On the Edge of Flight: A Lifetime in the Development and Engineering of Aircraft by Eric William Absolon

Author:Eric William Absolon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Aviation
ISBN: 9781473816862
Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
Published: 2013-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Loss of Meteors in Service

We stood looking at this pile of wreckage. Fred Turton, service manager, had asked that someone go with him to have a look, with a view to trying to understand and explain some hitherto unexplained loss of Meteor aircraft in service with the Royal Air Force. So I was instructed to go. This is going back a few years before the events described in the previous chapter.

The loss of an aircraft in service could be due to several incidents, apart that is from enemy action. These incidents would be dealt with by normal RAF procedure and, since the aircraft had been approved and received into service from the manufacturer, the latter would not normally be involved. But several aircraft had been lost in similar situations. It was time to consider if there was some fundamental problem that had not come to light in service trials. The first line of contact would be through the service department of the manufacturer. That is why the Service Manager and the ‘systems and controls’ man from Engineering Research stood silently contemplating this wreckage. There is nothing more sad and evocative to an aviation engineer than a crashed and broken aircraft. This thing of beauty – yes, to an engineer, a thing of beauty, lying in pieces, dead, never to fly again. Never to be able to rocket to 40,000ft or more, to fly at hitherto unheard of speeds. The world speed record was taken by a Meteor at over 600mph.

During the war, the Meteor was the only aircraft in service that could catch the German V1 ‘flying bomb’. The technique was to approach the V1, get the Meteor wing tip under the wing of the bomb, and then flip it over to the point where the gyroscope in the weapon was toppled and it lost guidance, spinning into the ground. I can remember being at Hastings during this time when my father was stationed there and seeing V1 wrecks in the fields.

So, the Meteor was well proven, a great deal of flying experience in service, under all sorts of conditions. Why now were these accidents happening? The basic reason turned out to be quite simple. The undercarriage was coming down at altitude after a manoeuvre, with disastrous results. But why?

A military aircraft was designed in response to an Operational Requirement (OR) issued by the Air Ministry, in turn responding to a perceived threat and designed to meet that threat. The Meteor OR was F9/40, meaning that it was issued in 1940. That shows how rapidly things moved at that time, compared to today’s developments – the Eurofighter for example. Within four years, the Meteor was designed, prototypes built, fully flight tested, service trials completed, put into production and used in service on operations.

But testing and trials were not in any way compromised. The company tests were tightly controlled and monitored, with a Resident Technical Officer (RTO) from the Air Ministry. Equally, the service trials were carried out by the Royal Air Force under strict conditions.

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