Grumman F9F-8T/TF-9J

Chinese plastic kit manufacturer Kitty Hawk has just released a 1/48th scale kit of the Grumman F9F-8T/TF-9J. (For my earlier notes on this airplane, see http://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2011/02/f8f-8t-cougar.html)

This is very welcome since it is one of a handful of U.S. Navy airplanes that have gone unrepresented as an injection molded kit. A built model looks pretty good:

 

It's clear that the length of the nose-gear strut on this model is representative of the TF-9J on display at the Pima Air&Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona rather than a flyable airplane. (It may have been fixed in the kits as produced.) The "sit" should be more like this:

There are few other detail discrepancies notable in the model built. See http://tailhooktopics.blogspot.com/2014/06/grumman-f8f-8ttf-9j-notes.html for some notes and illustrations. Darren Roberts is providing a excellent and informative progressive build review here: http://www.arcforums.com/forums/air/index.php?showtopic=277195&st=0 and a summary of the build here: http://www.zone-five.net/showthread.php?p=286534#post286534 Before you buy it and for sure before you build one, you should take a look at his posts.

Another very helpful and illustrated build review: http://www.themodellingnews.com/2014/07/review-build-nic-cougar-tamer-takes-on.html. Note that the builder did not encounter the problem with gluing the plastic that the kit is made from but did note a couple of detail errors. (Others have noted the "Marines" marking on the upper right wing is incorrect; it should be the aircraft number and the tail code.)

One configuration option provided in the kit is the ejection seat. The first two-seat Cougars were delivered with Grumman ejection seats. These were soon replaced with Martin-Baker seats. See http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2011/02/transition-to-martin-baker-ejection.html. The Grumman seats were used in the model above, but Martin-Baker seats had been standard long before the Marines began to use the TF-9J as a Fast FAC (Forward Air Control) as the model is marked.

As usual, the single best reference on a Navy airplane is available from Steve Ginter. See http://www.ginterbooks.com/NAVAL/NF68.htm

Darren Tamanaha put some excellent detail pictures of the Pima TF-9J HERE. Note that the shock struts are bottomed instead of being inflated as it was for a flyable airplane.

More Modeling Notes on the 1/72nd Airfix A-4B Kit

The Douglas Skyhawk is one of my favorite airplanes. I even wrote a book about it, Scooter!. When Airfix released a new 1/72nd scale kit of it two year ago, I devoted several posts to it. See http://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-airfix-172-4b4p-modeling-notes.html

For an excellent built article of it by "Speedman" on Britmodeler, click HERE. This is a picture from that build:

Airfix had used the A4D-2 displayed on Intrepid as a basis for the kit, including the decals. Speedman decided to replicate that display, even to the point of adding red aileron-control-surface locks.

Neil Lowe posted a question about the Airfix kit on my post on A4D-1 vortex generators (HERE). He noted that there was a detail on the top of the fuselage between the canopy and the red anticollision beacon that is suggestive of the vent that is only present on the J52-powered A4D. I hadn't noticed it before. He also asked about the access panels in this area.

As far as I know, there is no vent in this area on the J65-powered A4Ds (I haven't seen any pictures of the top of the Intrepid A4D but I doubt that it has the vent). This is a picture of an early A4D-1 that depicts this area and the two access panels.

So for J65-powered A4Ds in general, this detail should be removed from Airfix kit. Whether or not you add the access panels is up to you.

27 Charlie

Hancock Deploying, 2 August 1969:

William T. Larkins

Steve Govus was on the flight deck of Hancock during its 1969/1970 deployment to the waters off Vietnam. Not only that, but he took pictures. For his first-hand description of the experience,  I recommend that you take a look at http://twentyseven-charlie.blogspot.com/.

A Brief History of the Rescue Arrow

David Collier asked when the red rescue arrow was introduced. The short answer is I don't know for sure, but it would appear to be circa 1957 (Elliott, on whom I normally rely, wrote in one of his Monogram Color Guides that he had been unable to find a directive for its initial use).

The rescue arrow was undoubtedly introduced to guide an uninformed rescuer in opening the canopy of a crashed Navy airplane. Up until at least the mid 1950s, the instructions to do so, if present at all, were marked on the fuselage in fine print. What was worse, the canopy control might very well not be near the entry to the cockpit and jet canopies were increasing made of tougher stuff than heretofore, making breaking one for entry a difficult proposition.

The earliest prominent rescue marking I could find in a brief search (and the only one on a blue airplane) was on a F9F-8 Cougar. I don't know the date of the photo but it was possibly taken during a cruise between November 1955 and August 1956 aboard Ticonderoga.

Note that the canopy release is on the very back of the canopy, not the most obvious place to look. The arrow guides the rescuer from the canopy sill back to it. However, this appears to be a very nonstandard marking. This was the eventual marking on gray/white Cougars.

The rescue arrow clearly wasn't introduced with the change to gray/white markings. None of the Navy jets I looked at that were the first with the new color scheme had it. In a review of dated photos of various airplane types, I saw no rescue arrows in any picture taken in 1956 but usually in pictures taken in 1957. There is a possibility that Douglas led the way. This is an early A4D-1 on the initial at-sea trials.

The red(ish) circle in the lower right side of the national insignia is the location of the canopy release handle. Just to the upper right side of the circle enclosing the star is what may be a small red arrow pointing to it.

 

The above is a different flight-test A4D-1 with a similar marking that is clearly an arrow.

However, on initial-production A4D-1s, which were among the first Navy airplanes to be delivered in the gray/white scheme, the identification of the canopy release was considerably more subtle.

At some early point in A4D production, it was decided that a canopy-jettison capability should be added and its location made a little more obvious but not as obvious as the arrow was to become.

The standard red rescue arrow was present on this A4D-1 aboard Randolph in early 1957 to direct attention to the canopy release handle since it did not yet have the canopy jettison capability.

(The addition of canopy jettison, as opposed to release, is why there are occasionally two rescue arrows on the left side of an A4D.)

The F4D followed the same evolution. No rescue marking on the early production airplanes, a small red arrow as shown here on a very early deployed Skyray, and then the standard large one.

 

In September 1962, a directive was issued to change the color of the rescue arrow from red to yellow.
The F4H-1 Phantoms, however, had yellow rescue arrows from its first flight in May 1958.

(The F8U-3, which flew a week or so later in early June, had a red rescue arrow.)

My guess is that the rescue arrow was changed red to yellow to avoid the connotation of danger, which would be off putting to the nonprofessional rescuer, while still attracting attention.

Rick Morgan noted:  The yellow/black canopy jettison markings seem to align with use of the colors for all controls that make things leave the aircraft.  EA-6s (and others I suspect) actually de-activated those handles in the about 1990 because while they’d never been used for a real emergency we had several cases where untrained ground crew pulled the handles thinking that was the way to open the canopy on deck.   

More background and non-standard examples would be very welcome...

Trumpeter 1/48 A3D Skywarrior Yet Again

As the previous post states, I haven't seen the kit first hand. I have read comments about the engine nacelle not looking "right". However, it wasn't until I saw the pictures in this detailed and well illustrated build thread that a possible problem became apparent: http://s15.zetaboards.com/Mainly_Military/topic/767183/1/

It's hard to tell from a photo of a model, but it looks like the slight bulge downward of the engine inlet and nacelle have not been properly represented. The J57 engines had their accessories mounted on the bottom of the engine, requiring the cowling to not be symmetrical around the centerline of the engine.

The inlet lip itself is not quite circular, being deeper than the width and a bit more round (bigger diameter) at the top than at the bottom:

Another frequently mentioned observation about the recently issued Trumpeter KA-3B kit is that the refueling drogue is far too big for 1/48 scale. Here is a picture of a Skywarrior with a partially streamed drogue for reference.

The actual drogue is variously reported as being 24" and 30" in diameter when streamed.

Trumpeter 1/48 A-3 Skywarrior One More Time

The A3D/A-3 Skywarrior is one of the airplanes that I've accumulated quite a bit of material on over the years. Although it isn't my scale so I haven't seen it first hand, I did post some observations on errors in the kit (see http://tailhooktopics.blogspot.com/2013/05/trumpeter-148-a3d-2-skywarrior.html for example). However, I was recently a little chagrined to be informed that yet another error with the kit is one I would not have noticed if I'd been given the opportunity to comment on it in the design process.

It turns out (see http://www.network54.com/Forum/624633/thread/1395310050/Trumpeter+Skywarrior+findings) that the aft bomb bay door actuators are located at the very front of the main-landing-gear wheel well. That's a minor detail since it wouldn't be easy to model that area in a meaningful way even in 1/48th scale. However, it does mean that the bomb bay doors actually extend aft of the bulkhead between the aft end of the bomb bay and the main-landing-gear wheel well, contrary to what I would have assumed, and doesn't end there as Trumpeter would have it.

I would also have assumed that the bomb-bay door actuation at the back end of bomb bay would be the same as the front end, an actuator driving a linkage:

At the moment, I don't know if there's a similar linkage on the aft side of the aft bomb-bay bulkhead or the actuator acted on a torque tube in the axis of the bomb-bay door hinge line.

In Trumpeter and my defense, the location of the aft edge of the bomb bay doors is generally obscured by the main landing gear. However, if you look very closely from the right angle...

Anhedral/Dihedral and Wing Sweep

The question of how much anhedral the F3H Demon wing has came up on a modeling website recently. (Anhedral is the opposite of dihedral; instead of the wings angling up relative to the fuselage when viewed from the front, they angle down.)

The answer is, strictly speaking, none. However, it looks like it does have some and appears to depicted with anhedral in a front view. The reason is that the F3H wing is swept and also mounted to the fuselage at a non-zero angle of incidence relative to the fuselage reference line.

This also makes the wing look thicker than it actually is when viewed from the front.

The effect is even more pronounced in the front view of the A3D Skywarrior because its wing is not only mounted at an angle of incidence, it has a higher aspect ratio.

As a result, in a side view the leading edge of the wing tip is lower than the leading edge of the wing root and therefore has to be drawn that way in the front view. Nevertheless, the wing itself has no dihedral; in other words, a line drawn from tip to tip on a front view of the wing that is at zero angle of incidence would lie right down the middle of the leading edge.

Taper in airfoil thickness between the wing root and tip can also create an illusion of anhedral/dihedral or mask it. An example is the A4D Skyhawk. It looks like it has no dihedral. In fact it is almost three degrees. (Note that aerodynamicists do not measure dihedral with respect to either the upper or the lower surface of the wing. It is generally defined with respect to the chord line; in the case of the A4D, it is measured at the trailing edge of the wing.)

A line drawn from tip to tip with the A4D wing at a zero angle of incidence lies along the upper surface of the wing, because it is basically flat. The taper of the thickness of the wing from root to tip is all in the lower surface, which results in the wing having a little dihedral from an aerodynamicist's view point.

Some airplanes do have anhedral in the wing, of course. The F8U Crusader is one, although the actual angle might be exaggerated by the sit of the airplane relative to the camera and the raising of the wing for takeoff and landing. (You'll also note that in this picture, the horizontal tail appears to have no dihedral when in fact, it does.)

In this case, a front-view drawing can be relied on since the wing is mounted a zero angle of incidence.

Aerodynamicists also define wing-sweep angle in a very specific and even more non-intuitive way. It is not measured at the leading edge as you might think, but generally at the quarter chord, or 25% of the local chord back from the leading edge of the wing. In accordance with this convention, the A4D has a wing sweep of about 33 degrees, somewhat less than the sweep angle of the leading edge.