dhfan wrote:
I think your mention of an air brake on Mosquito W4052 could be a case of right company, wrong aeroplane by some years.
When the DH.80 Puss Moth was first built in 1929, it was 7mph faster than expected. They put it down to clean entry and what we would now call streamlining.
As a result of this the glide angle was too good making it difficult to land. The solution was to modify the shock absorber fairings so they could be turned through 90° which reduced the glide ratio from 1 in 10.5 to 1 in 8. I'm sure those figures will mean more to a pilot than it does to me - I can only sort of understand it.
Source "DH A History of de Havilland" by C. Martin Sharp
Interesting, thanks! I really appreciate the source as well!
Another difficult first to pin down is the first airplane with a telescopic gunsight. As noted in a
previous post, reflector sights sights go back to the First World War. Tube type collimator sights also existed at the time, with examples such as the Aldis sight. However, it is important to note that the Aldis sight is
not technically a
telescopic gunsight - it does not provide any magnification.
[1] The problem is obviously then determining which - of the various airplanes having tube gunsights - actually had magnification. The A5M, BF2C, D.XXI, F3F, I-15, Ki-27, Ki-43, P-6, P-26, SBD, TBD all had tube type gunsights at one time or another, but it is not clear which, if any of them, are actually telescopic. (For reference, the TBD used a Mark III, Mod 2.
[2]; the F3F a Mark III, Mod 4.
[3]; the SBD a Mark V.
[4]; and the I-15 an OP-1
[5])
The U.S. Signal Corps had a "Unit Sight, Type A-1 (Telescopic)" as early as 1925.
[6] This is likely the same as a 1918 sight made by Eastman Kodiak.
[7] This was mounted in a USD-9A biplane.
[8] Again, however, it is not apparent if it actually provides magnification.
As an aside, I have wondered for a while what these true telescopic sights were supposed to be used for. The original reflex sights would have been a benefit since they remove most of the parallax and make it so the user does not have to have their eye directly behind the sight. However, the actual telescopic sights seem like they would be very difficult to use in combat since any movement of the airplane would be greatly exaggerated due to the magnification.
[9] I did see one suggestion that they may have been used for identification of targets, which would seem to make sense.
On the subject of gunsights, the website
Aircraft Gunsights has a number of examples.