May 20, 2004
A visit to Duxford
I visited Duxford last weekend with my cousins. The Duxford site is one of the campuses of the Imperial War Museum. This campus is north of London, in the Cambridge area and was an active aerodrome during the WWII (the American 8th Air Force was based there I believe).
To someone who had grown up steeped in the legends of Nelson, Wellington, and the heroes of the Battle of Britain this was a memorable visit. It was a perfect English summer day. Blue skies, puffy clouds, 70+ degrees. Much the same as it was in the summer of 1940 when the battle was fought. One can just imagine, hearing the sound of a Spitfire and a Hurricane warming up their motors, what it might have been like when Duxford was an active aerodrome. Pretty romantic stuff.
The Imperial War Museum is England's museum devoted to the wars of the 20th century. Unlike just about any other museum I can think of, it actively works to preserve and restore functioning war machines. This includes, at Duxford, main battle tanks and armored cars as well as WWI and WWII vintage aircraft.
There is a major air show coming up shortly (the anniversary of the D-Day landings) and so we were fortunate enough to see some of the warbirds warming up for the show. They have huge restoration and conservation hangars there (restoration is returning to flying condition, conservation is preserving for exhibition only) and they allow visitors to walk through all of them.
There is a new hangar on the field just to house some of the American planes, including both a B-52D and an SR-71 Blackbird. They have removed the motors from the Blackbird and I was able to get within a couple of feet of it for a nice photo. I've got to say the safety-wiring is as good as anything I could do.
To my untutored eye there is quite a difference in the apparent complexity of the two motors. Yet, they both propelled planes at Mach 1.3 or better (I think the maximum "acknowledged" speed of the Blackbird is Mach 2.5). Both have titanium skins. Very cool technology. Sad to think that neither is flying anymore. But the U2 still is. Weird, eh?
Hangar 1 used to be the main hangar and now that a lot of stuff has been moved out it is home to one of the original Concorde prototypes. I'm looking forward, on my return to Seattle, to visiting the Boeing museum and seeing the one that was just flown in there. This one at Duxford was either the 2nd or 3rd produced and was an instrument testbed. I saw a huge radiation detector just aft of the cockpit. A sign next to it explained that they were not sure how much radiation the passengers would receive while the plane cruised at altitude (about 60,000 ft).
Take a gander at the cockpit of the prototype. It is stunningly complex. My uncle (who works evaluating commercial airline simulators) has a poster of an Airbus cockpit on his office wall). From here I can see maybe one dozen controls on the cockpit firewall for pilots to fiddle with. A huge difference (as one might expect) in thirty years.
One looks at the cockpits of vintage planes (like the Spitfire) and sees the huge complexity of the 60s-90s planes and now the new simplicity of modern planes. Why do we have to keep learning that simplicity enhances performance?
Posted by artandscience at May 20, 2004 06:57 PM