Re: Fw Triebflugel page is Up!



Bill Shatzer wrote:

The heck of it was, the XFY and XFV VTOL fighters were -Navy- projects.

The thinking was they could dispense with the need for aircraft carriers to provide air cover for convoys and assault landing forces by deploying a couple of VTOL fighters on the fantails of each of the various ships.

Given the difficulties in getting the thing down in one piece on a tarmac firmly attached to terra firma, ya' gotta wonder who had the bright idea that that backwards landing maneuver could be successfully completed on the deck of a pitching ship.
The thing that would spook me is crosswinds; imagine trying to get the descent rate right onto a pitching deck while also tying to compensate for a wind that wants to blow you into superstructure or off the fantail.
The Royal Navy gets around this problem with their shipboard helicopters by firing a harpoon-like probe into the perforated deck of the landing pad and winching the helicopter down while maintaining upward lift on it. Maybe they had something like that in mind.
What really made the vertical landing on the Pogo frightening was the inability of the pilot to be able to judge his descent speed; he had a wind vane at the end of the wing that allowed him to tell if he was ascending or descending by which way the arrow was pointing, but it didn't tell you how fast you were descending, and trying to archive a slow, steady descent rate proved almost impossible to judge. If you were applying just a little less power than needed, you would begin to descend at a slowly increasing rate until eventually the airflow over the back of the wing wanted to make the plane flip to a nose-down attitude, and at that point you would really auger in in every sense of the word. It never got that far with the Pogo, but that's what happened to the French Coleoptere, although the pilot ejected about the time it had hit around a forty-five degree angle... by the time it impacted the ground it was going almost horizontally.
Lockheed never even tried a complete flying transition in theirs, limiting it to a conventional takeoff and landing with a temporary landing gear: http://www.eddh.de/x-files/dl_files/lockheed-salmon.jpg
....and only doing practice descents at altitude. Their results were the same, and the Navy wisely decided to ditch the whole idea before somebody got killed.
In retrospect, all these problems should have been foreseen before metal was ever cut on these two oddities.

Pat
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Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Apollo 11: A Night to remember
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    (rec.aviation.piloting)
  • Re: WWII Japanese Carrier Approach?
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    (rec.aviation.military.naval)