I remembered reading about this ages ago, and was lucky enough to find this:



See, the good planes fly and land just fine without the pilot along at all...

Interesting tid-bits of history....

However, the ejection knocked the F-106 out of the spin and it took off towards the horizon. Major Jim Lowe, who had been following Foust in one of the other two Darts and giving him suggestions, had to shout out: "Gary, you better get back in it!"
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See, the good planes fly and land just fine without the pilot along at all... [/quote]

There's more to this than meets the eye.. In Navy ACM, or Aerial Combat Maneuvering during the F8 days, two practices were taught.. zero G maneuvering and times where letting go of the controls to totally unload the wings is the appropriate procedure..

In flat spins, let go of the controls to totally unload the wings and power up to let forward speed build, and planes will fly themselves out of the spin.. The other end of the extreme is a G load induced wing stall, not a good thing to happen.

This is one subset of zero G maneuvering, as defined by what a plane does/handles when in a zero G arc trajectory or in outright free fall... With zero G loading on the wings, many planes with as low as 5 knots of forward indicated speed still have attitude control..

Watching a Cobra head maneuver is an interesting demonstration, and as was found an excellent way to shake a plane on your tail and end up on the attack on their tail.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uTfZLQdkHo

The 'six was not a dogfighter. It was built to knock down Bears and Badgers and the like with the red star on the side, coming over the Pole. It had pretty good thrust, to hit high Mach #'s, and acceptable handling. The pics of Bushtwo in his ang days are in a 'six, iirc.

Yep. The last F106 Fighter Intercept Sqn (FIS) was the detachment up at KI Sawyer in upper Michigan. I had a couple guys as cross-trainees from there.

The one thing about that cobra maneuver we noticed in the sim was how much airspeed you lost doing it.

Just before I went out to the Tucson ANG to qualify the techs on their F-16's, they had a bellyflopped A-6. Tore the heck out of the LG doors, but once they jacked it and got the doors open, the LG gear worked just fine. Impressive! Wish I had gotten copies of the pictures.

My understanding of where this would be used, e.g. a fighter on your tail and nothing else is working to get them off, pulling the cobra uses the sudden loss of speed to your advantage, in that the attacker will zoom by so fast (with a real risk of mid air collision) then recovery from the cobra can put you a position to get on the tail of the attacker.

Kind of like a squatter in traffic.. if you got a car in front of you that can stop significantly faster than you, your only choice is to either hit them or evasive maneuver to go around them.

Now an attack plane reacting fast enough pull a cobra as soon that the chased plane did, that would be quite a dance.. if they don't mid-air....

The aero drag in a cobra is immense, almost belly flat to the course. P47's and P38's and Stukas had dive brakes that could be used the same way. P38's had a maneuver called the Lockheed stomp. They would not hang around and dogfight, but strike and run away in a high speed climb that could not be matched, then did a skid turn with one engine firewalled and one at idle, and came right back down the throat of the pursuer with 4 .50's and 2 20mm cannons in a space of about 2'x2' in the nose to chew on them with, in a 450mph dive.

P47N's with the paddle prop blades had a high decel rate when you chopped the throttle on that big old corncob motor, and that tough old bird didn't care if you shot at it, it was armored like a tank.

Good info on earlier techniques on the '38 and '47.. Had not heard of that before <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/patriot.gif" alt="" />

I've wondered about the history in the paddle prop on "Rare Bear" I've seen run at Reno many times.. Huge monsters.. makes a really low frequency sounds on passes... reckon any kin to P47N paddle?

Good video and sound when it was a 3 blade.. went to a 4 blade paddle later...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCTHgYSHOn0

later 4 blade rare bear..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MuLPRqDAK0&feature=related

looks like it's using boil off cooling, maybe for oil....

Those 4b paddles on RB are a later design than the ones on the 47n and some retrofitted D models in Europe. The old ww2 paddles had round ends, with the same width chord to a short taper into the hub assy, looked a lot like an old style canoe paddle, thus the name. RB's props look like the props on Stallions and Helio Couriers and all those other vstol turboprop cargo utes like they used in late Nam, the stepchildren of Beavers. Those had the benefit of computer aided designs, and are much more refined in an aerodynamic sense.

One "story" from Euro in ww2. The Spitfire could outclimb a 47 like it was standing still, until the 47 got the paddle props instead of the 3 blade pretty prop. The 47 was a lot faster in a straight line. As fighter pilots are wont to do, the Brits liked to make a pass at the "friendly" Yanks in the 7 ton milk bottle 47's, and then climb away untouchable, laughing all the way. They did this to Gabby Zabreski, the 47 ace, just after his squadron got the paddle props and water meth injection. The 47 passed the climbing Spit like it was parked, and swatted it with the prop wash from that 13' diameter paddle prop.

The 47 is a lot lower pitched than the inline 51 or 38 water cooled motors, and swings a larger prop at lower rpms (the inline motors usually have a gearbox for the prop, and the corncobs put the prop on the crankshaft. I do not know how they have modifed the powerplants and drivelines on either.

The only thing I've heard that is close to a 47 is a hellcat or bearcat. I had the opportunity to see a pair of matched F8F Bearcats at an airshow once. One of these later continued vfr flight into ifr conditions, and the thunderstorm spit out a shower of blue and gold duralum confetti and one big ole corncob into a soybean field in TN somewhere. They were owned by a pair of brothers who owned the Nashville Tennessean and the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

All good stories. On the modern stuff the pilot makes request to the computer thur the stick. No mechanical linkage. If you get into trouble let go of the stick and
let Betty fly, with certain restrictions of course.