[Closed] For the Cold War jet fans

Oh yes! I shall be watching!

Mind if I drop this here as a reminder of one of the finer STW Threads I've started?

http://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/when-wars-were-colder-planes-were-cooler

BRILLIANT!!!

I can thoroughly recommend this too

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Empire-Clouds-Britains-Aircraft-Ruled/dp/0571247954/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345579053&sr=1-1

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Oh my lordy - I am deinitely going to be watching this - the headset service gets put back a day!

I might mug up on my downloaded pictures of Vulcans, Victors, Valiants, Javelins, Vampires and Lightnings in preparation.

Oh for the days when planes seemed to take their design ethos straight from the pages of 'Eagle'.

Saw that this morning while flicking through the TV guide. Already got the reminder set. 🙂

Here's a cold war jet fan

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cheers for the heads up

Reminder set and poised. 😀

I'm going to throw in a recommendation for Skunk Works by Ben Rich in here too.

American cold war genius' at work.

I have a high pressure turbine blade from a Rolls Royce Olympus jet engine which was fitted to a Vulcan Bomber

[url= http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4077/5451200863_8df9667831_z.jp g" target="_blank">http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4077/5451200863_8df9667831_z.jp g"/> [/img][/url]
[url= http://www.flickr.com/photos/cheesyfeet/5451200863/ ]High pressure turbine blade[/url] by [url= http://www.flickr.com/people/cheesyfeet/ ]gary_foulger[/url], on Flickr

Useless, but at the same time, very cool!

Lightning-tastic!

🙂

Fair play, STW is still ace. Thanks for the heads up 🙂

TA 😀

Any chance anyone in the UK can record this and the next episode and send it to me out here in Oz on DVD?

Please pretty please!

Cheers for the reminder, it had slipped my mind. Sky box set for record. 😀

Just texted my Dad, to get the Sky+ on record...

For me mind, not for him! 😉

Sooooooo looking forward to watching this, strange really as the cold war was not far from over by the time I was born, but I just think the engineering from the period, on all sides, was absolutely fantastic!

Zokes: I'm also expat. Try installng expat shield and then you can watch on iplayer.

@Squidlord: Expatshield seemed to struggle with the distance (being in Oz). The only one I found that worked well was YourFreedom, but that's bloody expensive for just one programme (I usually just get it set up for the 6 nations).

I think there was a mention of another VPN service at one point that to me looked promising (but I'd just paid for yourfreedom), but i can't find any trace of it on here now...

Zokes - I know a couple of t0rr3nt sites that might have it in a day or two.
(I know the morality of these was discussed here a day or two ago. If there was some way I could pay for the BBC from abroad I would. Honestly. Easiest way for me to get UK TV, not that I watch a lot of it)

Cool - shall keep a look out.

Thanks. SKY+ set.

I've set it to record the series. All being well with that, I'll stick the file on my ftp server for you. The file will be in .ts format, which can be viewed with VLC media player.

Send me your email address at my gmail address

sp00ge1972

On this subject, a wingless Lightning seems to have randomly appeared in the carpark of an industrial unit of the A46, just North of M5 Jct 18. Quite took me by surprise on the old commute...

Thanks for that. I still think that the Russian Ekranoplans were some of the coolest cold war engineering projects.

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A timely bump.

It might feature Eric 'Winkle' Brown with luck - flown more types of plane than anyone else in history. He lives at the back of my uncles house and regularly sets alight the trees with his bonfires!

For the real geeks amongst you... a fascinating history of banging out:

I read earlier that the last flying electric lightning crashed at an airshow. Bit of a bummer that one.

It's bods like Eric Winkle Brown that I think about whenever I feel like I'm about to grumble at on old boy pottering along the road or pavement in front of me. Don't suppose I'd be too happy if he set my garden on fire though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Brown_%28pilot%29 - Quality stuff.

Here we go!

I'm quite excited!

*pulls up chair*

Kettle on...

RAF Tangmere (where the RAF High Speed Flight was based) - not much left, but a very fine museum there now. Well worth a visit if you are in the area

http://www.tangmere-museum.org.uk

Accuracy a bit dodgy

If anyone wants to get up close to these jets, and see,hear, and FEEL their thrust on take-off, then Bruntingthorpe airfield, Leics, has an open day this Sunday (26th Aug.), with fast taxi runs from amongst others, the Lightnings, Victor, Comet, Hunter.

http://www.lightnings.org.uk/

The noise is incredible, you have to be there to know how loud they are, it really does make you shake.

RAF Cosford is a good day out, National Cold War Exhibition is very good

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https://plus.google.com/photos/100546096143152578024/albums/5765045954322837809
https://plus.google.com/photos/100546096143152578024/albums/5764722553144893761

And they have a TSR-2 🙂 !

Jesus, that Victor is something else. What an amazing looking machine.

BRILLIANT!

Still get a tear in my eye when I see the Harrier.

Well that was a bit good, however we were carting around with TSr2 and the yanks were pushing out u2s at 70k feet and 12h recon flights.

Most enjoyable viewing

I was a young air cadet standing at the end of the runway when the last of the Lightnings left Leconfield in the 70's. It feels strange to think that there are so few left, and that I really am that old 🙁

I was very young, but I've seen all three V-Bombers flying, and I've seen the big pink one fly, at the RIAT just after the Gulf War. Odd to think that pink was effective camo! Astonishing looking aircraft, though, and seeing one fly over the house with three Tornados behind in IFR formation was quite a thrill.
So many fantastic aircraft, the Javelin, Meteor, Sea Vixen...
Sigh...

One jet sadly left out was the awesome Blackburn Buccaneer. I was trying to find some incredible BBC tv footage of the Buccs weeing in the Yanks shoes at the Red Flag challenges at Nellis AFB, Nevada in the late 70's. I remember it vividly, with the Americans astonished voices over the intercom. Found this archive blog about it, lots of fabulous reminiscing here for everyone:
http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-48541.html
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Did find this:

there's a very sad looking Lightning just next to the A1 near Newark; it's in the "rotate" position but it's been very heavily graffiti'd 🙁

That'd be XN728 probably? Gone for scrap now.

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Hasn't that been there since the late seventies? The site was a scrapyard!

Aye. But finally they scrapped the scrap 🙁

More cheerful... I used to ride past this every day on the way to work:

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Poor thing was falling apart, but still I was a wee bit shocked when they did this, to move it:

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Particularily since it was transported intact when it was moved to Ferranti. And then, it sat in a heap for years, seemingly abandoned. But just now, I saw this:

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Not usually that much of a plane nerd but I always liked these mad looking things... Had the model kid as a kid, and this one locally to gawk at. Might need to go and see it next time I'm down that way.

One jet sadly left out was the awesome Blackburn Buccaneer. I was trying to find some incredible BBC tv footage of the Buccs weeing in the Yanks shoes at the Red Flag challenges at Nellis AFB, Nevada in the late 70's. I remember it vividly, with the Americans astonished voices over the intercom.

I remember that coverage on the BBC news...!

Was at Farnborough today visiting the AAIB and by the main road the Air Sciences Trust have a Lightening and a two seat Harrier to name but two exhibits.

Bucc's had some very clever ideas in them. Like ducting some of the jet flow out of little ports on the wings to help with increase lift/reduce landing speed for carrier work cos they had stubby wings. I wonder if some Forumla One engineers used that for inspiration the blown diffusers of recent years?!

love stuff like this 🙂

Why has Eric Brown not been knighted?

His autobiography is jaw dropping and yet self-effacing. He has been in the thick of almost all of the biggest developments in British aviation history. It's scandalous he's been overlooked.

Bucc's had some very clever ideas in them. Like ducting some of the jet flow out of little ports on the wings to help with increase lift/reduce landing speed for carrier work cos they had stubby wings. I wonder if some Forumla One engineers used that for inspiration the blown diffusers of recent years?!

Shortly before retirement, the Bucaneer was apparently used for tankage duties. A pair of Tornadi from a base 'somewhere in Scotland' met a Buc loitering over the North Sea, refuelled on their way to a range in West Germany. The Buc continued to loiter, again giving them fuel on the way back and all 3 a/c recovered to base. The Buc was found to have 1,000lb of tankage fuel left over. So, instead of carrying this excess fuel, the Buccaneer could have carried a 1,000lb munition, refuelled the Tornados, ACCOMPANIED THEM TO GERMANY, DROPPED THE ROUND, THEN REFUELLED THEM ON THE WAY HOME!! Does this speak volumes about the capabilities of the aircraft or the deficiencies of the Tornado, or a bit of both???

A statistic. The Avro Lancaster max T/O weight was 63,000lbs achieved from a 1300 sq ft wing area and 4 Merlins. The Bucc's max T/O weight was 62,000lbs achieved with 500 sq ft of wing, 2 Speys and no AB!

I was lucky enough to see the Lightnings in 'action' at airshows in the late seventies.

One memorable show was at RAF Church Fenton in 1978, the Lightning concluded his display by going vertical on full reheat from a starting point of what could have been no more than 100feet above the runway. Even looking through binoculars I lost sight of the aircraft.

What seemed like a few moments later the P.A. announcer said that the pilot had radioed his altitude in as 40,000 feet...

Thought that was impresssive, until I read this on wiki:

[i] In 1984, during a major NATO exercise, Flt Lt Mike Hale intercepted a U-2 at a height which they had previously considered safe from interception. Records show that Hale climbed to 88,000 ft (26,800 m) in his Lightning F.3 XR749. This was not sustained level flight, but in a ballistic climb or a zoom climb, in which the pilot takes the aircraft to top speed and then puts the aircraft into a climb, trading speed for altitude.[/i]

BOOM! literally!

Amazed to see Tebbit in this program, hideous creature.

Fantastic show thanks for the heads up 🙂

northwind - is that lightning at the museum in dumfries now, or am i imagining things?

"Red & Black, Bananas Bananas..." 8)

ittaika - Member

northwind - is that lightning at the museum in dumfries now, or am i imagining things?

Aye, that's the one.

when is the 2nd half of this programme on?

when is the 2nd half of this programme on?

Wednesday, BBC4, 9pm.
It's about the growth in passenger air traffic from the end of WWII. No more Vulcans barrel rolling on take off. 🙁

Buccaneers were ace, shame they missed them off the programme. There was a rumour that Buccaneers could be flown "hands off" at low level, the ground effect would basically mean it would sit there at 60ft as though chained to the ground. Not sure how true that was but I've seen both Buccs and Phantoms being flown spectacularly low across airfields. 🙂

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Part 2 - Wednesday 21:00 on BBC 4

xlnt, i enjoyed the first half like.

I love the story from the Red Flag competitions about the Vulcan trying to sneak in from Canada at around 50ft and being spotted and told his game was over, peeling off to reveal two Buccs flying [i]under[/i] the Vulcan's wings, and getting through to hit the 'target'! That's some flying. 😯

Bump for the second part of the programme tonight, 9pm, BBC4.
About the evolution of civil aviation after WWII.