Forgotten Warbirds of the Early Jet Age

hello there just before we kick off today's video i do want to give a quick plug to a brand new channel that i have called into the shadows if the name doesn't give it away the channel is very much focused on the darker side of everything early episodes have covered things like how we fight the world's deadliest disease how the congo suffered the worst of colonialism and how the nazis escaped europe to south america on the rat lines so if you'd like to explore the darker side of history and science please check out into the shadows there is a link below and now today's video [Music] hello everybody welcome back to another brand new episode of side projects this one's all about forgotten warbirds of the early jet age not forgotten anymore like bourbon pinot noir and percurino cheese why is pecorino cheese never heard of that oh jets get better with age it sounds tasty though that said against modern combat aircraft that stand little chance so perhaps they don't age that well at all whatever the case despite high development cost poor performance abysmal safety records and hopeless obsolescence there's just something really cool about vintage jets fully agree i love looking around at museums because i'm a massive nerd if you're inclined to agree stick around because we're about to look at five forgotten warbirds of the early jet age though it's not so well known now the odd ron fr1 fireball was one of the earliest mixed power aircraft which meant that it had both piston and jet engines didn't even know that was a thing perhaps more impressively a farbel was the first airplane to land on an aircraft carrier under jet power in november of 1945 but the event wasn't planned and it almost ended in disaster the original idea was to touch down using power from the 1 300 horsepower right cyclone radial engine in the nose but things changed quickly when it stalled on approach the frantic pilot was able to get the general electric turbo jet in the tail lit just a few hundred yards out but after slamming into the deck the heavy plane barely snagged the last to restore before barreling headlong into the ship's elastic crash barrier as dramatic as it was the fr1 story began years earlier when american jet engine development was in its infancy back then jet engines were complex unreliable and underpowered these characteristics made them unsuitable for carrier operations but the navy was eager to harness the new power plant's potential and to that end the ryan aeronautical company of san diego california was awarded a contract for three mixed power prototypes all of which were delivered in 1943. by all outwards appearances fireballs weren't any different than the traditional piston engine planes featuring single seats wings set low in their fuselages and tri-score landing gears unlike their counterparts each had a ge turbojet engine producing 1 600 pounds of thrust stuffed into its stubby tail since standard nose inlets weren't feasible due to the big radial engines up front air was fed into the jet through ducts in the wings which made them much thicker and less aerodynamic than they might have been otherwise to simplify things both engines used identical aviation fuel drawn from shared tanks but the first prototype made its maiden voyage in june of 1944 with only its radial unit installed a second plane flew a few months later but early on a host of issues were revealed that included problems with stability and wing strength both of which ultimately proved to be an achilles heel to make matters worse each of these prototypes crashed during testing although the incidents were different further the planes also suffered from the inability to recover from steep dives underpowered radial engines that were prone to overheating and arresting hooks that tended to skip over the lines they were meant to grab onto which is a pretty big flaw when it comes to a carrier-based aircraft though a number of successful takeoffs and landings using one or both power plants were made when it came to officially qualifying pilots for carrier operations most just couldn't cut the mustard perhaps if performance had been better these issues could have been remedied or overlooked altogether but sadly the fireball wasn't a thoroughbred in fact for such a powerful twin-engine aircraft the nearly 12 thousand pound machine could barely top 400 miles per hour or 643 kilometers an hour which made it markedly slower than many of the planes it might face in battle like the 425 mile per hour fock wolf fw 190 and the nearly 550 mile per hour messerschmitt me262 by november 1945 only 66 fireballs have been delivered and probably not by chance they never saw combat shortly after japan's unconditional surrender ordered for more than a thousand additional aircraft were canceled existing fireballs technically remained in service for a few years after the war but they were officially mothballed in the summer of 1947. [Music] the swift was a single-seat multi-role british debt developed and manufactured by supermarine of spitfire bain between the late 40s and mid-1950s the concept for the aircraft was conceived after world war ii when england found itself in a perplexing predicament money was tight and though government officials and raf brass considered another major conflict unlikely anytime soon it was evident that piston engine aircraft were rapidly becoming pretty obsolete as a result a tentative aircraft development policy was adopted which in the end put many of the country's fighters bombers and interceptors a generation or more behind their competitors nonetheless development of new aircraft did go forward and the prototypes that would eventually become swifts were given 500 series designations in 1948 the type 510 took to the air and it's made in flight as the first british aircraft with swept wings and tail surfaces a number of upgraded variants followed although in many cases design improvements created more problems than they actually solved in addition swift's had a number of persistent flaws that included an unreliable and fuel-thirsty engine poor maneuverability unpredictable heading characteristics and afterburners reheaters that often refused to light at high altitude from the get-go test pilots doubted the plane's airworthiness designed as claimed it was hopelessly over engineered and cost surged into the proverbial stratosphere on the bright side the first production model the mk-1 was powered by a revolutionary avon 109 axial flow jet engine capable of producing 7500 pound-feet of thrust the new warbird had gobs of power but still couldn't break the sound barrier and since advancements in jet technology were arguably made more quickly in the 1950s than any other decade before or since the future just didn't look particularly bright as a result swifts were generally seen as little more than stop-gap machines only fit for service until better aircraft were developed but the outbreak of the korean war in 1950 prompted britain to order more than 100 of them though no swift would ever fly in combat in late september of 1953 an f4 piloted by commander mike lithgow broke the world absolute speed record attaining nearly 738 miles per hour or 1 185 kilometers an hour but despite this success the first production model f1 wouldn't actually enter raf service until 1954 the year after the korea war ended the break-in period was marred by multiple accidents after which the swift f1 became a member of a particularly unflattering club composed exclusively of aircraft that entered service and were officially grounded in the very same year other ground attack and reconnaissance variants did remain active for brief periods but terms like abysmal failure a national scandal were being thrown around with increasing frequency nearly 200 swifts were built but in the end their mediocre performance inherent design flaws and poor safety records just couldn't be overlooked nor could development costs which ultimately exceeded 20 million pounds which today 700 million pounds or nearly a billion dollars the mig-9 was a first-generation jet aircraft developed by the mikhail gorovich design bureau in the waning months of the second world war in late 1945 orders were handed down to mig from the council of people's commissars for a single-seat jet fighter powered by a pair of bmw 003 engines that have been captured on the eastern front the two engines and later reverse engineered variants would be located in the lower fuselage behind the cockpit but other than its cutting edge power plants the new plane's airframe wasn't much different than those of the earlier propeller driven aircraft that it was intended to replace the council's directive stated that the plane must have a top speed of at least 560 miles per hour 900 kilometers an hour at sea level climbed to 16 400 feet that's five thousand meters in four minutes or less and have a range of no less than five hundred and ten miles or eight hundred and twenty kilometers three prototypes were initially ordered in anticipation of test flights that were already scheduled for mid-march of nineteen construction got underway a few months later and the first unit began ground testing in late december a number of inherent defects were discovered and though many were remedied in later models the program took another serious blow when in the summer of 1946 the first flight where the aircraft crashed in dramatic fashion before stunned mig executives and military officials who'd made the trip from moscow originally intended as both a fighter and an interceptor the mig packed quite a punch with its singles 37 or 57 millimeter into 23 millimeter cannons but though potent when ingested into the engine's air intakes the gun's exhaust gases often caused the compressors to stall especially at high altitude where the air was the thinnest multiple attempts were made to resolve the issue including repositioning the cannons lengthening their barrels and fitting them with muzzle brakes but nothing worked additional deficiencies included lack of air brakes and ejection seats self-sealing fuel tanks and armor around the cockpit which would have significantly improved survivability for both pilot and machine and it's kind of amazing that pilots got into this without those devices unfortunately these options would also have made the plane heavier and more complex and more expensive than it already was and none of that would have fixed what was perhaps the new mig's biggest problem unswept wings which made it unsuitable for high-speed flight in a classic miscalculation soviet leadership assumed that many of these flaws would be corrected during production few were but multiple orders totaling hundreds of aircrafts were placed between 1946 and 1948 and many of the planes would eventually be equipped with new more powerful soviet-made afterburning rd20 engines including prototypes just more than 600 aircraft were built most of which entered service with the soviet air forces in 1948 and 1949. mig-9s were flown by a number of fighter regiments and hundreds were sent to china's people's liberation army air force plaf as trainers fighters and ground attack aircraft it's rumored that the plaf briefly considered sending some of them to korea in 1951 but in an age of more advanced fighters like f-86s flown by better-trained american pilots it's barely certain to say they would have sustained heavy heavy losses and instead they were restricted to domestic use though during its short life the mig-9 met many of its original performance parameters it was ultimately dropped for the mig-15 which went on to become one of the 20th century's most effective and mass-produced military jets when it comes to aircraft with both revolutionary design and abhorrent safety records few top the vougt f7u cutlass the us navy's early cold war tailless carrier was a huge departure from traditional aircraft and many of its design elements came from german scientists and engineers whisked away to the united states after world war ii but despite its groundbreaking layout the aircraft amassed a cringe-worthy record during its service life which was prematurely shortened by the deaths of more than two dozen pilots and even more shockingly that 25 percent of all cutlasses were lost in accidents that's crazy guys ironically the design actually won a navy competition in 1945. regret one can't help but wonder what the safety records would have been like for the aircraft that lost the competition killed everybody the prototypes were ordered in 1946 the first of which accelerated to 625 miles per hour that's 1058 kilometers an hour in the sky over naval air station patuxent river in southern maryland shortly after delivery in 1948 bort's design featured short swept wings with large surface areas and instead of a traditional tail housing a single rudder each cutlass had two vertical stabilizers protruding from the center rear of the wings themselves in addition all controls were hydraulically powered which provided pilots reassuring artificial feedback while reducing fatigue though the system was notoriously unreliable the cockpit's positioned toward the nose and the retractable bubble canopy provided good visibility during takeoffs and landings but due to the extraordinarily tall nose landing gear at rest the pilot was 14 feet higher than the carrier deck this was done to orient the nose upward during takeoff to increase lift but the gear strut itself was prone to failure and its position directly under the cockpit often results in back injuries during rough carrier landings another of the board's problems lay in its anemic westinghouse engines which some disgruntled pilots claimed put out less heat than the toasters that the company's housewares division manufactured with about 3000 pounds of thrust each they were moderately powerful but even in unison they just weren't up to the task of propelling the nearly seven thousand pounds that's over twelve thousand kilogram gutless cutlass adequately especially during takeoff and to add insult to injury the engines frequently flamed out in the rain notable cutless accidents included an ejection in front of a large crowd at an air show in the summer of 1950 and another near san diego in 1954 after which the rocket-laden plane circled over the famous hotel de coronado for half an hour before crashing onto the shore nearby i mean at least they had an ejection seat one of the cutlasses strengths was its armament of four twenty millimeter cannons and its ability to carry more than five thousand pounds of ordnance including bombs and early sparrow at air missiles the firepower wasn't enough to right the plane's abundant wrongs in an official attempt to drum up support for the flagging platform the blue angels flew two cutlasses in a side demonstration in 1953 but behind closed doors aviators ground crews navy officers and even company officials considered it an irredeemable death trap of the 320 units built between 1948 and 1955 all were officially retired in 1959 having done little more than earned the distinction of being one of the deadliest military craft of all time the s09000 trident was a high-performance interceptor built by french aircraft manufacturer snc aso in the 1950s after the second world war france made rebuilding its military a priority and it no longer wanted to rely on foreign equipment but though jet development was still proceeding rapidly many engines still produced insufficient thrust to repel new aircraft to the speeds for which they were designed so rockets offered a viable solution they were immensely powerful and relatively simple to manufacture but on the downside they were dangerous unreliable and typically burn through their fuel in a matter of minutes hence a mixed-powered solution seemed logical in the early 1950s the french air force expressed interest in a domestically designed and built supersonic interceptor requirements included a heart-stopping climb rate the ability to attain mach 1.3 and the ability to deploy from unfinished airstrips it was a tall order but the smc aso submitted an unorthodox proposal for a sleek aircraft with a turbo jet at the end of each wing and a big rocket motor in the fuselage nearly a dozen prototypes and pre-production aircraft were ordered between the early and mid-1950s and though aircraft losses and pilot fatalities mounted during early testing the design seemed promising apparently other than all the death featuring a dagger-like fuselage the trident looked fast even when it was parked in the hangar its thin straight wings and menacing cockpit made it a sight to behold and it featured a number of innovations like state-of-the-art radar and fire control systems and control surfaces that moved entirely which eliminated the weight and complexity associated with traditional elevators and rudders on which only relatively small flaps moved during flight the plane would use all three engines during takeoff ascent and travel to the interception point after which the jet engines alone would be used to return to base each 42-foot long trident would have a crew of one and would be kept aloft by stubby razor thin wings just 23 feet that's seven meters wide from tip to tip the central rocket was powered by a mixture of furylene and nitric acid and produced more than six thousand six hundred pounds of thrust and each of the two turbojets produced nearly 2500 pounds of thrust with a maximum takeoff weight of just 13 000 pounds that's 5900 kilograms the machine had a thrust-to-weight ratio approaching one-to-one enough to propel it to a maximum speed of mach 1.92 and reach the astonishingly high altitude of 79 000 feet three different variants were built with upgraded engines fuselages canopies and electrical systems but the latter stages of development were characterized by a number of dramatic accidents including one in may of 1957 when a fuel leak caused a trident to explode at the paris air show resulting in the pilot's death thanks to rising development costs short range high fuel consumption and a number of safety issues that weren't ever likely to be overcome the project was in dire straits to stave off the inevitable sna cso set out to highlight its plane's impressive performance it did become the first european aircraft to attain mach 1 during level flight but the program was cancelled shortly thereafter and though a few airframes were tucked away for future development most were destroyed and sold for scrap so i really hope you found this video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Sideprojects

Views: 174,520

Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects

Id: AZOTO_V8Bss

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021