Jerry Eichenberger wrote on 11/11/10 at 12:32:54:Yo, mick -
I wish I could have met your dad - we could have told some real tales and I could have learned a lot from him. Sounds like he was one of those great guys from his generation.
I'm surprised that RAF worried much about tire wear on Spits and Hurricanes - weren't most RAF stations still basically large, sod fields during the early War years? And with the relatively light weight of a Spit or Hurricane, I wouldn't have thought that tire wear was a big deal, especially operating off of sod fields.
The experiments I knew of related to bombers. As they weigh many times what a small fighter does, tire wear with them is more expensive, as they have more tires and they wear out so much faster with the weight. When our B-47 came along, tires were wearing out really fast, since it was the first jet bomber to be built in any large numbers, and it landed much faster than anything before it.
Remember how it had the big drag chute that was deployed after landing to slow it down? Many fighters had them too, including my all time favorite, the F-4 Phantom. Brake technology wasn't that advanced then, and the drag chute was needed to slow down even using a 10,000 foot runway.
The F-4 emergency procedure for a drag chute failure to deploy was mainly to stand on the brakes, bend over and kiss your posterior good bye, and hope that 47,000 pounds of iron screaming down the runway at 160 mph would come to a stop before you ran out of runway. If it did stop, the brakes were probably so hot that the landing gear was trashed, and you might even get a gear fire from the overheated hydraulic fluid in the braking system. The brake discs would get red hot and heat up the fluid to its flash point. Of course the tires were goners.
The kind of stuff for 25 year olds; not old men.
I'm sure Jerry that testing on bombers was also carried out. Did you know that every citizen in Britain was obliged to turn in any scrap metal, mostly though it was not scrap, they came and took all iron railings around houses ,we were expected to hand over all alluminium pots and pans. It was about this time my dad took up motorcycling, you could own a car but to keep in running on two gallons a week was tough. he also rode bycles.Smoked a pipe and always carried a sketch pad and a small water color box. one of his fellow workers was a fantastic artist,and my dad and him became good friends ,he taught my dad to draw and paint on there lunch hour. His name was Reynolds
not Joshuh. I had one of his paintings ,but it got badly smoke damaged in a fire.
My dad had a dark side that is to personal to go into.But generally a very decent man,and a perfect father.