red750

Plan continuation bias - read report

Thank you F.V.

This is the photo I referred to in the opening post. Does anyone on this site own or have owned this aircraft?

Thank you.

Thanks for that. The photo was that of an Australiann Lightwing Ga-55. There is nothing on the Hughes Engineering website more recently that 2021. Have they gone out of business?

I was going through some of my photos and I came across one that had a 2-3 format rego, rather than the normal 2-4 format. Can a rego of, say, 25-0999 be shown on the aircaft as 25-999? In other words, can the 0 in that location be dropped? (Note, that's not the real number in question.)

The Sud-Ouest SO.6000 Triton was an early experimental French jet aircraft. It has the distinction of being the first indigenously-designed jet-powered aircraft to be flown by the nation, having been designed and manufactured during the 1940s by the French aircraft construction consortium SNCASO. 

Work on the French jet aircraft initiative had begun in secret during the Second World War, and harnessed research retrieved from Nazi Germany. Almost immediately after the end of the conflict, the French government issued a requirement for a batch of five prototype jet aircraft to be developed by French industry. To avoid delaying the overall project, it was decided to use the German-designed Junkers Jumo 004-B2 engine after severe development issues were encountered with the indigenously-developed Rateau-Anxionnaz GTS-65 turbojet engine. The British Rolls-Royce Nene turbojet engine was also adopted for some of the prototypes. 

On 11 November 1946, the first prototype performed its maiden flight, flown by test pilot Daniel Rastel. This feat was viewed by the government as being an important, and public, advancement in the capabilities of French industry and military capability. A total of five aircraft were produced for the test programme, including one for static testing only. Despite multiple aircraft been built and successfully flown, further development of the SO.6000 was abandoned following the rapid emergence of more advanced jet-powered fighter aircraft.

The Grumman XF10F Jaguar was a prototype swing-wing fighter aircraft offered to the United States Navy in the early 1950s. Although it never entered service, its research paved the way toward the later General Dynamics F-111 and Grumman's own F-14 Tomcat.

Keep on goin'. Might stop at 2000.

I have just completed the 1600th profile in the Aircraft profiles section. About a dozen have been completed by other contributors, particularly Old Man Emu, but I'm not scrolling through 1600 to count them. I've given up on trying to total the view counts manually, they will change before I finished. We'll have to get a computer to do it for us.

The Boeing–Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche is an American stealth armed reconnaissance and attack helicopter designed for the United States Army. Following decades of development, the RAH-66 program was canceled in 2004 before mass production began, by which point nearly US$7 billion had been spent on the program.

During the early 1980s, the U.S. Army started to formulate requirements for the replacement of its helicopters then in service, which resulted in the launch of the Light Helicopter Experimental (LHX) program. Nearly a decade later, following the refinement of requirements, evaluation of submissions, and the rebranding of the program as the Light Helicopter (LH) program, during April 1991, the Army announced the selection of the Boeing–Sikorsky team's design as the contest winner, shortly after which a contract for construction of prototypes was awarded. The Comanche was to incorporate several advanced elements, such as stealth technologies, and a number of previously untried design features. Operationally, it was to employ advanced sensors in its reconnaissance role, in which it was intended to designate targets for the AH-64 Apache. It was also armed with one rotary cannon and could carry missiles and rockets in internal bays and optionally on stub wings for light attack duties.

Two RAH-66 prototypes were constructed and underwent flight testing between 1996 and 2004. On 1 June 2000, the program entered its $3.1 billion engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase. However, during 2002, the Comanche program underwent heavy restructuring; the number of Comanches that were to be purchased was cut to 650. At the time, the projected total cost for the full production of the Comanche in such numbers stood at $26.9 billion. As early as the late 1990s, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had reported that it had "serious doubts" about the program, observing that the Comanche would "consume almost two thirds of the whole Aviation budget by Fiscal Year 2008". Multiple government agencies had acted to cut the number of Comanches on order, but, as a consequence of the heavy reductions to the numbers to be procured, the unit costs soared.

On 23 February 2004, the U.S. Army announced the termination of the Comanche program.

The LearAvia Lear Fan 2100 was a turboprop business aircraft designed in the 1970s, with an unusual configuration. The Lear Fan never entered production.

The LearFan was designed by Bill Lear, but not completed before his death in 1978. It was planned for production to be carried out in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in a new factory built with money from the British Government in an effort to boost employment. The aircraft had a pressurized cabin and was designed for a service ceiling of 41,000 ft (12 500 m). It could accommodate two pilots and seven passengers, or one pilot and eight passengers.

It featured a pusher configuration in which two engines powered a single constant-speed three- or four-bladed propeller at the rear of the aircraft. A purpose-built gearbox allowed two Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6B turboshaft engines to supply power via two independent driveshafts. The intent of the design was to provide the safety of multi-engine reliability, combined with single-engine handling in case of failure of one of the engines.

The aircraft was made of lightweight composite materials instead of the more common aluminum alloy.

Another distinctive feature was the Y-shaped empennage. Two stabilizers pointed upward at an angle, similar to those on a V-tail aircraft, and a short vertical stabilizer pointed downward. However, unlike conventional V-tails, there was no pitch/yaw control mixing on the Lear Fan. The downward-pointing rudder also served to protect the propeller from ground strikes during takeoff and landing.

After the cancellation of a planned test flight on December 31, 1980 due to technical issues, the first prototype made its maiden flight on January 1, 1981, a date officially recorded by sympathetic British government officials as "December 32, 1980" in order to secure funding that expired at the end of 1980.

The Lear Fan, however, did not enter production. Structural problems were discovered during the pressurization of the all-composite fuselage. The US Federal Aviation Administration refused to issue the prototype with an airworthiness certificate because of concerns that, despite having two engines, the combining-gearbox that drove the single propeller was not adequately reliable. Development was abandoned in 1985 after only three aircraft were built.

The three aircraft were rgistered N626BL (Bill Lear), N327ML (Moya Lear, Bill's wife), and N21LF (Lear Fan).

@KRviator

I suggest you re-read these rules , particularly points 3 and 5 or your posts may be removed.

red750  Moderator.

The Planet Satellite was a British light aircraft of the late 1940s. Designed to exploit new technology, the aircraft was abandoned after two crashes although the innovative fuselage was later incorporated into a helicopter prototype.

The Planet Satellite was designed by Major J. N. (John Nelson) Dundas Heenan, of Heenan, Winn and Steel, consulting engineers, 29 Clarges Street, London, W.1. Dundas had served in the RFC in WW1, retiring as acting Major in 1919 and had then worked at the family firm of Heenan & Froude, leaving in 1935 when the parent company went bankrupt. He served on the British Air Commission to North America in World War II, and communicated many of Frank Whittle's reports to the USAAF, which eventually led to the Bell P-59 Airacomet, the first US jet aircraft.

The Satellite was a futuristic looking four-seater aircraft built of Elektron, a 90% magnesium alloy, in a true monocoque 'teardrop' shaped fuselage with no internal reinforced structure. The wings were also skinned with sheet elektron. The UK manufacturing rights for Elektron were owned by F. A. Hughes and Co., which had acquired the license in 1923 from IG Farben in Germany. Hughes & Co. had been fully owned since 1947 by Distillers Company Ltd., (makers of Gordon's Gin and Johnnie Walker Whisky), who decided to finance the Satellite: a partnership established the Planet Aircraft Company, which operated as a subsidiary of a liquor company.

The Satellite was powered by a 250 hp de Havilland Gipsy Queen 31 mounted amidships driving a two-blade Aeromatic "pusher" airscrew in the tail, with cooling air drawn by a fan through a flush slot on the roof of the fuselage. Other notable features included a 'butterfly' V-tail and a retractable tricycle undercarriage with some Elektron components, with the nosewheel retracting into a reinforced keel made of solid Elektron that ran the length of the underside of the fuselage.

Breaking with conventional design and manufacturing conventions, Heenan declared in the July 1948 Aviation News issue, that the 400 drawings made were in stark contrast with the standard of approximately 3,000 drawings required for a project of that complexity.

Need more horsepower?

A Facebook video clip:-

https://fb.watch/oPemEMqaA2/

Three screenshots from a Facebook reel taken with Snip and Sketch, because these reels usually require a FB account. A Piper Arrow undercarriage which did not lower properly.

The Blackburn R.B.2 Sydney (serial N241) was a long-range maritime patrol flying boat developed for the Royal Air Force in 1930, in response to Air Ministry Specification R.5/27. It was a parasol-winged braced monoplane of typical flying boat arrangement with triple tailfins and its three engines arranged on the wing's leading edge. After evaluation, it was not ordered into production and no further examples were built.

With development of the Sydney abandoned, construction of a cargo-carrying variant powered by radial engines, the C.B.2 Nile was also ended.

The Airspeed Fleet Shadower was a British long-range patrol aircraft design that did not go beyond the prototype stage. A similar aircraft, the General Aircraft Fleet Shadower, was also built to the extent of prototypes. While the concept of a fleet shadower had some promise, the resulting designs were soon overtaken by wartime developments in airborne radar.

The Royal Navy envisaged a need (Operational Requirement OR.52) for an aircraft that could shadow enemy fleets at night and the resulting Specification S.23/37 called for a slow-flying low-noise aircraft with a long range, capable of operating from an aircraft carrier's flight deck. The specified performance was to be a speed of 38 knots (70 km/h) at 1,500 ft (460 m) for not less than six hours.

Five companies showed interest: Percival, Short Brothers, Fairey Aviation, General Aircraft Ltd and Airspeed.

General Aircraft submitted the G.A.L.38, of very similar general design to the AS.39. General Aircraft and Airspeed were selected to build two prototypes each and Airspeed received a contract on 10 August 1938.

The Airspeed AS.45 Cambridge was a British advanced trainer of the Second World War built by Airspeed Limited. It did not reach the production stage.

The AS.45 was designed in response to Air Ministry Specification T.4/39 for a single-engined advanced trainer to guard against potential shortages of current types, such as the Miles Master and North American Harvard. Airspeed's design, given the provisional service name Cambridge, was a low-wing monoplane of composite construction with a single piston engine and a tailwheel-type, retractable undercarriage. The Cambridge's fuselage had a steel tube structure, while the wings and tail were wooden, with plywood skinning. Pilot and instructor sat in tandem in an enclosed cockpit, with each crew position having doors on each side, one for normal use and one an emergency exit. A 730 hp (540 kW) Bristol Mercury engine drove a three-bladed propeller.

The first of two prototypes flew on 19 February 1941. Testing showed deficiencies in both maximum speed and low-speed flight characteristics.

There was no attempt to rectify these shortcomings, partly because there was no shortage of advanced trainers thanks to plentiful supplies of Masters and Harvards and partly because of the importance of Airspeed's other products, the Horsa and Oxford.

The Blackburn Perth was a British flying boat which was in service during the interwar period. It was essentially an upgraded Iris, and hence the largest flying-boat to serve with the Royal Air Force at the time (and the largest biplane flying boat ever to serve with the RAF).

The Blackburn R.B.3A Perth was designed as a replacement for the earlier Iris to Air Ministry Specification 20/32. Developed from the Iris Mk. V, the Perth first flew in 1933. It differed from the Iris by replacing the Rolls-Royce Condor engines of the Iris by more powerful Rolls-Royce Buzzards and having an enclosed cockpit for the pilots. Unusually, in addition to its normal armament, the Perth was fitted with a Coventry Ordnance Works C.O.W 37 mm (1.46 in) autocannon in its bows.

The Perth entered service with the RAF in January 1934, when the second aircraft was delivered to No. 209 Squadron RAF at RAF Mount Batten Plymouth. Perths remained in service until 1937, being replaced by the Short Singapore and the Saro London. One aircraft was retained by the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment until 1938. Only four Perths were built.

The Blackburn R.B.2 Sydney (serial N241) was a long-range maritime patrol flying boat developed for the Royal Air Force in 1930, in response to Air Ministry Specification R.5/27. It was a parasol-winged braced monoplane of typical flying boat arrangement with triple tailfins and its three engines arranged on the wing's leading edge. After evaluation, it was not ordered into production and no further examples were built.

With development of the Sydney abandoned, construction of a cargo-carrying variant powered by radial engines, the C.B.2 Nile was also ended.

The Blackburn B.48 Firecrest, given the SBAC designation YA.1, was a single-engine naval strike fighter built by Blackburn Aircraft for service with the British Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War. It was a development of the troubled Firebrand, designed to Air Ministry Specification S.28/43, for an improved aircraft more suited to carrier operations. Three prototypes were ordered with the company designation of B-48 and the informal name of "Firecrest", but only two of them actually flew. The development of the aircraft was prolonged by significant design changes and slow deliveries of components, but the determination by the Ministry of Supply in 1946 that the airframe did not meet the requirements for a strike fighter doomed the aircraft. Construction of two of the prototypes was continued to gain flight-test data and the third was allocated to strength testing. The two flying aircraft were sold back to Blackburn in 1950 for disposal and the other aircraft survived until 1952.

The Blackburn B-54 and B-88 were prototype carrier-borne anti-submarine warfare aircraft of the immediate post-Second World War era developed for the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm (FAA). They shared a conventional monoplane design with a mid-mounted inverted-gull wing and tricycle undercarriage. The pilot and observer sat in tandem under a long canopy atop the fuselage. The B-54 had a piston engine while the B-88 had a gas turbine driving large contra-rotating propellers. The radar scanner was mounted in a retractable radome in the rear fuselage, behind a long internal weapons bay. The program was cancelled in favour of the Fairey Gannet aircraft.