stever219
-
Posts
2,911 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Events
Profiles
Forums
Media Demo
Posts posted by stever219
-
-
On 4/4/2024 at 10:00 AM, Mikey-1980 said:
The photoetch parts are templates to ensure the vortext generators are then place back in the right place on the wing surface. however, from looking at the upper wing surface of the Cosford museum Javelin, there doesnt seem to be any? Its all lovely and smooth?
However, XA801 in guard duty, does have some slight little nubbins there that I may be able to get away with perhaps?
XA564 at Cosford is one of the first 20 production Javelins and, AFAIK, has no service history, which makes her an odd choice for a “Service” museum. Many of the early production jets were used for trials and development work and brought a number of modifications intended because NF that were incorporated into later production examples, the vortex generators being amongst them. It was not common practice for trials aircraft to go on to have front-line careers, although not unknown, s most wouldn’t get the full modified cation treatment as XA801, for example, did.
-
1
-
-
2 hours ago, cmatthewbacon said:
That most recent one looks like someone forgot to latch and lock the two big cowl doors… which is bad news, but hardly Boeing’s fault. Also, isn’t that exactly the kind of thing the crew walkaround is supposed to catch?
best,
M.
It appears that the fan cowl latches weren't in properly (awaiting confirmation). If so this is an issue common to the A320 family. The "problem" is that the latches are on the underside of the cowlings and not easy to get a good look at during a walk-round check unless the checker was to bend very low or even lie on the ground. The latches are supposed to be painted a bright, eye,-catching colour (after the BA incident at Heathrow I think) but paint wears off or gets discoloured/overpainted and getting that low may not appeal on a cold, dark, wet, windy, grubby remote stand at stupid o'clock on a dirty winter morning (or evening or points in between).
With so many bits and pieces on modern jets tied in to configuration warning systems why has no-one apparently yet done this with the fan cowl latches? I know there have been incidents when apparently correctly closed doors (yes I am thinking of THY981) have opened in flight, but the aviation industry has, I hope, moved on since then and structure and systems design has improved. Just a thought......
-
3
-
-
@Wings unlevel I'm extremely jealous of the rapidity of your progress and the quality of your work with this magnificent kit. I hope the initial fit of the wing centre section on yours is better than it was on mine; there was much sanding, filing and gritting of teeth to get a flush fit with the fuselage top.
Whilst mucking about with the centre section I opened out the boundary layer bleed outlets(?) that are located at around 60% chord just inboard of nos. 2 and 3 engines; there's a vertical wall at the front of the "ramp" that I removed and then backed with short lengthe of square section tube to give some depth to the outlets. Kept me off the streets for half an hour or so........
-
1
-
-
It’s good when you get to this stage @PhantomBigStu: did you have any trouble with the lower-surface joints? I had to thin down the locating tabs quite a bit on all three of my new-tool Vulcans (2 x Black Buck and one free-fall “bucket of instant sunshine* delivery vehicle). Apart from that, so far, they’ve gone together well.
-
@PhantomBigStu you'll need the Olympus 200 tailpipes rather than the -300s depicted in the instructions. Thankfully Airfix have made it quite 3asy to get all the right bits in the right places with engraved marks on the parts. Or you could try finding a set of Freightdog's resin parts.
-
1
-
-
The colour images from the book are very nice, but which Lancaster(s) were they taken in? One thing's for certain; they weren't taken in any of the Type 464 provisioning Lancasters. The radio, navaids and ecm/esm gear (such as it was) evolved over the life of the type and the fit on, for example, NX611 is vastly different to PA474, which is different again from that in the extensively-modified R5868 which differs from that on ED937.
The Type 464 provisioning Lancasters weren't fitted for Gee, Oboe or H2S, so any kit related to those items was omitted or removed to save weight. Bearing n mind the low altitude at which Operation Chastise was flown was the rest bed and oxygen crate underneath it also removed? T1154/R1155 (or is it the other way round?) was fitted to keep in contact with Ops at Scampton. At least 1 VHF R/T set was carried for air-to-air communication in the target area but I've never seen it described or illustrated; the control unit was probably on the left-hand side of the cockpit somewhere within easy reach of the pilot, but the main box was where?
We will probably never know the precise internal arrangements of these special Lancasters, the best we can hope for is a reasonable approximation (unless a decent set of drawings or specifications turn up from what was Avro's).
-
1
-
-
4 minutes ago, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:
I wonder what these would look like in the later low viz grey colors ? 🤔
Interesting thought, but the Javelins would have been quite long in the tooth by then (mid-eighties) and highly unlikely to have received much in the way of mid-or late- life updates so few, if any, are likely to have worn air-defence greys. That doesn’t mean that any that might have survived as airfield decoys couldn’t have worn them............
-
2
-
-
On 3/25/2024 at 10:13 PM, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:
Well done on this, I never wanted to build on but now I might because it’s in high speed silver.
XH898 was the only Javelin to go naked in service, but a 5 or 11 Squadron jet would look quite eye-catcjing comme ca (think 1960s Lightnings).
-
2
-
-
6 hours ago, dov said:
The next master of desaster will strapp in. And ? He can not change the real uneducated low payed workforce.
Education in the US is the real errosion.
Maybe the military arm pays better? The other thing that makes all so bad is money. If this would be not the only prime goal in their life, all could become better.
Happy modelling
Boeing’s military division also has problems: the KC-46 programme has been plagued by delays, cost over-runs and quality control issues that have cost them many millions of dollars; the saga of the replacement for “Air Force 1 and 2” also just about beggars belief, but some of that is down to the customer.
-
1
-
-
Oh what should have been. Designed at the behest of a committee that hadn’t consulted the customer on which the type was foisted by a disinterested government. Hamstrung by a “use as much existing kit as possible” policy inflicted on the design team and a string by of changes demanded by the prime customer (shades of the VC-10 fifteen years later) this was an aeroplane facing an uphill struggle from the moment of its conception. BSAA had faith in the type, but two unexplained disappearances didn’t help its prospects.
I used to love drawing the basic Tudor shape, especially the stretched Mk. II and VII, and re-imagining them with tricycle undercarriages and either turboprops or pure jets in Ashton-style nacelles. Sadly future developments of the Tudor were never to be.
-
1
-
-
1 hour ago, NoSG0 said:
Golden parachutes opening ?
CEO Dave Calhoun end of 2024, Stan Deal has retired effective immediately and Larry Kellner.
I cannot believe (or maybe I can) that the FBI is crass enough to be telling passengers from the Alaska Airways Fligt 1282 incident that they may have been victims of a crime before they've actually determined that a crime has indeed been committed. I know that there are crimes of omission as well as commission but each must be the result of some degree of intent: if the problem is down to tired/bored/poorly-trained/poorly-supervised production line worker/s deliberate intent may be hard(er) to prove, especially at Board level. I suspect only the ambulance chasers will do well from this.
-
1
-
-
22 hours ago, Tribesman72 said:
Yeah I’d love to have seen/heard one powered up, I’ll get some of the seeing part done when I make it down to Lee-on-Solent, but not the noise of it.
There is some video footage on t'internet of ops at Dover showing arrivals and departures. I'll never forget the sounds of the engines running down at the end of a flight: most of the noise was due to the air from the cushion escaping under and between the fingers at the bottom.
Engine starts could be interesting. One afternoon the final, final, final!! callfor Flight 559 to Calais had been made. The Departure Lounge hostesses had taken the foot passengers out to the craft and had come back in for a final tally of boarding cards. As they were doing this an American tourist came charging down the lounge, heaved both of the very heavy double-glazed doors open and legged it out onto the apron. By now the bow door had been closed and the steps had been pulled away from the sides. He went all the way down and turned right to try to get on via the stern door: as he did so the second pilot started number 2 engine, the starboard inner which produced a large sheet of oily orange flame and smoke just above head height and about eight feet in front of him. I have never seen anyone stop dead and turn white as rapidly as he did, before or since. By now the hostesses had legged it after him (short, close fitting skirts, high heels and summer blouses), they grabbed him and frogmarched him back into the lounge, heaving the doors shut very firmly. "Boarding card, NOW" demanded the senior hostesses. His hand was visibly shaking as he pulled it from his jacket pocket. The two hostesses looked at the card, looked at the man and informed him "This is for the next flight!" The look in his face was even more priceless as the hostesses strode off with their fisttfulls of boarding cards and I sloped off back to my office trying not to laugh too obviously.
-
4
-
-
Sorry to hear of your loss Pete: like others here I‘ve been there too, three times so far. The most recent, Sooty, four months short of his 18th birthday, was paradoxically the hardest. Treasure your memories of Franko in the good times and be happy that you did the best for him m and that you gave him a safe and loving home. 8 months after Sooty’s passing we took on two 2-month old ex-pub kittens; they’re not replacements for our previous trio but they’re good company just the same. Maybe you’ll find a new friend to care for (or be servant to) but that’s for you to decide, just take your time.
-
3
-
1
-
-
The model represents an early SR.N4; the vehicle-deck cabins were soon deleted as, with no view of the outside world, anyone susceptible to motion sickness would make it painfully obvious very quickly. The wing cabins were extended inboard to afford more seating with some sort of view, but the ride could still be “stimulating”.
The depressions that Airfix have moulded either side of the pylons are the lift fan intakes and, as such should be open at the bottom but I suppose the extra cost in tooling the fans and their chambers would have pushed the kit beyond the bounds of affordability. The fans themselves are 11 feet in diameter and around three feet deep; they operate centrifugally and were balanced to within two ounces diametrically. Each fan and its associate propellor, the latter 19 feet in diameter, was driven by a 4,500 shp (approx,) Bristol Siddeley Marne Proteus gas turbine. The engines were mounted in pairs either side of the stern doors, of which more anon.
Like nearly all of the conventional cross-channel ferries the vehicle deck was drive-through with loading at the stern, using mobile ramps, and offloading down the built-in bow door-cum-ramp. On one occasion we’d had an arrival from Calvin and the vehicle deck was chock full. As was normal practice as soon as the bow door was open the deckies would signal drivers to start engines and then marshall them off (the flight deck access ladder being slap on the centre line and quite close to the not over-wide doorway was prone to being clouted in the break-neck rush to clear Customs and Immigration). Also normal practice was to open the stern doors to help to clear the vehicle deck of exhaust fumes.
Last on at Calais had been a bloke in a Range Rover with a speedboat on a trailer in tow. He’d seen the doors open, though ‘I’n not waiting for that lot to get off!” and stuck it in reverse. Without the ramps in there’s about a four-and-a-half foot drop from the vehicle deck to the ground as he discovered in short order. The trailer went off the edge, the front end, with overhanging boat bow, pivoted upwards and before he hit the brakes got very firmly wedged against the roof and the stern door frame. To say that the Hoverspeed people weren’t impressed is a big understatement: it was nearly peak season, all flights were fully booked and suddenly they had a ‘craft going nowhere. It took about two and a half hours, a crane, quite a lot of bad language and a degree of ingenuity to get boat, trailer and Range Rover off (two return flights lost) before the engineers could get in to assess for damage. I don’t think that that particular customer was ever welcomed back but ‘d love to see the correspondence with his insurers......
-
4
-
4
-
-
40 minutes ago, PeterB said:
Hi Selwyn,
I have built at least 2 of these and was well pleased with them, except perhaps for the Sidewinder rails which look a bit crude to me. When I first moved down to South Wales in 1979 there was a "museum" in a field alongside Cardiff Airport - actually it was a collection of planes more or less parked in a field but there were some interesting items there as I recall. Back in around 1990 rebuilding work at the airport seems to have resulted in the collection being dispersed though there is still a small museum there. One of the things I do remember being there was a Super Sabre in a rather worn dark green finish - probably Danish, in which case it may have been the F version. Although I did once see one flying over my parent's house during a display at Leeds/Bradford Airport when I was a a lad, the one at Rhoose was the only only I have actually seen close up. I have no idea where it ended up.
Pete
As far as I can tell the F-100 was on loan from USAFM and/or had been funded under MDAP so were scrapped as the USAF didn’t want them back and they had to be “de-militarised”.
-
1
-
-
@Colin W that looks beautiful.
I have an on-line-auction-win Airfix MRCA that I want to finish in this colour scheme but the decals are beyond help: I certainly don't want to do '946 in her current weapons loading trainer colours though. I think you've at least inspired me to dig the kit out and get all of the big bits together. Please could you tell me how wide the red areas of the tailerons are? That way I can work out the masking for the outer wing panels, thank you.
-
@bentwaters81tfw thank you for that! I'm presently in paid employment but that may not last much longer; I may have to quit on health grounds, so DWP here I come!!
-
1
-
-
I left my original day job after 38 years and 5 weeks when my employer closed our office and left me (as a non-driver) with nowhere else I could get to without spending half the day getting to and from. By then the job had become a nightmare of self-justification and political-correctness gone mad and I couldn’t wait to go. The next morning, lyrics no in bed well after normal getting-up-time the feeling of relief that I never had to go back to the Fun Factory again was overwhelming!
I vowed that I wasn’t going to slob around the house all day, although I had (and still have) a fair few d-I-y projects to get on with, and Her Late Majesty’s DWP wanted me to justify my entitlement to Jobseekers’ Allowance by actually seeking a job (WHY....?), so I wound up doing a number of training courses of dubious long-term value, but found a part-time job in a local department store coffee shop for 6 months and a volunteer post with a local charity which led ultimately to full-time paid employment there; I‘m still there over 7 years later but maybe for not much longer as, guess what?, we’ve had a bad attack of box-ticking, self-justifying politically-correct capability reduction seasoned with a big dollop of management ineptitude.
I suppose that if I chuck the job, or it chucks me, I can get on with the d-I-y and to get some of my stash built before the Grim Reaper hauls me away to the manure tanks adjacent to the fire pits of Hades for eternity, but my state pension doesn’t kick in for another 29 months and my daughter’s petrol habit isn’t getting any better, so a further spell of low-paid employment beckons but I’ll see what I can get from it.
-
6
-
-
On 3/10/2024 at 11:09 PM, Stefan Buysse said:
I wonder if it's possible to build a tanker Valiant with this kit. So far, I have not seen anything externally different from a bomber Valiant. Could it be that the refueling gear is completely hidden in the bombbay when not in use. I also have not seen special markings like the orange and black stripes on Victor tankers.
Cheers, Stefan;
Externally the Valiant tankers were identical to their B and PR siblings. All of the refuelling equipment, including a supplementary tank, was concealed within the bomb bay. The Airfix 1/72th kit has a fair representation of this in the current boxing or available separately for the initial release; there should be a few images on one, probably even on this august forum. I don’t think that any of the tankers appeared in the final camouflage scheme (I’ve an idea that some of them in the WZ- serial range were still in High Speed Silver) but I’d like to be proved wrong on that.
-
1
-
-
On 3/16/2024 at 10:22 PM, wimbledon99 said:
So I could have removed them?? So annoying. I checked the instructions three times to see if I missed something. Hey ho, it’s just a hobby!! Once built, it will collect dust for a couple of years before being recycled 😔
Personal choice. I wrecked a set of roundels trying to get them over the stall-warning vanes and guards (SWS) and I've been wracking my brain cell for an "easy" way to avoid repeating the experience ever since. Using a template to locate them (use a known pair of vortex generators or skin joints as your fixed points to locate the SWS bits), removing them, applying the roundels then using the template and PVA to reinstate the SWS bits in just about the right place seems to be least likely to result in roundel wrecking. Others may know differently/better. If you're going to tape the template to the wing it's probably best to leave applying stencils 'til afterwards. HTH.
-
1
-
-
@wimbledon99 the "other bits sticking up from the wing" are the stall warning vanes and their guards: Airfix haven't quite got them right for a parked Javelin, or one in controlled flight for that matter. From memory the vanes lay flat between the guards under most circumstances: as the Javelin approached the stall and the airflow began to break away from the wing upper surface the vanes would pivot about their leading edges, breaking an electrical circuit, illuminating a warning light and setting off an aural alarm in the cockpit. On my next Airfix Javelin I'll make a tape template of the vanes and guards before removing them, applying the roundels and then reinstating guards and vanes using PVA and the template to get them back in the rigtt(ish) place.
-
1
-
3
-
-
I think it’s time me to chuck it for today: I’ve just mis-read the title of this thread as “UK’s (possible) new Chipmunk procurement”!
-
There have been several threads on here about the original Lou IV that strongly suggest that the areas of the upper surfaces that had had the invasion stripes applied had subsequently been overpainted in a dark blue-grey. At least one eye-witness account from a respected aviation historian supports this. I'm currently stalled most of the way through building an Airfix P-51D-5 in these colours, mostly because the invasion stripes decals are about as thick and stiff as a sheet of deep-frozen lino.
-
5
-
-
31 minutes ago, ArnoldAmbrose said:
So it really hit the fan? (As the saying goes. 🙂) Regards, Jeff.
Thankfully not on our watch; we left it for the night sh1(f)t!"
-
2
-
Worst avoidable aviation accident ever?
in Real Aviation
Posted
I’m hesitant to bring Bealine 548/ “Papa India” to this party, but as Britain’s worst accident in terms of fatalities it deserves consideration. Others might wish to consider PA103 but that was no accident.
The BE548 accident is well documented and a number of “errors of omission” were identified:
pilots were not not subjected to exercising ECGs duration their medical; this might have brought attention to Captan Stanley Key’s latent heart condition which had a significant bearing on his ability to safely and accurately fly the aeroplane and to deal with the developing emergency,
there was no speed baulk on the droops to prevent their retraction below 225 knots (safety speed) and no interconnection between flap and slat extension/retraction sequencing which could have prevented early retraction of the flaps leaving the droop lever unguarded and susceptible to mis-selection,
poor communication within the airline about this peculiarity. Pilots were known to retract the flaps early to improve acceleration in order to alleviate the Trident’s ground-gripping propensities. A least one had come very close to going in as G-ARPI did when droops were selected up early; IIRC the PM was watching the droop gauge and saw it start to move below safety speed and selected the droops down again. At the time incidents like this were not well communicated (blame culture being much in evidence),
lack of trust in the stall prevention systems, stick shake and stick push. Pilots had reported spurious, or apparently spurious, operation, particularly of the latter (shades of MCAS 47 years later?). On the accident flight the stick push had operated three times in quick succession and one of the crew had selected “override” to prevent its further operation
poor rostering by the airline. BE548s crew that day was a scratch relief crew which included two inexperienced members: the least experienced of whom occupied the P2 (co-pilot’s) seat. The third crew member, P3, was both more experienced and further on in his training but was not allowed to fly as P2 on this occasion,
It could be argued that the then-ARB should have specified that in order to achieve certification flap/droop “UP” selection could not be made below certain airspeeds and that the stick shake/push system should have greater integrity than it did (G-ARPI-s stick push valve was misaligned and could have generated spurious pushes).
This was the accident that really helped to get CVRs mandated; the lack of one seriously affected investigation of this accident as it was not possible to fully determine who did, or did not, do what to place the aeroplane and the 119 souls on board in a position from which escape rapidly became impossible.