specialist aviation press suggest the British Carrier will heroically sail into the wind like forever .
or whatever when conducting flight operations with the F-35 . The author of these sentences is of course extremely prejudiced against the greatest thin' evah but it's available even on paper . Now some USAF plane is on exercise and it's a windy morning and airfield sensors show the winds peaked above 30knots and horrooors it's coming from directly behind . The pilot dude starts up the engine , the wind beats the engine exhaust , pushes it along the fuselage into the intake of what would be known as the auxilary power in the 1990s . Hot air means less density which leads to less output which in turn means the engine slows down and it being the smartest evah mounted on a plane anywhere anytime , the electronics keep pumping fuel . Heat , fuel and lovely , very lovely . It takes the ground crew 20 seconds to put the fire out . The pilot even gets singled a bit , all by that 30 knots wind beating the "most powerful" fighter engine and it's 17 million dollars worth of damage to the plane , 12-5052 by the tail number . Am a propeller head for like 45 years ; my older brother says as a baby in Bulgaria (before we emigrated) whenever some jets went by ı would point my finger at them and shout "Dog" ; apparently ı was never that big a fan of MiG stuff but ı have never heard such a thing . Reported to be so little that ı wasn't even walking back then so ı guess it was the noise ; as much as the dog in the garden . A lot of bark and apparently bite , as my older brother says it was always kept chained . But then am limited to reading stuff , like the A-10 was the only plane that would have a birdstrike from the rear ; but ı imagine it is still yet to be burned by the wind ...
friends of Lockmart in addition to friendly companies to Lockmart , do not despair ; the global accidents page right next to the article has a generator fire on a F-18 , a pan put under a different F-18 to catch oil leaks suddenly catching fire , an engine auxilary self deploying in flight and causing fire on a yet another F-18 . Three times for PW while Lockmart gets an airframe bonus with a fourth F-18 breaking its wing through hydraulic issues .
so , from a detailed description of tests with the British ship , it's obvious that if it is ever caught from 6 o'clock , the same might happen afloat as well : They are eagerly looking forward to flight tests where the deck will face the full 1500 degrees heat of the exhaust . They expect they won't be a raging inferno at the very first go , but have to carefully measure what happenz . Me remembering all the snickering that went against the Freestyle or that Yak 141 or whatever , with damn stupid Russians needing water sprayers on the deck in order not to catch fire or melt the ship down . But it seems evil Santa Claus refused to partake with electromagnetic catapults or even pay the tiny sum of 2 or 4 billion Pounds that the poor old RN needed to install on their own . So , keep into the wind or better never slow down under 50 knots , so that the wind will not catch you . The ship is capable of 60 knots at least , right ?
