Miloch wrote in
:
In article , Mitchell
Holman says...
Miloch wrote in
:
In article , Mitchell
Holman says...
Miloch wrote in
:
I am always amazed that the country that
made the beautiful Spitfire could also make
planes as ugly and this and the Blackburn II
With a name like Mitchell, it's understandable you'd be partial to
the Spitfire!
And the B-25........
My father flew them in the 50s and early 60s just to get in his flight
time for flight pay...he hated them! Said they were too noisy and
left his ears ringing long afterwards. As a 10,000 hour pilot, he had
hearing loss all his life due to flying....
What struck me about sitting in a B-25
cockpit was how incredibly cramped it was.
The pilots were literally shoulder to
shoulder. Even a VW has more room than a
Mitchell. It is like the designers took
a A-20 frame (single pilot cockpit) and
just slapped another set of controls in it.
Truth be told I don't think a copilot
was necessary, even Lancasters were flown
with a single pilot. Ditto for the other
medium bombers of the day, like the Ju-88
and the He-111
https://hearinghealthmatters.org/hea...8/wwii-bomber-
crews-and-hearing-loss-part-ii/
...."In terms of the noise generated by the airplane itself, Little
(2018) indicates that the noise exposure question is more complex than
it first appears. In his description of the noise in these planes he
suggests that the aircraft noise to which a crewman was exposed would
depend their distance from the engine noise. He indicates that the
noisiest places would have been those that were the closest to the
tips of the propeller blades. (The B-25 might have had the loudest
cockpit of any American bomber, because the tips of the spinning
propellers were only about a foot from the pilots canopy.)
On the B-17 and the B-24, the crewmen who were the closest to the
propeller tips would have been the pilot, copilot,
flight-engineer/top-turret gunner, and, on the B-24, the radio
operator. By contrast, I suspect that the tail-gunners would have been
exposed to the least noise, simply because they were the farthest from
the tips of the propeller blades.
But ya!...I've always wondered if it's a matter of budget and being
practical or one of aeronautical design skills.
It almost seems like lack of streamlining is part of British
aeronautical DNA.
*