The Boys' Own Book of Aeroplanes

The word “forget” doing some very heavy lifting there :rofl:

‘Fire and shit yourself’

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So, ten fire breathing dragons in full flow and the designers were surprised at the fire risk😁

The Bristol Brabazon. Such a shame it didn’t survive being cancelled to at least survive in a museum.

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Your feed and mine, they’re the same!

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Popped in to see the parents and my aunt has dug out a lot of old photos…(bit of googling to work out the plane)

Croydon aerodrome 1918 - Airco DH.9 (de Havilland)

One of them is my great great grandmother and on the other is her sister. My aunt thinks she was a pilot or navigator involved in training for the RFC and her sister was a typist. Not sure about that as I find it unlikely they would have allowed women to teach men

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Great pic Chris

I think you are right. But that uniform does look like the early women’s legion in the RFC.

http://www.rafhornchurch.thehumanjourney.net/History/women.htm

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Very cool, I used to fly model planes on the old but if the runway still left.

The main building is worth a visit if you are ever passing through Croydon/Purley way.

Stinson Model A Tri-Motor

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It always worries me when the engineer decides to throw a couple of stays onto the wings. Obviously the wing structure would fail without these.

Or you can make the required strength lighter by having cross braces under compression than by having a larger beam element in the wing itself without too many aerodynamic losses given the presumably lower speed compared to modern planes.

Yea, yea, yea… Wouldn’t get me on one. Plus they had limited understanding of how metals cracked under stress, plus plane losses were and expected norm. It’s pretty, ish, but not one for uptiddlyup stuff.

Just be glad your distant progenitors weren’t travelling on the Mark 1 versions of these things at the moment they discovered the hard way about structural stressors and metal fatigue…

Mind, they often knew their limits (“known-unknowns” stylee), and so overbuilt - look how many DC-3s are still flying, often with wacky new engines…

Best of which has to be the Conroy Triturbo :heart_eyes:

IMO you can NEVER have too many engines on an aircraft!

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My first ever flight was in a DC3. The climb up the aisle to our seat was summat else.

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Wellesbourne today ( not my photos ). Runway run gone a wee bit wrong…


s

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The sign should read 20 yds instead of 200 yds.

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