tinyurl.com/zvv69ou
Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown was known as the 'world's greatest test pilot'
He completed 2,407 aircraft carrier landings and flew 487 types of plane
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>> tinyurl.com/zvv69ou
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>> Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown was known as the 'world's greatest test pilot'
>> He completed 2,407 aircraft carrier landings and flew 487 types of plane
"Worlds" greatest test pilot? Certainly the UKs greatest test pilot, but Chuck Yeager might argue over the global tag. And he is still alive.
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I very much doubt Chuck Yeager has anything like that number of different planes in his logbook. And, 487 is actually understating the figure as just one entry covers all the different types of Spitfire, despite the fact that a Mark One flies quite differently to a Griffon engined Mark 19.
Also Eric Brown was perhaps the last man alive who flew a ME 262, perhaps the scariest plane ever made - a fuel leak could dissolve the pilot!
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>> Also Eric Brown was perhaps the last man alive who flew a ME 262, perhaps
>> the scariest plane ever made - a fuel leak could dissolve the pilot!
I suspect you mean the Me163 - a rocket plane. The 262 was a twin jet in similar performance bracket to the Gloster Meteor.
There are several flyable reconstuctions of the 262 still around.
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I suspect you mean the Me163 - a rocket plane.
Whoops, yes I did. But bet he flew a 262 as well given his job at the end of the war.
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I recall Brown saying the 262 was something like 120mph faster than any allied aircraft, and it was fortunate that Germany had not managed to make very many. "Sobering" I think he said.
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>> I very much doubt Chuck Yeager has anything like that number of different planes in
>> his logbook. And, 487 is actually understating the figure as just one entry covers all
>> the different types of Spitfire, despite the fact that a Mark One flies quite differently
>> to a Griffon engined Mark 19.
>>
>> Also Eric Brown was perhaps the last man alive who flew a ME 262, perhaps
>> the scariest plane ever made - a fuel leak could dissolve the pilot!
Yes the germans loved using stuff called "T-Stoff" and "C Stoff" The planes had two tanks and if the two fuels even got a sniff of each other they would explode. They didn't even allow the two tankers on the airfield at the same time, one arrived, fuelled and left, the other arrived, fuelled and left. Tankers painted in different colours to make sure. When mixed in the combustion chamber, they made the thrust.
T-Stoff was a stabilised high test peroxide and did in fact dissolve a pilot in an accident once. C-Stoff was basically methanol.
And that reminds me, Probably the greatest Test pilot of all time, anywhere, of any age was Hanna Reitsch, - Remarkable woman.
Last edited by: Zero on Mon 22 Feb 16 at 12:12
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His autobiography is well worth a read. I hope they re-broadcast the documentary they made on him too.
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Available on torrents.
Very very good.
Zero,
As far as the T-stoff goes, I recall asking Andy Green about the advances in rocketry. He said he used to have a 'trick' at seminars where he washed his hands in the Bloodhound peroxide fuel to show how safe it was.
Then he got married.
Next time he did the 'trick' his platinum wedding ring decided it liked peroxide a lot, and got very warm, very quickly...
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Numpty presenter on Radio 4 Today programme this morning referred to the RAF pilot...
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Remember when the Telegraph (???!!!) had the Typhoon and Hurricane on the cover, with 'Typhoon and Spitfire' as the caption?
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Further story in the Mail today -
And now a new book reveals Eric might have been the first man on the moon had he agreed to accept U.S. citizenship. A fiercely patriotic former ADC to the Queen, he refused to surrender his British passport with the result that the UK has had to wait more than 45 years to hear the extra-terrestrial musings of Major Tim Peake instead.
A new book on the Space Shuttle, Into The Black, by Rowland White, reveals that, during the Sixties, Eric was invited to be part of the same X15 space rocket programme as Neil Armstrong and his colleagues. But the precondition was taking U.S. citizenship. Years later, however, he would become good friends with Armstrong who hailed Eric as a 'role model'. Praise indeed.
Did he have any regrets? According to his friend, TV producer Nicholas Jones, who made the film, Eric Brown, A Pilot's Story, Eric wished that he — and Britain — had been the first to break the sound barrier, instead of America's Chuck Yeager.
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Britain's Greatest Pilot: The Extraordinary Story of Captain Winkle Brown
On BBC2 at 7pm tonight.
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Work today is covering somebody else's outreach session in a local library.
There was copy of EWB's book 'Wings on my Sleeve' on the disposals shelf. Now in my bag and all my loose change in the library donations box.
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brilliant book.
One of those books I got absorbed into and only noticed it was getting harder to read because the sun was setting in the evening
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RIP Eric 'Winkle' Brown - Zero
