Tag Archives: hampshire

Black Arrow Remains

For a brief period, the UK was a space power with the ability to launch satellites into orbit. This was a brief moment, and the launcher was called Black Arrow. I am pretty sure I have posted something about this launcher before because it was developed on the Isle of Wight. The test facilities out near the Needles are now part of a National Trust location and you can see where the rockets were test fired over the cliffs.

The FAST Museum at Farnborough has the remains of the one Black Arrow that was launched into orbit. The first stage is not designed to go to orbit and is discarded early in the flight to follow a ballistic trajectory back to the earth. It was launched from Woomera in Australia and the stage fell back into the desert. Consequently, it wasn’t hard to find unlike anything dropping into the ocean. It has now on display.

It looks in surprisingly good condition. I thought it would be totally crumpled but the cylinder is basically intact. The engine nozzles on the base have taken a bit of a beating but are still clearly recognisable. The shapes they formed particularly fascinated me so that is the top picture on the post. There is also a high-speed wind tunnel model of the launcher on display so you can see that it was a pretty compact rocket. A small payload although one that is apparently still happily orbiting the earth to this day.

G600 Has the Usual Gulfstream Flaps

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This G600 was coming into land at Farnborough while I was visiting. The conditions were far from ideal for photographing anything flying but I am not going to pass one up if the chance presents itself. I was close to the approach path so had an almost head on position. Not ideal but it would be fine. However, what struck me as I looked at the images afterwards was the flaps. Gulfstream has never impressed me with their wing designs. They always seem to have just gone with a larger wing to achieve whatever performance was needed and the flaps on all of their jets seem to be barn doors rather than some advanced design. It seems that the current generation of jets is no different. I guess it doesn’t matter enough to their sales so why bother?

Snowdrops at Longstock

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I am going to be repetitive on the blog for a while. I have already photographed some snowdrops on my bike rides and posted about it. Then I made a more specific visit to see some snowdrops. This will not be the last snowdrop post this year either. In Longstock, there is the Leckford Farm Shop run by Waitrose. Last year I saw lots of bluebells in the grounds when we visited. Dad told me it is a good place for snowdrops too, so Nancy and I diverted in there as part of a walk we were doing in the area.

At first, I only saw a few small clumps on flowers along the path. It had me wondering whether we had missed the peak. However, I just needed some patience. As we got closer to the shop, the area under the trees was covered in snowdrops. They looked really great. With snowdrops, if you are close, they appear to be quite well spaced. Taking shots from further back and lower down helps make them look really dense. They feel that way when you look at them but getting the photo to reflect that sense is a bit more of an effort.

Farnborough’s Older Buildings

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In my days working in aerospace, I dealt with people at the RAE/DERA, but I never had any visits there. I went to the show, of course, and BAe moved the headquarters there and I spent plenty of time in those offices, but I never was on the government side of the site. Now it has been handed over to private developers, you can drive around the various buildings. Much of it is new development or refurbishment of old buildings.

There are some of the old facilities still there, though. A couple of wind tunnel buildings are in place – one of which has camouflage paint for some reason! There are plaques on the various buildings to give a bit of their history. I know of many test programmes that were undertaken in these facilities, and I believe they are still in use since some of the capabilities are still in high demand.

One smaller building is the remains of a water test tank. This was apparently shortened at some point and now the building still has the tank profile inside while the outside has the test rails but seems to have been filled in. It is good that so much of the original facilities is still there even as redevelopment has taken place. Sadly, I won’t get to experience what it was like when it was at its busiest.

Snowdrops Alongside My Ride

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The weather has not been great for cycling during the winter with it being wet. I have ended up riding the trainer indoors to try and keep in some shape. I did get one Sunday when it wasn’t raining but looked like it might. I decided to head out irrespective of the chance of it getting damp. I got lucky and, while it did drizzle occasionally, it was actually pretty dry. As I rode through the country lanes, there were loads of snowdrops along the side of the road and in the trees just off the road. I mostly rode on by but did stop on a couple of occasions to take some photos. Here they are.

Frame for a Balloon Hangar

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Aside from the buildings at Farnborough, there is also the frame from a balloon hangar. This was a fabric covered structure with the fabric having been lost in a storm many years ago. I read that the frame was previously in another location but was moved to this space as part of the redevelopment of the site. Some elements needed repair or replacement but much of it is original. It was repainted and assembled with some minor additions to prevent people climbing the structure. On a gloomy day, I decided a combination pano and HDR was needed to record it. Not anything like the grand scale of the hangars at Moffett Field I used to see but still cool.

High Speed Intake Model

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The FAST museum at Farnborough has an extensive collection of wind tunnel models – both low and high speed. One that caught my eye was one that an old colleague of mine had worked on. It was a high-speed intake test model for what would become the Typhoon. You might be familiar with whole airframe wind tunnel models that are used to assess the aerodynamic characteristics of a plane. However, there are many different types of wind tunnel testing that get carried out. Intake testing is one of them.

This model served a number of purposes. There is the more obvious one which is assessing the quality of air coming down in the inlets as the aircraft changes angles of pitch and sideslip. A rake of probes will be set where the front of the engine would be located and then the test programme can assess how distorted the flow is as the aircraft manoeuvres. This is then compared to test data on what the engine can accept before it starts to have problems.

The Typhoon has the two engine inlets side by side. This can result in a problem with one engine affecting the other one. If an engine surges, a pressure wave will come back up in the inlet, and this can then affect the flow into the other engine. This surge interaction needed to be investigated prior to the plane flying.

One less obvious test programme related to the testing of air data system inputs. Fly by wire aircraft are very dependent on the quality of the measurements of the aircraft’s pitch, roll and sideslip. As the aircraft changes its angles, the readings at the location of the probes need to be calibrated. Flight testing will refine this information, but you need to have initial data for the first flights before calibration can be demonstrated. The intake model is the one that was used to verify the flow field around these sensors. I’ve included a shot of the sensors on one of the development aircraft to show where they are.

This model was very important in the preparation of the Typhoon for flight test. Great to see the model has been preserved.

Seeing a Kodiak Again

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The Pacific Northwest was a great place to see Daher Kodiaks. They were built over in Idaho and there were plenty of them in the Seattle area. Even so, I was still keen to see them as there is something about their chunky functionality that appealed to me. When I came back to the UK, I wasn’t expecting to see them around. Consequently, when I got to the FAST museum at Farnborough, I was pleasantly surprised to see that one was inbound shortly from Guernsey. It was really overcast with the base very low. The instrument approach would result in popping out of the clouds quite late. I went with my preferred technique for shooting in such conditions with a couple of stops of overexposure with the goal of having enough light on the airframe and then post processing to bring the sky back down to something sensible.

I wasn’t exactly sure what the angle on the plane would be from the area outside the museum and where the plane would come into view, but it wasn’t too bad as it worked out. I had a reasonable sighting line and enough time to react. Having a dark grey aircraft in such dreary light was not helping but I think I got something reasonable from it.

St Cross

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Head south out of Winchester and you come to an impressive church. It is part of the hospital and alms houses of St Cross and, while it looks like a cathedral, it is just a normal church. Not only does it look good, but it is also situated in a lovely valley alongside the river. We took a walk down by St Catherine’s Hill and then crossed the valley to return up the river. This gave us both a good view across the valley then close up to the church. Here are some shots to show it off. It must be considered picturesque because it is used as the cover photo for the Ordnance Survey map of the area!

FAST Museum at Farnborough

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Farnborough sits at the centre of the history of aviation in the UK. From the first powered flight in the country, through the development of key aircraft in the First World War, through the research into aviation that took place in what was originally called the Royal Aircraft Establishment and then evolved through various names. (Oh yes, it also has a large trade airshow every two years.) Eventually the establishment was closed down as facilities got consolidated.

While there had been a museum on site, that collection got redistributed. However, a bunch of volunteers came together to create the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust (FAST). This museum is on one edge of what was once the airfield campus. They have many exhibits that document the varied work that was undertaken at Farnborough as well as the nearby Pyestock gas turbine research facility. Apparently, they have way more stuff than they can display so things get rotated in and out of the public space.

Some of the specific exhibits are worthy of their own posts so you will see more of this place in the future. I went one damp Saturday to take a look around. This was not optimal for the planes outside because the light was not great and most of the airframes had covers on their canopies. That didn’t stop me, though. There is a two seat Lightning sitting alongside the gate which is always a good start.

Within the museum grounds are some top types. The recent retirement of the Puma made me happy to see their example which was not built by Westland but was actually from Aerospatiale and provided to Westland to use as a pattern before it became a testbed at Farnborough. The raspberry ripple paint looks good on it.

There are a couple of Hunters including one that had been used for research into night flying using low light TV and infra-red sensors. A Gnat is there which is always fine. A Scout and a Lynx are part of the collection and a two seat Harrier T4 was a particular pleasure. There are also cockpits from other type including a Canberra and a Trident. The museum is free to visit although they do welcome voluntary contributions. If you are in the area, it is worth a visit. More to come…