Legendary German film maker Werner Herzog* took time out of his busy schedule to choose his favourite Engine Testbed aircraft and to ponder on what went wrong enough in your life to lead you to spend time on aviation blogs.

“Guten tag. Ich bin Werner. The flying engine testbed is a mother nurturing a cuckoo that in all too many cases will result in her own downfall. This cursed aircraft may carry an engine not designed to aid its own type’s propulsion, but is instead a parasite, often hanging with ugly imbalance from the exploited wing or nose. Yet again cruelty triumphs. Walk with me to the abyss to a place even more hopeless than that of the cropdüster.”

*Not Werner Herzog

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

If there is a God, he made the 108 in a state of anger. The baseness and obscenity of this design is as if God vomited on those wishing to bring the Taurus, Sabre and Griffon into the world.

Avro Vulcan

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds

Look at this haunted albatross, his gentle innocent face belying his murderer’s belly. The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of the Vulcan. Man’s hubris is never more loudly shouted than by the nuclear bomber. The sadness of the atomic end is sad only to us. Though Avro founder Alliott Verdon Roe had been a card-carrying fascist, Avro’s Lancaster would taken part in the obliteration of the Nazi state, each bomb seemingly loaded with high explosive irony. The blockbuster film is named for the bomb which can destroy a block of houses, and today the blockbuster film can destroy the imaginations of a block of houses. The Vulcan could have finished humanity and left space for the trilobites or woodlice to take over. He did not destroy us but instead was an essential part of the development of both Concorde and the Panavia Tornado.

Avro Lancastrian

Like a writer using Chat GPT, this Avro Lancastrian is assisting the suicide of her own kind. Look how she carries the precious Sapphire turbojet under her wing. The fool. She was haunted by Ghosts, Griffons and the troubled flow of the Nene and Avon.

Gloster Meteor

The Meteor was the master of moderation. While the Messerschmitt 262 fought until the end of the death cult that spawned it, the Meteor observed the War from a distance. It looked forward to a civilised future of quiet flights from Bristol to Dublin, and so gave the world the turboprop.

Ilyushin Il-76LL: Meeting Gorbachev

The young Sergey Ilyushin was a gutter cleaner who dreamed of balloons. With a boxer’s face and the sleek hair of a presidential candidate, his aeroplanes contained despair. How can one talk of Russia and the Soviet Union without addressing the sadness?

Apart from the fact that it fed on fish, almost nothing else is known about the extinct Spectacled cormorant of Russia. Perhaps the Il-76 was built as a flying memorial to the cormorant. It is said that Sergey was originally inspired by the albatrosses over the sea, so this would follow.

High-winged and beefy (I’ve been called worse) with space for a team of engineers, the Il-76 is an excellent engine testbed. Beneath its maternal wings it has coaxed the NK-86 turbofan, TV7-117A turboprop, D-90 turbofan, D-18T, PS-90, NK-93 shrouded propfan, D-236T propfan, 30KP and notably, the Franco-Russian PowerJet SaM146 and Indian Kaveri.

Hawker Hart

I have so much disdain for the Hart and I will not share its sordid story of Merlins, Napier, Mercury and Pegasus.

Even Dwarfs Started Small

The first aircraft to fly with ram-jets, the Polikarpov I-15bisDM, was, somewhat bizarrely, a biplane.

North American B-45 Tornado The Wild Blue Yonder

Fast, brutish and stylish, the General Electric J79 is the engine of the jet age. If it was silver and penetrating the ether in the most thuggish American style, then it had a J79. Be it the Hustler, Phantom, Super Tiger, Vigilante or even nutso land speed record hunting cars, the J79 is the unruly howl of post-war America in all its glorious lunacy. The North American XB-45 had the honour of taking it into the sky for the first time. 17,000+ J79s made the Cold War a lot more exciting and it all started with the B-45. Americana, so bland in its madness, has no place at my table.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Despite what the Bristol-knockers will tell you, the Bristol Hercules radial engine was a massive success: powering over 25 different aircraft types including the Beaufighter, Stirling and Wellington. The Wellesley Type 289 engine testbed was used to test the Hercules HE.1S and was vital to its development. Ok, so maybe we’re overselling it here. The Wellesley was one of several types used as testbeds for the Hercules, it was no more important than any of the others, which included the desperately charismatic Northrop Gamma and at least one of the painfully uncharismatic Fairey Battle.

In mythology the baby Hercules was nurtured by his would-be assassin Juno who had been tricked into looking after the baby she wanted dead. Juno suckled Hercules at her own breast until he bit her nipple, spilling her milk across the night sky and so forming the Milky Way.

Fairey Battle

(As an aside, if you’re including testbed use on engines in the positive column for any aircraft then you have to consider the often-dissed Fairey Battle a resounding success as it was testbed for the Hercules, the Taurus, the Sabre, the Monarch and the Exe. By this criterion the magnificently ugly Hawker Horsley is probably the most successful aircraft of all time).

Caravelle

The CFM International CFM56 is so boringly name its easy to gloss over the fact its massive significance. This Anglo-French masterpiece powered into the sky for the first time on March 17 1977 on the elegant rear-end of a Caravelle. 33,000 odd units later the 56 has conquered the world, powering all sorts Airbuses and Boeings. It was the Caravelle that ushered in this reassuringly unexciting revolution. It was also considered as a candidate to pioneer a rather more risky technology. In 1958, a nuclear propulsion option was proposed for the the Caravelle with an onboard nuclear turning the engine and replacing the need for conventional fuel. This radical, and probably terrible, idea was also considered for the Super-Caravelle, a supersonic design concept that fed into the later Concorde.

Hawker Horsley: Echoes from a Sombre Empire

They will tell you the Merlin engine was not named for the wizard – but for the British the name carried such a magical weight it might have well have been.

We must cry for the Horsley. It was was an extremely suitable airframe for the purpose of testing engines, being the right size for the larger engines that were coming along. Its bolted up steel tube structure meant it was easy to fabricate a new engine mount. It was strongly built and had plenty of drag which meant there was little chance of more powerful engines overstressing the airframe (which was an issue with Battle testbeds, hence some of them had fixed undercarriage). It also had plenty of fuel capacity for long testing flights, and docile flying characteristics that allowed engine testing to take place with little risk. The number and variety of engines that he trialled suggests to me that he was inherently suitable for the role – several models of AS Leopard, Jumo 204 diesel (and then the licence-built Napier Culverin), R-R Buzzard, apparently a Napier Lion though I haven’t seen direct evidence of that, and of course the Merlin. And the Merlin variant that it tested (contributing to its fitness to pass the 400-hour flight tests) was the important Merlin G, the first model with the parallel head, which became the Merlin III, which won the Battle of Britain. Furthermore, the experience with the Buzzard fed into the Merlin. And the experience with the Jumo 204/Culverin fed directly into Napier’s development of the wonderful Deltic engine – not an aero-engine but a huge contributor to postwar warships, torpedo boats and trains, some of which were in service until 2018.

The Horsely died the anonymous death of a capable manservant. The egotistical Spitfire meanwhile, high on the snorted ground bones of the proletariat, sang itself into eternal fame.

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Interview with former RAAF F-111 Aardvark pilot Michael Crain

The Royal Australian Air Force had the most formidable warplane in the region with the swing-wing F-111. We spoke to former F-111 pilot Michael Crain to find out more.

Best thing about the F-111?

It was fast with buckets of fuel and handled exceptionally well at low level.   

You could cruise at 480KIAS on the deck for 2.5 hours with only internal fuel.

…and worst? 

Visibility mainly due to side by side seating.

Complete this sentence: ‘The F-111 was better than the Tornado because…

“It could drop a bomb in a bucket MORE than 25 miles from base” (stolen from the Buccaneer Song)

Complete this sentence: ‘The F-111 was better than the F/A-18 because…

…we could hit the targets!  We had friends 🙂

What are the pros and cons of side-by-side seating? 

Crew coordinations somewhat better. You can see what your crew mate is doing and someone brought in a knee tap as the signal when certain switch changes were made by the NAV. Resources can be shared so you don’t need to take two sets of everything and on long flights the Nav can prepare a gourmet meal while the pilot makes sure the autopilot behaves.

The Nav can act as a co-pilot during non tactical phases. That is how we trained them. And many were pretty good pilots once the jet was cleaned up and out of the circuit/instrument pattern. That’s where it was most difficult to fly well. 

The biggest negatives would be lookout. The Nav spends a lot of time heads down so can be vulnerable from the right.  One can offset this disadvantage by flying bloody fast and keeping all the bad guys in front where you can see them on the radar. This was very effective as we were looking up at any threats despite not having a pulse doppler radar and we were able to stay in ground clutter and limit observability from ground threats.

What is the fastest you ever took a F-111? 

M2.2 at 50,000’ We were still climbing at 10,000 fpm at start of level off and I’d been trying to keep it at about M2. It was a rocketship! The jet was straight out of the AUP (Avionics Update Program) for its test flight schedule and my 3rd last flight.I have 1250kts Ground speed in my log book on a previous Mach 2 run with a student.   

Was it still viable when retired?

Oh for sure.   It was constantly being updated and better than when I left.  The AUP meant we could do mission software upgrades, Paveway 3 and AGM-142 with a huge standoff range. We had better electronic warfare kit and Night Vision Goggles etc.  Obviously it’s not stealthy but we were never a poor cousin to anyone in the big exercises.It would always depend on the opposition but I can’t remember ever being shot by any of our regional “opponents” on exercise.

For example I spent a week fighting Eagles in the Northern Territory on a RAAF FCI (Fighter Weapons School equivalent).  They had AMRAAM and we were able to avoid them enough to stay out of range.   Even after our F-18 escort had all ‘kill removed’ (left exercise after being ‘shot down’).   

It’s harder at exercises such as Cope Thunder and Red Flag where the airspace is more limiting and forces everyone through a fairly narrow flightpath to do the same, but the point of those exercises is to push everyone through their limits and while you may get through the fighters you still have the ground defenses to get through.   Fairly similar to what the Tornados saw when they were low in the first phase of Desert Storm.

What kind of upgrades did it need? 

A head up display would have been good. Our deployment of Sidewinders was clunky and involved selecting the fuel transfer to the inboard or outboard station to uncage the seeker.   Which made it a two person job! A case of HOTAS + a Nav!

While the Avionics Update program made the mission system and flight controls digital, it was politically sold as a maintainabilty update and not as a mission enhancement program and thus the left side of the cockpit was basically untouched.   In reality it was a massive enhancement to our mission capability and that progress was ongoing after I moved on.

Datalink, better anti air capability for self defence,JDAMs and other J series weapons

Describe your most memorable mission 

That’s quite hard to answer. Things that stand out are dogfighting Tornados and Hawks in Malaysia, shooting an F-16 at Red Flag, dropping a stick of high drags in the Cope Thunder using the pitot probe as sight (with the Nav who bombed Gaddafi’s Ilyushin in Eldorado Canyon whose PaveTack video was shown to the world), watching a Mk 84 bomb detonate beneath me and seeing the massive shockwave dome of rarefied air, to going head-to-head with an F/A-18 low level at over 1000kts closure while guns tracking.

But perhaps one I felt a sense of achievement was at Red Flag. Loaded with live Mk 82 bombs our target was an airfield in the range complex where we planned to simultaneously attack in pairs spread formation with just enough separation to stay out of each others frag envelope.  On taxi our INS decided to head to Caesars Palace for an early beer, basically turning us into a 40-tonne-dump truck. I’d experienced the same problem on the range at home not before and after dropping all my practice bombs about 500 feet short doing how we had been trained for degraded visual delivery modes, I worked through the systems and developed a strategy in case it happened again.   And now it had and it was time to test the theory.   

Anyway after talking the Nav out of joining the INS at the bar we launched, fought our way through blue air.  Jinked and chaffed though the layers of SA3s SA6s and ZSU-23-4s and eventually rolled out long enough to line up the target at exactly 550KIAS and 500’ dead level.  The sight was now just a manually depressed dot with extra dialled in to account for AoA.  No stabilisation, nothing. Took a deep breath, said a prayer and released.

We then fought our way back to the egress point while providing fighter escort for the B1Bones since Blue air had all bingoed out by then. After landing we had the big debrief and had to nervously await the results of all the strikers.  Direct Hits, job done, a sigh of relief and that was the end of my Red Flag which I suppose was as close to combat as I ever got. So nothing really compared to those who have served in theatre.

What did maintainers think of the F-111? 

At the Squadron level they loved what they did although they often put in long hours to have the jets mission ready.   Our servicability rates where pretty good despite it being a relatively old airframe. There was a lot of pride throughout the maintenance organisations within the group.  From depot level down to the squadron maintenance.

Which aircraft types did you feel competitive with and which did you look down on? 

We felt we could hold our own against anyone.   We trained so much with 4th generation fighters especially our own F-18s that we developed tactics to deal with them.   We were quite aggressive in our own formation self defence which helped get the job done and notch up quite a few kills on bad guys with poor SA.  There is not much more fun than getting a tone on a F-18 or F-16 and letting loose. And didn’t they hate being shot by a pig!

We didn’t look down on anyone, however we felt we had a pretty good advantage over anyone in the region.   Especially with respect to training and competence with our equipment.   But one can never be overconfident so all threats were treated with respect. 

A big advantage we had was simply an honest, no holds barred and thorough debrief as one is accustomed to in Western forces. Lets just say that some/many regional forces don’t like losing face which does detract from learning opportunities.   

What was the role of RAAF F-111s and is this adequately performed by the current types? 

Land and Maritime Strike,

Reconnaissance

Precision Air Support (Tank Plinking)

Air Defence (against non fighter type)

CAIRS (in the G model)

Central gas Light and Heating (side job for major events)

The RAAF is highly capable now.   While no individual asset probably has the capability of an F111 on its own and in its time, the force structure is excellent.   Super Hornets including the Growlers are highly capable.   With F35s, KC-30 tankers and Wedgetails they can project Air Power successfully within the region and beyond.   One of our old mottos was “do more with less” and we were very good at getting the most of what we had, but since the mid 90s the RAAF has been working on plugging the gaps in its own capability.

Tell me something I don’t know about the F-111? 

We could use the Pavetack to get a sidewinder lock on a non manoeuvring target in the dark. 

I helped develop no lock intercepts from an ex Mirage pilot. We could be vectored (or do it ourselves) onto a target and complete an intertept where we rolled out behind the target.  The Pavetack could be cued to the same reference as an AIM9 and the Nav would talk the pilot up/down/left right etc to get a lock.  Sort of boring and interesting at the same time!

What should I have asked you? 

Who’s the best pilot? Although probably best you didn’t since unfortunately it’s not me!

Do ‘dump and burns’ have any tactical application?

Dump and burns are just a party trick although the quickest way to reduce wight at around 4000lbs/minute.   Simply light the afterburners, turn on fuel dump and try not to go supersonic through the High St :).  It really has no practical function although maybe it would confuse an IR missile.  It just feels the same as every time you select full afterburner – 5 distinct kicks as each zone lights up (that’s what select zone5 means) and a massive acceleration.  There really isn’t anything else comparable (except the roller coaster at Ferrari world Abu Dhabi-thats like carrier launch!).

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Could you beat a Tornado in a drag race?

Pretty much  if you start at say 450kts though it would be neck and neck with a Tornado until their low fuel light comes on)).   Imagine the Tomcat B would be the same.   But we could pretty much out run anything.   I noted an Hornet flights that their acceleration hit a bit of a wall at around 550 kts whereas we would just sweep the wings back  and maintain the acceleration.

F-111 versus Su-24: thoughts?

 Ford versus Ferrari or Lada versus Cadillac 

The F-20 was the ultimate US F-5 derivative. However unlike the twin-engined Tiger II and Freedom Fighter, the F-20 was powered by a single engine. It was intended to serve the needs of US client nations not cleared for fighters as advanced as the F-16. The F-20 had similar performance to the F-16 but would have been easier to maintain and cheaper to operate. Flight trials went extremely well and Chuck Yeager became an enthusiastic advocate of the type. When restrictions on F-16 exports relaxed, the F-20 lost its raison d’etre. An attempt to provide F-20s for the US aggressor fleet proved unsuccessful. In the end this privately funded fighter fell by the wayside.

• Jim Smith

“..built at the administration’s suggestion as a so-called non-provocative fighter, which meant one that was designed to be sold to friendly countries but designed to be vulnerable to our own state-of-the-art interceptors. Arming our friends was good business, but being able to shoot them down if they became our enemies was good strategy. To build this kind of airplane required the permission and cooperation of the administration, which could otherwise block such hardware sales.” – Ben R. Rich & Leo Janos, Skunk Works

The key strand running behind the Tigershark story is the FX program. FX (Fighter eXport) was a result of a decision by the Carter Administration in 1977 that sales of US front-line equipment would be restricted to NATO allies, Australia and Japan. The intention was for the US to be seen as a force for peace in the world, rather than a promoter of conflict through the export of highly capable weapons of war. Part of the context for this decision would have been the decision by the preceding Ford Administration to sell F-14s to Iran and F-15s to Israel

While this noble aspiration to be a force for peace sounded good, there were a few immediately evident problems. The first of these was that many nations that fall loosely into a political category of West-leaning democracies felt threatened by peers and neighbours who were operating Soviet-built equipment. In order to support these nations it would be necessary to make available capable, but not absolutely top-end, aircraft that would be able to defend against exported Soviet systems, while not making use of the most sensitive US technologies. This was the driving objective behind the FX program. A secondary factor was that, in the absence of US aircraft being available for export, other countries were turning to alternatives, notably the Dassault Mirage 2000, and this was threatening to impact on US Industry.

As may be inferred from the short description above, the FX programme was really addressing State Department and industry objectives rather than US Defense Department needs, and as a result, the two departments had rather differing degrees of interest in the programme. Differences of emphasis between these Departments would later significantly affect FX programme outcomes.

The requirements for the FX programme were rather unusual. The aircraft to be supplied under the programme would have to meet the following requirements:
• Performance, cost & capabilities should be between those of the F-5E and F-16A
• Optimised for the air-to-air role, and with deliberately limited strike capabilities
• Payload/range performance had to be substantially inferior to that of contemporary fighters in the US inventory
• Deployment and maintenance had to be easier.
These requirements defined a second-class aircraft, with offensive (strike) roles limited, and emphasis given to air defence capability. In addition, the DoD took the view that such an aircraft was unlikely to be required by the USAF, and in consequence development of the aircraft would be the responsibility of the selected contractor, although the State Department and Department of Defense would assist with sales efforts.
This approach to the FX programme represented a considerable risk to Industry participants, who would have to carry much of the cost of developing and producing FX aircraft, and in the event, there were only two bidders, Northrop with the F-5G/F-20 Tigershark, and General Dynamics with the F-16/79.

F-5G/F-20 Tigershark technical characteristics

The F-5G was a development of the F-5E, originally intended for sale to the air force of Taiwan, intended as a higher-powered version of the F-5E, offering enhanced performance at a reasonable cost. The F-5G would be fitted with the GE-F404 engine in place of the 2 General Electric J85 engines of the F-5. The result of this engine change would be an additional 60% thrust in an airframe weighing only 17% more than the F-5E.

This aircraft would perhaps have been an attractive option for Taiwan, but for a change in US policy in regard to the People’s Republic of China. President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 had begun a process of rapprochement and dialogue, and in pursuing this, the State Department were made aware of Chinese concerns about US arms sale to Taiwan. As a result of these concerns, President Carter blocked the sale of the F-5G to Taiwan, which then developed its own light fighter, the AIDC Ching-Kuo.

In early 1981, there was a change in administration in the US, with Ronald Reagan replacing Jimmy Carter as US President. In consequence, the attitude of the US to Arms Control began to change, and additional exceptions to the ‘no export of advanced weapons’ policy began to occur. Israel had already been allowed to purchase both the F-15 and F-16; following the change in US administration, a number of additional nations were authorised to procure the F-16A, including Pakistan, Egypt, Venezuela, Greece, Turkey, and South Korea. Other export sales to the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Israel were allowed under the earlier Carter policy.

Taiwan had been the main focus of the F-5G development, but sales to that nation had been blocked. In an effort to make the aircraft attractive to a broader customer base, Northrop approached the USAF and sought approval to re-badge the aircraft as the F-20 Tigershark, while at the same time introducing avionics and sensor upgrades to make the aircraft more competitive with the F-16.

Compared to the Northrop F-5E Tiger II, the most significant design changes for the Tigershark were the avionics upgrade, and the use of a single General Electric F404 engine, which was originally designed for the F/A-18 Hornet. The new engine provided 60% more thrust than the combined output of the F-5E’s two General Electric J85s. This improved the aircraft’s thrust-to-weight ratio substantially, and enabled an increase in maximum Mach to 2.0, with a ceiling over 55,000 ft (16,800 m).

The wing was similar to the F-5E, but had modified leading edge extensions (LEX), which improved the maximum lift coefficient of the wing by about 12% with an increase in wing area of only 1.6% and also reduced pitch stability. A larger tailplane was fitted to improve manoeuvrability, along with a new fly-by-wire control system.
The F-20’s avionics suite was significantly enhanced, adopting the General Electric AN/APG-67 multi-mode radar as the principal sensor, offering a wide range of air-to-air and air-to-ground modes. A large number of weapons, including Sidewinder and Sparrow air-to-air missiles, could be integrated on the aircraft, which was also armed with two 20-mm Pontiac cannon. Cockpit instrumentation and layout was brought up to the then-current state of the art, with a head-up display supplemented by two flat screen multi-function displays.

The small size of the F-20 meant that payload range was somewhat limited compared to larger contemporary fighters. The F-20 was fast, agile and hard to spot visually due to its small size, but was perhaps less well armed and equipped than some of its competitors, at least partially as a result of the constraints imposed by the Carter administration’s export policies. Nevertheless, there was some interest from Bahrain and Morocco, and also some interest from South Korea.

We spoke to test pilot Paul Metz, author of a brilliant new book on the F-20 to find out more:

Best thing? State of the art avionics and reliable.

Worst thing? It did not sell

How did it compare with the F-16? One thing we did not cover in our interview was the Fighter For Export (FX) concept as defined by the U.S. government.  In late1977, President Carter decreed that the FX had to have performance better than the F-5E but less than the USAF front line fighter, the F-16.  Two companies responded to this opportunity to build the next FX.    Northrop offered its F-20A and General Dynamics offered the F-16 re-engined with a General Electric J79, the so-called F-16J79.  The F-20 significantly out-performed this export version of an FX.  In 1981, President Reagan offered production F-16As to Venezuela, Pakistan and S. Korea.  This was a fundamental change in the U.S. FX program.  It authorized front line U.S. equipment, the F-16A/B, to traditional FX countries.  Northrop countered with changes to the F-20 which would equal and exceed the F-16. There simply was not enough time to make those changes.  National policy for the FX changed instantly.  Changing an airplane takes years.  

How do you rate it in the following areas

A. Sustained turn 
B. Instantaneous turn
C. Acceleration 
D. Climb rate 

 Again, an apples to apples comparison would be the F-20A versus the F-16J79 as an FX fighter.  I will answer with an apples to strawberry comparison of the F-20A to the F-16A (with the F100 engine).  My reference library of F-20 technical data has been donated to the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance, CA so I cannot provide the engineering details.  In any event there are no one-sentence answers to your questions.  There are areas where each airplane has a slight advantage over the other.  For example, at slow speeds the F-16 flight control computers limit angle of attack to 26°.  The F-20 has unlimited angle of attack maneuver capability.  At the same time, at slower speeds, the F-16 has a lower wing loading and thus a better sustained turn rate than the F-20 until the F-16 hits its angle of attack limiter.  In general the F-20 has better fuel specifics (analogous to miles per gallon).

Pleasure of flying The F-20 had a spacious cockpit and was a fighter pilot’s airplane-easy to fly, easy to operate, reliable with intuitive flying qualities, a legacy of the F-5 family. 

Cockpit roominess Excellent.

Ease of take-off and landing Piece of cake.

Why was it cancelled? Should it have been?  The Tigershark project was terminated by Northop who funded all project costs.  It was cancelled after the U.S. government changed the standing policy on sales of fighter aircraft to foreign allies.  Policy can be changed at the discretion of the President of the U.S.  A “policy” is not a law nor is it a contract between the government and the company providing the product.  A contractor assumes the risk of cancelation under these circumstances.  Northrop assumed those risks.  The government acted within their rights.  There was no business case for an intermediate fighter for export (FX) after the President offered front line U.S. aircraft (F-16s) to all .

Biggest myth?  That the Tigershark was as reliable as Northrop claimed.  It exceeded all frontline fighters by a wide (and some termed “Incredible”) margin.  

What should I have asked? Nothing to add. Good job.

Were you sad about its demise? Disappointed is probably more accurate. The loss of the Tigershark occurred with the win of the Advanced Tactical Fighter program that produced the YF-23.  So Halloween of 1986 was a bittersweet day at Northrop.

Pre-order your copy of The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes Vol 2 today.

Stay tuned to the Hush-Kit YouTube channel which will soon release an in-depth interview with Paul Metz.

This article can now be found here.

The Barbie Jet is an overpowered oddity with some excellent design features. But, this extremely innovative jet features an extremely serious design flaw (if it were turned into a full-scale aircraft). Our independent analysis, by aero engineer Joe Wilding and Jim Smith, reveal a litany of serious aerodynamic and structural issues that would curse it, if it were made into a real aircraft.*

*There are no plans to make it into a real aircraft and as a toy it has no safety issues.

“…the aircraft has a glide ratio of 3.0, which is worse than the space shuttle when landing.”

There are two versions of the Barbie Jet. The Mk I first flew in 1999 and featured smaller, wing-mounted engines much like a 737 or A319. The Mk II first flew in 2021 and featured upgraded engines mounted on the aft fuselage, similar to a DC-9 or Gulfstream G-V.

• Mk.I “Airplane”:

Features include a working microphone (great for communicating with ATC), a “magical” food service center, and Real jet sounds!

• Mk.II “Dreamplane”

But wait, there appears to be a (possibly Saudi) knock-off, the “Sweet Holidays Airliner” with a single tail-mounted engine similar to a DC-10, and most like the single-engine PiperJet. This version features a few unique details such as a variable-geometry swing-wing, and a pivoting cockpit canopy for easier pilot egress. This variant didn’t have a successful commercial launch and only a few exist. The last known example was being flown by ‘Pilot Kent’ operating as an overworked smuggler for a “sweet” minor ex Soviet republic airline with a dubious safety record. Previously Kent was an Iranian test pilot, who took the IAIO Qaher-313 on its maiden flight. It is rumoured that Barbie had an affair with Roy Orbison while visiting pre-Revolutionary Iran and Pilot Kent is the son. Judge for yourself.

Wait, do we still say ‘maiden flight’? That’s pretty archaic. Is the pilot or the flight ‘taking’ the aircraft’s virginity, is the aircraft a maiden? All very strange. Is flying sex? Are unflown aircraft InCels? Are museum aircraft post sexual? Or is that mailplanes?

For the rest of this analysis, we will focus on the Mk.II Dreamplane.

First, a 3-view drawing was created to develop and extract all of the critical information needed for performance analysis, such as dimensions and surface areas. This 3-view was generated based on US intelligence photos taken from outside the BarbieLand International Airport fence, and the excellent coverage in the deep dive article from the Feb 2021 issue of Flight International. Scale is hard to determine from photos. A kid’s toy version of the aircraft was used to determine scale, knowing that the Barbie world is 1:6 scale. The toy length of 2.296 inches was used to determine a full-scale aircraft length of 13.78 feet. 

The aircraft has somewhat unique proportions. The overall length and wingspan is similar to a BD-5 Jet. However, the fuselage size and aircraft weight is quite a bit different from that zippy jet which James Bond flew in Octopussy.

Weights

A proprietary statistical weights model was used to estimate the empty weight build-up of the aircraft, as shown in the following table (in pounds):

• These weights seem reasonable. One big advantage of this aircraft is the unusual BMI of the pilot and passengers. A “standard” scaled Barbie passenger (per the FAA and EASA) weighs only 105 lbs. 

• Propulsion
  • The Pinkjet 2000.23 is a highly proprietary engine, and no performance data has been published. However, it is known that the engine is a pure turbo jet, and the performance can be estimated by scaling the engine size and comparing to other turbojet engines of similar performance. The engine is 13.44 inches in diameter (a little less than a GE J85), and this results in an approximate takeoff thrust of 2,050 lb per engine at standard day, sea level conditions. The engine is estimated to weigh 280 lbs dry.
  • With a pure turbojet, it is very hard to be Stage V noise compliant. Therefore it is believed that the Barbie Mk.II Dreamjet uses a Hush-Kit (and yes – I do feel used)
• Fuel system The fuel is contained entirely in the wing. Roughly scaling the wing, and assuming the fuel is contained in the full wing span, between the forward and aft wing spar, the wing can contain roughly 7.5 US gallons per side, or a total of 120 lbs of fuel.
• Airframe
  • To say the fuselage is chunky is a gross understatement, it makes a P-47 look like a Romanian sausage. And size is a mixed blessing for the structural designer. On one hand, the height and width of the fuselage increases the bending stiffness. On the other hand, surface area is not your friend when trying to design a low-weight structure, particularly if it is pressurised. And all good jets are pressurised. 
  • And what about those windows? Wow, they are big and they are going to be heavy, especially when sized to carry pressurisation and bird-strike loads. But wait! The aircraft does not appear to actually have windows, just cutouts. So I guess the window weight is actually zero. Same for the pressurisation system. That is a brilliant minimalist design though there is a minor risk of lateral birdstrikes to passengers’ heads.
  • The blunt aft end of the fuselage is the biggest problem with the Dreamjet. It would produce separated flow and would increase the aircraft drag by 5-10 times compared to a conventional, streamlined jet, making it impractical.
  • Another questionable design feature is the fully opening fuselage. This makes entry and exit convenient, as well as transporting bulky items such as Barbie jet skis. However, it would be a structural and systems nightmare to design a robust door latching mechanism that had to carry all of the fuselage loads.
  • The wing is straight forward. It appears to have an 11% airfoil, which is a good compromise for a medium-speed subsonic jet, considering structural weight, fuel capacity, and aerodynamic drag.
  • The vertical and horizontal tails seem reasonable.
• The horizontal tail winglets are an interesting addition, not often seen on aircraft. Winglets improve aerodynamic efficiency by reducing lift-induced drag. They have a similar effect as higher wingspan, without the downsides of increased span, namely structural weight and ground operations constraints. On a properly designed aircraft, the horizontal tails generally produces very little load in cruise flight. Any negative load produced add to additional wing lift required and is referred to as “trim drag.” The effort to include tail winglets must mean that the aircraft is not balanced well and is indeed producing a lot of down force in cruise flight. On the other hand, details on aircraft sometimes have nothing to do with engineering or efficiency. It is possible the tail winglets flowed from the pen of the designer to compliment the other stunning lines of the Dreamjet.

• Stability and Control
  • The Dreamjet tails were analyzed using a method called “Tail Volume Coefficient”. This calculates the area of the horizontal and vertical tails, multiplied by the distance they are from the wing aerodynamic center. This value is then normalized based on the wing dimensions.
  • The Dreamjet has a Horizontal Tail Volume Coefficient of 1.03, and a Vertical Tail Volume Coefficient of .079.Both of these are similar to the statistical values for a jet transport. Therefore the tails seem to be sized well for this type of aircraft. The only concern is the placement of the main landing gear. It is quite far aft on the fuselage and the aircraft would need considerable speed before the horizontal tail could lift the nose for takeoff.
• Performance
  • Wing Loading: The Dreamjet has a wing loading of 68.0 lbs/ft^2, which is similar to other business jets. This would result in a stall speed of 100 knots, reasonable for a jet aircraft.
  • The Thrust/weight ratio is an eye-watering 1.54!!! This is 20% higher than the highest T/W ratio jet in the world, the F-22. This means the Dreamjet could climb to dreamland vertically.
  • Of course the biggest problem with the Dreamjet, and one reason for the high T/W ratio, is that it can carry very little fuel. Assuming an average turbojet fuel consumption of 1.25 lbs fuel per lbs thrust per hour, the Dreamjet could run at full throttle for exactly 1.4 minutes before its fuel was exhausted.
  • Would the F-19 have worked in real life? Find out here.
  • Takeoff: On a normal takeoff, the high T/W ratio would provide blistering performance: a 335 foot ground roll. Even factoring an engine failure during the takeoff roll, the Balance Field Length would be 1,500 feet. Impressive! 
  • Top speed The wetted area of the aircraft and a “clean” jet design would suggest a drag area as low as 1.6 square feet. This could produce a top speed well into the supersonic range, assuming it had enough fuel to accelerate long enough to reach that speed. However, the blunt fuselage it likely increasing the drag area of the aircraft to 15 square feet or more, 10x the ideal value. With this drag, the aircraft could still cruise at a speed around 300 knots, or Mach 0.5. However, the buffeting coming off the ass end of the aircraft would probably not make for the most comfortable ride.
  • Range Although almost everything before this point seems plausible, if not quite exciting, range is where it all falls apart. Let’s look at a climb scenario. You are sitting on the end of the runway. You advance the throttles forward. The 1.5g of acceleration is approaching that of a Formula 1 car. After a few seconds, the aircraft is airborne and the pilot could pull the nose vertical. For here, the aircraft accelerate and climbs like a rocket. Only faster. After 1 minute, the Dreamjet is at 30,000 feet. The pilot can then level out, turn off the fasten seat belt light, and they configure the aircraft for glide mode, because that is the Dreamjet will become a glider in the next 30 seconds. And with the massive airflow separation coming off the fuselage, the aircraft has a glide ratio of 3.0, which is worse than the space shuttle when landing. From 30,000 feet, the plane could glide for about 17 miles. But hopefully the pilot is skilled and can land on the first approach, because there is no fuel for a go around.
  • Summary If you could put a better tailcone on the aircraft to reduce drag, and you and your closest friend weighed an unchanging 105 lbs, the Barbie Mk.II could be a dream jet. And I am kind of fond of the pink colour and sassy pony-tailed Barbie on the tail. 
  • – Joe Wilding

If you enjoy this kind of thing (and we all do) it’s time to pre-order The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes Vol 2

We also sought the wisdom of Jim Smith

The Barbie Jet – Hot or not?

By Jim Smith

I have to say I really like the Barbie Jet. After all, one can never start too early in encouraging the next generation to take an interest in owning an entry level executive jet.

Why do I suggest this is an entry-level executive jet? Well, single-pilot operation plus generously spaced accommodation for two passengers is one aspect of this, as are the small rear-mounted jet engines, typical of this class of aircraft.

In fact, the appearance of the aircraft strongly suggests that the folks at Mattel have been looking for inspiration in the slightly more obscure end of this market, since, rather than the popular Citation Jet series, the Barbie Jet appears to have a very close relation in the form of the Swearingen SJ 30. Only 8 of these were built, one of which graces a scrapyard in Brisbane.

This aircraft so closely resembles the Barbie Jet, that there is little doubt that it is one of the parents of that aircraft. The Brisbane aircraft lacks its tailplane, but the configurations of the SJ 30 and the Barbie Jet are similar to the larger Sino Swearingen SJ-30-2 photographed at Farnborough by Dr Ron Smith, which shares the tailplane arrangement of both.

Of course, the element which sets the Barbie Jet apart from the SJ 30 is the large fuselage, and the loading arrangements, which take the freight door in a new direction. The large fuselage strongly suggests that the Barbie Jet is, in effect, the SJ 30-Beluga, with a capacious fuselage providing Barbie and Ken with luxurious accommodation, as well as offering the manufacturer a second line of business in supplying the urgent package-delivery trade.

Photo: Airbus Beluga

This impression is heightened by the colour scheme, which draws heavily on the signature colour used first by Clay Lacy for his Mustang, and later, by the FedEx air freight business.

Photo: Clay Lacy’s Mustang at the Compton Air Show

What about performance? Well, the low-powered small-business jets generally offer modest, but effective, performance, with budget operation enhanced by only requiring a single pilot. Typical runway requirements are about 1000 m, with payload-range dependent on aircraft size and weight. The performance of the Barbie Jet will be somewhat reduced by additional fuselage drag compared to competitors, which is likely to impact on cruise speed, take-off distance and range. Some small benefit in range may be obtained through the use of winglets.

One area of concern may be the effect of the large fuselage on behaviour at low speed. T-tail aircraft are known to be liable to experience handling difficulties at low speed, as the control and stability of the aircraft may be reduced as the tailplane is affected by wing and fuselage flows. The Barbie Jet is likely to require some control system assistance, such as a stick pusher, at low speeds. However, as the design is not strictly competing in the commercial airliner market, the penalty of some flight limitations, and a slightly higher approach speed, may be acceptable.

Hot or not? Always dependent on personal taste, but I’d suggest at least comfortably warm.

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Despite over 800 being built, today the Nakajima Ki-49 bomber remains out of the historical limelight. Appropriately for such a seemingly introverted machine, it was assigned the almost comically innocuous codename ‘Helen’, after the wife of an Allied intelligence officer in the Pacific Southwest. In service with the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service and operating in dangerous skies, the type served as a bomber, anti-submarine patroller, transport and even as a kamikaze manned suicide aircraft. Often facing utterly fierce opposition, the bomber had a sting in its tails – and an even more potent one on its back. Often condemned as vulnerable, we asked author George Eleftheriou for the truth about the shadowy ‘Storm Dragon’.

“It wasn’t vulnerable! Would you call the Dornier Do 217 or the Tupolev Tu-2 or the Vickers Wellington vulnerable? Why is it that only Japanese aircraft have this reputation?”

What is the closest Allied analogue to the Helen, and how did it compare?
Rather difficult to answer. Combat-philosophy-wise the Martin B-26 Marauder would be the closest one. A fast medium level bomber that would have been able to conduct raids in lightning speed avoiding getting intercepted by enemy fighters was a common concept in many air forces around the world.
The B-25 Mitchell is a second close but the ground attack role it was largely assigned to in the Pacific did not match the combat deployment of the “Donryu”. With only a 7.7-mm flexible machine gun in the nose, it simply could not do any serious strafing attacks like the Mitchell could.

The US B-26 Marauder had a maximum speed of 287mph and the Mitchell even less, at 272mph. In theory, Helen was faster than both, with a spritely top speed of 305mph. That’s only on paper, of course. In reality the “Donryu” (Storm Dragon) was much slower, with a max speed never exceeding 400km/h as beyond that, the engines badly misbehaved. As it was equipped with engines of only 1410 horsepower engines, compared to the hefty 2000hp and 1700hp of the two US bombers, this speed could only be achieved by sacrificing the bomb load. “Donryu” could carry a ton of bombs while the US bombers could carry almost double. In the Pacific Theatre, where most combat took place over jungles, big bombs did not really matter. Where they mattered most was against ships. Therefore, Helens, like Mitchells, normally carried 50kg bombs and quite often cluster bombs. But the extra ton the US bombers carried meant higher destructive capability and success rate.

What was the best thing about it?
The Donryu was the first Japanese Army bomber with a tail gunner operating a 7.7mm machine gun. An improvement over the Mitsubishi Ki-21 “Sally” that only had a remotely operated machine gun on the tail. But in any case, the role of the tail gun was to force the enemy fighters out of this vulnerable blind spot and into the sights of the heavier and more destructive 20-mm cannon Donryu had on its dorsal position.

And the worst?
I would have to say its engines. Underpowered, difficult to maintain and prone to breakdowns.

How many were lost in combat, and to what causes?
Difficult to answer. No loss statistics by the Japanese Army have survived, if any were kept. Model 1 Ki-49s were retired once Model 2s became available and they were assigned to some flight schools in Japan and probably to a few transport units. It could be said that most Model 2s, the model that saw the most combat, were shot down but a good number was destroyed on the ground by Allied bombing raids.

Was it based on another design or was it developed into another type?
Neither. It was an original design by Nakajima and there was a small number of models and test aircraft but it had no successor.

What was its most important historical contribution?
None I know of. The tail gunner maybe?

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Who used it?
Unlike Allied aircraft types that were operated by different nations, it only saw action with the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force. If you’re asking about units, the 7th, the 61st, the 62nd, the 74th and the 95th Sentai were the primary units that flew the type.

(Ed – I believe it did have some post-war use by the French in Indochina, with Indonesian guerilla fighters and as a transport with the Royal Thai Air Force though I’m happy to be corrected if wrong)

What was its worst operational experience?
If you’re talking about combat missions, then it must be the loss of eight 62 Sentai Donryu and one damaged during a single raid against Ledo, Assam, India, on March 27, 1944.
Another unpleasant experience was the loss of nine 74th Sentai “Donryu” and four seriously damaged during a ground attack raid by US Navy aircraft in Luzon, the Philippines, on November 19, 1944.

Why was it so vulnerable?
It wasn’t! Would you call the Dornier Do 217 or the Tupolev Tu-2 or the Vickers Wellington vulnerable? Why is it that only Japanese aircraft have this reputation?

Would you say it was the worst Japanese aircraft, and is that what interested you about the aircraft?
It was definitely not the worst Japanese aircraft. There were other types with higher attrition rates, like the Mitsubishi G4M ‘Betty’ and technically speaking the much venerated Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa with its meagre 7.7mm machine guns was completely obsolete by the time it started to be produced.
Perhaps this kind of infamy was stuck to the Donryu because it has been considered an easy-to-shoot-down type. But contrary to non-Japanese sources, many Donryu that are counted as “kills” by Allied fighter pilots, did manage to bring their crew back to base.

Its engines left much to be desired and therefore it can be said that it was not a good aircraft. It was definitely not an overall improvement over the older Mitsubishi Ki-21 Sally except for a few features like the tail gun and the 20-mm dorsal cannon.

But as the reader can find in the Osprey publication, the crews who had no previous experience with the Sally and therefore couldn’t compare the two types, were not particularly unhappy with the aircraft and did their best with what they had. For example, the crews and bombers excelled during night missions. As explained in the book, most Helen losses were caused by miscalculation, bad tactics or simply bad luck. For sure, more powerful and reliable engines would have resulted in a much better aircraft but I cannot say the Donryu was a death-trap. At best it was a mediocre type that, in my opinion was placed into production to appease Nakajima after its original design was ‘borrowed’ by Mitsubishi to produce the Sally. But objectively speaking, Nakajima always had issues with its engines, whereas Mitsubishi produced better ones and therefore superior aircraft. It was the mindset of the Japanese Army (and Navy) compounded by the technological limitations of the Japanese industry and the reality on the ground that failed to provide the Japanese bomber crews with better really heavy bombers.

Much has been debated as to why the Japanese (and the Germans) never put into production a really heavy four-engined bomber. Both the Sally and the Helen were developed as fast bombers with the possibility of a war against the USSR in mind and combat operations in Siberia where no industrial centres or other major targets existed. Therefore the bombers were designed to quickly attack troop concentrations and fortifications, mirroring similar German tactics. When the Sino-Japanese War broke out, the bombers were assigned to exactly these roles and occasionally attacked cities aiming mostly on military targets rather than conducting carpet bombing that was later employed by the Allies.
Similarly during the Pacific War, Japanese bombers targeted enemy troop concentrations closely liasing with the infantry. Strategic bombing was never necessary since there were no appropriate targets. The Japanese Empire wanted to capture the oil fields of South East Asia and put them to use, not destroy them. In the opening days of the war, Allied held airfields were not targeted; the enemy aircraft found on them were. Because the airfields were expected to be captured by the advancing infantry and then be operated by the Japanese aircraft.

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When the need arose for really heavy bombers, such as during the attacks against the Allied bases in Assam or later during attacks against bigger bases that were built by the Allies like on Morotai Island and Leyte, that’s when the Japanese industry and technology failed to deliver, mostly because it lacked experience with four-engine designs (except for flying boats). In any case, newly delivered four-engined heavy bombers would have created new challenges, requiring bigger and better constructed airfields and more efficient logistics to support heavier bomber operations. The Japanese could barely supply enough fuel for their Helen and Sally-equipped bomber units and never got even close to the logistic capabilities of the Allies.

The Helen, like many other Japanese aircraft types, has this reputation of being a bad aircraft that was vulnerable and quickly shot down by Allied pilots. The more I delved into original Japanese sources, like testimonies from bomb crews, the more I realised that the complete story has not been told and that inspired me to write this book with Osprey.

10 things you shouldn’t believe about air combat

A lot of bollocks is talked about air-to-air combat, so in an effort to dispel some popular myths we approached former Air Warfare Instructor Paul Tremelling to separate the wank from the chaff. Paul is a former Sea Harrier, Super Hornet and Harrier pilot and author of this book. Over to Paul.

I’ll be honest with you. I may not have read the question which is a cardinal sin. Air combat could well mean just about anything to just about anyone. When asked for my thoughts my mind immediately went to 1 v 1. Usually assumed to only occur in the visual arena; sometimes termed Air Combat Manoeuvring, sometimes termed Basic Fighter Manoeuvres (following the usual trend for pointless rebranding), once upon a time called a ‘Dog Fight’ because ‘Cat Fight’ was already taken. That’s what came into the mind’s eye. Probably because (with the notable exception of watching a Leopard tank drive over a house one day) manoeuvring close in is probably responsible for the most compelling and exciting things my eyes have ever been asked to take in. It’s also responsible for significant periods of my eyes not working…

The idea of 1 v 1 combat is an amalgam of various threads. It makes sense that in a field where there could be a winner and a loser that there are grounds for competition. It makes sense that if one is interested in a certain technology or a given profession, then you might want to know what or who is the best at it. It makes sense from a historical stand point that one could get a relatively accurate idea about warfighting prowess in a much simplified event that closely resembled a sport. This is how we got jousting and in a historic echo this is probably why we refer to Air Combat Manoeuvring as ‘the sport of kings’; despite the very low propensity of the royals to actually give it a crack. All this combines to make 1 v 1 air combat a ripe breeding ground for all kinds of myths, misconceptions and outright lies – because the picture we have in our heads is of duelling knights obeying the rules of chivalry; going about their business to prove a simple point; probably in peacetime on largely similar mounts, on a flat field, in nice weather, both armed with the same long pole. This is a petri dish for nonsense because all sorts of things happen when lives aren’t at stake and when we try to make some incredibly complex terrain fit our ineptly simple map. 1 v 1 combat is actually about killing the opposition, who happens to be in an aeroplane. It’s about lethality, survivability, g, power, lift, speed, sensors and countermeasures. Air combat should really be viewed as jousting but where a knight is on the ground breathing his last having been shot by an archer (pun possibly intended) he knew nothing about…

A few myths for you to consider.

10. It’s all about the jet ‘God doesn’t play Top Trumps’

This is of course nonsense. We know that it’s nonsense. We even prove to ourselves that it’s nonsense by using phrases such as ‘if flown by equally talented pilots’ when comparing aircraft to show that we understand human ability has to come into the equation at some point. So how do we get ourselves into this irreconcilable piece of the Venn diagram? It’s because we have favourites. Usually based on some bias or ignorance. Which is fine – we probably mean that it’s mainly about the jet. We can probably agree that the aircraft as a weapon system is critical, but the weapon system is the aeroplane, the cueing system, weapons, the sensors, the countermeasures, other stores and the fuel load. All of which can vary dramatically from mark to mark, country to country, unit to unit and day to day.

9. These jets can always take a pounding ‘Fragile jetsculinity’

Think about an aircraft’s construction. How much of it is unnecessary? Probably very little. Unnecessary stuff costs money and adds weight. I take the point that people build in redundancy into warplanes such that they can take damage. Some warplanes can take one hell of a beating. The A-10 springs to mind. The Super Hornet had so many redundant systems that learning them was a pain. But what do you actually want a weapon fragment or 30mm (or so!) piece of metal to do? Hit something vital. How many flight paths are there through a warplane that a 30mm hole can take without hitting something? Not many. How many jets can take a missile hit in the cockpit area and survive with an intact pilot? Not many. Think about it from a weapon designer’s standpoint. He/ she wouldn’t really be earning their pay if it couldn’t crack the one job it had. Obviously things change. In World War 2 aircraft being full of a whole heap of nothing could, and did, take hundreds of rounds on occasion.  The point is simple. One shell can be enough. Particularly in modern aircraft. I lost a friend to an accident that to the best of my knowledge was caused by ingestion of a single pebble – a 30mm shell is going to do more damage than that. Even if a single shot isn’t fatal – it could lead to one that is. The obvious corollary to this is that pretty much no weapons deliver a perfect kill per shot. Some fail on the rail, some in flight…and that’s before we get into weapons launched a little outside max range, a little inside minimum range or with a little too much alpha or crossing rate…those ones may not won’t work at all!

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8. Rear hemisphere guns ‘Mauser bowser’

The gun is dead handy. It is a very effective weapon so long as you can use onboard sensors, aiming symbology, skill and luck to get your bullets into the same bit of sky as an enemy. There is a myth, or at least a very clear but erroneous picture in our minds of guns kills being scored from the rear hemisphere. Of course they are and of course that is common in training. Why? Because training rules prevent you from executing a head sector shot for reasons of collision risk and because ‘slashing’ guns kills are hard to validate on tape. A kill is a kill.

Every head sector pass is a guns kill begging to be taken. Invariably in training we will brief something along the lines of ‘Take pre-merge shots but only post merge shots to count’. This is due to the need to get into the training but in so doing we are making things significantly artificial as a good game’s a fast game and if someone’s trying to kill you then removing them sharpish is a great idea. Removing them before the fight’s even got going is a brilliant idea. I’d dearly like to engage in Basic Fighter Manoeuvres but not quite as much as I’d like to gun you in the face. The same is true of the slashing or waiting guns shot.

This involves thinking or suspecting that the enemy is going to fly through your HUD and firing with the correct amount of anticipation such that they and your deadly shot string arrive at the same time. As above…it may only take one.

7. Medium range weapons ‘Bring a cricket bat to a boxing match’

1 v 1 combat can obviously be practiced at any range you want – it just gets a little more fruity as the range decreases. This means fights can be made to fall into two buckets – beyond and within visual range. Our vision of 1 v 1 tends to be within visual range. This division is straight forward but has a number of draw backs as rules and exceptions appear neatly stacked. For example: If I know exactly where an enemy aircraft is because I can see them with my own eyes but we have yet to manoeuvre aggressively in relation to each other – has anything changed spectacularly from a second ago when I knew exactly where he was because my radar was kind enough to tell me? No. Obvs. Just because I am manoeuvring visually with an opponent does that mean that my medium range weaponry is useless? No, of course not. Some medium range weapons are truly fearsome in the visual arena and actually (think about it) have more energy than their shorter range cousins so may turn out to be the weapon of choice. It is more than possible that your medium to long range weapon is useless in a short range fight because no-one told the designer that you’d like it to work there…or the designer took the presence of the short range weapon as an excuse to over look that part of the envelope. It’s worth checking. Long and the short of it (see what I did there) it’s worth checking because your medium range weapon might well be the weapon of choice.

6. Flares work ‘Who flares wins?’

Yes of course they do. Sometimes. Do they work all of the time? No, they are clever but so are seeker heads. RF countermeasures work as well. Sometimes. They may even accidentally cause a weapon to detect a target that isn’t there and prematurely detonate. But that’s a bit of an outlier. I’m sure that most readers of this would understand that Infra Red Countermeasures don’t work at all against guns and RF guided weapons. I speak as someone who deployed IR Counter Measures against a Surface-to-Air threat that I knew was a visually aimed gun…but doing nothing felt weird. Doing something, as it turned out, felt stupid. I never really got it straight in my own mind whether or not to use counter measures pre merge – on the grounds that in my small and camouflaged aircraft, not moving relative to the enemy – I would also be unleashing dazzlingly bright magnesium. As a wise USAF head said to me one day ‘Better to be seen than be dead’. That’s true, but it’s also true that if you’re not seen they may find it harder to kill you. The counter-counter argument is that weapons are so damn fast these days that holding onto your flares until you see a launch may produce sub-optimal results. Countermeasures may work. It’s not guaranteed and one thing we can all agree on is that they will definitely run out! Shall we just leave it at that?

5. Opinions ‘Zero G contract killers’

I wanted to put this first, but thought better of it as you may give up at this point and at least you’ve read half the article. Your opinion doesn’t matter. Neither does mine so don’t get upset. What matters is the science, the context and the pilot’s ability. Too many people feel the need, or exercise the right, to talk about 1 v 1 combat without knowing what excess power is, what instantaneous or sustained turning rates are, what the actually weapon engagement zone of a specific weapon is or what sensors the platform can use to throw what shots. We’re back in that silly part of air-to-air top trumps and assignment of fighter capability based purely on what somebody said at an airshow. My brother went to a wedding once. Just about as relevant to the conversation as most opinions. Opinions need to be based upon facts. Facts to which one has actually applied conscious thought and refined with experience. Then you get an opinion. And it may still be bow-lacks.

4. It’s academic ‘If LERX could kill’

 It won’t be. I was speaking to a wonderful senior officer from the USAF the other day and he co-located the nail and the hammer’s head very well. We agreed that despite the various air fleets of the free world spending years airborne and billions of pounds of aviation fuel in training – when the fight comes, it’s not going to look like an academic set up. We’re not going to charge at each other from doctrinal ranges. 1 v 1 is highly, vanishingly, unlikely to occur from being in parallel fuselages, at an agreed height and speed, confirming that both aircraft are ‘Tally’ before executing an outward and then inbound turn. Simply never going to happen. The reason we do it is the opposite. We train and train and train because when 1 v 1 happens it will be ad hoc, no notice, unscripted, unusual and fleeting. We need to be able to cope with that and the best way to do so is to give the young warriors of the free world every single opportunity to see just about every sight picture there is – so that when we do actually get into a 1 v 1 they fight and win. Quickly. By killing their opponent. If you ever hear anyone start a sentence comparing jets with the words ‘Well in an academic set up…’ feel free to get on with your pint.

3. It’s uncomplicated ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’

By this I mean that there is a myth that one can separate 1 v 1 combat from everything else that’s going on. Air Combat is necessarily complex in itself. It’s complicated by everything else. Even if there were no other fighters knocking around, or SAMs playing you’d still have to think about distance from home plate, the weather and other factors. No real point winning the fight and crashing on the way home for lack of fuel. Actually that would be a really good way of getting a Martin-Baker tie and ensuring that you were wined and dined by the weapon manufacturer for ever. This point also talks to the environmentals that no aircraft designer can really account for. From a visual perspective what is the effect on both aircraft of having cloud around. Does it seduce IR weapons? Can it mask a fighter for a critical second? How about looking down over farmland, would that suit a particular camouflage scheme. Is it better to be up in the crystal clear blue stuff or down in the industrial haze? It’ll all depend on your system, proficiency and sometimes just a preference. It may sometimes be similar, but it’ll always be different. We’ve all been in situations where we simply cannot see the other aircraft despite knowing exactly where it is – and we’ve all had the reverse, the lucky spot on a canopy glint. We’ve all tried to run for home and been shot. We’ve all shot a runner. At least one USAF kill in GW1 was down to the enemy fighter flying themselves into the ground. They all count.

2. It’s protracted ‘Time ain’t on your sidestick’

 I actually fell out with a USN buddy over this. Not in a fisticuff sort of way but rather a fundamental belief sort of way. This hero, and he was a hero, believed that 1 v 1 combat was a continuum in which one flowed from one manoeuvre into the next. I was very much of the mindset that I would do anything I could to get the first shot off even if that left me poorly placed for a follow on encounter. My rationale was that there wouldn’t be one.

1. You need to get the nose on ‘HOBS choice’

 Nope. Not anymore. Not for a long time. Helmet mounted displays changed the game a long time ago. Early versions were fielded by the South African Air Force and then on aircraft such as the MiG-29. We all got incredibly bunched about the threat’s ability to throw an off boresight shot at us, before we remembered that we could throw one a similar angle off boresight (away from straight forward) using the radar. Then we got bunched again because working the HOTAS and watching a screen whilst manoeuvring hard isn’t quite the same ‘User Experience’ as some form of evil eye attached to your bone dome. The fact is that helmet mounted cue-ing systems changed the game and in many ways wrote a cheque that High Off Boresight (HOBS) weapons cashed. Why strive to get into the Control Zone (that bit of sky behind the enemy from which he cannot eject you kinematically) when you can simply look at the enemy and unleash a AIM-9X or other similar weapon? These weapons are extraordinary. Some can be launched over 90 degrees off boresight. Just picture what that looks like as compared to the WW1 experience of getting to height, finding the enemy and starting to circle. It looks like anything in your bit of airspace to be shot. We no longer need to stop at HMS either. How about targeting an aircraft that you can’t see other than as a track being passed to you via datalink? Can you imagine how annoying it would be to be in danger of winning a 1 v 1 only to soak up a shot that was cue-ed using a data link track from a third fighter?

But let’s join up 1 and 10 for fun. Your favourite aircraft may be amazing. But if the other person has got a slightly better electric hat…they may well come out on top. (So to speak).

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The Westland Whirlwind: A Catalogue of Advanced Design

The Westland Whirlwind was a brilliantly designed fighter aircraft of World War II. Matt Bearman from The Whirlwind Project talks us through 10 remarkable design innovations of the beautiful and unlucky Whirlwind.

1 . The Tail Acorn

The coke-bottle shape became famous in postwar aviation as a way to avoid wave drag when going transonic – but many years before Westland had used the same shape to smooth out the pressure gradients that make for shocks around the Whirlwind’s T-tail. At the time the flutter that made the Whirlwind vibrate in a dive was understood to be the result of ‘interference drag – and whatever was really causing it, the solution was an acorn and a fairing.

The shape on the prototype’s leading edge grew from a pimple to a bulbous acorn, each iteration proving more effective than the last. The manufacturing drawing for the successful version was sent to the US military at the same time as Whirlwind P6994 was shipped to Wright Field AFB for trials.

This became the only detailed manufacturing drawing – as opposed to General Arrangement drawing – to survive, by ending up in the US National Archive in Maryland. Accompanying it is a letter from the Whirlwind’s designer-in-chief W.E.W. Petter, discussing pressure gradients and suggesting solutions to the high-speed aerodynamic problems of the P-38.

2. Retractable Tailwheel

Often overlooked, a fully retracting tailwheel with doors was not something you would normally find on a fighter in the thirties. Being new technology, it wasn’t perfect. Until modifications made it harder to break, high landing speeds and grass fighter strips meant complete failures of the unit were common – expected even. Never fatal and usually causing no extra damage, this was just an annoyance.

The mechanism was complicated – overly so, as were so many moving parts on Petter’s ‘baby’. The landing light has a complicated retracting mechanism involving hydraulics and joints on multiple axes.

Nothing was kept simple if it could be made complex – and hard to maintain for ground crews, who loved the Whirlwind far less than its pilots did.

3 – Monocoque Fuselage

Truly groundbreaking was the rear fuselage. Not so much in its use of an exotic magnesium alloy instead of the more usual aluminium, but in the fact that it was a pure monocoque.

Belt and braces had been the way until then – while the principle of an aircraft’s skin contributing to its strength was well established, few designers had sufficient faith in the theory to let a tube of thin metal hold it all together without a lot of internal frames, stringers and bracing.

The Spitfire, for example, was a semi-monocoque. While the skin was ‘stressed’ – i.e. it took some of the load – it was rivetted to structural members that were intended to keep things rigid.

The Whirlwind’s skeleton on the other hand was just a series of formers with a couple of bulkheads separating modular, hollow sections. While the cockpit section had some heavier (though sometimes strangely unconnected) members, the rear fuselage really was just a lightweight, empty tube. This was fortunate as it offered smaller groundcrew the opportunity to crawl down inside to fix the frequently broken tailwheel.

4. Fowler Flaps

This was very new in the 1930’s -a flap that didn’t just hinge, it slid backwards and down. Fairly common now but revolutionary at the time, the device gave more chord and more lift – you could use it for take-off in the partially open position, as well as for landing when fully down and ‘draggy’. One odd thing about the Whirlwind’s Fowler flap is that it was just one flap, running across the entire centre-section and incorporating both the curvature of the lower fuselage and the rear of both nacelles into the moving part.

Not only did this introduce an extraordinarily complex geometry to the system of rollers, actuators, jacks and guides, the engineering challenge was compounded by linkage of this system to the cooling gills on the trailing edge.

Using cams, the cooling shutters would be held fully open at half flap for take-off and climb and almost shut, with just a small aperture for exhaust, when the flaps were either fully deployed (as in landing configuration) or fully closed (in the cruise). This was a completely automatic system which made sense in normal operation. There may even have been a slight ‘Meredith Effect’ to the shut condition, further reducing drag. However, pilots weren’t always happy with only indirect control of engine cooling.

5. Slab Sides

Whatever his engineering design quirks, Petter really did seem to know his aerodynamic theory. He may have been informed by aerodynamicist John Carver Meadows Frost, recorded by obituary as the designer of the Whirlwind’s fuselage. Frost went on to design the world’s only viable flying saucer – the Avro Canada Avrocar.

A wing has to decrease in thickness towards the trailing edge if it is to work as a wing. This makes a deeply awkward ‘hollow’ when the resulting shape meets a rounded-section fuselage low down. Worse than the dodgy aesthetics, it produces what was then called ‘interference drag’ – by the bucketload. 

Designers were trying endless variations of fillet shapes to fill the gap, like the Spitfire’s huge fillet with inflections and double curves that needed a craftsman, an English wheel and several days to make.  In 1937 Petter – or perhaps Frost – had a lightbulb moment. This was really all about pressure gradients – just make the fuselage side locally flat, leave the gradients to the wing, and the problem goes away. Frost later used his insight into pressure changes to make the Avrocar fly.

The unorthodoxy of this shape has meant that artists and model kit designers have given the Whirlwind a small fillet ever since. It never had one – it’s just an illusion created by the peculiar transition from flat sides to a round frame aft of the trailing edge.

6. Bubble Canopy

Fighter pilots have always been as concerned about what is behind as in front. Although enclosed cockpits gave the opportunity for at least some comfort, a common complaint was not being able to see an attack shaping up from the rear.

Drawings for Westland Aircraft Co’s proposed P-9 from early 1937 show a perfectly smooth, teardrop-shaped and fully transparent canopy. This was extraordinarily ambitious – the technique and tooling to manufacture of such a large acrylic bubble didn’t exist. It was as though Petter was assuming it would be invented before he had to build a prototype.

Whatever inside information Petter possessed, as it was also in 1937 that Mouldrite, a division of ICI, began producing beads of their new ‘Perspex’ material that could be placed in a large mould to produce a complete rounded canopy.

7. Slats

Sitting on the leading edge of each outer wing, these spring-loaded slats were meant to ‘pop out’ at low speed and delay the stall. It was a piece of advanced aerodynamics that was generally sound but the automated deployment presented problems. Being independent, if one wing was closer to the stall than the other – in a tight turn for example – only one slat would deploy.

The asymmetry was often too much for the aerodynamic balance of the fighter and two Whirlwinds came down as a result before the slats were simply wired shut in 1942.

8. Leading edge intakes

This was a real shot in the dark by Petter. There had been no research anywhere in the world into what effect taking a large chunk of the leading edge out of a wing would have on lift and drag at the time of the design. It was a suck-it and see design that more or less worked. The duct itself, containing radiators and oil coolers, was designed – sculpted even – according to the work of Fred Meredith of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, whose work was later ‘borrowed’ by the North American Aviation team to produce the P-51’s drag-reducing belly scoop.

It is a tribute to Petter’s instinct that the wing performed as well with the large aperture in the leading edge as without, whilst having no external protuberances for cooling did make the Whirlwind slipperier than most. Retracted flaps narrowing the exit aperture and capturing the ‘Meredith Effect’ helped.

However, the complete lack of data on how to avoid flow breakdown inside the duct meant that very often not all the air that should have got to the radiators did, and overheating did happen. How much of that was due to the shockwaves coming off the propeller blades (spoiler alert) and how much was down to turbulence generated by the lips and walls of the duct will probably never be known – but it added to the myth of ‘unreliable’ engines.

9. Cannon

Nothing so subtle about these. While many of us now admire the Whirlwind as a flying machine, the four prominent 20mm cannon are impossible to ignore – The Whirlwind was after all a weapon of war and it functioned as a piece of flying artillery. Developed from the Oerlikon FF S, the 20mm Hispanos were aimed by simply looking down the nose. The concentrated fire needed no ‘harmonisation’ – they all pointed the same way and delivered rounds within inches of each other regardless.

Though the Whirlwind was mooted as a ‘Bomber Destroyer’ – essentially an interceptor – it was rarely used for this. Even during the Battle of Britain, it was recognised that the Whirlwind was better suited to other tasks. Should German armour have attempted to cross the channel, the barges would have had little chance on encountering a Whirlwind. Any vehicles that made it across would have been intensely vulnerable to the cannon. All the Whirlwinds delivered by the Autumn of 1940 were kept back in Scotland by Dowding for this possible use.

From 1941 until 1943 the relatively few Whirlwinds in service wreaked havoc on ground targets in occupied France using these weapons, as well as the 500lb bombs they were later modified to carry.

10 . The Culprit – DH Constant Speed Propeller

 The big one. It was discovered in 2018, by this author, that there was in fact nothing wrong with the Rolls Royce Peregrine engine, the one famously blamed for the Whirlwind’s cancellation. What looked like an inexplicable fall-off in engine power with altitude was in fact an entirely explicable fall-off in the propeller blades’ ability to turn power into thrust. To explain requires a series of concepts of varying degrees of difficulty to be ‘lined up’ and born in mind simultaneously.

The first is that a propeller blade is an aerofoil, working perpendicular to line of flight. All aerofoils accelerate air over their surfaces. Propeller blades are moving considerably faster than the aeroplane they are attached to, their velocity a combination of rotation and the aircraft’s forward movement. With all this it is inevitable that locally over the blade’s foil some air will become supersonic, especially further out where geometry means the blade section is moving faster for any given rpm.

That was the easy bit.

The fatter an aerofoil, the greater the local acceleration. Modern thin propeller blades won’t go ‘locally supersonic’ right up to the point where they are actually hitting the speed of sound – and even then the resultant shock, and drag, will be less. Fat aerofoils hit big problems much earlier. The Whirlwind’s propeller blades would start to create shockwaves at a combined blade velocity of 0.7 Mach.

Now bear in mind that the speed of sound decreases with altitude. So at combined speed of, say, 575 mph a fat bade section would produce no draggy shockwaves at 1,000 feet and yet be an aerodynamic mess at 30,000ft.

It all comes together when one considers the final innovation of the Whirlwind, the De Haviland Constant Speed Propeller. The idea is simple enough – all reciprocating engines have speeds at which they are most powerful or most efficient. Cars use gearboxes to keep close to a desired rpm whatever the speed. The constant speed system – of which the Whirlwind was a pioneer – works a little like an automatic gearbox. When it senses deceleration, it lowers the angle of attack of the propeller blade aerofoils. Drag on rotation decreases, and rpm comes back up. Too fast, and the blades go ‘coarse’ again, to slow it down.

As the Whirlwind climbed, it started to experience shockwaves on the blades. The higher it went, the draggier things got for the propeller. The constant speed unit, oblivious to the real cause of the drag, simply fined the blades in response, keeping up the revs. It wouldn’t stop until it had passed through a negative incidence, producing no thrust whatsoever. The Whirlwind appeared to lose power at height and as almost no-one had knowledge of transonic aerodynamics, nearly everyone blamed the engines, including Petter himself. Famously, this got the program cancelled.

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Soviet airline memorabilia to break the ice

There’s a particular exotic glamour to artefacts from the Soviet-era Aeroflot airline. Perhaps this why one of my favourite aviation books of recent times was the exquisite Fuel book of the Aeroflot ephemera of Bruno Vandermueren. With this in mind I tracked down Bruno to choose his 10 favourite pieces from his collection.

10. Timetable winter 1937-38

On the cover, a PS-89 equipped with skis flying in a snow storm over an industrialised town. It was at the height of the Stalin’s Great Purge.

Only 8 of these aircraft were build and a timetable from this period is almost as rare as the aircraft itself. This particular copy I picked up in Kiev a few years ago thanks to one of my local contacts.

9. ‘Riga-Moscow-Riga’

Save Time! Use Air Transport! Riga – Moscow, 820km. By train 36 hours. By passenger airplane 3,5 hours’. The map shows the entire USSR with the Aeroflot trunk routes.

The brochure is undated but seems to be from the early 1950s. In those days, publicity used the slogan ‘Use Air Transport’ without mentioning ‘Aeroflot’. It was a time when most long distance travel was done by train. Colorful promotional brochures started to appear to entice the population to fly by airplane instead. This plane – train comparison of travel times and ticket prices was common until the early 1970s.

8. Brochure describing the Moscow – Khabarovsk route

Long distance routes in the early 1950’s were quite an undertaking. The Ilyushin Il-12 made 8 intermediate stops: Kazan – Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) – Omsk – Novosibirsk – Krasnoyarsk – Irkutsk – Chita and Tygda. Total flight time was 22 hours while the total journey took some 33 up to 42 hours, depending on the schedule. This was in case everything went as planned but during the first years in Aeroflot service, the Shvetsov Ash-82FN engines weren’t very reliable and had to be overhauled every 100-150 hours.

The brochure was designed by Sergey Sakharov, one of the leading artists in Soviet advertising creating famous posters for vodka, cigarettes and fruit juice. His work for Aeroflot included several posters and my collection includes other brochures of his hand like ‘Moscow – Tbilisi’, ‘Moscow –Tashkent’ and ‘International Air Routes of the Soviet Union’. I’m still trying to find ‘Air Routes to the Resorts of the Caucasus’, ‘Air Routes to the Resorts of Crimea’ and ‘Moscow – Tashkent’  but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.

7. Timetable for summer 1960 of the Estonian Aeroflot Directorate

It depicts the Tallinn skyline as seen from the beach and an Ilyushin Il-14 is flying overhead.

Local timetables are among my favorite Aeroflot ephemera. Although most were not as colorful as this one, they always make for interesting reading. Often the schedule was simply printed in a local newspaper. In the USSR, even many small villages and settlements had an airfield, grass strip or a nearby river which could be used to land, in total some 3,500. Some of them are difficult to find on a map. This led me to draw local route networks based on these timetables. Nowadays, literally thousands of these places in the ex-USSR are not connected by air anymore.

Order The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes Vol 1 here.

6. Civil Aviation magazine 11/1962 ‘Under the Aeroflot Emblem’ by A. Kirillova

This monthly magazine never had a high circulation and, as with other ephemera, most copies were simply thrown away over time. I’m still missing several editions but this cover from November 1962 with the Tupolev Tu-104 and Aeroflot hammer and sickle logo is definitely among my favorites with still some influence of constructivism.

5. Antonov An-10A brochure published by ‘Avtoexport’ (Car export) before ‘Aviaexport’ was established in 1961.

After a crash near Kharkiv in 1972, the first Soviet turboprop airliner vanished from Aeroflot service. For this reason, the An-10 is often overlooked although it played an important role in the development of Aeroflot.

Its cargo twin sister, the An-12 has proven to be a tireless workhorse. Even today, half a century after production ended in 1973 and the grounding of the An-10 fleet, several An-12 are still flying regularly in the service of cargo operators from ex-Soviet countries. While writing this, I can hear the hum of a Cavok Airlines An-12 flying at 20,000ft over my home near Brussels and whenever I can, I visit Ostend airport to see them in action up close.

4. Tupolev Tu-144 cigarettes produced in Moscow by the Java tobacco factory for Aeroflot’s 50^th anniversary in 1973. At the time, it was still common to smoke on board an airplane.

Several years after I acquired this cigarette pack, I saw a picture of a similar one depicting an Il-18. Only then I realised it must have been part of a series of cigarette packs depicting the aircraft types in the fleet.  It would take another decade before I stumbled across the entire box set of 10 cigarette packs for sale on eBay by a British seller. It contains the An-24, Il-18, Il-62, Mi-8, Tu-104, Tu-124, Tu-134, Tu-144, Tu-154 and Yak-40. The fact that I never found these cigarettes in a former Soviet country was because they were, most likely, only sold in the Soviet ‘Beriozka’ shops. These shops sold luxury goods to foreign tourists in exchange for foreign currency and were not frequented by the local population.

3. Panoramic postcard from 1979 of an Aeroflot flight crew at Elista airport, North Caucasus

Among the many hundreds of Soviet airport postcards, it remains one of my favorites. It expresses the typical atmosphere of a Soviet regional airport: the crews, a Yak-40, the airport terminal with the waiting area outside and the rough concrete surface. Only the passengers, stray dogs and an old ZIL fuel bowser are missing.

2. Promotional brochure showing the Ilyushin Il-86 take-off from its birthplace Moscow-Khodynka airfield

The two almost identical buildings are the Aeroflot hotel and the administrative building with in between the Moscow City Air Terminal where passengers could check-in, drop off their luggage and choose direct transport to their airport of departure.

When I was in Moscow in 2017, the air terminal was about to be demolished. New shopping malls and other buildings were erected everywhere around but while walking in that area, one could still witness the presence, or at least the remnants of a great aviation legacy. Several aircraft design bureaus were located at the Khodynka field, not in the least the Ilyushin bureau. All Il-12, Il-14 and Il-18s had been constructed there, as well as the prototypes of the Il-62 and Il-86. It must have been quite a sight seeing them take off from the heart of the city.

1. Moscow – Algiers – Conakry – Dakar by Ilyushin Il-62

To conclude this nostalgic journey through Aeroflot ephemera I’ve chosen an advertisement announcing the new weekly service Moscow – Algiers – Conakry – Dakar by Ilyushin Il-62 on the back cover of ‘Soviet Union’ illustrated magazine of February 1969.

Flight SU-065/66 departed Moscow Sheremetyevo every Thursday morning, stayed overnight in Dakar to fly the same route back to Moscow arriving on Friday just before midnight. Inflight service on international flights was always of a high standard and the Il-62 was definitely one of the most comfortable airliners of its time.

Back then, in the winter of 1968-69, Aeroflot operated regularly to 48 international destinations. By 1990 this number had risen to 119. Most of them out of Moscow but also a few out of Leningrad, Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Kiev, Minsk, Tashkent, Yerevan and Vilnius.

The world and the aircraft have changed a lot since then but these ads continue to inspire and make one wants to travel, not only to a new destination but also back in time.

Order The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes Vol 1 here.

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