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"David Wallace" wrote in message ... George Z. Bush wrote: I remember reading stories about the air war in WWI, and I always wondered why Fokker included a third wing on that unique three-winger fighter the Germans used and why. I don't believe any other aircraft manufacturer built a line model with three wings, but I could be wrong about that. Probably to increase wing area and still maintain a small profile. They are tiny planes even when compared to the small size of the Sopwith Pup and Camel. Sopwith came out with a 3-decker prior to the Fokker, but neither of them remained in service very long. The DR1 was mainly active between Nov 1917 and May 1918 and of the 320 or so made a large number crashed due to structural failures. They sure look cute in the flesh though. Out of curiosity, did you ever fly the C-46 at all, and if so, how did it compare to the C-47? I've often wondered what the difference in run length for take offs and landings was. Finally.....somebody asked me something I can speak about from personal experience. Yes, I had about a thousand hours or so in C-46s, most in the left seat. In its day, the C-46 was the Mack truck of the airborne trash hauling business. From my failing memory, the max gross on the gooney bird was around 28,000 lbs, whereas the same limitation on the 46 was 35,000, although we pretty much routinely took off with 40,000 lbs. (or even a little more) during active operations. Needless to say, it required a bit more run length for T/Os and landings. In the air, unless the hydraulic control boosters were operable, it handled about like what I imagine picking up a horse one handed might be. However, it did have two of those P-47 sized R-2000 engines, which had a lot of muscle compared to the goonie's R-1280s. The gooney bird, OTOH, was God's gift to any pilot who needed to fly a transport. She handled well in the air, flew well on one engine (and could even climb 2-300 fpm on one engine if you weren't loaded, and was the most forgiving airplane ever designed by a human being. It was able to haul two CG-4(?) gliders in a twin tow pretty easily if you didn't mind staggering through the air at about 90-85 mph, and could also handle one of those big RAF Horsa gliders. I recall once (as a lark) taking off a PSP runway in Italy on a training flight with the wind directly on the nose at about 25 mph on cruise settings just to see if it would do it. Needless to say, since I'm telling you about it, it did. Pretty stupid, right? But then, I was young then and never bothered to think of what the options were going to be if it couldn't break ground. With clear headed thinking like that, I'd probably have become a statistic if I'd ended up in fighters. (^-^))) George Z. |
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