Classic British Flight Sim

Ralph... Lucky chap that but his wing didn't flex...He just bent it and it stayed bent The early Venom FB1s when overstressed on pull outs from ground attack flexed so far that they cracked and separated the bottom skin of the wings from leading edge to the corner of the wheel well. The wing then flexed back and the now cracked bottom skin jumped one edge over the other to overlap...Wasn't noticed for a while and then when spotted they were all grounded and we were given back some Vampire 5s to use till they modified all the Venom FB1, limited them to 6G and painted Red Bands on the wings.

Peter,

Quite right. The flexing started to go all wrong when he exceeded 7.5g. I feel that these design loads ignore the ‘adrenalin effect’ apart from the fact that some pilots, such as yourself, can handle g-loads much better than others - 2g and I've had enough. But then, all aircraft design is a compromise and ‘realistic’ evaluations have to be made. On adrenalin, reminds me of a copper I knew who got a call and with a couple of colleagues was chasing a burglar over some back gardens. They saw him go over the top of a high fence and he nearly got away but they cornered him and my pal said to him, ‘How did you get up that 10 foot fence back there because we couldn’t’? The burglar said ‘What fence?’

Crikey! You were very near the edge with those Venom FB1’s. Were you pulling more than 6g before the modification?

Interesting to read about limiting the Boeing outer ailerons use to the lower speed ranges. Sounds like a neat design to use the flaps speeds as ‘monitors’.

Ralph

Yes, we were near the edge Ralph...but in those days nobody actually knew where the edge was! The Venom was the first aircraft that I flew that had an accelerometer (G-Meter). The R/P firing was the thing that had high G pullouts...The dive angle had to be 30 degrees for the sighting system to be accurate and believe me the first time someone shows you a 30 degree dive at low altitude, you would swear it was a 60 deg dive when looking out through the windscreen at the approaching terrain. To convince yourself that it was only 30 degrees you would have to look out 90 degrees to port or starboard and then you could clearly see the angle between horizon and the bottom edge of the canopy was in fact only 30 degrees and not the much steeper angle that you imagined when looking out through the front. Also, you had to fire these rockets at a range WITHIN the "All Burnt Range" of the rocket motor...Any further out and the cordite would finish burning before the projectile got to the target and the trajectory would immediately steepen and it would fall short. To avoid passing too low over the target and collecting debris from the explosions or flying into the ground, it was necessary to break sharply upwards immediately after pressing the fire button and then as the nose came above the horizon a rolling pull to left or right to avoid overflying the explosion...Even then if you were firing High Explosive heads you would feel the "CRUMP..CRUMP" of the explosions beneath you. You never actually saw the impacts unless you were keen to die!

So you can see that it was a situation where a quick hard snap back with the stick to get that nose up above the horizon was going to produce some brief applications of high G on the Meter tell-tale needles. It was very common to see 8G or even 8.5G on that needle...even before we wore G Suits. The G would only be up at that high figure for a short moment in the break and not long enough to cause you to black or grey out. The G Meter would then show between 5G and 6G for the remainder of the breaking turn away from the target.

When we flew the "Red Banded" machines later we did not use them for R/P or 20mm Air to Ground practice...I think the Red Banded ones were the servicable to fly but not yet modified Venoms...When the full mods were carried out and they no longer had the Red Bands on the wings then we went back to normal weapons firing practice :flying:

Peter,

Thanks for the information. I had no idea that RAF pilots were regularly getting near the design limits. Incidentally, the Spitfires and Hurricanes et al, were stressed to 8g. After the WW2 they thought that they could save some structural weight and shaved off 1/2g.

Ralph

Heh, I bet some of the later Spitfires could dive faster then the early jets!