Complexity of Warbirds

[marine air]

I saw a bare bones hulk of a Westland Lysander. Lots of springs , chains, cables, wires, struts, rods, endless sorts of weird things. Huge, heavy, complex wings . Landing gear legs were complicated and immensely heavy. It's as though no one told the engineers it was supposed to have short field capability.

[The Inspector]

I've often heard that one of the reasons the SB2C Helldiver had such a long and troubled gestation period was that its systems were more complex and maintenance-intensive than its contemporaries...SN

In "Flights of Passage" by Samuel Hynes, a memoir of his time as a pilot from training to eventualy combat at Okinawa in VMTB-232, he says the issue with the SB2C was that everything on the plane was electrically actuated and the circuits proved to be unreliable. "You'd go to drop your flaps, and the flaps on one side wouldn't come down". What eventually took the "rag off the bush" was when one of the tails completely fell off a plane that was warming up. (I've read other accounts of tail failures as well).

Didn't the prototype SB2C suffer an aft fuselage failure on it's first landing? I recall reading somewhere that the only thing that kept it going following several calls to cancel it, was the fact that it was built in President Roosevelts home state of New York.

[JDK]

The Lysander did have excellent short field capability and could and did lift a family of five from an unprepared French farmers field. It was designed to have a relatively large speed range and to undertake a huge range of tasks for army co-op.

Regards

[51fixer]

Complex? Anything with the word Napier in it.


or this.

Or Sleeve Valves.

[Ken]

From cafsocal.com regarding the Bearcat:

Standard features were sacrificed in order to reduce weight: fewer guns, less fuel, and no adjustable seat. Seat adjustments were made with cushions. Once extended, the tailhook stayed that way until flight-deck crewmen muscled it back. The outer 6 feet of the wings were folded manually in a simple upward-fold, unlike the "stow-wing" style used on other Grumman aircraft. On a flight deck, 50 F8Fs fit in the space taken by 36 Hellcats. The full-blown bubble canopy was a first for Navy fighters.

The outboard 3 feet of each wing was designed to break away if the wings were overstressed, thereby preventing catastrophic failure of the entire wing structure. Explosive bolts would automatically discard one wing tip if the other wing was broken off by stress. These "Safety Wing Tips" were not as safe as expected, and were eliminated after some fatal accidents. Several pilots shed their wing tips and augered in during dive-bombing pullouts; others had wing tip blow-offs during carrier landings, injuring deck crewmen.