onetrack

Some structural strength is removed by bending a tube form, because the metal is thinned on the outside of the bend radius and compressed on the inside of the bend radius.

In addition, the tube form loses its roundness and starts to become an oval shape, when formed into a bend. This loses more structural strength.

But if a mandrel former is used when bending the tubing, and the bend is is limited to a large radius, then the loss of structural strength is minimised. 

You'll notice the bend form is a very large radius, and I'd be pretty confident in stating they almost certainly utilised a mandrel bender to do the tube bending on this aircraft.

The Oshkosh appears to be a botched landing - but the ATC at Oshkosh seems to have left a lot to be desired, with inadequate landing spacing appearing to be a factor in that crash.

http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2014/07/vintage-experimental-aircraft-breezy-to.html

I'm not sure if any cockpit structure would assist in further protection, but I guess it would better than nothing.

Gee, you'd certainly need a full load of pax every time, to pay for the amount of fuel being slurped by 2 x 2,500HP P&W R-2800's spinning 4 blade ex-Corsair props!! No wonder they lost heaps of sales to turboprops! 

That's a really nice-looking little 4 seater - but I don't know how they get 860 Nm range out of a 27 Imp gallon tank, with a 180 HP O-360!

That's over 6 hrs flying time, and if anyone has an O-360 that goes for 6 hrs on cruise RPM on 27 Imp gallons, I'd like to buy it!

I reckon after about 4.5 hrs at cruise power setting, that would see that fuel gauge raising a sweat with the pilot!

I'm intrigued by the use of the term "eco cruise"? What is "eco cruise"? If this machine can get a 912 down to 1.8 gal/hr fuel use, what is the secret behind this figure? It sounds like "hypermiling" in a road vehicle.

The photo of the aircraft on the flight deck is of a Supermarine Sea Otter, with a Bristol Mercury tractor engine.

What a beast! There's early footage of a 2- engine Superwal R2 on YouTube.

What an amazing aircraft for the era! What a staggering amount of effort was needed to fly it!

You wouldn't want a takeoff crash carrying 80,000 litres of high octane avgas, the fireball would be seen from 50 kms away.

Some more interesting reading on this aircraft in the links below. It should have been kept under cover and kept as a prime museum piece - but as always, military carelessness saw it left out in the weather until it was so badly corroded, the main spar was badly damaged - this means restoration of it, has now become a huge money-pit project.

https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2020/04/28/convair-xc-99/

https://www.reddit.com/r/WeirdWings/comments/qiep3t/convair_xc99_prototype_transport_4352436_in_flight/

I can't even begin to imagine what those contraptions would have been like, to climb into - let alone try to fly them! Hats off to some Luftwaffe pilots with outstanding abilities.

How many Mistels were built, and did any of them actually achieve what the Nazis hope they would achieve?

It seems like total desperation, simply relying on just an autopilot for bombing accuracy.

EDIT - No need for an answer, I found it. It seems like "ineffective" would be an understatement, for the level of Mistel design and construction efforts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistel

It'd be interesting to know just how much of Howards fortune got p***** up against the wall with the vast amount of work that went into this project, all for nothing in the final washup. Only Howard could afford losses like that. I recall reading how he spent $11M just for an extended stay in one hotel.

Gary's probably gone into hiding, to avoid this God-bothering idiot, below. I've never seen so much religious rubbish posted on one website.

http://www.the-testament-of-truth.com/truth/web/gary1.htm

Red, this reads like an ad for Silverlight gyros, rather than a regular description and specifications!

Ahhh, O.K., thanks for that correction, Thruster. I presumed it was a fan to assist with cooling - now, upon closer inspection, I see it's fixed, and I can see the shutter rotation mechanism.

I guess that makes more sense, to close off the airflow for rapid engine warmup in Russian winters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivchenko_AI-14#/media/File:PZL104_Wilga_AI14_PICT0072.JPG

The "Kremlin Taxi"! She looks strong, like a Russian tractor! It's interesting to see the Vedeneyev M14P radial has a turbine-style fan mounted in the cowling directly behind the prop, for forced air cooling of the engine. That's the last thing I'd have expected to see from a country noted for its bitter cold.

I came across a couple of good articles about the Vedeneyev M14P radial being reconditioned and upgraded by engine shops. They admire the engine for its robustness, but they also re-engineer it for increased compression. 

Barrett Precision Engines do away with the magnetos and replace the ignition system with electronic coils (with a fail-safe backup), designed a very good fuel injection system for the engine, and replaced the antiquated 5 ring pistons with modern 3 ring forged pistons, to lower oil consumption and to reduce friction. The standard engine produces 360HP, but the modifications make it produce 400HP with ease.

The original Russian pistons are fairly pure aluminium and therefore have a high expansion rate, which leads to piston looseness when cold, and high oil consumption. The Barrett forged pistons are an alloy taken from automotive racing engine design, whereby the alloy has a nearly identical expansion rate to the steel cylinder.

https://www.kitplanes.com/engine-update-new-life-for-old-radials/

http://www.russianaeros.com/vedeneyev/vedeneyev-engines/

Wow, that aircraft had better come with a good A/C system as standard! Imagine sitting in that, under that huge glasshouse, for an hour, on a 38° day!? Fried eggs, anyone?

That was a pretty remarkable effort for 1928, to produce a neat little biplane with a 150HP 5 cyl radial, that weighed only 499kgs, and which appears to have quite a satisfactory turn of speed, and ROC.

De Havilland obviously took Ettore Bugatti's famous comment to heart. When Bugatti's race drivers complained the heat from the Bugatti front brakes was transferring to the alloy wheels and melting the tyre beads, Ettore raged in response, "My cars are made to GO! - not STOP!"  He never did anything to fix the problem, just told his drivers not to brake so much.

The DH.88 Comet was obviously made to go fast, everything else was secondary.

Old K - I bet the Nazis didn't make any jokes about a twin-Merlin-powered wooden night fighter/bomber, held together with stale milk, that could see off anything the Luftwaffe could produce!

Yeah, but what about those mudguards?

It looks like a PA-12 Super Cruiser with a Cessna tail! Now, with some research, I find the PA-12 was the basis of the original design!

Somewhere in my 6 cabinets of thousands of books, manuals, brochures and historical information, I have several copies of the Australian "Wings" aviation magazine from 1932 - and in a couple of them, there's advertising and information about the Lascondor aircraft and the Larkin Aircraft Supply Co. I'll have to go hunting and see if I can find those copies of Wings and extract the information. 

The Lasco aircraft truly were the peak of Australian aircraft designing and building in the early 1930's, but the Great Depression ensured that aircraft designing and building would only be done by the Govt, after the Lasco era.

Herbert Joseph ("Jimmy") Larkin was the driver behind the Larkin Aircraft Supply Co, he was a decorated WW1 Veteran who initially joined the Royal Australian Engineers as a sapper, and was wounded in the chest by a Turkish sniper at Gallipoli. He was evacuated to Britain to recuperate.

Somehow he ended up becoming a Signals clerk for Gen. Sir John Monash and Gen. Sir Henry Chauvel (Signals were merged with Engineers in 1911, before becoming a separate Signals Corp again, in 1925).

Larkin joined the RFC in early 1916, was appointed a Temporary Second Lieutenant, then a Flying Officer - then he became a flying ace of WW1 with 11 confirmed victories. He was awarded the DFC by Britain, and the Croix de Guerre by the French.

He built his aviation business initially from around late 1919/early 1920, on a Sopwith agency. But when Sopwith folded in the Post-WW1 Depression of 1921-22, Larkin renamed his business LASCO and went on to greater and greater aviation enterprises all through the boom years of the 1920's - even starting a flying school in 1931.

However, Larkin was noted for an impatient and tactless nature, and these attributes, as well as the impact of the Great Depression on aviation activities, contributed to his total downfall. A defamation lawsuit was launched against him by Western Mining in 1934, after Larkin published some scathing and untrue information, and he lost - and his LASCO business was liquidated around the same time.

He claimed in his bankruptcy examination that he had personally lost his £1000 mustering-out payout from the end of WW1, plus a £20,000 inheritance, in his investment in LASCO - not to mention around 15 years of work!

He left Australia in 1937 and went to Europe (it seems that may have been France, but details are sketchy). With WW2 looming, Larkin joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in July 1939 and was appointed a Flt Lt in the General Duties branch. He was promoted to the position of Sqdn Leader in the Administrative and Special Duties Branch on 1 December 1941. In April 1943 he relinquished his RAF commission under some pressure related to revealing sensitive information to the press - and then reputedly served with American Forces as a purchasing officer - but once again, details are very sketchy.

His post-WW2 career is even sketchier, but he is reported to have worked in France, Switzerland and Germany, initially selling WW2 surplus, then Peugeot cars - until he retired to the Channel island of Guernsey in 1956, where he apparently indulged in his lifelong interest in horticulture, and he even published a book on Bonsai culture, in 1968. He died on Guernsey on 20th June 1972, in his 78th year, after leading quite an extraordinary life.

His very full life is recorded in the link below -

https://airscapemag.com/2019/05/20/going-by-air-part-4/

With a Volvo for a powerplant??  How did they make a Volvo go so fast, and did the pilot have to wear a hat, rather than a helmet? And was the Viggen super-safe in a crash? 

These are quite a nice handling aircraft, apparently. I have a friend in California who owns one. John H. Martin is his name, he ran a big private waste/recycling operation out of Bakersfield.

He gifted the business, and apparently, the Broussard as well, to his son Jeff - who is showing Juan Browne around the Broussard, below - and Juan is quite impressed with it. It's the French equivalent of a Beaver.

The Martins modified their R-985 in the Broussard with fuel injection, which helps the fuel economy a bit - if "economy" is something you could ever use in the same sentence, as "P&W R-985!

The design, viewed from the front or rear, certainly looks like the designers were having a wow of a time, chortling over how they could make the final shape as rude as they could make it.