Sat Sep 07, 2019 11:18 pm
#1718978
Thoughts.
I worked on the Tucano in "Whitehall" (actually a building just off Oxford Street), then Boscombe Down, on quite a few aspects of its introduction to service. It was not a brilliant aeroplane on numerous levels, and very clearly a political purchase as all expert opinion preferred the PC9 or even the PC7.
Nobody rated the Firecracker, but incidentally that aeroplane's still in service at the National Test Pilot School in Mojave, where student test pilots use it to develop their aeroplane assessment skills.
The task of getting a civil Permit to Fly (I think you can probably discount a CofA) on it won't be trivial, but we did document the aeroplane well at Boscombe, as presumably did our colleagues in Farnborough on the structural aspects - so the data should be there to do the job: probably with a slightly restricted envelope compared to the military one (I'm thinking particularly of spinning). I do recall reports: almost certainly lost in some tidy up over the years, showing that the maintenance man-hours on the aeroplane was considerably greater than predicted [somewhere around 10 man-hours/flying hour rings a bell], so the running costs are unlikely to be low. It's also got two live seats, and the overheads on those won't be trivial either.
The general understanding was that Shorts built the aeroplanes "to fit" so interchangeability of parts between airframes may be hit-and-miss at best. That will have a significant impact on the ability to keep some going. At one point we had some airframes which rolled inverted if you stalled them in the landing configuration - a problem eventually solved by randomly swapping tail/front fuselage combinations until they stopped doing it. At Cranwell they found that the range of airframe nose-to-tail lengths was around 10", and the two airframes I back-seated at Boscombe had around 3" difference between them in seat base-to-canopy height. That's a lot of variation.
The task of getting it onto a civil Permit would be rather interesting - if anybody is serious, I doubt I have the capital to invest, but I do have most of the skills and would be interested to at least have a chat about it. Any excuse to look at increasing my long-static ejection seat hours is worth talking about!
G
I worked on the Tucano in "Whitehall" (actually a building just off Oxford Street), then Boscombe Down, on quite a few aspects of its introduction to service. It was not a brilliant aeroplane on numerous levels, and very clearly a political purchase as all expert opinion preferred the PC9 or even the PC7.
Nobody rated the Firecracker, but incidentally that aeroplane's still in service at the National Test Pilot School in Mojave, where student test pilots use it to develop their aeroplane assessment skills.
The task of getting a civil Permit to Fly (I think you can probably discount a CofA) on it won't be trivial, but we did document the aeroplane well at Boscombe, as presumably did our colleagues in Farnborough on the structural aspects - so the data should be there to do the job: probably with a slightly restricted envelope compared to the military one (I'm thinking particularly of spinning). I do recall reports: almost certainly lost in some tidy up over the years, showing that the maintenance man-hours on the aeroplane was considerably greater than predicted [somewhere around 10 man-hours/flying hour rings a bell], so the running costs are unlikely to be low. It's also got two live seats, and the overheads on those won't be trivial either.
The general understanding was that Shorts built the aeroplanes "to fit" so interchangeability of parts between airframes may be hit-and-miss at best. That will have a significant impact on the ability to keep some going. At one point we had some airframes which rolled inverted if you stalled them in the landing configuration - a problem eventually solved by randomly swapping tail/front fuselage combinations until they stopped doing it. At Cranwell they found that the range of airframe nose-to-tail lengths was around 10", and the two airframes I back-seated at Boscombe had around 3" difference between them in seat base-to-canopy height. That's a lot of variation.
The task of getting it onto a civil Permit would be rather interesting - if anybody is serious, I doubt I have the capital to invest, but I do have most of the skills and would be interested to at least have a chat about it. Any excuse to look at increasing my long-static ejection seat hours is worth talking about!
G
I am Spartacus, and so is my co-pilot.