A Technological and Nimrodian Appendix to Postblogging Technology, Fall 1953: Delta Dawn

 There was something about "Delta Dawn," an earworm of my childhood (written by Larry Collins and Alex Harvey, as performed byTanya Tucker, Bette Midler, and Helen Reddy) that bothered me as a young man. That's not surprising given its disturbing lyrics, but I did not then pick up that it was written about Alex Harvey's survivor's guilt over his mother's apparent suicide. So there's that, even before the Wikipedia article has to disambiguate the song from an even sadder story, which is definitely not the kind of competition that people should be having. 

The Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, on the other hand, just didn't go as fast as it was supposed to. Not much of a story, but jeez, the subtext. 

This is a scrape of the history of the nine years and 10 flights (8 record settings of the homologued FAI world speed record) runs from Yeager's unofficial 1434kmh second record on 6 November 1947 through Richard Johnson's s 1079.6 kmh flight in an F-86A-3 on 15 November 1948 through Peter Twiss' 1822kmhflight in a Fairy Delta 2 on 10 March 1956. It doesn't really capture the total impression given by the full chart, which shows 67 record flights in the 35 years between 1912 and 1947, and only 9 since 1956. Speed record attempts used to be quite common, and became rarer as the costs and dangers associated with them mounted. The last half of 1953 shows a marked departure from this overall trend, with five new records from July to 29 October. Thereafter the F-100 Super Sabre h eld the record until the Fairey Delta made an almost unprecedented step forward, increasing the speed record by a full 72%, almost the same margin as that by which a 7 November 1945 Gloster Meteor 4 flight exceeded a 1939 record by a Messerschmitt Me209.

What I did not realise, or did not sufficiently take on board, was that these record attempts were being made in the overshadowing knowledge of the imminent flight of the world's first designed Mach 2 interceptor, the aforementioned Convair F-102. The prototype YF-102 had its first flight on 23 October 1953, and was lost in an accident nine days later, by which time it was presumably clear that early wind tunnel testing results were correct and that the F-102 would need a significant  redesign and a new engine to even reach Mach 1. The plane's sluggish performance would persist through its career, and in trying to find a non-Wikipedia discussion, I quickly came up with a listicle nominating it as one of the five worst fighters ever flown in service, which, considering the competition, seems a bit harsh. I could make a longer list than that out of Audit of War! Which is my point today: "Whaddabout the F-102." I am not obsessed.

So I was looking through Flight for contemporary comment about the F-102, or at least pictures but could not find it in the issues through mid-March. I also have the first six months of Aviation Week for 1954, so not the index, and I am not trolling through it. I did, however, come across some definite "spirit of the age" comment, including Tom Sopwith's annual statement for Hawker-Siddeley, in which he worried that the Americans were "clearly ahead" in aeronautical research, and catching up on jet engines, to which Flight chimed in with "what about atomic planes" "frank comment from Canada" about how American fighters were newer and better, the B-47 was the only bomber out there, there were no British civil airliners flying the Atlantic, the J57 was newer and better, and what about that? And, from the 26 March 1954 issue (which also announced a price increase), notice that the Comet was returning to service from its first grounding, and that the United States had a "deliverable" hydrogen bomb, and that the Bikini explosion in March had been "several times more powerful" than the first blast at Eniwetok, and "produced an effect equal to 45 to 50 megatons, being, "in fact, much more violent than had been expected, and tests of an air-dropped hydrogen bomb, planned for a few days later, had to be postponed while scientists revised their calculations." 

I offer these as two not-entirely parallel boo-boos. Flight's coverage of the Comet's return to service takes a moment to discount reporting the previous week that the Elba accident had been caused by a turbine disc disintegrating, as  it had discounted a report that "Professor Heinkel" had said that the Elba accident showed that the Comet  had been rushed into service, the previous month. It turns out that the accident was not caused by an engine failure, and Flight is grasping at straws when it says that it would never have been put back into service had there been any indication of such a failure. In fact, De Havilland put an armour ring around the turbine discs to contain fragmentation and that was good enough for all. It is also not obvious why it was placed back into service, and the next accident, the loss of South African Airways Flight 201, was only three weeks away, and would also occur over the Mediterranean, flying out of Rome.  Professor Heinkel was perfectly right. The problem was structural fatigue, and while the causes for the Comet going into service with inadequate fatigue life are complex and institutional they are basically the result of the decision to rush the plane into service. 

The Castle Bravo boo-boo is the story of an even more incomprehensibly stupid mistake, and I find myself being, once again pre-revisionist. Castle Bravo was intended to yield 6 megatons, and exploded for 15, which is why Fifth Lucky Dragon was caught by the fallout that killed Kuboyama Aikichi just outside the blast's declared danger zone. It appears that the fact that the Castle Bravo blast was far larger than expected was perfectly well known at the time. Attempts by American officials to play down the amount of fallout produced appear to have been motivated by a desire to conceal its three-stage design, the final stage being the fission of 35% enriched uranium in the bomb casing by fast neutrons produced in the fusion stage. I think this has to do with the sense that mid-Fifties designers had that they were "cheating," that a true fusion bomb was inevitable, and that claims to have produced a true hydrogen bomb with thes workarounds would eventually look bad. But there is also the stunning ineptitude of the Eisenhower Administration once more on display, with the AEC not coming off much better, using a fuel of mixed 40% lithium-6 and 60% lithium-7, a pathway to fusion for lithium-7 nuclei not being detected, leading ultimately to a much greater neutron flux through the casing, and thus more fusion, fission, and fallout than had been expected. Lucky Dragon probably was pushing its luck, given that there might have been as many as 100 fishing boats, two inhabited atolls, and the test centre were in the actual danger zone, but that does not excuse a miscalculation that could have led to a much more serious tragedy. 

So, uhm, lots of mistakes were being made in the fall of 1953, or were making themselves known, or were about to make themselves known, in the fall of 1953. What about the F-102? The F-102 was one of the "1954 Interceptor" proposals, to be designed around a fire control system that would guide the plane into a high speed rocket-firing pass on a jet bomber intruder. High speeds and high altitudes put a huge premium on performance and control in order to hit the very small interception envelope. The F-102's delta configuration and the specified engines (both the Wright J67 Sapphire development and the notorious Westinghouse J40 were attached to the project before it entered service with the J57)  aimed at achieving that performance, while the Hughes MA-1 Fiue Control System would allow ground controllers and radar intercept officers to guide the autopilot as it placed itself on a vector yielding a weapon fire control solution. Successively each component failed. It is not precisely clear when Convair accepted that the aerodynamics of the F-102 were unsatisfactory, but it belongs to a generation of American airframes "saved" by NACA's pronouncement of the area rule, with the "Coke bottle" waist configuration achieved with some fairings and modifications to the wing together allowing the YF-102A to make its first flight more than a year after the YF-02, on 20 December 1954, eventually achieving Mach 1.22 and 53,000ft, and a June 1956 service entry.

By Mike Freer - Touchdown-aviation - Gallery page http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK
---Air/English-Electric-Lightning/2260192/LPhoto http://cdn-
www.airliners.net/aviation-photos/photos/2/9/1/2260192.jpg, GFDL 1.2,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26949478

The obvious counterpart to the "1954 Interceptor" was the English Electric Lightning, which began development on the same timeframe as the designated defender of British V-bomber bases as part of the surprisingly comprehensive strategic programme developed in the immediate postwar era. The problem here is that while design work on the Lightning began at the same time as for the F-102, it entered service in 1959. This reflected a painfully protracted and tortuous development process, with the Lightning merely a test aircraft for a significant part of its life in the mid-Fifties while the RAF waited on mixed-propulsion aircraft of even more extreme performance. The fact that the main contender was a Saro design does not exactly fill me with confidence that no political considerations entered the picture --indeed, I'm calling that hundred-foot-tall flaming letters spelling "political," as it really is incomprehensible to me that anyone would send government money to Saro in 1955 expecting a viable plane out of it. On the other hand, every single aspect of the F-102 development cycle was a failure: the Hughes fire control system eventually got out of the woods, but the rest of it went onto the junk heap. There was never a high-speed version of the F-102, and the J40 was part of a whole litany of failures that took Westinghouse, along with Allison and Curtiss-Wright, out of the business entirely. Being three years early does not mean very much when you deliver systems that don't work! 

c. 2010 Rich Burlew www.GiantTP.com

The contrary argument can be made that weapon systems that would have failed to fight a war that was never fought are not failures if they drive development circles. This, the Hughes FCS most definitely did. The rest of it, not so much. In retrospect, it is surprising that we know most about systemic institutional failure at Hughes, the company that eventually turned it around. The nature of the failures at Convair, Wright, and Westinghouse, which also appear systemic, remain obscure except to the extent that Floyd Odlum's involvement makes the Convair story appear, once again, political. Or obscure in that the failures all seem to be in areas where more cautious British development was driven by the suspicion that things were more difficult than they seemed. So, for example, the J40 had a precocious afterburner application, and afterburners are an area in which American developers led British --straight, as it turns out, to failure as it turned out that afterburners were harder to pull off than they looked. In much the same way, the Lightning's protracted development cycle led to a plane that could fly as high and as fast as the operational specification required. Which is kind of the point! 

 This brings me to the Fairey Delta 2, not to be confused with the previous Fairey Delta, a tailless delta to E.10/47 to prove aerodynamic concepts tested in models by Fairey from 1949 through 1953, and which mainly went to prove that tailless deltas could be dangerously unstable. The Delta 2 had its first flight on 6 October 1954, and soon demonstrated supersonic capability, appearing at Farnborough in 1956 six months after its record flight. The sore losers around the Fairey programme are eager to claim partial credit for the Mirage, and one could also single out the MiG-21 as a response to the way that Fairey shattered the record. Light fighters such as the Mirage and MiG-21 might be of dubious usefulness, but you would never know it from their export successes, and a Delta with a single Gyron or RB.106 would not have lacked for power. The might-have-beens, however, are much less important than that the thirty month gap between the first flight of the YF-102 and the Delta speed record seems a lot less meaningful when one bears in mind the YF-102's failure to meet the operational requirement.

My point here is not some specious bien pensant burblings about taking the middle ground between the frantic boosterism  of Flight and the criticisms of our frank Canadian commentator. It is, rather, to point out that you can use the facts available to tell the story you want. If the entire postwar British aviation story is one of failure, what's the harm in cutting it off at the knees? 

Just don't do it at the neck.