Kitty Liter Rocks

Round engines, Russian Aircraft and most retired military equipment share a common trait: "If its not leaking, its out of fluid". Cleanup is an ongoing process.

One of our volunteers brought in a large container of Kitty Litter to help. We were concerned about the expense and explained that while we appreciated the help, we could not afford to rountinely buy kitty litter instead of the other cleaning materials we use.

He explained "It was no burden, this was just sitting around the house because my cats refuse to use it".

The name on the box has been changed to avoid any slight to the manufacturer, after all anyone who has a cat knows they can be picky. Just ask any cat, my job as a cat owner is to find out what they want and deliver it. On the other hand, if the manufacturer contacts us, we will fully endorse their product as effective aircraft litter and as the product description promises, it clumps tight!

Event Pictures - more planes (and some cars)

Continuing our coverage of the Commerative Air Force (CAF), DFW wing and Cold War Air Museum 9/05 event.

The Skyraider flew in from the Cavanaugh Museum.

This T28 lives here at the airport.

The B24 can be seen flying over this beautiful T6.

This pair of T6's flew throughout the day.

An An-2,


and an O-2 were among the visitors.

This aerial view shows the B24 about to take-off, its wingspan is wider than the runway.

Another crowd pleaser was the display of military and antique vehicles.

Thanks and picture credits go to Kevin, www.sectorkmedia.com. To aggregate the posts and pictures from this event, click on the 090509 label below.

Up, up and Away!

Most of the jet aircraft at the Cold War Air Museum were equipped with ejection seats when they were in military service.
One of the first actions on arrival is to check and insure that these seats have been disarmed or disabled. While this makes the aircraft safe to work on and to move around in, it begs the question- “Hot or Cold”?

Should the seats be “hot” during flight or “cold”? Because the use of the ejection seat has a training requirement prior to useage, the consensus has been to leave the ejection seats “cold” and rely on the robust nature of the airframe and the skills of the pilot should an emergency occurr and require an emergency landing. After all, no one is shooting at us over Lancaster.

In fact, the general consensus is that barring an on board fire, or the total loss of control function, the occupants are better off “riding it down” in the event of an emergency as the aircraft we fly are exteremely durable and robust. But enough of this, lets talk about where ejection seats came from and how they were developed.


A bungee-assisted escape from an aircraft took place in 1910. In 1916 Everard Calthrop, an early inventor of parachutes, patented an ejector seat using compressed air.
The modern pattern for a plane was invented by Romanian inventor Anastase Dragomir and its design was successfully tested on August 25, 1929 at the Paris-Orly Airport near Paris and in October 1929 at Băneasa, near Bucharest.

The first ejection seats were developed independently during World War II by Heinkel and SAAB. Early models were powered by compressed air and the first aircraft to be fitted with such a system was the Heinkel He 280 prototype jet fighter in 1940.


After World War II, the need for such systems became pressing, as aircraft speeds were getting ever higher, and it was not long before the sound barrier was broken. Manual escape at such speeds would be impossible. The United States Army Air Forces experimented with downward-ejecting systems operated by a spring, but it was the work of Sir James Martin and the British company Martin-Baker that was to prove crucial.
Early seats used a solid propellant charge to eject the pilot and seat by igniting the charge inside a telescoping tube attached to the seat. Effectively, the seat was fired from the aircraft like a bullet from a gun. As jet speeds increased still further, this method proved inadequate to get the pilot sufficiently clear of the airframe and increasing the amount of propellant risked damage to the occupant's spine, so experiments with rocket propulsion began. The F-102 Delta Dagger was the first aircraft to be fitted with a rocket-propelled seat, in 1958. Martin-Baker developed a similar design, using multiple rocket units feeding a single nozzle. This had the advantage of being able to eject the pilot to a safe height even if the aircraft was on or very near the ground.

Helmets

Who, among aviation buffs and action fans the world over, could ever forget the exciting scenes of fighter jock icy-calm bravado as pilots repeatedly push their aircraft to the limits in such classic movies as ‘TOP GUN’ and ‘THE RIGHT STUFF?’ Watching those stirring adventures in the wild blue yonder is guaranteed to shoot a Sidewinder missile thrill down the spine of the true fighter movie aficionado.

Of all the ‘tools’ used by the military pilot, perhaps the most glamorous of them all (to the wannabe Tom Cruise) is the flight helmet. Just as in the medieval era, when a knight’s ornately decorated helmet summarily symbolized all of those chivalrous qualities that ennobled him as a fearless fighting man, the protective helmet an aviator wears, visibly sums him up as a card-carrying member of an elite group of fliers.

Each flight helmet visually tells a unique story about the special requirements for pilot safety and protection modern high-performance military aviation has demanded over the years, as the technology of military aviation has continued to advance in quantum leaps.

In the early years of the 1900s through the end of the Second World War, the aviator’s helmet was made of soft (frequently insulated) leather and was intended purely to protect him from the effects of wind and cold. As advances in wireless radio communications developed, the basic leather helmet began to feature earphones for radio receiver headsets; still later, as turbo charging technology permitted higher aircraft operating altitudes, oxygen delivery devices became standard as well. Early eye protection in the form of rubber-framed glass goggles were adopted virtually from the fledgling days of manned flight as the most reasonable way to protect the eyes, especially in the old open-cockpit machines.


With the higher speeds and altitudes permitted by jet engine powered aircraft, more thought began to be given to sparing the pilot from the potential hazards resulting from the substantially increased inertial forces encountered in high-speed jet turbine powered flight. And as the potential for buffeting in jet aircraft cockpits became known, American researchers’ thoughts focused on devising some sort of enhanced protective headgear to protect the contracted civilian flight test pilots who were evaluating the new jets at such secret testing sites as Muroc Field, in the Mojave desert.

The result was a number of what are now called ‘transitional’ helmet designs. These were typically constructed by private aircraft company personnel for their own use and typically incorporated some form of hard protective hemispherical crown attached to the upper hemisphere of the standard soft fabric or leather flight helmet. Examples known to have existed and been used were made from old leather football helmets, phenolic resin miners’ helmets, pith horse polo helmets, and even cork-lined vintage race-car driving helmets.

One such design became known as the “Tanker” interim helmet, which used the compressed fiber top half of the US Army M-1 leather tanker helmet attached to a standard USAAF ANH-15 or A-10A fabric flight helmet; this helmet was used briefly by early USAAF Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star crews in 1946 and 1947. Even as this ‘transitional’ helmet was finding application in the first production USAAF jet, research on hard protective helmets was being conducted by the Air Force’s Wright Patterson Aero Lab and Northrop Aviation’s Dr. Charles Lombard.

Changes in helmet communications system components (earphones, com cords, and connectors) continued to be made throughout the 1949 to 1960 period.

One especially interesting concept developed in the 60s period was the so-called 'clam-shell' design. Technically known as the US Air Force HGU-15/P 'Windblast Helmet' (USAF version) and the US Navy AOH-1 / HGU-20/P (US Navy version), and developed as an integrated head protective unit with oxygen breathing system built in, the 'clam-shell' featured a two-part shell that opened and shut like a marine bi-valve's shell. It featured a swivel actuated face visor, with separate articulated sun shade, it looked very much like the conventional pressure helmet used during this time (viz. the Navy's Mk. IV full pressure helmet assembly of the early 60s). While the windblast protection afforded by the whole-head encasing clam-shell helmet design in emergency high speed ejection was excellent (it was intended for principal use in the Air Force’s new Convair F-106 Mach 2 interceptor), there were also aspects of the design that were found to be operationally awkward (especially for high-G air combat situations). These included substantial weight of the assembly (bearing down disagreeably on the wearer's spine in high negative-G maneuvers and turns), fouling of the chin-piece on parachute harness hardware, lack of adequate peripheral fields of vision, and lastly, a tendency to fog up and become opaque.