the time the XF6F-3 flew on 30 July 1942, it looked a great deal different than it's original concept four years earlier.

The XF6F-3 looked pretty darn close to the XF6F-1 for shape and dimensions.

The F8F was a clean sheet design, the F6F was not.

The F8F wasn't really designed for the same mission as its two older brothers.

- Ivan.
 
As I said before, the F8F was a cleansheet design and it's development started in 1943, a year AFTER the F6F went into production.

The G-50 (Grumman designation for what would eventually be the XF6F) design process started in 1938, two years BEFORE the F4F went into production.

What started out in the planning stage was refined considerably over the years before the XF6F-1 was actually built (the contract for the Hellcat was signed in 1941). So what you see in the -1 (or -3) is not what was originally on the drawing board.
This should come as no surprise, really, as several successful types looked nothing like their early concepts - there were six proposed concepts for the P-38.

In regards to the evolution of the F6F's engine:
XF6F-1 - Wright R-2600-10
XF6F-2 - Wright R-2600-16
XF6F-3 - P&W R-2800-10
XF6F-4 - P&W R-2800-27
XF6F-5 - P&W R-2800-18W
XF6F-6 - P&W R-2800-18W
Final production:
F6F-3 - P&W R-2800-10
F6F-5 - P&W R-2800-10W
 
Yeah. English really got messed up by that French conquest in 1066
Correction, Norman and Breton conquest, we then spent the next 500 years fighting the French, that is we, the Bretons and the Normans, Brittany and Normandy now both being part of France, except the the Channel Islands or Isles Anglo-Norman as the French call them.
 
Sorry guys, but the G-50 (XF6F) was started in 1938 as a successor to the F4F. As the design matured, several changes were made, but it started life as a follow-on.

Several design changes occurred as the design matured between 1938 and 1941: Low mounted wings, wider-track maingear, R-2800 instead of R-2600, hydraulic undercarriage, self-sealing tanks, higher cockpit, etc.

By the time the XF6F-3 flew on 30 July 1942, it looked a great deal different than it's original concept four years earlier.

The F8F was a clean sheet design, the F6F was not.

Then again, F6F was not just a better version for the F4F, but a whole new A/C.
 
While Grumman was always looking forward and had many "irons in the fire" so to speak (like all aircraft manufactures of the time), from the sources I have it would seem that during early 1941 they were mainly focused on the production of the F4F. At this time the Wildcat was still considered a first-rate carrier fighter, until certain weaknesses came to light after meeting the A6M in combat later that year. So when the US Navy asked Grumman to create an improved version of the Wildcat during the middle of 1941 they were fully on board with doing so. Leroy Grumman and William Schwendler were about to make this a reality when they received requirements from the Bureau of Aeronautics that proved to be too much for the basic Wildcat airframe and thus they scrapped this idea in it's entirety. After designing a completely different aircraft to meet these new requirements, Grumman Design Number 50 became the XF6F-1 and the US Navy bought the contract with little hesitation.

Source: Hellcat: the F6F in World War II (Tillman)
 

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