E-2C, inspired by what I saw last month.
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5 comments:
Cool. I may have been a ground pounder in the Army, but with my degree in history and both parents serving in WWII, I read about and study all of our military services. The Navy in WWII is fascinating, with the Great Pacific War and the Battle of the Atlantic (which took the life of my mother's first husband, his Patrol Yacht USS Cythera torpedoed off Cape Hatteras May 42).
I just read a novel about the USS Midway, forward deployed in Japan from the point of view of the crews of A-6 Intruders, set in the early 1980s. The author, Luke Ridenour was an intruder pilot. The title is "Over the Horizon" and it's on Kindle for ~ $3.50.it was fascinating, a Navy version of my experience in an infantry battalion in West Germany for 44 months, 76-79. It's good, but could have used more editing, but still worth the read.
E-2 is an interesting airplane. It is a development of the earlier Grumman S-2s and was never developed as a separate airplane, just a bunch of enbgineering changes to the older airplane. When a friend of mine was building the E-2 flight simulators in the early 1980s they found that there was no usable flight test information on the airplane to do the aerodynamic modeling. Navy usual practice then was to specify that the trainer would fly like BUNO xxxxx, the flying qualities test aircraft at Patuxent River so there was boxcar loads of data. Not for the E-2C. So the fleet project team pilots would fly an airplane from RVAW-120 to Bradley airport near the trainer factory and fly the trainer and collect data with the force gauges and protractors, then fly the airplane and do the same things and collect the data and then make the trainer fly like the airplane. One thing they found was that the lift they were getting from the wing was so much more than it should have been. After puzzling over it they found that the airplane gets a large amount of it's lift from the rotodome. They were really flying what amounts to a biplane.
Hmm. I think that's not correct. The E-1 was a derivative of the S-2. I believe the E-2 was a clean-sheet design.
Comrade
Everything I can find in documentation says you are correct. The WF2,E-2 in the new Air Force system, appears to have been a clean sheet design, first flight late 1960. I distinctly remember lots of phonecons and message traffic on why the trainer didn't fly right and the lack of aero test data to build it. Funny thing is to build a trainer you need lots of data points and information on how one parameter changes as other parameters change, not the nice smooth curves and stuff from Aero 101 class. Over the course of 20 years and numerous changes in the installed equipment (thank goodness) I would wager there were lots of changes in c/g and flying qualities, let alone data that got tossed or mislaid. Even the rotodome in the E-2A doesn't look like the C version.
As of when I left in the early 1980s there were a hand full of flight test engineers at Pax River Strike Test that gathered the data needed, either from old files or by doing the flight testing.
E-2 was a cleansheet as CM says. And yes, the wing does give 'some' lift, but it is designed to be 'flight neutral'. And they just don't sound right with those new props... sigh
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