The Bluebird Project

You'll all be getting bored with this cockpit opening two days later malarkey...

Bored? No.

Impressed? Hell, yes.

I can echo the comments about Nigel's openness and willingness to inform through personal experience. I contacted Nigel via email to ask a question about the Quicksilver design. After an exchange of emails and phone calls it turned out that it was convenient to call in at the Quicksilver site and me...

That is an interesting one. As you say, it was heated to beyond boiling point, so it would have been a gas under pressure, looking for a way out of the void in the frame. So why didn't it come back out of the way it came in? Maybe the engineering types here can answer this one, but given that there ...

"While you were at Cosford looking at the TSR2's intakes,...". I certainly did spend time looking at all the aircraft in the Test Flight hanger at Cosford, including the ones you mention. All the aircraft there had caught my interest when I was growing up because there were so many differe...

Thanks to all who've explained in such detail, it's appreciated.

regards

Russ

The FAQ's that I have are a bit more technical, but looking at the photos I'm left wondering how K7 worked. By that I mean; How much of K7 was in contact with water when on the plane, and how far into the water did she sit? How did the planing wedge work? In a "pic of the day" a while back...

".....but I bet there’ll be a lot of griping and moaning if we push it back a year. "

Not from me. You will only rebuild K7 once; stuff the calendar, build her right.

Keith, Thanks for the info on the intakes. I'd assumed when I saw the Harrier film that the extra intakes were opening to dump excess pressure, but I can see now that they were actually there to suck extra air into the engine. That makes sense of them working by spring loading - when pressure is too...

All, thanks for the replies - interesting point about the sucking power of the Orpheus, there's a posting elsewhere about rivets being sucked in following the Orpheus being fitted, I should have remembered that. Keith, yes I'd spotted the difference between air-intake profiles, and now you've mentio...

On the Pic of the Day 23/08/09, which shows the start of the rivets being drilled out, there's a small rounded lump just above Bill's wrist, behind the start of the planing wedge. As it's not on the centreline, I assume it's not part of the boat, in which case it's probably just a very large piece o...