In article , Guy Alcala
writes
ArtKramr wrote:

It seems as though the Air Ministry didn't entirely trust Mitchell. Imagine
being an aircraft designer and having th air ministry withhold info that would
impact on your designs. The mind boggles.

It wasn't a case of trust, just a case of need to know. Mitchell only needed to
know that a tailwheel was a firm requirement, not the rationale behind it, to
design one. I imagine the spec change to increase the armament from 4 to 6 or 8
x
.303s was handled the same way -- they told him what they wanted and asked him
if
it could be done, but probably not the reasoning behind it. Whether the
tailwheel
case was an example of the government being classification happy is another
matter; the Brits tended to be (and still are, to a great extent) a lot more
reluctant about releasing such details, even when they're apparently innocuous,
than we were/are. OTOH, there were some probably unnecessary security concerns
over Mitchell's technical assistant, S/Ldr H.J. 'Agony' Payn, AFC RAF (ret)
because he'd divorced and his second wife was foreign (maybe German; I forget).
After Mitchell died he was named manager of the Design Department at Supermarine
(not Chief Designer, the post which Mitchell had held). The Air Ministry forced
Supermarine to remove him from work on the Spitfire or anything else classified
because of this, and in fact the company fired him.

Supermarine tried two different designs, a single wheel and one with dual wheels
(side by side). The latter tended to get clogged with mud, so they went with
the
single.

Guy


The 'need to know' principle is at least a couple of hundred years old
in UK government. The notion (valid, if infuriating at times) is that
even the most innocent details can be amassed and used, for instance to
gain knowledge of civil service culture to the point that someone can
masquerade as a government official and dupe another official into
giving away secret stuff. One of the acknowledged masters of building
up a mass of cultural information to get more out of people was Hanns
Scharff, who got tons of operational information out of captured allied
aircrew just by having friendly chats with them. His approach worked
where 'roughing up' had failed.

A double wheel, like the Mosquito, was it also an anti-shimmy measure?

Cheers,

Dave

--
Dave Eadsforth