What's new
Van's Air Force

Don't miss anything! Register now for full access to the definitive RV support community.

What a Day!

Bob Ellis

Well Known Member
A crowd of over 50,000 flocked to RAF Cosford, one of the United Kingdoms major airshows, to enjoy the brilliant sunshine and equally dazzling air and ground displays on Sunday 09 June 2013. They also witnessed the RV8tors display team, Alister Kay and Andy Hill, create RV history by being the first RV's to fly in formation with the last flying Vulcan bomber. The Vulcan, which is now privately funded through a trust, enthralls crowds wherever it goes due to its unique delta wing, agility and the whine/roar of its 4 jet engines. Unfortunately due to fatigue life/costs it is nearing the end of its flying life. The RV8tors too dazzle their crowds with a dynamic yet elegant show, as I witnessed at Welshpool airshow hours before the Cosford display, finishing with a giant white heart drawn in the sky by their smoke trails. After providing the Vulcan with wing tip smoke and one of it's more unusual escorts the RV8tors put on their own show (more photos here).

G2A_Vulacn_RV8tors.jpg


Photo by PhilEAF92

No these are not photoshop'd these photos are for real and are a testament to both the slow speed handling of the Vulcan and a great homebuilt design. I, along with photographer Karl Drage, were honoured to be asked to fly my own RV8 to capture this once in a lifetime experience (our air to air photos to follow). It was even more poignant for me as I last flew in this very aircraft 31 years ago as co-pilot.

RV8tor_2_A2A.jpg


Photo by RV8tors (G-JBTR far right)

What a Day Part 2 contains some amazing air to air shots

What a day!
 
Last edited:
Great photos! Thanks for sharing.

Remember seeing a Vulcan at Carswell AFB in '78 or '79. Impressive plane!! But I bet it burns some gas...
 
Fantastic!

Incredible photos. I was lucky enough to see a Vulcan perform at Ellington Field here in Houston way back in the day and it's still one of my all time favorite airshow moments.
 
What a huge honor...I remember watching the Vulcan come by as a kid at various air shows (perhaps Holme-on-Spalding-Moore or Brough) and will never forget the ROAR of the engines. It's the kind of noise that makes all your hair stand-on-end, and you would feel it in your stomach as it went by. Incredible piece of by-gone engineering.
 
Very nice! What a treat and an honor to have been able to fly in formation with it.

When I was growing up, we lived under the approach for Offutt AFB. There was a Vulcan detachment stationed there, and seeing those enormous, graceful birds go overhead was always a treat. There is still one here at the Strategic Air Command Museum, and it's one of my favorite aircraft to this day. I've read the story of the one pictured, and it's sad to think it will have to become a static display. All good things, I suppose, must come to an end eventually.
 
from downunder

thanks for sharing....have had the pleasure of seeing / hearing one fly overhead on it's visit to Australia when I was a teenager ... awesome sight and sound
 
Vulcan

It was a regular at the CNE Airshow, Toronto for years and alway a highlight. Lots of smoke and serious noise!!! Great memories and awesome pics.
One thing though..... that blue sky was obviously photoshopped. :p
 
Thanks for sharing this with us.

Always loved the Vulcans, even before Star Trek:rolleyes:

There is (was?) one on static display at the Castle AFB museum.
 
Last edited:
Neat pics.

The Vulcan is amazing to see in an air show. I saw it over the sands in Southport, but it didn't have the RV escort then...:)
 
Magnificent photo. My father worked on the prototype of the Vulcan. Had a model of the aircraft in the house for as long as I can remember. For an ex pilot of the AC flying in formation with the last one that you use to fly must have been a great experiance. Thanks for sharing.

Joe Hine
RV4 C-FYTQ
 
That is really neat. The Vulcan is one of those planes that if you are near when it takes off or flies by you won't forget. I put it right there with standing near Concorde or a B1 with the Afterburners (Reheaters) on their takeoff roll. Thanks for posting! :)

Cheers,
Stein
 
Vulcan

Yes what a beautiful aircraft.

I had the pleasure of working on a few ( mostly servicing ) and helping the mechanic ( Flt Eng )change a faulty part once ( a starter if I remember correctly ) whenever they showed up in Bagotville, Qc. when I was based there in the late 70-early 80s..

The Victor ( another V Bomber ) was also a neat aircraft ..

Really nice pictures..

Bruno
[email protected]
 
I offer the following as a sincere tribute to the generation of engineers (some right here) who did their best to fight the Cold War from offices and classrooms on both sides of the line. They designed aircraft and missiles without supercomputers; their tools were brainpower, sharp pencils, hard work...and calculating ladies.

Dr Lissaman was a friend of a friend, so one day in 2004 this Word.doc arrived in my email. It was later published in Air & Space. I cannot look on British aircraft of the era without thinking of this story.

Dr. Lissaman passed last spring.

_______________________________________

Mrs. Whitley and the Cold War
Peter Lissaman, January, 2004

I was a very young and arrogant young man when I worked in the research dept. of Handley-Page Aircraft. It was in the early 50’s, the hottest period of the Cold War. We built a graceful, sickle-winged and rather eccentric RAF bomber called the Victor. It was specifically designed to drop nuclear bombs on Moscow. At the time, it seemed like a very sensible thing to do. The plant was in a Dickensian factory building in the London suburb of Cricklewood. The aeroplanes were built in great echoing hangars at ground level while upstairs was a rabbit warren of tiny random offices. There were few corridors, so one had to go through different rooms to get anywhere. One of these, the Calculator Office, was commanded by Mrs. Whitley. These were pre-computer times, and calculations were done by a team of twittering girls, operating massive green, dented Friden mechanical calculators. They would set rows of ten digit numbers by hand, and pull a heavy lever, like that on a Las Vegas one–armed bandit. It went Kerchunk, Kerchunk and the little numbers on dials rotated like those on an odometer. The girls were neat and proper, wore no make-up, and were under the severe matriarchal control of Mrs. Whitley. They had graduated from the local secondary schools, and could have been waitresses or shop clerks. Pairs of girls made identical calculations for each step, and each checked the other’s results. They NEVER, EVER made a mistake. It was legendary.

Each morning, because of the strange floor plan, I would walk through the Calculator Office on the way to mine. Everyone was hard at work. I would always greet her, “Good morning, Mrs. Whitley, and how are your calculating young ladies this morning?”

She never replied, but obviously brooded on my arrogance. I think the young ladies enjoyed it, but not Mrs. Whitley, which was the main reason I did it.

The director of research was a distinguished and elegant European designer, Doktor Gustaf Lachmann. He had had a classic career; having flown with von Richtofen in the Jagdstaffel Werner Voss and studied at Gottingen under Ludwig Prantdl, the famous German aerodynamicist. He had hated the Nazi party, defected, and became a British subject in the thirties, designing aircraft to bomb his homeland. He was very kind to me, perhaps because he sensed that I held him in huge awe and admiration. I thought him a God-like figure. He regaled me with harrowing tales of his times on the Western Front in the first World War, and, even more hairy, his first battles as a cavalry officer on the Eastern Front. Wounded by a tactic he considered most unsporting, machine guns versus cavalry, he received a transfer to the Imperial Air Force. Many cavalrymen forsook the horse and took to the skies, greatly reducing their changes of survival but also significantly increasing their attractiveness to the fair sex. It was a reasonable exchange, Dr. Lachmann assured me.

The latest Victor, the Model B Mk II, exploited a special maneuver. It would pull up into a steep climb, pitch its deadly ordnance in the direction of Moscow and then “beat it”, as the RAF had it. That meant “run away as fast as possible”. For this launch maneuver, the outer wing panel had to be re-designed. I, a boy fresh out of graduate school at Caltech in the USA, was ordered to do this man’s job. It involved designing a new airfoil. The airfoil, called an aerofoil in England, is the beautiful streamlined cross-sectional shape of a wing. Using what were then very advanced mathematical methods, the theory of Kuchemann and Weber, I drew up a shape that I thought would be OK. But the pressure had to be checked. Massive calculations are needed to find the pressure distribution on an airfoil, a job for Mrs. Whitley. I carried the long list of numbers defining the shape, called the ordinates, into her office and asked her to complete these computations. She allowed as she might have it done in two weeks if one of her girls recovered from the flu.

Continued
 
Two weeks later Mrs. Whitley presented me with a large table of hand written numbers, within which the pressure values were embedded. There was nothing in the way of a print-out in those days, and graphics was just an impossible dream. I returned to my office, and, like a Victorian engineer, leaned over a drawing board to plot the pressure. It looked rather funny. Near the front, on the top of the airfoil, Mrs. Whitley had predicted a huge negative pressure peak. It looked like Vesuvius rising out of the plains. It was clearly unacceptable. I took the graph into Dr. Lachmann?s office and waited silently. He made all the decisions for the research office, as with his old Jagdstaffel. Ours not to reason why.

?This vill not do,? he said.
?Yes, sir, I agree with you.?
?You must fix zis, Lissamann,? he hissed. One could hear the double ?en? as he made my Cornish name sound totally Teutonic. I know he would have liked it to have been ?Unter-Leutnant Lissamann?.
?What do you suggest sir, ? I asked meekly.
?Zat?s for you, Lissamann. You have zis advanced degree from America.?
?Yes, sir,? obediently. ?I?ll do my best?.

I returned to the office, dismayed and depressed. I had no experience, and didn?t know that in engineering one is almost invariably wrong the first time. One of the older chaps, who was ex-RAF and knew wings, came to the rescue. He had nothing like my credentials, but ten times my sense.
? Can?t possibly be that way, Peter. The bloody girls have got it wrong!?

With this dangerous thought I went to Mrs. Whitley. This was a sensitive matter, so I tried to be tactful.
?Is it possible, Mrs. Whitley, that there could be some small error here??
?No, Mr. Lissaman, it is not possible. My girls have never made a mistake.?
She slammed the door shut. I couldn?t check two weeks of calculation by six girls myself. It was a daunting problem. It worried me for a week, especially as Dr. Lachmann asked me every day how I was progressing.

One day, inspired by the dreamy spring weather, it occurred to me to check the ordinates of the airfoil. A revelation! One of the ordinates, just where the pressure had been so uncouth, was listed as 9.243 instead of 2.943.

I dashed through to Mrs. Whitley.
?Mrs. Whitley, your girls made a mistake. They used 9.2 instead of 2.9!?
?They wouldn?t have done that Mr. Lissaman. They never do.?
?Well, don?t worry who did it. Let?s just change the numbers and re-calculate.?
?I don?t think my girls should do that, Mr. Lissaman.?
?Well, I wish you would, Mrs. Whitley?

I retired to our Research Office.
Three days later I went back. Mrs. Whitley was adamant.
?They did it right the first time, Mr. Lissaman,? she said stubbornly, ? and the answer's the same. They did it just the way you said.?
She produced the original input sheet. There, in my own handwriting, was the offending ordinate: 9.243!
?You wrote it like that,? she said. ?My girls did it right, and they?re not going to spend another two weeks and miss their tea just because you changed your mind. We certainly won?t do it again. We did it right the first time.?

The long-suffering Mrs. Whitley had arrived at her sweet moment of revenge.

This was depressing, deeply. It was, literally, back to the drawing board. I sharpened some 6H pencils, leaned over the board, and laid out the airfoil I had specified. It had a huge bump on the top. There it was, large as life -- a colossal kink in the supposedly streamlined shape. I took the airfoil shape into Dr. Lachmann.
? What do you think of this aerofoil, sir??
?Horrible, horrible, Lissamann,? he declaimed. ?Zat must be the problem?.
?Yes, sir, that?s what I thought it might be.?
?Vell, ve?ll just have her change it.?
?An excellent idea, sir, but I?m afraid she won?t?
?She von?t! Vy not Lissamann??
?She says she did it right the first time, sir. She refuses to do it again. At least not for me.?
?Since ven vas Mrs. Whitley designer of ze RAF nuclear bomber force??
?Since this morning, sir,?
?Come vith me, Lissamann.?
We marched back to the Calculator Office, I a respectful step behind the great man. Mrs. Whitley was all aflutter with pride and gratification. ?What can we do for you, Dr. Lachmann??
?Vell, it?s this ridiculous aerofoil Lissamann brought you.? She eyed me vindictively, so delightful to have him drop the ?mister?.
? It is totally unsatisfactory. But, as a result of your careful calculations, ve have an idea for an improved design.?
?The girls will be very proud of that, Dr. Lachmann. They worked so hard on this.?
?Zo, I vil send Lissamann in vith my new design.?
?We?ll be honored to do it for you, Dr. Lachmann.

When we got back he said, ? Take zem in some new ordinates, und, Gott in Himmel, make zem schlict.? I knew the German word from my Caltech days. It meant very smooth, to a special degree. I complied, and sent the new airfoil back.

Mrs. Whitley?s pressures on the new, smooth airfoil looked perfect. The wind tunnel tests confirmed its excellent behavior. It was decided to use it on the new models of the Victor. Everyone was delighted. Aerodynamicists like to sign their work ? airfoils in those days were, after all, an art form. I asked Dr. Lachmann if I could put my name on the new airfoil.

?Zat vill not be necessary, Lissamann,? he said, as though he were responding to the butler?s offer of another brandy. Those were authoritarian days.

Some time later we were discussing the performance of the new Victors.
?Do you think we could get Mrs. Whitley to design some more aerofoils for us?? I asked.
?Ach, you English. Always making jokes,? he responded.
?Better than always making war,? I replied.
He looked at me and smiled, but grimly. We were in England, I was descended from generations of English yeomen who had fought for, and laughed at, that sceptered isle. He was a refugee. There was nothing else he could do.
 
Nice story Dan and probably sums up that era beautifully!

Thank you to all who have posted and I am glad the photos brought back happy memories. To the younger ones amongst you I hope I have introduced to you one of the all time great flying machines.

Words like neat, amazing, cool, awesome and frozen cool have been used so far. Please monitor this thread over the coming days/week as further photos are released and video links posted. You will not be disappointed and I can't wait to see what words you use then!
 
What a Day Part 2

Hi all sorry for the delay getting the air to air photos to you but as you will see from below they generated some exclusives! Now that they have gone public it is now time to share them with VAF - enjoy......

IMG_8684bw.jpg


My 15 minutes of fame was being RV8tor 3 for a brief period!

IMG_9027.jpg


The shadow just makes this one!

IMG_9235.jpg


When I sat in this position it all brought it home - me in my homebuilt plane next to the very one where I cut my flying cloth!

IMG_9195.jpg


My favourite!

If you would like to read the full story about how it came about click here

Thanks to the RV8tors and the Vulcan crew for making this happen and to Karl Drage for capturing it so well.

WHAT A DAY!
 
Last edited:
Fantastic

Really beautiful pics.

I remember as a small boy in Adelaide watching an all white Vulcan pass overhead as it headed for the Rocket range at Woomera and the nuclear test site at Maralinga. I can still see this massive white delta shaped "cloud" thunder across the sky.

What a magnificent experience you have all had. Thanks for sharing it.

Cheers

Jim
 
Back
Top