[foxmoth]

Reach for the Skies on TV now and Bader joins his new squadron and to show them he is not a “passenger” gets airborne in a Hurricane to show them he can fly - during this he does an inverted pass - I would have thought this would have been with a normal carburettor so why didn’t the engine cut out?

[Paul_Sengupta]

Which channel is it on?

[Highland Park]

It was on BBC2....

[lobstaboy]

Reach for the Skies on TV now and Bader joins his new squadron and to show them he is not a “passenger” gets airborne in a Hurricane to show them he can fly - during this he does an inverted pass - I would have thought this would have been with a normal carburettor so why didn’t the engine cut out?

It's a great film, but you do know it's not a documentary, right?

[foxmoth]

Yes I know that and that the film was obviously made at a later date, but were later Hurricanes fuel injected or fitted with an inverted carb?

[Dave W]

Yes, but how did they film it? Later version?

(Crossed w foxmoth)

[Paul_Sengupta]

It's a great film, but you do know it's not a documentary, right?

Next, you'll be telling me that The Dambusters isn't either.

[Highland Park]

Yes I know that and that the film was obviously made at a later date, but were later Hurricanes fuel injected or fitted with an inverted carb?

The Merlin was never fuel injected IIRC, a weakness when compared with the Daimler Benz in the Bf109...

Also I’m reasonably sure the scene in the film wasn’t real and was a model (and indeed I have no idea if it actually happened in real life...).

Ian

[joe-fbs]

Miss Shilling's orifice?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-m ... r-40267364

[joe-fbs]

Just pulled my copy of Reach for the Sky (a 1954 hardback, blimey I think it's a frst edition, complete with newspaper cuttings from when Sir Douglas died in 1982) from my bookshelf. Chapter 14 starts with the scene created in the film. Was Paul Brickhill a historian or a novelist? Obviously the jump from book to film can be large. As far as I can tell, the films of Dambusters and Reach for the Sky are as accurate as filmaking ever is but the film of The Great Escape is fiction (they even change Roger Bushell to Roger Bartlet).

[lobstaboy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice

Despite the apparently risque title this link is to the wiki page that gives a bit of background.
Essentially at the time the scene in the film was set, inverted flight was going to be a problem because of the normal carbs fitted to Merlin engines. An issue in the first years of the war, as it explains. Miss Shillings Orifice was a temporary solution for short duration manoeuvres involving negative G - introduced in 1941. Carbs that completely overcame the problem introduced in 1943 for Merlins.

Added - Joefbs beat me to it...

[Dave W]

IIRC Paul Brickhill was a pilot and POW originally, and became what I suppose these days we'd call a "popular historian", chronicling events he'd been involved in originally and then branching out to adjacent areas.

Edit: Yes, pretty much it. I hadn't realised until reading that (Wikipedia) that Brickhill wrote The Great Escape and The Dam Busters simultaneously!

[foxmoth]

Added - Joefbs beat me to it...

But as you pointed out this was not for sustained inverted.

[BEX]

I wondered about that too. (It's p*ssing down here in Hampshire, and watching seemed the best way to spend the afternoon .... my excuse)

Anyway, in the film as the aircraft was rolled the right way up the engine seemed to give out a short plume of smoke... exactly as it would after starvation and the fuel supply (and power) was restored.

Was it a series of short upside down sequences edited together?

BEX

[joe-fbs]

Sir Stanley Hooker also comments on the orifice at the end of chapter 2 of Not Much of an Engineer including "...the hole passed sufficient fuel to keep the engine running". As had been noted above, the orifice was an interim fix while SU redesigned the carburettor. Sir Stanley also notes that injection removed the cooling effect of evaporation in the carburettor hence costing the Daimler engine some power.