Sunday Fail : Rocket fighters

Along with the jet engine the rocket engine was another alternative method of propulsion that promised unrivalled performance gains over piston-engined fighters. However whereas the jet engine went on to dominate military (and civil) aviation the rocket engine has not and to this day there has only been one operational rocket powered fighter (not including jet powered aircraft which also used rockets) and that was the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet. Why? Because of range.

The Komet, which was one of the advanced fighters designed by the Germans in a desperate attempt to halt the daily Allied bomber attacks, had an amazing performance. It could reach around 700mp/h far in advance of anything on the Allied side at the time and easily out-climb any fighters being able to shoot up to 39,000ft in 3 minutes. That performance came at a price though and the Komet had only enough fuel for a few minutes of powered flight. After that it was simply a futuristic looking glider and had to try and return to it's base unpowered.

One other problem with the great performance was that the targets (the bombers) were much slower than the Komet and thus were difficult to hit. The Komet pilot only having a couple of brief opportunities for firing on it's target before it had to disengage. Only a small number of successful kills were made by Komets. Allied pilots quickly learnt the Komet had very short legs and waited for the fuel to run out before attacking the now unpowered Komet.

After the war rocket power continued to be explored by the various participants in the Cold War but the pure rocket powered fighter died a quick death. Rocket power was explored to boost the performance of jet powered aircraft but as jet engines gained in power rocket power has been relegated to research aircraft only.

Sunday Fail : Project 685 "Mike" submarine

The Soviet Project 685, known as "Mike" to NATO, was a singleton class of submarine which sank 5 years after commissioning and is now a radioactive time bomb under one of the richest fishing areas in the world off the coast of Norway.

The order to design the 685 was made in 1966 but it took nearly 20 years before K-278 (as the boat was numbered) entered service in 1984. The 685 was an experimental submarine designed to test a number of new technologies and design features including a double hull and stronger internal bulkheads. The inner hull being titanium. The 685 could dive notably deeper than any NATO submarine, down to 1250m. The 685 included a personal escape sphere built into the sail to allow the crew to escape if anything happened in the deep sea.

The 685 came a cropper in relatively shallow waters though, on the 7th of April 1989 while at a depth of no more than 335m south west of Bear Island a fire broke out on board. Despite the watertight doors being closed the fire was able to spread via cables. The reactor was shut down and the submarine surfaced and most of the crew abandoned ship though many died of expsoure. Several hours later the submarine sunk. In total 42 men died in the accident.

And 685 became a radiological hazard. As well as the reactor the 685 carried 2 torpedos armed with nuclear warheads. If there is a serious radioactive leak then rich fishing grounds off the coast of Norway could be ruined for centuries. Surveys of the wreck have indicated cracks along the hull but as yet no serious radioactive leak. The wreck has a large hole in it's torpedo compartment however. Sea water is said to be corroding the casings of the warheads and the submarine's hull. Some plutonium was detected to have leaked from one of the warheads in 1994.

As raising the wreck would likely be too risky the strategy instead has been to seal cracks in the hull. The hull is now said to be safe for 20 to 30 years. So that is reassuring.

Sunday Fail : Rockwell XFV-12

The Harrier is, to date, the only successful V/STOL jet fighter in the west. The US adopted the Harrier themselves but in the 1970s they tried to produce a superior and supersonic fighter to replace it. This was the Rockwell XFV-12 which was fine except it couldn't actually take off.

The XFV-12 had a thrust augmented wing, engine thrust was diverted through slots in the wing to produce vertical thrust. The XFV-12 had 2 sets of wings more or less as it's canards providing almost half of the available wing area. So why did it fail?

The problem was simple. The thrust available, even with an uprated engine, was not enough to get the plane off the ground. Too much engine thrust was being lost through the exhaust ducting. It probably could have worked, if the aircraft weighed 25% less. A major drawback with the thrust augmented wing scheme by the way was that the wings could not be used to carry weapons which meant that the only place to carry weapons was under the fuselage.

This proved rather academic in any event as the project was canceled by the end of the 1970s due to cost... and being useless.

Sunday Fail : Chauchat

Some weapons seem great in the workshop or drawing board. However once they are used on the slightly less controlled situation of the battlefield then their design flaws are often shown up especially if they have been badly made. Such was the case with the FM Chauchat or Fusil Mitrailleur Modele 1915, a light machine gun developed by the French in the First World War.

Over a quarter of a million Chauchats (named after the man who headed the commission that accepted the gun into service) were made making it the most widely produced automatic weapon of the war and it was used by the French and seven other nations. It was one of the first light machine guns that could be carried and fired by 2 men, someone to fire it and someone to assist him, instead of needing a whole team. There was just one problem with the Chauchat. It was rubbish.

It's main problem was the open sided magazine. In a muddy environment it caused the gun to easily jam. It was used in the trenches. Enough said. It's bad ergonomics and loose bipod also made it an inaccurate weapon when it wasn't jammed. It also overheated easily if used for long bursts rendering the gun useless until it cooled down. This could take several minutes which obviously was not a good thing if the Boche were attacking.

The 8mm Lebel cartridge it had to use caused some of the problems as the cartridge's taper dictated the semi-circular nature of the magazine. It's action was also not suited for a light machine gun. It's design flaws were made worse by the gun's generally poor standard of manufacture and the poor raw materials used. The gun was quite light though which was maybe it's only virtue.

Improved guns without the open sided magazine were designed but were too late to see any service in the war. The gun itself was immediately replaced with superior guns after the war. Indeed there were superior guns like the Hotchkiss M'le'09 around before the Chauchat that should have been adopted instead. It has been described as the worst machine gun ever which is maybe a little unfair but the gun was certainly bad enough to qualify for this series.

Sunday Fail : Northrop XP-79

The dawn of the jet age saw a great flowering of aeronautical design. Fed by data captured from the Nazis aircraft designers sought to see just was possible with the new jet engines. Not everything worked out though, and the Northrop XP-79 was one of them.

The XP-79 was an interceptor developed by Northrop in WW2 initially to powered by a rocket but later 2 turbojets were substituted because of delays in developing the rocket engine. Although it was to be fitted with 4 machine guns the XP-79, which was built very strongly from a magnesium alloy with very strong wing leading edges, was intended to ram enemy bombers and slice off their tails with it's wing's leading edge!

Whether this could have worked is unknown, the XP-79 only flew for around 15 minutes. On it's first flight in September 1945 the pilot, who lay in a prone position in the plane, lost control and was killed whilst trying to escape it. The project was canceled.

Sunday Fail : Anti-tank Dogs

Never work with children or animals showbiz types say, Russian Army troops probably said the same thing in WW2 when they tried to use dogs to destroy German tanks. The idea seems simple enough, strap a bomb to a dog and train it to go underneath a tank and then get it to release the bomb which can then be detonated. However training dogs to do just this proved impossible. One serious problem encountered was with bombs on a timer, the dog often returned to it's trainer with the bomb still attached to itself...

In the end the Russians decided they would have to sacrifice the dogs and turned the bombs into simple contact detonation devices. The dogs were trained to go underneath a tank, the bomb would touch the underneath of the tank and boom! It seemed to work well enough in training but when it came to try the bombs out for real one problem was the dogs had been trained with stationary tanks and didn't want to go underneath the Germans who unsportingly did not stop for the dogs. The different smell of German tanks compared to the Russian tanks with which the dogs had been trained also caused canine confusion. In the first attack 30 dogs were sent out but only 4 detonated their bombs near German tanks. This maybe doesn't seem so bad until you find out 6 dogs returned to the Russian trenches and blew up there instead!

The Russians did persist with the dogs and claim 300 German tanks were destroyed by the dogs though its not known how accurate this figure is. How many dogs died is also unknown but considering the earlier success ratio the number of dogs who perished must have been vast.

The use of dogs as an offensive weapon does not have a very distinguished record. Unfortunately thousands if not millions of Man's best friends had to die before people got the message that dogs plus bombs is not a good idea. Insurgents in Iraq are reported to have also tried using dogs with bombs but the lack of success has continued.

Sunday Fail : F-111B

While the F-111 has had a successful career as a bomber for the US and Australian Air Forces it was also supposed to be an interceptor for the US Navy. The TFX (Tactical Fighter Experimental) programme in the early 1960s was supposed to combine the Air Force's need for a tactical fighter bomber with the Navy's need for an interceptor.

To try and please everyone is very difficult as we all know, especially as both services did not really want to share a programme. Requirements changed also, originally the Navy wanted a large interceptor but later maneuverability became "important" again after early experience in the Vietnam War showed that dogfighting was not yet relegated to the history books. But the F-111B, which was the Navy's version, was a large and rather sluggish plane.

The F-111B was overweight by some margin and this added to it's poor performance. It was noticeably inferior to the F-4 Phantom an aircraft it was supposed to be superior to and replace. By the late 1960s everyone had given up trying to make the F-111 the plane the Navy needed. The US Navy instead went for a new design... the F-14 Tomcat, which turned out quite well...

The F-111 for the USAF proved to be a solid tactical strike aircraft with strategic bombing and electronic warfare versions also developed. The F-111 was finally retired from US service in the 1990s and will leave Australian service later this year. Only 7 of the F-111B were built and were retired by the end of the 1960s.

Sunday Fail : Maus

The Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus was the heaviest tank built in World War 2, and at 192 tonnes probably the heaviest tank ever built (by comparison a Leopard 2 weighs just over 60 tonnes). Now tank designs often get heavier during their development but the Maus was rather impressive in that aspect, the original design was to be 100 tonnes but the result (which never entered service) was almost double that.

That sheer weight bought a lot of problems of course. It was too heavy to use many bridges so it had to be designed to ford rivers instead. To cross deep streams or rivers the Maus was designed to be able to travel along the river bed fully subermerged coupled up to another Maus on the bank which would supply it with electrical power for it's transmission. Late in the war you might think German engineers and scientists might have better things to do.

Moving nearly 200 tons was another problem of course, a special railway car had to be built for it. But for it's own engine no German made engine proved powerful enough to give it a decent performance. A 1200hp engine was fitted but this couldn't take the Maus over 8mp/h.

The Maus would have been a formidable tank to fight of course with a 128mm cannon and a 75mm secondary armament (which on it's own was more powerful than the guns tanks had had for much of the war). The armour ranged from 60mm to 240mm steel. However it is not thought any of the Maus prototypes saw any action. The Soviets managed to capture several prototypes but noticeably it does not seem like the Maus made much impact on postwar Soviet tank design.

The Maus was no doubt an impressive sight but it's utility as a military weapon was rather suspect. Considering the vast resources that would need to go into producing a decent force of the tank it is likely the Maus, if it had entered service, would have remained in small numbers and considering it's slow speed probably would have just been bypassed by advancing Allied forces and destroyed at their leisure.

Sunday Fail : P-75A Eagle

Two things can screw up a project: bad timing and changing requirements. Unfortunately for the rather interesting P-75 it suffered from both.

Conceived early in America's fight in the Second World War the Fisher P-75A Eagle was an innovative attempt to build a high performance fighter. Unfortunately by the time it was ready to begin flight tests the war was almost over and the USAAF no longer needed the type.

In 1942 the USAAF was desperately in need of a high performance interceptor with a high rate of climb, the Fisher Bodies division of General Electric came up with the interesting idea of combining aircraft parts already in production with a powerful engine to come up with a solution to the air force's problems quickly.

The P-75 thus took wings from a P-40 (originally they were to have come from a P-51), the tail from an A-24 and the tail wheel unit from an F4U and combined them in a new fuselage and they fitted a 2885hp Allison V-3420 engine in it. The P-75 had quite an advanced design with twin contra rotating propellers and the engine behind the cockpit.

By the time of the P-75's first flight in late 1943 however the USAAF needed a long-ranged escort fighter not an interceptor and the performance was rather disappointing anyway. The design was modified into the P-75A which was ready for testing by late 1944. Unfortunately for the P-75A by then the end of the war was in sight and the USAAF no longer wanted new fighters of this type, especially a brand new aircraft. Just 5 P-75As were built in the end, the conditional 2,500 production order was canceled.

Sunday Fail : Nuclear Bazookas

Sometimes people joke about a "nuclear hand grenade" well here is the nearest thing to it, the nuclear bazooka, a weapon that did enter service but maybe we should be thankful that it never had to be used...

The idea is simple: a very short range tactical nuclear weapon that can be used against fast approaching enemy troops. Weapons like the Davy Crockett (US Army) and Wee Gwen (British Army) were designed in the 1950s as a way of halting Soviet ground forces and buy time for NATO to regroup.

Davy Crockett was amazingly thus a nuclear recoiless rifle projectile with a range between 2-4km. Obviously the nuclear warhead of such a device had to be very small otherwise it would be destroy the defenders too. Davy Crockett had at it's core the W54 warhead which was the smallest ever produced by the US. The warhead had a yield of between 10-20 tons of TNT (0.01-0.02 kilotons) but a major part of the weapon's effect was the radiation produced that would leave the area of impact uninhabitable for 48 hours. As such it was one of the first neutron bombs though the term was not used at the time.

This radiation hazard proved even more important when the weapon was tested and found to be highly inaccurate. Anything 400m from the blast was likely to receive a fatal dose of radiation even at the lowest yield setting though 550m was considered the minimum safe distance for friendly troops. The margins were a bit tight though as 500m would cause sterility and a lack of co-ordination. Contrary to myth the blast radius was not greater than the range of the weapon so it was not a suicide weapon, in fact the blast radius could be as small as 200m

Davy Crockett was used by the US Army between 1961 and 1971. The British Wee Gwen never entered service and proved very controversial with the Army who considered weapons like it and the Davy Crockett unsound because of the difficulties it would create with command and control.

The inaccuracy was maybe the main problem with the Davy Crockett, because the blast radius of the weapon was small it was likely the defenders would have to fire a lot of the weapons to try and halt a determined mass Soviet attack. The further the projectile was fired (and thus safer to defending soldiers) the more inaccurate it got too. Well you see the problem there.

Because of the inaccuracy troops would have to fire more against concentrations of the enemy to try and ensure a hit and lets just say there were cheaper warheads they could have fired. Never mind less hazardous!

Sunday Fail : Pheonix

Part 2 in our weekly series of military projects that never really made it.

The Pheonix UAV was developed by GEC & BAE Systems for the British Army's artillery to work with the Battlefield Artillery Target Engagement System (BATES).  It is perhaps a typical example of a modern British defence project. Late, expensive, flawed. No maybe that is unfair as usually the end result works well after much toil and sweat and billions of pounds. Pheonix seldom did.

Despite a first flight in 1986 by 1995 there were no signs Pheonix could be got to work. After a review of the project a final chance was given to the manufacturers to try and get into service and they achieved this in 1999 and Pheonix saw active service in Kosovo and Iraq war. 198 were built, though because so many were lost they probably needed more. 23 were lost alone between March and April 2003 over Southern Iraq, there must be a market for UAV bits in Basra. Officially the Army say it worked well and that some attrition was due to it being kept on station for longer to keep an eye on the target and thus it could not be recovered.

Pheonix was launched by catapult from the back of a specially designed truck and landed by parachute. From the very basic design concepts alone you can see that something was wrong. Pheonix was a twin-boom design but instead of that then allowing for a pusher propeller to be fitted a tractor propeller was fitted instead on the front. Thus this meant the sensors had to be carried in a large pod underneath to avoid being obstructed by the prop. Most odd.

Pheonix was finally taken out of it's misery and retired in 2008.

Sunday Fail : Supermarine PB 31E Night Hawk

Military projects do not always work out as you know but usually the end result is something reasonably close to the original project aims (once you throw enough extra billions at it). But in this weekly series i will present projects that never made it. Military projects that simply never worked, not to say the projects were all bad. They failed for a variety of reasons, for the PB 31E it was probably just a bit ahead of it's time...

In this first week we go back to the First World War and the first aircraft to bear the Supermarine name, the company changed it's name from Pemberton Billing in 1916 (after Mr Pemberton Billing sold his interests to the company's other directors). One of the last aircraft Pemberton Billing had been working on had been the PB 29E, a large quadruplane for anti-airship defence. Unfortunately the sole PB 29E crashed during flight testing but the Admiralty decided to continue pursuing Pemberton Billing's ideas for combating the zeppelin menace so sponsored a further aircraft (Bruce 1969).

Supermarine PB 31E

This was the PB 31E, like the 29E it was a large quadruplane 37ft (11.27m) long and with a wing span of 60ft (18.28m). It was made more sturdy than the 29E with a planned crew of 5 and heavily armed with a 1½-pdr recoiless gun and twin Lewis machine guns. It was intended to be able to stay aloft for up to 18 hours and carried a searchlight that was powered by a separate engine and thus was probably one of the first aircraft to carry an auxiliary power unit (Andrews & Morgan 1981). Because of the long planned duration it was fitted with some basic comforts for the crew including a heated cabin. The aircraft also carried armour in some key areas and the cockpit was bound with fabric to avoid wood splinters in the event of a crash to protect the crew.

The problem with all of these features was weight, the PB 31E weighed over 6100lb (2787kg) when loaded and there simply wasn't the engine technology of the time to properly handle such a plane. Two 100hp Anzani engines powered the PB 31E and was enough to get it airborne but not enough to give it sufficient performance to perform in the anti-zeppelin role. The PB 31E took an hour to climb to 10,000ft which meant that zeppelins could easily escape it by ditching ballast and climbing rapidly. The design speed had been 75mph (120kph) which was considered fast enough to catch zeppelins (though some zeppelins could go faster than that in favourable conditions) but it is reported the PB 31E struggled to pass 60mph (97kph) (Bruce 1969).

Front view showing the search light on the nose

The PB 31E first flew in February 1917 but by then it was apparent there were flaws in the concept, highlighted by the PB 31E's poor performance. Unable to pursue a zeppelin it's only chance of success would have been the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time and firing on the zeppelin before it got out of range (Bruce 1969). It's main armament, a 1½ pounder Davis non-recoil gun, was also rather unwieldy.

The sole PB 31E was scrapped in the Summer of 1917, the second planned example never being built. The PB 31E, which was given the name Night Hawk, was technically innovative and it's concept could maybe have worked with a better performance. It was an early example of what we would call today a "weapons system" (Andrews & Morgan 1981). In the event the zeppelin was near the end of it's time as a military weapon anyway, Supermarine survived the war. You may have heard of one of their later products.

Further reading :

Supermarine Aircraft Since 1914 (Andrews & Morgan, Putnam, 1981)
Warplanes Of The First World War - Volume 3 (Bruce, Macdonald, 1969)