I spend a lot of time on various Facebook aviation groups. Probably too much time.
If you think politics is ugly, just wait until a couple of aviation geeks go at it over which was the best fighter plane of WWII.
Now the reason I’m writing this, is that inevitably when someone posts a picture of an aircraft that looks vaguely like something else, someone will have to proclaim that “It’s just a copy of a Westland Woodchuck!”
Note: There was never a Westland Woodchuck to my knowledge but there should have been! Once you’ve built the “Westland Weasel” and the “Westland Woodpigeon” the Woodchuck would be the next logical step.
The Brits sure know how to name ‘em. Nothing strikes fear in the heart of the enemy like being attacked by a Woodpigeon. That’s right up there with the Fairey Featherduster and the Supermarine Softfluffybunny.
OK, enough silliness. My mind goes to some very strange places when it’s sleep deprived.
Usually these end up with the Americans accusing the Russians of copying everything from us. Then the Brits chime in and accuse the Americans, French and Russians of copying everything from them. So far the French have refused to comment, because they’re the French.
There have been a few notable direct copies in aviation. Probably the best known is the Soviets reverse engineering the B-29 to build the TU-4. They did not, as legend has it, copy the battle damage. In fact it proved more difficult than you would think, since they had to convert everything to metric and work with different thicknesses of metal than the original. Reverse engineering is still, you know, engineering.
So while a TU-4 looks very much like a B-29, it’s not an exact copy.
It also has a different engine. The Russians already had their own 18-cylinder radial so they didn’t have to reverse engineer the Wright R3350. Probably just as well since the R3350s were so prone to fires that the B-29 was nicknamed the “Boeing tri-motor”.
Likewise it took the Russians over 1,200 engineering changes to build a licensed copy of a DC-3 to Soviet specifications. So while an Li-2 really is a copy of a DC-3, it’s very much a different aircraft and I doubt many of the parts would actually bolt up to a DC-3.
I tend to think that we’re not the only smart people in the world and other countries are, for the most part, capable of designing their own aircraft.
Air molecules don’t carry passports. Aircraft built for the same job will probably look very similar.
Fighter pilots spend hours studying aircraft identification, because most warplanes of a given era look about the same, especially when one flashes by you at 400 mph.
A Spitfire looks about like a Bf-109, which looks about like an early Mustang, which looks a lot like a Ki-61, which looks a lot like a Macchi 202, which isn’t too far off from a LaGG-3. Low wing, conventional tail, single liquid-cooled piston engine. That’s how they rolled in the 1940s.
That actually put you at a disadvantage flying something like a P-38, because nothing else really looked like a P-38 and you could spot one from miles away.
Let’s take three turboprop airliners of the 1950s. The Lockheed Electra, Ilyushin IL-18 and the Vickers Vanguard.
|
Electra |
il-18 |
Vanguard |
lengTH |
104 FT |
117 FT |
122 FT |
WINGSPAN |
99 FT |
122 FT |
118 FT |
MAX WT. |
113,000 LB |
141,000 LB |
141,000 LB |
PASSENGERS |
98 |
120 |
139 |
FIRST FLIGHT |
1957 |
1957 |
1959 |
Since the IL-18 was introduced at the same time as the Electra, and two years before the Vanguard, obviously the Russians not only were master spies but perfected time travel as well. No wonder we were so scared of them.
A more logical explanation is that this was a case of parallel development. Three planes built to do the same job ended up looking a lot alike. Because air molecules act the same in Burbank as they do in Moscow or London.
The Brits love to complain that us bloody yanks stole the design for the Miles M.52 to build the Bell X-1 and break the sound barrier before they could. This assumes a lot, by the way. Even if the Labor government hadn’t cancelled funding for the M.52, British aircraft projects of the late 40’s and early 50’s had a habit of going way over schedule. There’s no guarantee that the M.52 would have been ready in time to break the sound barrier before we did.
While there was indeed some data shared between British and US engineers in the late 1940s, the Bell X-1 doesn’t really look anything like the Miles M.52. For one it was rocket powered instead of jet powered, plus the wing and tail are totally different. The X-1 fuselage was based on a .50 caliber bullet, something they knew would go supersonic.
The M.52 did pioneer the all-moving tail, which became standard equipment on supersonic aircraft. The Bell X-1, however, broke the sound barrier without it. The X-1 had a conventional elevator, which would become immovable when the supersonic shock wave formed on it.
The entire stabilizer on the X-1 could be trimmed electrically, which is how Yeager controlled it during the transition to supersonic flight. Not nearly as advanced as the British solution, but it was good enough.
If anything I’d say the French Leduc 0.10 looks closer to the Miles aircraft than the X-1 did. The French, however, managed to come up with that weirdness on their own. They never needed help building strange looking aircraft.
Let’s look at airliners. Today the most efficient way to build a practical jet airliner is a low, swept wing with two large fan engines slung under the wing. Smaller regional jets will probably have them back in the tail, because there isn’t room under the wings.
That’s why everything from an Embraer 170 on up to a Boeing 777 looks about the same. Engineers generally arrive at the same answer to the same question. Until the next major breakthrough, whatever that may be, airliners are going to look about like they do now.
Our approach to Russian aircraft during the Cold War was schizophrenic to say the least. If we weren’t deriding their primitive designs we were saying “Ha! It’s just a cheap copy of a Douglas Dustbuster!”
Except when we wanted funding for a new aircraft, of course. Then it was “OMG! The MiGSukhoiTupolev-900 is ten feet tall and unstoppable!”
That’s how the F-15 came about. When we first saw the MiG-25, we assumed it had a very low wing loading and was extremely maneuverable. If it could do what we thought it could do, we were in big trouble.
Turns out the MiG-25 was, to put it mildly, a pig. It was far heavier than we imagined and less maneuverable even than an F-4. Other than being fast in a straight line, it didn’t have much going for it. Plus it was designed to intercept a high flying bomber, the B-70, that never entered production.
So the F-15 ended up being one of the greatest air superiority fighters ever built, in response to our fevered imagination of what a Russian plane was capable of. Oddly enough I never hear someone on the aviation forums wrongly call it “Just a copy of a MiG-25”.
In most cases, when you see two look-alike aircraft it’s probably a case of parallel development. Aircraft are generally designed to meet a specification. That specification largely determines what it’s going to look like. “Give me a bomber that can carry 20,000 pounds of bombs 4,000 miles at .9 mach” will probably get you roughly the same airplane whether you say it in English, French or Russian.