Royal Aircraft Factory SE5a | Curator on the Loose!

[Music] hi i'm matthew burchette and welcome back to another episode of curator on the loose i'm the senior curator here at the museum of flight in sunny seattle and today have we got a cool one for you we are talking about bam this guy the se5 now i know what you're thinking what the heck does se5 stand for it's the royal aircraft factory's name for scout experimental five duh so easy anyway today is gonna be awesome this plane was a huge factor in world war one even though it really didn't hit the front lines until 1917 and even into 1918 and we'll get into that in a little bit but it was a game changer and we're gonna talk about some of the things that made it so cool okay let's start right here with the tombstone right up front that's a radiator now wait a minute why does this thing have a radiator most world war one airplanes used a rotary engine which was air-cooled kind of like a vw bug not this guy the se5 was originally equipped with a 150 horsepower hispano-soueza inline engine which means that it's like the engine in your car today it used a radiator in glycol to cool itself that was kind of cool for the day in fact it also used in some models a geared engine instead of a direct drive engine that created some problems originally this guy had the tendency to throw off the entire front part of its engine not something you want to happen when you're in the middle of a dog fight luckily woolsley a british company came up with the viper engine and it was a 200 horsepower engine and that's what equipped a lot of the se5 a versions now you know where that name comes from and this is an se5a it is equipped with a haspano sweeza engine but it's the 8b engine and that was one that was kind of iffy but it still was an amazing plane in fact check out this exhaust system that is really cool in fact a lot of guys would chop this exhaust to get better performance out of their engine and save weight that big old tube running down the side that's all weight that you want to have for carrying ammunition or lightening up your plane so that you can dog fight better always a good thing one of the cool things about the se5a was it was kind of a tuner plane and if you don't know what a tuner is well it's kind of like me i like to tinker with my subaru to to get it to go faster and to jack around with the turbo and stuff pilots in the sc5a for some reason they did all sorts of crazy things to this like i mentioned before they would chop the exhaust pipes to save weight or to get more horsepower out of their aircraft in fact english ace james mccudden did all sorts of things to his plane he lowered the seat he got rid of what was known as the greenhouse which was a big plexiglass cover that was right in front of his face and he hated that thing a lot of pilots did that and they put these little windscreens in front but mccudden also changed up his engine he put in high compression pistons in fact he was able to get about nine more miles per hour out of his plane that's pretty impressive one of the other things that the pilots loved was the armament package on this aircraft and you can see it had a 303 louis gun on what was known as a foster mount and it allowed the pilot to either fire this gun from inside the cockpit straight ahead right over the propeller so you didn't need a synchronization gear or you could pull it down all the way to here and fire vertically which means that you could come up under somebody and fire at them from below that was really a game changer and pretty awesome the french were the first they put it on their new ports but the brits loved this thing the other gun in here was the ubiquitous 303 vickers machine gun and that guy's way up there but there's one thing that really sets the se5a apart from other british planes and it's this tube right there and that's called the aldous gun sight and you don't see it a lot on any other plane but for some reason it was really popular on the sc 5a now what the heck is an oldest gun sight it looks like a telescope well it is and it isn't it's what's known as a columnating site it was a 32 inch long tube with a 2 inch diameter viewfinder and you used both eyes open to use it you didn't have to squint to see into it which was great because when you're chasing a dr1 triplane you really want to see what's going on around you so you kept both eyes open and there were two concentric circles that had been etched into the lenses there was no magnification all it did was it kept those two circles right on your target really kind of no matter where you put your eye which helped the pilot immensely if you're a gun guy think of it as a red dot sight that's exactly what it is it wasn't illuminated but it uses the same principle as a red dot sight if you're not a gun guy and you want to know what a red site is or a red dot sight is just look it up on google there'll be more than enough information for you but let's get into the cockpit now and check out what it was like for the pilot i love this part you can see how high up i'm sitting in this plane and if you watched our other episode on the stop with tri-plane you'll remember that i was about right here in that cockpit that's why a bunch of these pilots lowered their seat it is kind of odd to be sitting so high up now you got a great view i can see right over the nose i can see really over the top of the wing got a great view below me and a lot of pilots removed the little headrest so i can totally see what's going on behind me and if you know anything about dog fighting check your six so let's do that real quick all right we're good all right one of the great things about this plane is it was really well equipped now it's not well equipped like a modern plane you'll hear pilots refer to the six-pack and those are the six instruments that they use for basic flight instruments now in this case you had a three pack you only had your compass an altimeter and your air speed indicator the other six gauges in here were all related to that inline engine up front you have some levers that you'll use to open and close the radiator shutter you've got your let's see a priming pump you've got your switches to turn um power on and off that kind of thing so it's pretty comfy in here actually and it's equipped with that typical british spade grip and of course there are those two levers one for the vickers machine gun and one for this lewis gun of course i don't have to go up and do this that's what this cable is for it actually runs to the spade grip and i can concentrate on keeping my eye looking through this aldous site and going after those fokker d7s i am really digging this right now this is awesome let's talk a little bit about our plane now the first flight of the real se5a was in november of 1916 but it didn't hit the front lines until 1917 and didn't really make an impact until 1918. remember we talked about the engine problems well on top of that it also had some pretty serious problems with its wings in fact they would just kind of pop off that's not a good thing luckily british engineers at the royal aircraft factory figured out what was going wrong made some tweaks to the structure and this guy became an amazing fighting aircraft it was stable it was fast in fact at 138 miles per hour it was the fastest plane over the battlefield beating out any german plane and pretty much on par with the spad 13 at 135 miles per hour this was a beast and it made a huge mark in the war towards the end now like i was saying ours was built in 1971 and completed in about 1988 and it was built by three guys in florida and they did an amazing job it's equipped with an actual hispano sweeza 8 b engine that's really really cool and we're really glad to have this on display because you can tell it's an amazing plane it looks kind of like a tractor of the air but there's something about that boxy look that i just really like it's not a sop with tri-plane which i feel is the most awesome of the world war one airplanes but it's still really cool it just says let's get this job done thank you guys for tuning in now here's a little thing for you if you've liked this episode and you want to get up close and personal with the se5a have we got a deal for you we are doing what we're calling premium experiences one of them is up here in our world war one exhibit and you get to have drinks and hors d'oeuvres in our french farmhouse and take a peek in this cockpit we will roll some stairs up for you and you can look into the cockpit and see for yourself just how cool this plane is if you're interested look it up on our website or email at curator at museumaflight.org i will hook you guys up with a really cool experience and we will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: The Museum of Flight

Views: 74,504

Keywords: Museum, of, Flight, aircraft, flight, education, WWII, history, curator, nonprofit, raf, se5a, pilot

Id: KMK6Kmms4N4

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020