Wind Tunnel Models

No doubt some of you civil airliner freaks will be able to help me with this one, its a Hawker Sidderley Vertical Take-Off airliner model under test in the 15ft by 15ft VSTOL wind tunnel at Hatfield, dont know the date but I can tell you that in the colour pic the fans along the fueslage are actually running ie working, so much so if the model was not attached to the string mounting, it would be able to support its own weight off the ground. Damned if I remember the HS project number but I am sure one of you will. The colour pic is slightly out of focus cause the tunnel is wind-on, you can tell because there are tufts on the sting that are swaying in the wind. Used to work here for my sins. Got quite a bit of cine film of this poor old aircraft running in this tunnel. The b/w pics show more detail and the sheer size of the model judging by the piltdown man scale. As you can see it has 16 lift engines and a pair for forward thrust. It pains me to think that the UK was in my working memory at the forefront of technology and now everything is made in China.

Yours truely pretending to work on a ill-fated Blue Riband project - a boat powered by a pair of RR RB211s! The model is mounted on a ground board and the tunnel is the Hatfield 9ft by 7ft.

Yes thats it the HS 141

Avro W144 1/28th scale model (out of copyright)

norwichpaul wrote:

Avro W144 1/28th scale model (out of copyright)

Designed by Gerry Anderson?

Yes PNK it looks a bit like Fireball XL5 except this beast was un-manned. The A V Roe (Avro) W114 was designed under the Operational Requirement (OR 1159). This was a modified version of the air-to-ground stand-off missile known as Blue Steel (W100) and is often referred to as Blue Steel Mk.II. The new design carried on the upper surface of the body two booster rockets, designed to provide the propulsion of the missile after it was released from the aircraft at about M = 0.90. These provided the acceleration until the ram jets (four 18 inch diameter BRJ.824 motors) on the wing became effective at M = 2.0. The boosters were then discarded. A nose plane effected longitudinal stability, and lateral stability was provided by means of a single fin placed on the lower surface of the model.
The model in 1/28-scale was tested in the 3ft by 3ft Supersonic Wind Tunnel at Thurleigh between August and September 1959, at Mach numbers between M = 0.8 and 2.0. Tests were carried out with various combinations such as boosters removed; fin and boosters off, engine and boosters off and, the complete model with everything fitted. Although the experiments proved the integrity of the design, the W114 never went beyond the design stage because of the company’s commitments to the W100 project and it was cancelled soon after the wind tunnel tests in 1959. Source: Wind Tunnel notes at Thurleigh.

Well, it certainly would have been impressive if built. I get the impression that the late fifties had plenty of good ideas and it was only technology holding it back. If modern metals and carbon fibre were around then, let alone electronics.

Then again you have to be impressive and effective. Would it have been effective I wonder?

I assume the goverments of the period had to spend a lot of money on replacing worn out CANCELLED stamps.

You can almost feel a TSR2 theread starting soon!

Peter