I posted the page here along with additional information and photographs: http://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2011/11/lockheed-p-80a-carrier-trials.html
Yesterday, while providing information to a friend who was writing a book on Landing Signal Officers, I had the opportunity to review the picture I used to establish the presence of the barrier guard in front of the windscreen:
This is another from the same event:
Not proof, but it is not present in any of the other pictures taken of this airplane during shore-based testing.
I had concluded that it was a barrier guard (or strictly speaking, a Davis barrier* activator) necessary in the event of a collapsed nose gear) because I was expecting to see one. A scabbed-on guard had been added to the McDonnell FH-1 for its carrier trials accomplished three months earlier and was standard equipment on Navy carrier-based jets until the advent of the angled deck.
My guess is that the P-80 trials were accomplished without a barrier activator by the simple expedient of keeping the deck clear, sort of an early version of the angled deck. But, see Gerald Asher's comment below.
*For a gouge on the difference between the standard barrier, the Davis barrier, and the barricade, see http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2010/10/barriers-and-barricades-one-more-time.html
"Yeah, but..."
ReplyDeleteI guess it was a case of the blind leading the blind, since I bit and ran with it in my own research - but I'm still not quite convinced that it was ship's structure, either. I may be trying to pound a square peg in a round hole, but looking at the P-80's nose, the upper edge where the reflected light makes it appear lighter than the rest of the nose, there appears to be a break in the line, corresponding to the vertical 'post' we assumed was a barrier - a break which, in my mind, would only be there if the 'post' was bolted directly to the nose - or very close to it, like a handler holding it aloft directly on the opposite side of the nose. Color me a 'conspiracy theorist'...
Interpreting photos can be a minefield.
ReplyDeleteI recall arguing with my dad (who had been a nav. plotter on Vulcans and no aviation slouch since his own childhood) that the Kfir C2 had canards. Which he insisted was a large UHF antenna on the spine. And once you've 'seen' something, it's very hard to 'unsee' it. I could see why he thought that - the photo was from slightly above a Kfir banking in harsh sunlight - but he just couldn't see it was one of a pair of canards. Which to be fair were not common back then.
(This in the days long before the internet, and a slightly fuzzy photo in those full colour, but horrible quality paper, aircraft encyclopedias that Aerospace Publications started out on in the mid-70s: they did improve dramatically with advances in print technology).