Small point Comrade Chevan. The Rolls Royce engine was the NENE.Not the Nine2.
Rolls-Royce, like the rest of the British Aero industry liked to give models ‘Pet names’ rather than jumbles of letters.
Piston Engines were named after birds of prey, so, Eagle,Falcon, Hawk, Condor, Griffon, Goshawk, Kestrel, Buzzard–the Merlin was not named after the Wizard, but after a small British hawk. Luckily, jets came along just as they were running out of names, they were down to Buzzard and Vulture.
Jet Engines were named after minor British Rivers, so Nene, Avon, Derwent, Tay, Spey. In the '60s they started a mythological theme Olympus, Pegasus. Please don’t press me on why there was an RB211.
haw can you be sure that Lyulka, Klimov and Dobrinin ( the another soviet jet designers) didn’t adopted the ideas from GErmans?The Jumo004 was much better the first Lyulka’s post-war TR-1, so hardly he didn’t used the german experience for his further devices.
I don’t think that soviet designers simply copied the GErmans - this is a deadline.But the majors working ideas of axial turbofan, tested by GErmans , were certainly applied in firs soviet Axial engeens.
Just like the Sergey Korolev, the major soviet rocket designers, has built his first rocket R-1 as …full german copy of V-2 , equiped by the soviet-made primitive electronic:)
Olympus and Pegasus were originally Bristol Siddeley engines, and later taken over by Rolls. They tended to Greek Mythology - e.g. Perseus and Orpheus. Armstrong Siddeley tended to Gemstones, with e.g. the Beryl and Sapphire.
Thank you sir for such a infore about anthology of Britich aero names.
I heard the Brits and Amers have a tend to call its combat vehicles by the names of animals.But i didn’t really know the NENE was called after the …british river;)
But would you like to be so kind please to tell now why was Rolls-Royce RB211?
Have the rivers finished in Britain?
That was supposed to be a joke. The RB 211 is actually the Trent engine–named after another River. RB 211 was the working title as a project for the Lockheed Tristar and DC10. For various reasons Rolls-Royce went bust in the middle of the RB 211 development with the cost of the engine being blamed as the prime cause and the name became famous. As the Trent the engine powers almost all types of widebody and heavy lift aircraft–even the Tupolev Tu 204.
There is a complex story behind the naming of aircraft in British military service. I shall keep that for another post.
Well observed. Armstrong Siddeley used gemstones for turbo-jets and earlier really cool names for piston aircraft named after cats—Civet, Lynx, Tiger, Cheetah. All Bristol’s engines had mythological names piston and jet.
Personally I tend towards the Napier convention (Sabre, Culverin, etc.), although there are wierd ones like Nomad (which to be fair was pretty descriptive given the fuel efficiency) and Pobjoy. Then you get the wierd ones like the Rolls-Royce Crecy (5000 BHP two stroke diesel aero engine!)…
Buzzard?
Now I didn’t know the Griffon engine was named after a bird, not the Merlin, but please tell me, what was the Buzzard and who made it?
Thanks,
Deaf
An English Merlin
A Cape Griffon
A Rolls-Royce Buzzard - a 36litre 800HP V12 engine manufactured at the Rolls-Royce Derby factory in the 1920s
It was used to power a variety of Seaplanes but a had a short life, only 100 were made. It was the basis for the specialist ‘R’ engine used for air and land speed record vehicles.
ww2Admin, most sources document the fact that the Jet xp59 project was deliberately given the designator of an earlier existing project which itself was quietly shelved. This would be the 1938 multiseater aircraft the filmology mentions.
This was by no means an unusual subterfuge in the USA, as much the same thing happened in relation to the XP47, and a couple others I cannot offhand recall immediately.
Even the flying bat XP49, and the XP 53 “Ascender” were given designators of earlier projects, so it was plainly a normal occurrence.
Hope that info is of some help.
Kindest Regards ww2Admin, Uyraell.
[QUOTE=cato;162592A] Rolls-Royce Buzzard - a 36litre 800HP V12 engine manufactured at the Rolls-Royce Derby factory in the 1920s
It was used to power a variety of Seaplanes but a had a short life, only 100 were made. It was the basis for the specialist ‘R’ engine used for air and land speed record vehicles.[/QUOTE]
Had a short life? Well what do they expect after naming it Buzzard?
Deaf
Nope. The second one crashed and then they scrapped it and there is not even any samples in museums.
They had 6 in various stages of completion lined up on a runway. They were ordered to chop them up. It was a truly sad day. The consenses among many is that sabotage caused the crash. There is a smaller prop driven model at the Chino Air Museum that was restored (and flys) by some of the same people that originally built them.
A slight correction here. The RB211 is not at all a working title for the Trent as mentioned here.
Yes the Trent was a further development of the RB211 three spool engine. But the RB211 was itself post bankrupting Rolls-Royce, has been their most successful engine and has made Rolls-Royce into one of the aero engine leaders today.
I have no idea why RR skipped naming the RB211 after an English river as was their custom. But Ido know that RB stands for Rolls-Royce Barnoldswick (This being the small town in northern England that the engine was designed)
I hope this helps
The Airacomet, to my knowledge, was a test bed and not combat ready for anything. It was a ‘proof of concept’ machine nd apparently not very fast nor agile, but you have to start somewhere. The fling wing never saw combat either.
Let’s not forget the Gloster Meteor which flew a bit earlier than the Airacomet and the P-80 and which also went overseas during WW2 but wich did not engage in fighter-fighter combat either.
Technically wouldn’t the worlds first “jet vs. jet” have been Meteors vs. V1’s?
No to both.