Buried in all the doom and gloom of world news, this little tidbit brought a small smile.
Do the British still build the best engines? Time will only tell, but it’s innovation at its best!
Gary
A great article find! Thanks for sharing and it sure beats reading the terrible news around the world. Do the British still build the best engines? Who knows but remember when the P-51 Mustang first were fitted with Allison engines. They weren’t too hot until they put in the British Rolls Royce Merlins in them. Talk about turning a straight up stock Mustang into a hot rod aircraft. Gotta love the growl of a Merlin engine…
But then the Allison finally turned into a great engine. It was an attempt to go to high technology, and the war demanded it be put into service before it was fully developed. Those lousy performing aircraft with early Allisons were dogs at high altitude because they lacked the originally intended turbocharger.
A bit of history on that. By the mid thirties the performance of fighter aircraft had evolved so that a single stage supercharger was inadequate. But with two-stage chargers there was a real problem overboosting the engine at low altitude. So controls were added so that pilot could manage boost pressure. However, if pilot got into a dogfight, especially one that involved changes of altitude, that was just one more task for a very busy pilot. The original Allison concept included a fixed speed primary blower and an automatically (pneumatically) controlled turbocharger. Development of that turbocharger with constant boost pressure took awhile, so initial engines just did away with second charger and were intended for low altitude use. Eventually it became a good fighter engine and the turbocharger worked as planned.
Isn’t it interesting how details like that get forgotten in the overall soundbites? The Allison engine was inferior to the Merlin, etc. P-38s couldn’t perform at altitude and were inferior in Europe. Too bad people tend to oversimplify items and leave out the details that really explain what happened.
John