Another great British invention that was abandoned. And you wonder why our industry is dead!!
More details at it's Wikipedia page
Saturday, 15 March 2008
Fairey Rotodyne....1950's technology. The forerunner to the Osprey.
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5 comments:
Proper Gerry Anderson stuff that.
It is such a shame men in white boiler suits are almost extinct. Not quite gone yet though, I caught one on camera last year.
They must use differential thrust on the props to counter rotor torque, linked to the rudder.
We used to count down the bearings on the tail rotor drive shaft on Bell helicopters, as a standing engineer joke, ``0.9, 0.81, 0.729, 0.6561 ...''
No rotor torque as the power was from rotor tip ramjets...... saw it fly at Farnborough, it was noisy enough to make your ears bleed at 100 yards I reckon, not good for city centre use.
Captn,
The noise was the "official" excuse. Actually Fairey's engineers had already gotten the noise down to the target level (96dBa at 600 yards at the time of cancellation) and were working on reducing it even further.
As to it being the forerunner of the Osprey - well, let's just say that 50 years ago Fairey had something that was a lot less mechanically complex (and therefore more reliable) that could match or even outperform today's product from Boeing. Now imagine what 50 years of development could have done.
Just another example of why we should dig up the corpses of every British industry executive, civil servant and politician from that era and have their remains publicly burnt then pissed upon before turning them into farm fertiliser.
96dbA at *600* yds? Seriously?
Halving the distance would result in 6dbA increase perceived (3dbA is about double the power intensity)
So... 102dbA at 300yds, 108 at 150yds, 116 dbA at 75yds.
Ouch.
I hope that Fairey's boffins were going to be able to severely reduce the noise level; where would you be able to operate the thing in an urban environment?
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