Friday, May 15, 2020

The Friday Flyby - Wings of Weirdness

The Vultee XP-54 Swoose Goose
Whoa! What the heck was that?!?!

The Curtiss-Wright XP-55 Ascender

Wait! What?!?! What the Hell? Did you see that? What the heck was that?!?!

The Northrop XP-56 Black Bullet

Holy crap! What is that, what the fire truck is that!?!?!

I gotta quit drinking, you won't believe what I think I saw!


Weird looking aircraft, I blame Beans.

Actually the subject came up in the comments the other day when Herr Beans mentioned an experimental aircraft that could do odd things with its nose...
The Vultee XP-54 prototype. A Pusher aircraft with twin booms leading to the tail. Tricycle landing gear. Pressurized cockpit. Nose with twin 37mm cannon steerable 3 degrees side to side, 6 degrees up and down.
So you know, I just had to go looking.

The 1930s and 1940s must have been a pretty wild time to be an aircraft designer. Seems like they let their imaginations run wild from time to time. Note that all of the aircraft above actually flew, although none ever became operational.

Vultee XP-54:

The Defense Media Network website had this to say about this aircraft:
As happens so often, the intended powerplant of the big XP-54 ran into technical glitches and had to be canceled. The aircraft had to be completed instead with a 2,300-horsepower Lycoming XH-2470-1 24-cylinder liquid-cooled engine driving a single, four-bladed propeller instead of the planned contra-rotating blades. 
Apart from the engine switch, the XP-54 faced other challenges. In the book Vultee Aircraft, Jonathan Thompson enumerated the strikes against the XP-54 before it ever flew: The XP-54 was, Thompson wrote, “burdened by unconventional engine, airframe, armament, pilot accommodation and ejection systems” and it would have been “unrealistic” to expect it to become “a successful operational airplane.” In an emergency, the pilot was supposed to be able to jettison the propeller twirling around behind his back and escape the aircraft via a downward ejection. The downward escape system was dictated by another revolutionary feature, a pressurized cockpit, something “engineers really didn’t know how to do in fighters,” at the time, said Dustin W. Carter, an engineer who worked at Vultee.
For those of you who expressed interest in how the exploding bolts to jettison the propeller thing actually was supposed to work, if you go here you can read the patent for a similar device (note that it's a link to a PDF, I downloaded the PDF, my computer has not exploded, yet) here. (I was somewhat disappointed that no exploding bolts were involved.) (Note that the patent paperwork actually shows the Bell YFM-1 Airacuda, which we talked about here.)

Another odd thing about the XP-54 was that the pilot boarded the aircraft using an elevator. (I'm sure Tuna will get a kick out of that!)
The XP-54 was unique in numerous ways. The pressurized cockpit required a complex entry system: the pilot's seat acted as an elevator for cockpit access from the ground. The pilot lowered the seat electrically, sat in it, and raised it into the cockpit. Bail-out procedure was complicated by the pressurization system and necessitated a downward ejection of the pilot and seat in order to clear the propeller arc. Also, the nose section could pivot through the vertical, three degrees up and six degrees down. In the nose, two 37 mm T-9 cannon were in rigid mounts while two .50 cal machine guns were in movable mounts. Movement of the nose and machine guns was controlled by a special compensating gun sight. Thus, the cannon trajectory could be elevated without altering the flight attitude of the airplane. The large nose section gave rise to its whimsical nickname, the Swoose Goose, inspired by a song about Alexander who was half swan and half goose: "Alexander was a swoose." – a name also partly shared with the oldest surviving B-17. (Source)
In case you're wondering about the song, well as we're a full-service blog -



Not very PC, is it?

Curtiss XP 55 Ascender:

While I'm not a big fan of the name, (Well, it's supposed to ascend, innit?) this bird is kind of neat looking, but...

(Read Me)
That's the second time I've seen that pusher-type aircraft had engine cooling problems. Makes sense, no airflow over the engine with the prop in the back would be like turning the fan off on a hot Louisiana morning and expecting not to sweat. (Thank the Lord for central air!)

I suppose Ascender is a better name than Descender, which it should also do, but gracefully and not tying any low altitude records if you get my meaning.

At least the engine sounds normal -



Does look like a Burt Rutan design doesn't it?

Northrop XP-56:

Now this bird was just odd looking all the way around -



About that name, Black Bullet -
For reasons that remain obscure, the Northrop XP-56 (first prototype natural metal, second olive drab) was nicknamed the 'Black Bullet'. It certainly resembled a bullet but lacked the projectile speed or direction. The first prototype had no vertical fin, and relied on its underfin more to protect the propeller than to provide stability. This arrangement, of course, was inadequate. Nose heaviness was corrected but became tail heaviness. During a fast taxi run the aircraft blew a tire, somersaulted and threw test pilot John Myers out. He was saved by his polo helmet and the second prototype was fitted with an upper fin. With a 2000hp engine, one thing the XP-56 was not was underpowered, but it proved slower than expected. The intended X-1800 water-cooled engine had been cancelled and the substituted air-cooled radial was not the most suitable for a pusher layout. Fuel consumption was excessive and while waiting to conduct wind-tunnel tests, the project was cancelled. (Read Me)
Threw the pilot out?!?! Not a good thing I'm thinking.

Now of all the weird aircraft out there, and there are many, I've actually seen this one in person, it is a pretty big aircraft!

(Source)

Uh, that thing that just flew by, did that have a puller propeller and a pusher propeller? Yeah, I thought so.

That last bird is the Dornier Do 335 Pfeil, or Arrow auf Englisch.

There is exactly one of those in existence, non-flying rather sadly. Down at Udvar-Hazy, juvat and I both have pictures of it. (No, none with a gunsight superimposed... Which is, of course, a juvat favorite.)




It was apparently very fast and handled very well!



The following video actually talks about the Pfeil in the possession of the Smithsonian...



So the US got two of those at the end of the war, one went to the Army Air Forces, the other to the Navy. Apparently the AAF lost their aircraft, no record exists of it. (I'd check Dave 's Daily Day Dream's condo, I'll betcha he's got it stashed somewhere. Hhmm, juvat has a lot of places to hide an airplane...)

I suspect shoe clerkery!

So the Pfeil at Udvar-Hazy was the bird the Navy test flew? Seems they beat it up quite a bit but at least they didn't lose it.

Interesting little tidbit, which is maybe interesting to only me, is that all four of these aircraft had their first flight in 1943. Odd that...




62 comments:

  1. Doing the Convair XFY-1 Pogo next?
    Frank

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    1. It's official, I have three suggestions (including yours Frank) for another post about Wings of Weirdness. Like I mentioned to Virgil, there are probably enough odd-looking aircraft to do a whole series of posts.

      The Pogo I remember from when I was a kid, thought it was neat looking, didn't think much of the landing technique though...

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  2. XP-55 looks enough like a Long-EZE (or would that be the other way around) that with the right paint scheme and some mostly cosmetic modifications, an enterprising pilot might have the most unique warbird replica this side of the Tora, Tora, Tora T-6s.

    Another weird aircraft suggestion might be the Northrop XP-79. Because the XP-56 wasn't weird enough, the XP-79 was a rocket powered flying wing armed with four .50 cals and a reinforced leading edge to ram bomber formations.

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    1. And it crashed on its only flight, killing the pilot who tried to jump but was hit by the aircraft.

      Too weird. I wonder what some designers were smoking during the war.

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  3. I remember seeing a Pogo at Moffett Field in the fifties.
    IIRC either Monogram or Revelle had a model of it.

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    1. You actually got to see one? Really cool.

      I remember the model kit. Lindberg still has a kit of that bird. Available on Amazon for under $15 in 1/48th scale.

      Amazing what one can find on the Internet.

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    2. I'm with you Uncle Skip. I was at Moffett in the late 50's (for what I do not know) and saw it fly. The launch went fairly smoothly and the transition to level flight was smooth. Unfortunately I had deadline and couldn't stick around, I always thought it would be a boich to land what with the pilot having to be looking back over his shoulders to gage both descent rate and elevation.

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    3. Yes, landing must have been...

      Interesting.

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  4. Downward ejection must be a bummer if at insufficient altitude - as in an aborted take off...
    So that Pfeil is rather large, esp When sited in the museum next to what looks like an Arado
    Another flying wing that never saw operation or even flight was the A-12 Avenger II nicknamed the Flying Dorito - there's a mockup prototype at the air museum in Ft. Worth. It was to be a stealth bomber replacement for the Intruder for the Navy. The program was cancelled and the F-18 Super Hornet took over the role. Not sure if the A-12 designation would have been confused with the SR-71 precursor, which was much earlier in use.
    BTW, I didn't realize that Convair submitted a design designated Kingfish to compete with that U-2 replacement program. Some interesting info here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_Kingfish

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    1. Early F-104s had a downward ejecting seat. Which was problematic in the early days of the jet. Single Engine with loss thereof not unheard of, could make for an interesting day. While going through F-4 school at Luke, I was sitting at the bar when one of the German students sat down beside me. Over a beer, I asked him about it. He said, that most people had decided that if engine loss occurred at low altitude, they would roll inverted and punch out then. I liked the F-104, but am glad I never flew it.

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    2. The F104 was Fast but a bit scary! I thought of the roll inverted before ejecting, but that assumed you had the time and altitude to do so.

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    3. Tom - Convair loved that delta wing, didn't they?

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    4. juvat - Why in the world, by all that is holy, would a single-seat aircraft with no overhead obstructions, be designed with a downward ejecting seat?

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    5. Tom #2 - I honestly never cared for the F-104, looks like a manned missile, those little stubby wings give me pause.

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    6. Turned like a manned missile also. But man was it FAST!. They were adversary air at one Red Flag I was at. I was coming off target at low altitude going just about the Mach. Saw one pass over me with about 90 degrees out. I lit the burners as he started turning toward my tail. (I would have turned the other direction. It would be quicker to point at me.) I figured with his turn rate (not very fast) and at least 270 degrees of turn needed, he'd be no factor. I was wrong. Very shortly there after, he's flying formation with me. (Yes, my wingman's backseater was known as Mr Magoo)

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    7. Heh, not a great callsign for a WSO!

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    8. The F-104 "jocks" (we had a different name for them) at George AFB in 1965 always wore the "spurs" into the club, just to make sure that we knew who they were. It didn't sit well with some.
      Sitting mobile control was always fun with them in the pattern. Lots of engine smoke and G-dawful landings.

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    9. Spurs were an attachment to normal flying boots. In that "airplane" the "pilot" would attach the spurs to a device that, upon activation of the ejection sequence, drew his lower legs back so as to not be cut off by the canopy rail. We had a similar functionality in the Phantom, but we left all the parts in the aircraft.

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    10. I seem to recall leg straps in the F-4 that the crew had, they would pull your legs in to keep them from flopping around during an ejection.

      Spurs, seems fitting.

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    11. The B-47 had one downward-ejecting seat while the B-52 had two of them. At least there, it could somewhat be justified, though I think it could have been done better. Of course, none of them were zero-zero seats, so it made rather less of a difference then, didn't it? And up until the B-52G, the tail gunner was actually located in the tail and couldn't eject at all. The tail-gun 'turret' was jettisoned and the gunner would go out a slide where the guns had been located. I know of at least 1-2 cases where a tail gunner did that on the runway and escaped a plane, and probably happened at least that many times at altitude, but otherwise? Ugh. The two guys in the lower deck of an Avro Vulcan didn't have any ejection seats, either, unlike the pilots, producing a bit of an 'us or them' mentality in some crews if it came to a low-altitude problem. With most other crews, there was an understanding that the pilots would do everything possible to make sure the lower guys got out, to the point of at least some crashes with no survivors suspected because they thought the pilots simply weren't going to abandon the guys down in 'the hole' to certain death without giving it their all and waiting too late. That would be entirely understandable to me, but again, there weren't zero-zero seats available for anybody, so that the decision point would be a lot earlier today.

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    12. 'earlier THAN today," sorry.

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    13. I knew about the downward ejecting seats in the B-52 and the bit about the tail gunner's position, didn't know the B-47 had one nor anything at all about the Vulcan. Wow!

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    14. As to the typo, my mind read it as you intended. 😁

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  5. I see you had the same problem I did photographing the Do 335. Up close for details, it was too big to be in one shot. Far enough away to see the entire thing, no details. Interesting Friday Fly By, Sarge. Well done.

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    1. Yes, she is rather large. Of course, another part of the problem at Udvar-Hazy is getting a photo of an aircraft without other visitors in the way.

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    2. There was that. Fortunately, I went the Friday before Halloween. Nobody was there until, the Halloween celebration started about noon. Then it was mobbed and the line out the door went around the parking lot.

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    3. My biggest issue was always the silly couples who would stand for long moments in front of an aircraft taking selfies, or the husband taking pictures of the wife with the aircraft. Man, take a photo of the aircraft, does Mrs. Whatever have to be in the shot as well? A pet peeve of mine.

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    4. I thought that behavior was just a function of Halloween Weirdness, but I guess not, because it happened while we were there also.

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    5. Nope, pretty much year round and I've been there three times.

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  6. Apologies for This being a bit out of place, but was reading a bit more about Italian aircraft in WWII after your inspirational post on the P.108 and ran across another good Mark Felton video - I had no ideer the Italians bombed England in the Battle of Britain.
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mKykQvrLDSM

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    1. Good video. I see that Italian performance over Great Britain was as lackluster as their other endeavors during the war.

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  7. Lessons of ww2, mostly forgotten, prototype a lot, test a lot, pick few best and mass produce. Nowadays we are lucky to have 2 prototypes fly-off competing...

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    1. And it takes FOREVER to get something in the air from the drawing board.

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  8. Also, to fill in: weird but actually worked well: p-61 black widow, first us radar fighter

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    1. Oh, but I disagree, the P-61 was a gorgeous aircraft! (Okay, had a model of one as a kid, always thought it looked awesome. If, perhaps, a little weird.)

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  9. The siren song of "No Propeller in the Way" attracted a lot of designers because of the potential for all that open space up front to mount guns, glass, people, stuff or any combination thereof. Most successful NPinW designs, like the P-38, Mosquito and Me-110, did so by having two engines not mounted in the nose, thus leaving the nose open for guns and...

    So, yes, the song sung loudly to many designers. The site, Luft'46 (luft46.com) has many many many instances of maniacal German designers designing maniacal aircraft with engines all over the place.

    So, well, at least the Germans actually had a functioning jet engine in which to power their NPitW designs.

    And the Arrow? Not really a day-anti-fighter-fighter. More a big arsed anti-bomber fighter, especially in the night-fighter role. Big and fast.

    As to Burt Rutan? I think he's just some guy off the street who had some maniacal ex-Nazi's brain transplanted into his head. Since he's favored the design of many of the weird aircraft shown here, including the XP-56 Ass-Ender (yes, I had to go there) and the Pfiel (which he made a corporate prop-job aircraft) and the XP-55 and that weird Blom und Voss asymetrical design. If it's weird, Rutan will make a composite aircraft version and the press and some trade papers will claim it as the next best evolutionary step in aircraft and you'll never hear about it again. He's the most successful unsuccessful designer I've ever heard about.

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    1. Rutan gets a lot of press for non-commercially viable designs. I never really understood that. But hey, it ain't my money paying for it. (A lot of my money goes to really bad government ideas...)

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  10. As to many designs underachieving. It seems to be connected to designing the airframe for a proposed engine that never materialized. Isn't that what made the F-14A such a dog?

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    1. Often true. A number of designs failed as the desired engine was either unavailable or cancelled. Some designs only became a real success when mated with a better engine. (Think P-51.)

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    2. Though the A-36 dive bomber variant was used with some success in the Mediterranean, though it had some quirks (like dive brakes needing to be deployed before peeling off into a dive, else differential hydraulic pressures could cause unequal dive brake deployment which was a baad thing. It wasn't a purpose-designed dive bomber from the beginning like the Navy's SBD or SB2C,or the Luftwaffe's Ju-87 Stuka, so in northern Europe other planes filled that role (especially with rockets).

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    3. No, the aircraft was designed as a fighter, they used it in the other role because until they installed the Merlin, it was a dog at altitude.

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  11. Great post, Sarge. Thanks.
    Sometime in the twenties or thirties a lot of aero engineers must have gathered in a room and brainstormed over time about ANYTHING they could hang, screw or rivet together and let it fly. That was good, but where did they find the iron balled (is that allowed?) pilots to even taxi some of those things?

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    1. I know, took quite a set of cojones to get into one of those cockpits I would imagine!

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  12. Miles while Little known in the US were probably the global leader in canard aircraft in WWII.

    Tom-

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    1. Of course, I had to look them up, but they built the Miles Messenger (among other things).

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  13. IIRC, the Curtiss aeroplane (hey, it's the 1930's...they were aeroplanes then!) was also referred to as the Ass-Ender by the pilots and crews....for the location of the engine, of course.....

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  14. (Don McCollor)...the 20's were also filled with odd home designed and built aircraft (before the FAA or equivalent cracked down). Somewhere once I ran across an account of a home designer/builder (French, I think) that had built an aircraft with one outstanding flaw. It was inherently very unstable about the longitudinal (roll) axis. Once it flipped on its back, it was EXTREMELY stable. The pilot had an awful time trying to get it right side up again...

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    1. That sounds like a problem, especially when it was time to land!

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    2. Soooo.... make it upside down. Duh.

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  15. In 1970-71 there was a Convair Pogo on static display at NAS Norfolk. I remember wondering if the counter rotating props could actually pull it up and how you got into it.--Tex Airdale

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    1. They had a very tall ladder to get into it. Apparently the counter-rotating props made the aircraft more stable in vertical flight.

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  16. Sarge - here's an answer to your question about 'spurs'. Also it's within a great story about ejecting out the bottom of an F104. Didn't realize they converted them to upward ejection.
    https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/above-and-beyond-the-unhappy-bottom-riding-club-5642184/

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    1. That explained it very well. Amazing story of an F-104 downward ejection, guy was lucky to get out alive!

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    2. That is quite a story. I explained another aspect of spurs in a reply to an above post.
      I can remember the infamous "zero delay lanyard" used in the Deuce. On more than one occasion I noticed it still attached to the D ring going through Angels 25 on a half-awake night scramble. Here's the info.

      https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/equip/eject.htm

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    3. Pretty good explanation of the ejection system, thanks Dave!

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  17. Only one quibble with this post, regarding pusher designs having cooling problems. Specifically, airflow over the engine. All of these aircraft had liquid-cooled inline engines. Radiators for inlines could and were placed nearly anywhere. They really didn't depend upon airflow over the engine. Radials certainly did, and that was one of the faults of the B-36 that I never understood. Of course, even in a tractor configuration, a 4-row radial is going to have some cooling issues in some conditions. A few people mistake the nose of the D0-335, FW-190D, or nacelles of the Ju-88 as radials because of the frontal section, but those were annular radiators for inline engines. The Do-335 Pfeil would've been a most impressive 'heavy' fighter best used either as as a night-fighter, or (with longer wings) as a high-altitude interceptor, with suitably heavy armament. That cruciform tail eliminated the asymmetric rudder effects seen with nearly every other aircraft type, though the dorsal fin and rear prop would be blown away along with the canopy (or canopies) before the ejection seat (or seats in the night fighter variant) were activated.

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    1. Larry, I was relating the experiences of those who used the aircraft. As far as I know the Do 335 didn't have as bad of a problem. That wasn't my opinion about the cooling, but evidence from the historical record.

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    2. Sure, I only meant that it wasn't an inherent problem with inline pusher engines, only that those particular designs had flawed radiator designs. I think the B-36's cooling issues were pretty much inherent and there wasn't much they could do about it, not without creating so much drag with air scoops that its already low top speed would've been reduced unacceptably.

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    3. I figured as much, just to clarify. Pusher engines were used on a number of early WWI aircraft. Of course, the Wright Flyer was also a pusher. Probably was crappy radiator design.

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