Wind Tunnel Models

No Mawganmad, the HS 141 pre-dates the Chinese as being a major player in the civil avaition industry by a long way. The only reason why VSTOL airliners failed to get beyond the design stage was that the Air Registration Board refused to approve VSTOL for civil use. You might say well good for them, but you cannot blame the airframe / engine companies from examining the technology, which might have been approved. We cannot always sit in the dark ages otherwise Concorde would never have got off the ground and to be fair, the Kestrel / Harrier family is another example.

O my god I have just seen Fireball XL5!

I dont think the 141 was designed to be noisey, in fact quite the opposite, you are right about the Rotodyne that was both noisey - didnt it have ram jets on the ends of the rotor blades - and it vibrated badly. Its not fair to compare the Rotodyne with the HS 141 they are worlds apart.

Well talking of turboprops, my last proper job was carrying out vibration testing on a Double-mamba powered 146!



Without wings!!



Or a cockpit!!

The two boxes on the floor are laser devises that hits a target on each spinner. We could synchronise the blades on both engines so that they stobe. When this occurred we would take our vibration measurement inside the fuselage where there was an array spanning it with vibrometers attached to it. We were recording the vibratrion levels felt inside the fuselage in order to find out what the internal fittings were worth in terms of how they dampen out the vibration. One would be with the bare fueslage, another side panels, then with carpets, another with seats and carpets, then seats, carpets and luggage racks and so on. The whole project would have included fitting out a real 146 with two sets of Double Mambas (we had the engines to do this) but like all interesting projects it came to nothing and the project folded. This was a year after Hatfield had closed - we were funded by the DTI. Two of us were made redundent and the other guy went back to Woodford. I became an archaeologist.

And here is me working on an Astazou XVID (nightshift)

Its a wig, I am bald!