New “Flounder” Plane Is Britain’s Bid For Airline Supremacy (Nov, 1938)
New “Flounder” Plane Is Britain’s Bid For Airline Supremacy
A DESIGN for a super airplane, which would constitute a national bid for world-wide airline supremacy, has been projected by Fred Miles, prominent British aeronautical engineer. As shown in the sketches, the proposed 38-passenger plane resembles a flounder in general appearance. The estimated performance figures for the plane when powered by four 900 horsepower motors indicate a top speed of 295 m.p.h.
I remember reading old Superman and Batman comics and laughing at the rooms full of giant billiard tables, watches, furniture, etc.
I get the same reaction reading these old magazine extracts. Giant planes, carrying complements of mechanics, who maintain the engines, inside the wings… Sure, makes sense to me.
hip2b2: Glad to hear it. It worked for Convair when they designed the B-36. The wings were 7 and a half feet high and a few of the 16 man crew were mechanics who did indeed crawl through the wings to access the engine compartments in flight. So there.
Alcock and Brown (well, Brown, anyway) had to walk out on the wing and chip ice away from the carburators during their first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight. I’d *much* rather crawl inside the wings.
Wonder whatever happened to the X-2 “Flounder”? It would have made an interesting bomber.
I think this is the intended Miles X transport of which the Miles X Minor was a prototype.
Hirudinea: Never made it off the drawing board. It was a candidate for a competition and didn’t have enough seating. WW2 got in the way and apparently the company never made the conversion back from war production.
A prototype did fly however, and the design was validated on a small scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org…
http://en.wikipedia.org…
http://en.wikipedia.org…
Yeah – unlike a lot of the aircraft ideas we’ve seen on this blog, this one probably would have worked. A lot of outlandish-looking plane designs came from inventors who’d never actually built even one working aircraft, but Miles Aircraft was a REAL manufacturer.
It is the BWB – Blended Wing Body design. The Miles M30 is mentioned in the article.
http://en.wikipedia.org…