JimAttrill

To answer my own question, yes it was Ernst Udet.

I should know this, but who flew the aircraft with the insignia LO! Was it Udet?

It's well worth a look. It is on the home page of the site here: http://overflandersfields.com/

I learnt early in the RAF how to get away with stuff.... I did 2 years training at RAF Halton as an engine fitter and was then sent to 115 Sqn which did 'flight checking' ie checking ILS and other radio and radar stuff. We had old Vickers Varsity aircraft which I loved because I could get covered in oil Then we got a few Argosy aircraft (as in my avatar) and I was offered the job of the world! They would send me to Changi in Singapore to look after the aircraft which would follow me out there. I would be there for 3 months. The really stupid thing was that the aircraft crew were officers and Sgts but I was at the time a very junior Junior Technician without a stripe to my name. There was a thought to make me a 'temporary Sergeant' but that was out of the question. So I flew in a VC10 to Changi and waited for my Argosy to arrive. But before it arrived I had charge of an air-conditioned office next to the line and a Land Rover. Every day I would pick up the Land Rover and go to the swimming pool and spend a nice day. The Argosy had a very noticeable whistling noise so I would know when it arrived. And so it did, and I spent a wonderful time looking after it with no supervision. I had to occasionally get a SNCO from some other place to 'oversign' work that I had done. In this time I flew in the aircraft to Hong Kong and Gan in the Maldives. So came the day that the aircraft headed off back to the UK. I still had the airconditioned office and the Land Rover and was having a wonderful time. I had developed a friend in the 'movements' section and found that there were lots of guys who had been in Singapore for over 3 years who were dying to go home. So I got him to bounce me off all the flights in their favour. After two weeks I was sitting in my 'office' drinking tea which I could get from the cafe next door by banging on the wall, and I answered "115 Squadron detachment Junior Technician Attrill speaking". The man on the other end said that he was an Air Vice Marshal in charge of Signals in the Far East Air Force and my home station in the UK were asking what had become of me. (this is before emails and such so they had sent a signal) I told him that I was being bounced off the aircraft back to the UK and he then told me that I was a priority one passenger (I didn't know that). He then very nicely suggested that I get on the next plane out. Which I did, of course. Funny really as I was the lowest rank technician in the RAF and he was the equivalent of a Major General in the Army. Anyway I arrived back in the UK and they sent me on two weeks leave because I had done such a grand job! I did another 3 month detachment there later in the same way and that put me off the UK for ever. I applied for 'overseas' and they sent me to Germany for 2½ years and I loved that as well.

Well here goes. I had been a 'liney' on 4 Squadron Harriers in Germany. Servicing was in four stages - 1st line did the refuelling rearming etc and also had guys in 'the hangar' as we called it who did everything up to engine changes. 2nd 3rd and 4th line were those boring 8 to 5 people who did major services etc and had tea breaks. On 'the line' you drank tea or coffee when you could. So after 2½ years in Germany they sent me back to RAF Wittering, the Harrier base at the time. As a Cpl engine fitter I should have gone into the 'hangar' but this was 233 OCU and they didn't like us guys who had been at the 'sharp end'. So they put me on the line, but as 2 i/c to a Sgt. I had 21 mechanics under me. (a mechanic had 9 months training and a fitter as I was had a minimum of 2 years apprenticeship). I hated being in charge as all it meant was that when an aircraft came in I had to send out two guys to 'see it in' and others to refuel etc. I wasn't allowed to do any real work. After a while of making myself as unpopular as possible they put me in charge of the 'swing shift'. This shift was from 12pm to 7am when there was a handover to the day shift. There were only 3 of us on this shift, me as an engine fitter, an electrician and an amourer. The others had to check the gun firing circuits and such. I had to check the fuel and oil in each aircraft and top up the Liquid Oxygen. Also look down the intakes for birds nests, spanners and such like. Actually refilling the LOX was an airframe job but I ended up being qualified to do that as well to avoid having to have an extra guy on the shift. I had to sign for the fuel load and the LOX and then 'oversign' the others as I was the only NCO around. As you may guess, this shift was made up of 'bad boys' so we got on well together. One problem was that the bar shut at 11pm and it was easy to go to work having had a few beers. One night the armourer decided he was leaving the mob and took our vehicle which was an Austin minivan (not to be confused with the minivans they have in the US which are huge in comparison). So off he drove in the car on his way to London and freedom. Unfortunately he couldn't drive and somehow managed to hit a tree with it. Anyway, he brought it back. The next day I went to the Motor Transport yard and explained to the Sgt in charge that I had accidentally driven the car into one of the support I-beams in the hangar. I don't think he believed me but I had to be the driver as I was the only one with a licence. A couple of days later I also decided I had had enough (and lots of beer) and didn't even go to work at all. The other guys did my part of the work and forged my signature on the required forms! They told the incoming day shift that I had been taken sick and had gone home early. The list of crimes committed including doing tasks not qualified to do, impersonating an NCO, all this apart from the forgeries. I suppose we could all have been shot at dawn or something like that. The Forms concerned were the holy Form 700 which was the complete history of the aircraft, who did what and when etc. I never ever heard of similar forgeries happening. Anyway I 'bought myself out' of the RAF about 6 weeks later. This cost me two hundred pounds - a lot of money in 1973 and was officially to pay back for the training received.

Yeah, night shift was the place to be. No zobbits around and we could be very efficient. We would only have a couple of guys of each trade and would help each other out so we could knock off early. I could tell you a story about being in charge of the 'swing shift' (12 pm to 7am) that would make your hair stand on end. I suppose the statute of limitations means they can't court martial me now

I must tell you how I accidentally 'flew' a Harrier. After some engine engine work we would have to take the aircraft to the far end of the runway and chain it down in a special enclosure where the gases from the nozzles down would be ducted away. There was also a armoured glass room where you could watch it all happening. Quite a performance especially as we had to arrange for a foam fire truck to be there just in case anything went wrong. I was on the line one day and we had to do 'acceleration checks' on an engine but didn't want to go through all that hoo-hah which took hours and hours and we were on night shift. So I did what a few guys had done, run the engine up in the chocks, put the nozzles down and slam the throttle while watching a stop watch. IIRC it had to go from idle to 100% in 9.5 seconds (all jet engines accelerate quite slowly). So in I get and try this. Of course I am not looking outside and have hands and feet off the controls except the nozzle and the throttle with the left hand. I heard a bit of shouting on the intercom from the guy outside and looked out and realised I was hovering at about 3ft high. Slammed the throttle shut and settled back into the chocks. End of heart attack. I had assumed the aircraft had full fuel which was their normal state, normally 5000lbs or so. This one had very little in it, so it took off. It did show one thing - the Harrier was very stable in the hover 'hands off'. Often hard to work on, but all fighters were. I really loved that aircraft.

That's really strange. Any others? I do know that there was a German WWII rifle that would shoot round corners. Must have caused a lot of wear and tear at the turn.

Thanks Norman Prince for bumping this thread. It is interesting to see what people said about OFF back in 2009! And it's also interesting how much more complicated flying fighter aircraft has become since the 1960s. While not a pilot I worked on the engines of Hawker Hunter FGA9's and the first Harriers (GR1's in the RAF, AV8A's in the USMC). It was all mostly simple then, no 'glass cockpit' and no guided missiles either but unguided rockets and 30mm ADEN cannon. There was a moving map which mostly worked (it had real film inside and was powered by rubber bands and stuff). The pilots had to spend a few minutes setting it up against a pole over the other side of the runway. No radar and the Inertial Navigation couldn't be setup on a carrier as the thing was moving all the time. I read a whole report recently on the gear fitted to the AV8B's nowadays and am amazed that one pilot can cope with all this stuff. And what with the composite wing etc it only looks a bit like the original. It does seem however, that the engine is the same as it always was, just a tad more powerful.

No, if you look at that picture again you will see that the crankshaft is in the centre. It is the main big-end that is off-centre. It is very similar to a single cylinder engine rather like a single motor bike engine or a lawn mower engine. One of the great advantages of the rotary and radial is that the whole crank with its one offset crankpin is very short, whereas the crank of an inline engine whether a four or a six is much longer which allows for vibration. In fact some six cylinder engines suffer from harmonic vibration at certain rev-ranges and this can cause the flywheel to break off. The invention of the Lanchester flywheel damper made things better. Also the single crank can be built up from pieces bolted together which allows for the big-end to be a roller bearing. As you can't cut a roller or ball bearing in half, the big-ends on an on-line engine have to be plain shells. And before you ask, a two-row radial of 14 or 18 cylinders has a two-throw crank and is really two engines one behind the other with one crank (which is still short). The P&W 'corncob' R-4360 28 cylinder engine was the only 4-row radial I know of and was quite successful, being used in the B50 and B36 and many other aircraft. They managed to get over the cooling problems of the rear cylinders with clever and complex baffling. I must say that changing all the 56 spark plugs on one engine must have been quite a job!

No, the answer is to keep the firing intervals at every second cylinder which goes 1 3 5 7 for a seven-clinder engine and then carries on 2 4 6 1 3 5 7 2 4 6 and so on. This makes for an engine that runs very smoothly.

Well the crankshaft has to be 'off center' else the pistons don't go up and down! The operating principle of this engine is a bit strange, but basically the same as a radial which is rather like a single-cylinder motor bike engine crank except all the con-rods are attached to the one 'master' rod. Most of these cranks were bolted together which allowed the use of roller bearings in the one large big-end. Just to keep you lot on your toes, why do rotaries and radials have an odd number of cylinders in each row? (there are a couple of exceptions to this which didn't work well).

And of course the Germans had no source of Castor oil so resorted to inferior Ersatz oil. The main producer of Castor oil then and now was India so the maritime blockade stopped any imports to Germany. I don't know what they made their Ersatz from though.

It seems all these prototype triplanes offered no improvement over the biplanes. This is most likely why the Sopwith company went to the Camel and then the Snipe and stopped making triplanes. A triplane with the later Bentley rotary might have done well as the engine was light and powerful. First engine with aluminium cylinders IIRC - though they were sleeved with steel. More reliable than the Clerget 9B which it replaced which suffered from piston seizures due to overheating. It seems the French aircraft engine industry had got stuck in the rotary period and never really got going later on, being overtaken by Bristol, RR and DB and later P&W and BMW.

Believe it or not this is a Fokker! If a triplane is good, then a quintuplane must be better!

And I didn't even know that Albatros made a triplane! Come to think of it, I think most of the German manufacturers made one or two to compete with the Fokker. The Albatros is prettier and has an inline engine of course. I wonder how it handled and climbed? On the KISS subject I reckon that the Albatri were hard to make in comparison with the more normal wooden or steel frame structure of other aircraft.

K(eep) I(t) S(imple) S(tupid) ! Something that designers often forget to their peril ..... A good acronym although my favourite has always been RTFM especially when I have to explain it! (My English-German dictionary does not have 'acronym' though I would take a guess at 'akronym' - possibly a borrowing?).

I read somewhere that he did have oxygen but the supply failed. Makes more sense as nobody in their right mind would go to 22000 ft or so without it. I was reading about the Liberty engine which powered the LUSAC-11 and the DH9a. I was wondering why, as a V12, it had 45 degree bank angles whereas a V12 would normally have 60 degree angles for best balance. It turned out that it was also made as a V8 which normally has 45 deg banks. A very good engine with lots of design features stolen from Mercedes. Made by many manufacturers and the Lincoln company was formed specifically to do so. A good example of KISS

It was made by Packard.

It's a good looking aeroplane with those streamlined struts and with the connected aeilerons. I suppose I saw it on my visit to the USAF museum back in 2012, but saw so much that I can't remember it.

It's American and made by a famous car company ..... I think something like 1 500 were ordered and then that order was cancelled due to Nov. 11th. In 1922 a turbo-supercharged version held the world height record.

No banana for you!

Not much of a parking problem in those days - not much traffic either. The people look a lot happier than what I have heard of those times.