Westland thoughts

[Weaver]

So I'm currently reading Victor Bingham's book about the Westland Whirlwind fighter, and a bit of company background information struck me as an intrguing starting point for a what if.

Real Life:

Sir Ernest Petter Was the Chariman of the company. His son, Willian "Teddy" Petter was employed there as personal assistant to the Managing Director, Robert Bruce. Captain (later professor) Geoffrey Hill was working at Westlands at the time, developing his Pterodactyl series of tailless aircraft. In 1934, Petter Senior appointed the 26 year old Teddy to the post of Technical Director, over the heads of more experienced engineers such as Hill and Chief Designer Arthur Davenport, and directly against the advice of Bruce. This didn't go down well with Bruce and Hill who promptly resigned. One of the first things Teddy Petter did as Technical Director was to terminate development of Hill's Pterodactyl series.


Alternate Universe:

What If Sir Ernest was less keen on nepotism and/or Teddy fell out with him? Teddy was good at falling out with people and did, in real life subsequently fall out with his father for decades. Sir Ernest takes Bruce's advice and makes Teddy Davenport's assistant instead of his boss. Davenport is happier, Teddy still gets to apply his real skill, which was apparently structuring and organising a development effort, and, critically, Hill stays on and continues his Pterodactyl work.

Could we have seen a tailless, flying wing Lysander, along the lines of the Pterodactyl Mk. IV?


(This is an RC model, but it's very accurate to the real thing)


Could we have seen a tailless Whirlwind?

The Pterodactyl Mk.V of 1934 was a two-seat fighter that was considered the equal of the contemporary Hawker Demon when it was tested:



If Hill had stayed on, and a tailless Lysander had proved successful, it seems at least credible that they'd have made a tailless proposal to F.37/35. The object of the latter spec was a cannon fighter, and since the Pterodactyl layout was particularly suitable for a pusher-prop configuration, that would have left the fuselage nose free for a heavy cannon battery, just as the Whirlwind's twin engines did. Alternatively, twin tractor or pusher engines would have been a possibility. According to Wikipedia, there was a proposal for a twin-engined fighter from Westland to Specification F.22/33 (can't find a picture of it though).

Pterodactyl Mk. VI proposal:



After a spell at London University, where he became a professor, Hill went on to work at Short Brothers post war, where he designed the SB.4 Sherpa tailless jet-powered research aircraft. This demonstrated that the tailless layout was suitable for a high-speed monoplane, implying that a piston-engined stressed-skin monoplane Pterodactyl-ish aircraft would have been possible and practical in the late 1930s:



Excellent article by Tony Buttler about the Pterodactyls: https://www.aerosociety.com/media/18986/2022-03-buttler-westland-hill-pterodactyls.pdf

[jcf]

Maybe, but it's doubtful as Hill's Pterodactyls had all of the problems inherent to
tailless aircraft and his focus was on stability, which always reduces manueverability.
The Mk.V being the equal of the Demon is a questionable accomplishment and as the
Mk.V was never flown with the proposed turret the claim has to be taken with a large
portion of salt. The Mk.V and proposed Mk. VI turret fighters were intended as escorts
for bombers, keeping in formation with the bombers and using the turrets to defend
against incoming enemy fighters, they weren't designed to engage in dogfights and
would have been dead meat if they tried to engage a manueverable conventional
aircraft.

The purpose of the SB.4 was to demonstrate the aero-isoclinic wing and as such isn't a
good model for a usable 1930s/WWII design. The aero-isoclinic wing ended up as a
curiosity because it wasn't any better than anything else.

The fact is that the majority of tailless aircraft and flying wings have been solutions
looking for a problem.

[Old Wombat]

The fact is that the majority of tailless aircraft and flying wings have been solutions
looking for a problem.

Or vice-versa.   

[PR19_Kit]

The Sherpa still exists, but not flyable at present. It's in the Ulster Aviation Society's Museum at Long Kesh, and I saw it a few years ago.  It's in reasonably good condition as well, but in bits at the moment.

[Weaver]

Maybe, but it's doubtful as Hill's Pterodactyls had all of the problems inherent to
tailless aircraft and his focus was on stability, which always reduces manueverability.

By 1935, when the project was cancelled, the Pterodactyl concept had 10 years of development flying behind it and many of the early problems had been solved. The Mk.IV and Mk.V were judged decent and safe flying machines, and the Mk.V was maneuverable enough to meet the turret fighter spec.

The Mk.V being the equal of the Demon is a questionable accomplishment and as the
Mk.V was never flown with the proposed turret the claim has to be taken with a large
portion of salt.

The Mk.V was ballasted to compensate for the lack of the turret. Drag is another matter, of course.

The Mk.V and proposed Mk. VI turret fighters were intended as escorts
for bombers, keeping in formation with the bombers and using the turrets to defend
against incoming enemy fighters, they weren't designed to engage in dogfights and
would have been dead meat if they tried to engage a manueverable conventional
aircraft.

True, but that's a failure of the turret fighter requirement that applied to all aircraft submitted to it (F5.33 was withdrawn eventually), not specific to the Pterodactyl.

I'm not suggesting that the Mk.VI would have been responsive to the later cannon-fighter requirement that produced the Whirlwind. What I'm suggesting is that the Pterodactyl concept was making good enough progress to be competitive for as long as it lasted, and had development continued beyond 1935 it could have produced competitive designs to later requirements. Fighter designs would have been very different to the Mk.V/VI, although a design to the Lysander requirement MIGHT have looked somewhat similar to the Mk.IV.

The purpose of the SB.4 was to demonstrate the aero-isoclinic wing and as such isn't a
good model for a usable 1930s/WWII design. The aero-isoclinic wing ended up as a
curiosity because it wasn't any better than anything else.

I only brought up the SB.4 to demonstrate that Hill's concepts were amenable to cantilever monoplane, all-metal, stressed-skin construction (i.e. "1939 modern"), to head off somebody saying "but the Pterodactyls were parasol monoplanes and that was obsolete by WWII". I am in no way suggesting that you could just stick a piston engine in an SB.4 and call it a 1939 fighter. Any actual 1939 Pterodactyl fighter would have been at some point of development between the Mk.V and the SB.4.

The fact is that the majority of tailless aircraft and flying wings have been solutions looking for a problem.

True again, but that hasn't stopped an awful lot of time, money and brains being expended on them, and a what-if isn't required to improve on reality, just to be interestingly different from it. A tailless Whirlwind with a single pusher Merlin might have had much the same short, unsatisfactory history as the real Whirlwind, but the cause of it's demise might have been handling/structural problems, and/or the provision of cooling for the engine* rather than the engine itself. On a rational use-of-resources analysis, the Me 163 Komet shouldn't have got remotely close to production, but the fact remains that it did. If what actually happened was governed by what should have happened, then history would be a lot less interesting, and yes, that's absolutely the Chinese curse use of the word "interesting"...


*There were any number of proposals for pusher Merlin aircraft both before and during the war, but they were pretty much all killed off by Rolls-Royce's pessimistic estimates of how long it would take to develop a suitable cooling system, bearing in mind that the radiator(s) would have neither prop-wash nor airflow passing through them whilst taxiing. The problem doesn't strike me as insoluable, but equally, when you look at the way RR had to kill off Vulture and Peregrine development due to lack of design capacity, it doesn't strike me that they were exaggerating either.

[steelpillow]

Hill had been a pilot in the RFC during the war. He was originally motivated by the huge toll on his colleagues who lost control and fell out of the sky. He knew of JW Dunne's pioneering work on the stable tailless aeroplane, the only "safety aeroplane" that ever truly lived up to its name. After a stint as Handley Page's chief test pilot, Hill went to college to study aerodynamics. By 1923 he was ready to start bringing Dunne's ideas up to date. A mutual friend, Alec Ogilvie, arranged a meeting with them all over dinner, and Dunne gave Hill a newly-hatched drawing and small flying model of his own vision. Hill pretty much copied its planform for his first glider, although the aerodynamics were closer to Handley Page's take on Dunne's unsuccessful rival, Jose Weiss. Hill's wife helped him build the glider but, being one of those unfathomable second-class citizens with decorative hair and high voices, is seldom mentioned by the male historian.
The Pterodactyls II and III were to be closely related escort fighters, one with a pusher engine and guns in the nose, and the other a tractor-engined equivalent with a rear gun turret. They would take up the lead and the van in a bomber formation, to protect it from enemy interceptors. As noted, the Ministry were, wisely, not ready yet. After the MkIV, the idea was resurrected and updated as the V and VI, but only the tractor type was built.
Fairly early during the Westland saga, Harald Penrose took over as test pilot, and flew all but the earliest machines. His autobiography, Adventure with Fate makes for interesting reading. When Teddy Petter took over, it was just in time to write the company report on their testing of the Mk.V. He damned it with faint praise, so that the top brass could see no point in wasting further development money on something no better than that already well developed, and it was they who cancelled it.
During WWII, Hill was sent to Canada in a liaison role, and there he helped the National Research Council develop their own tailless glider.
Back in the UK, he continued to promote his Pterodactyl VIII transatlantic transport, now with Short's. in due course the Short SB2 Sherpa became the last tailless swept machine in the Dunne lineage - built by the same company who had built his first successful tailless plane, the D.5, back in 1910.

Somebody here muttered about the supposed problems of tailless aircraft. I would gently remind them that the Dassault Mirage III was the second most prolific fast jet ever built, after the MiG 21, while the Avro Vulcan proved the point in the subsonic regime. But let us return to the 1930s, when Canadian Beverley Shenstone had spent a decade studying tailless aircraft under Lippisch and Junkers. He wound up as a senior adviser to Supermarine and RJ Mitchell. Under his guidance, all the tailless magic he had accumulated was poured into its wing. And it worked! The tail was there more for trim and dogfighting with an unswept wing than anything else. In 1938, after leaving Supermarine, he studied a tailless pusher equivalent:
Although it can be difficult to get right if you don't know what you are doing, be under no illusion that a top-class beast can be tailless - the only whiffy bit is its social acceptance at Whitehall. And we know what to do about that here!