FLIGHT TEST BASICS

Aircraft have two main components: airframe and engines. To avoid disasters such as destruction of the second B-29 prototype and crew, February 18, 1943,3 a basic rule offlight test is that only one of these two main components should be unproven. In some cases this is accomplished by having a new airframe design use an established powerplant.4 This is not feasible if the new airframe also requires a new powerplant. Then existing airframes are modified to fit the new engine.

Thus, a B-29 Superfortress was used in 1943 as high-altitude jet-engine test bed for the General Electric 1-16 developed for the X-P59, America’s first turbo jet aircraft.5 A subsonic XF-4D swept wing fighter repeatedly was taken through the sound barrier in tests of GE turbines for supersonic aircraft. For the T-38 supersonic trainer, a modified FI02 carried the diminutive J-85 engine in its bomb bay and, when airborne, the tiny engine would be lowered hydraulically, air started, and then put through its paces. Flight testing of the gigantic J-93 engines for the X-B70 mach 3 bomber used a modified supersonic B-58 bomber with a J-93 engine pod slung in its underbelly (see Figure 12). Once engine development and testing had progressed

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I have tried to relate the issues discussed in the preceding papers to some broader themes in sociology and the sociology of knowledge. I have tried to bring out the role of interests, the need for comparative study and the need for a typology of social forms that can help us see patterns in engineering styles. My aim has been to raise questions and problems of a somewhat more general kind than has been addressed in the papers themselves. The richness of the papers means that there are many possible lines of comment and inquiry that I could have pursued but did not. In particular I have neglected what might be called the political or institutional dimension. This means that I have rather short-changed those contributors who have addressed this side of things. There is much that could and should be said on such matters. For example, there is a whole nest of issues that emerges in these papers about the relation between the so-called ‘free market’ and various forms of government finance and subsidy. Time and again we see the importance of government research and state finance, whether it be tacit subsidy of civil aviation through military expenditure or the research effort of government laboratories. Prof. Roland quotes the figure of 85% of aerospace research deriving from government funding.

A second example, to which I cannot resist drawing attention, is provided by a significant observation made in three of the papers. Profs. Bilstein, Crouch and Hashimoto, respectively, all note how rapidly, in the early years of this century, the British government responded to the emerging phenomenon of the aeroplane. In