The Curtiss XF14C; Dying Gasps of an Aircraft Giant
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ส.ค. 2024
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Thanks to everyone pointing out that I said "Lycoming" wrong. For those who don't know (which included me) it's "Ly-comb-ing" 😁
Curtiss still had a happy ending, though they no longer make planes, they still very much supply parts to aerospace and other industries. So unlike many they didn't vanish.
My take was that I'd read it as Ly-comb-ing for a million years but that given how you were pronouncing it I must have been wrong
Thanks for that, @Ed Nash. My inner-obsessive was starting to twitch, nervously, at the thought that I might have been mis-pronouncing this company name for 50+ years! 😅
If you want to cover an absolute beast of a Lycoming engine, check out the XR-7755 liquid cooled radial. It produced 5000 horsepower on test, with a projection of going to 7000 horsepower.
@@All2Meme Sounds like what the Hughes "Spruce Goose" could have used.
Your voice... I can almost feel the pain. Good on you for pressing on with an excellent video. Get well soon.
Yet Curtis Wright is still around today, but you can't say that for a lot of its rivals
That's an excellent point!
I toured the Curtis plant in the late 1970s in upstate New York. They were making the covers for the Recordack microfimers I worked on at the time. I guess life goes on.
As is Lycoming Engines...
And Continental and Pratt and Allison...all still makers of aircraft engines but Curtiss Wright does not.
@@cancermcaids7688 They still exist none the less.
Crickey- the bastard child of a Thunderbolt and a Gannet ... phew!
Always loved how this one looks. Utterly beastly, a little bit art deco.
I'd say more than a little Art Deco, Indiana Jones would look right at home in it circling around the Empire State Building.
But that's OK because I love Art Deco styling, Duesenberg and Packard cars, the 1936 Knucklehead Harley Davidson, they built beautiful machines back in those days, the architecture and even things like women's fashion and the suits and Fedora hats men wore, it seems like there wasn't a single thing designed in America back then from aircraft to refrigerators and even clothing that's displeasing to the eye, in my opinion it's the most gorgeous era in American history.
Who knew!
Nice one again Ed
Kind of a tough epitaph for Curtis considering just how critical aircraft like their P-40 Kittihawk/Tomahawk were to the early stages of the conflict
How true but they never seriously upgraded the very good P-40 until it was too late as apparently they were only interested in quantity production but they did also the wrong decisions and mismanagement, producing the awful Helldiver and the equally awful P-47 that was so substandard that it was relegated only for training at home incurring the wrath of the authorities. Someone might say that the Curtiss had too many senile guys at the top...
Curtis-Wright still exists so exiting aircraft worked for them.
The aircraft division was sold to North American who 19 years later merged with Rockwell who's aircraft division was then bought by Boeing in 1996 with the rest of the companies that at one time either merged of bought Curtis-Wright's aircraft division all being bought or merged with other companies.
That´s a really cool looking fighter, not gonna lie. I like it.
If you can't get one engine design to work properly, definitely try bolting two together.
Thank you! So many wrecks (mostly figurative) along the path of progress...
It's not all plane sailing.
@@brianedwards7142 Well put! 😎
It's a shame to see some of the great aircraft and car companies go by the wayside. It's strange how fast it happened in some cases. I guess it boils down to getting that one big contract nowadays. They are using their planes longer and longer and not in the variety they used to. WWII was a unique time when anyone with anything viable had a shot at getting a contract. And that went for all of the major combatants.
In book I have about the service of the P-40 and the Curtiss company, it's said that Curtiss was second in size to only General Motors during the war.
The last gasp for Curtiss Wright as an aircraft manufacturer was the XP-87 night fighter.
The designation XF14C shows how massive Curtiss's success in naval designs had been before. It already was Curtiss' 14th naval fighter design the navy ordered and payed at least until prototype stage.
All in all, it was a predictable failure. Too chunky and fitted with an unreliable engine that replaced an engine that didn't work at all.
Curtiss did some things right in the late 30s and early 40s, but there was much more done plain wrong. Switching the originally radial powered P-36 line of developement to a liquid cooled engine, creating the P-40 with relatively little investment was pure genius. The Curtiss C-46 Commando was a genius design too, fulfilling not only the air forces dire needs for a high performance transport, but also being a potentially superior rival to anything else on civilian market in the case that the war would have suddenly ended before military orders could have been placed.
Curtiss probably would have done better if they simply switched the P-36/P-40 line of developement back to radial as soon as the first R-2800s became available.
Now do one on the Curtiss XF-87.
Thanks for your amazing contribution to WWII, now FOAD (.... off and Die), same in UK! Nice one Ed, anticipating more dusty reminders of Commendable efforts in adversity!
I saw what may have been an O-1230 in the Aero Museum in San Diego, CA, when I was in my early twenties. It was HUGE for a horizontally opposed engine.
It looks like 2 completely different planes: sleek from full frontal or 3/4 on, but ugly as in a direct side shot. Odd indeed.
Had a few big issues but finally catching up...cheers!
I hate how so many aircraft like like this just got scrapped
Good job, Ed. Thanks!
A great remarkable very interesting video and aircraft Mr.Ed as always.Have a good one.
Can you imagine the original Top Gun movie flying the Curtis F-14 instead of the Grumman F-14?
Ccrtiss slowly became a "shady" company. They politiced the continuous production of the P40. The awful SB2C dive bomber, a case of good money thrown after bad to make it work. The C46 Command with it's leaky feul tanks turning the rather good transport into a flying bomb. Then there was the engine scandal. During the war Curtiss Wright built aircraft engines for the AAC. They paid off inspectors to OK defective engines. And finally the disregard of jet technology (I'm sure they thought it was just a fad) doomed the company.
Also their dismal attempt to build P-47 Thunderbolts under license for Republic (P-47G). They managed to build about 350 which were considered unsuitable for combat duty. Ironically today two of the flyable rare "razorback" Thunderbolts are Curtiss P-47Gs.
You also make a good point on how politics sometimes affected US war production.
XF does it mean ex-Fairey speculating on the P series engines of both 1600 bhp and 2000plus bhp designed by Fairey Aviation of Great Britain
Very sad😢 another Curtiss aircraft that just couldn't really get off the ground. I don't know if the problem was partly due to the lack of inspired personnel. Or as Ed said trying to do too much at one time.
Was just reading about this today, what a coincidence
Couldn't get the engine ironed out enough to go into production so let's a bolt two of them together. Makes sense to me
The view of the Buffalo @ 2:00 minutes shows the rudder about to unport and leave the vertical fin or it’s a bad camera angle.
Napier lion of 1917 had w 12 layout dohc and 4 valves per cylinder
Excellent.
Contra-rotating props would seem like a huge advantage for single engine fighters. But no country managed to quite get them to work during ww2. They must be more difficult to implement than they appear.
There are too many potential sources for vibration for a fast success. Developing a successful contra-rotating prop systems takes a lot of time. The prop blades are interacting with each other, the gear box is long and the hollow, counter rotating drive shafts are even longer and the variable pitch mechanism for two props is complicated too.
Curtiss during WW2 was like a slightly upgraded Brewster. Just a huge crap buffet.
Looks like something Blackburn designed and built
Yeah definitely. Or a bit like the Fairey Gannet.
Fairy made a similar engine called the fairy Gannet.
Is it just me or does it look like a fat CAC Boomerang?
Though I really like the contra prop and that huge single exhaust pipe. They both convey raw power!
An american sabre engine is definitely a very interesting idea
Wonder why they didn't use the Sabre gear train as a reference, would've saved dev time.
@@CreeperOnYourHouse UK and USA were military allies, but their industries were rivals all the time. They didn't tell each other all their secrets.
Napier was many years ahead of the whole world when it came to H or X type engines. They were the only company in the world who ever managed to make these kind of designs fully reliable and to set up an economic mass production and they had no alternative product in the drawer that could have kept the company afloat. It would have been economic suicide to sell their unique technical advantage to a company bigger and financially more potent than themselves.
Lycoming later invented much smaller boxer engines for Cessnas and the likes even if their big bois failed
They existed back then pretty much in the still used modern form. The 6 cylinder was used in an interesting twin engine drone bomber.
By the time the kinks of that drone bomber were worked out it was deemed not worthwhile because Japan had no real air power left to defend against crewed bombers.
The drones had early TV cameras. Both to fly the drone and aim the bombsight. Unfortunately this impressive weapon decades before any other like it was kept classified after the war. It's way lesser known even though there's at least one TH-cam video about it.
TY 🙏🙏
Almost similar to Brewster, the demise of Curtiss was mostly down to an unfortunate string of misses.The infamous SB2C, the XF14C, and let's not forget the truly DISASTEROUS C-76 Caravan.
This Boxer arrangement, with horizontally opposed cylinders layout, is the opposite of the opposed piston layout. Pointing this out is just an excuse to bring up the Junkers JUMO 204 which begat the Napier Deltaic. Another engine type that has pretty much died out, excepting the Acates Power design. The 204 flew and the Deltaic went to sea, a potential for videos?
Any chance of a video on the XP-87 Blackhawk, the final military aircraft design by Curtiss.
It is almost as if the Curtiss company had become "senile" in a development sense. The P-40, while a good sturdy and hard hitting fighter, was never quite on a performance par with its opponents and it seemed that Curtiss simply could not refine the design until too late. When they finally gave it the make-over it needed... the Mustang was available in quantity. The P-40Q could have been in production much earlier instead of the hordes of P-40Ns. The Helldiver's tribulations did not endear it with the Navy nor did their replacement for the Seagull. In a way, the story of the Hawker Hurricane parallels that of the P-40 in that it was overshadowed by the Spitfire. It was, like the P-40, a good, sturdy, well armed fighter that was never quite on a par with its opponents (but, like the P-40, in the hands of a knowledgeable and SMART pilot it was a contender). The difference was that Hawker (admittedly with some hiccups) was able to create viable successors, many of which are aviation classics. Curtiss SHOULD have been able to do so as well (Hell, they built a run of Thunderbolts for Republic), even if it required farming out the work to other manufacturers. There were so many smaller aircraft companies in the U.S. that were "spinning their wheels" producing trainers and utility aircraft. It is no surprise that Curtiss cobbled up this monster when Grumman were developing the Bearcat and the Tigercat (and even created a "Hot Rod" version of the Wildcat!). Not a bad looking aircraft but obviously bulky enough to see why the estimated performance was "pie in the sky" and, of course, the engines would have been reserved for the B-29s .
No wonder Curtiss Wright ended aircraft production in 1948 with designes like this disaster and the even worse XF15C. The company never transitioned to jet aircraft like most other US manufactures that had jets flying by 1945.
This Boxer!!! If you scale up the VW Beetle you would have the perfect super Beelte.
Looks a lot like a Fairey Gannet!
Why did the F7F took a very long time to develop. It missed out in ww2 but did fight in Korea.
Looks as aerodynamic as a brick....
Airframe similar to their P-60.
.. leaving Lycoming to develop the flat 12 into their now very successful, flat 6 which is still made today.
Interesting they didn't preserver with the concept for bombers though, could have fitted it right into the wing..
Did other aircraft use horizontally opposed/flat engines ? Was the issue with configuration itself or specific to the engine?
I don’t know it off hand, but Junkers used a diesel engine of flat configuration in the Ju-86
Napier liked the H shape
The precursor engine was flat, but according to the video the one originally intended for this airplane was an H pattern. Multiple variations of an H engine have been tried for both aircraft and race cars, but few were very successful. They took a lot of development, but they usually did not produce enough horsepower to overcome disadvantages such more weight, more frictional losses, more complexity, and less reliability.
Horizontally opposed engines converted from motorcycle engines were quite popular in early attempts in civilian ultra light aviation, but there was no mass production and certainly no domincance over other engine configurations like V-type, Anzani, radial and inline engines.
They seemed to be a dead end for a surprisingly long time until the first Continental and Lycoming horizontally opposed engines managed to prove that they were able to rival inline-fours. Today, 95% of light aircraft ase using horizontally opposed engines.
One factor easily overseen is that horizontally opposed engines didn't really fit to how light aircraft generally were designed before WW2. The vast majority had narrow fuselages with tandem seating, in an attempt to reduce drag by minimizing surface area. An inline engine naturally fits much better than anything else to that kind of design. Only after light aircraft manufacturers switched to side by side seating, the horizontally opposed engine suddenly fitted nicely to the fuselage shape.
There has never been a successful large, horizontally opposed engine for heavy aircraft. 99% are air cooled designs with 4-8 cylinders for light aircraft and the majority of the remaining 1% are air cooled two cylinders.
@@MisterOcclusion Junkers had devoloped opposed piston engines, with two pistons running in the same cylinder with a central combustion chamber. He originally intended to use them horizontally mounted in the wing, but that never worked out. In the end they all had to be mounted vertically to get theym reliably running.
Looks hideous !! "..Put it in the corn field ! .. PUT IT IN THE CORN FIELD !!! .."
Were there any successful counter-rotating props used in combat during WWII? The still used Russian "Bear" bomber is the only successful aircraft I can think of that ever used them, obviously this is not a WWII aircraft.
Almost, as wartine RR Griffons increased in power Seafire F Mk 46 adopted Rotol contra rotating props just after the war. So nearly did I think.
Fairey Gannet (postwar turbine, like the Bear). Few others...
Avro Shackleton, in service for ages.
Another reason for Curtiss' demise is because Harry Truman when he was still a senator looked into their business practices and found them to be rather corrupt. And there's no doubt that when he became president he was less than enthusiastic about supporting them.
I suspect Harry Truman and Hap Arnold had something to do with the demise of Curtiss as an aircraft manufacturer, if some of the stories I've heard are true.
I hope add use planes low combat insurgent battle or history counter insurgent cold war or civil war . How planes use
I'm not sure I'd call contra-rotating propellers novel, English inventor and engineer Frederick Lanchester patterned the design in 1909. See his Wiki entry.
Patenting it is one thing. Actually using it in a combat aircraft is another.
@@PaulMcElligott The first high-performance contra-rotating prop aircraft was the Macchi-Castoldi MC.72 built in 1931. It broke the world seaplane record twice before topping out at 440mph in 1934.
@@1maico1 With fixed pitch propellers. For a few test flights and some racing under ideal conditions, while money and workforce for excessive maintenance was no propblem. Getting it working with variable pitch propellers and making it reliable for hundreds of hours of lifetime under combat conditions is a whole different story.
It was sad to see how badly Curtiss lost the plot by the start of the Second World War.
F-14 looks a little different from what I remember!
Did you drink Cazalla, Anís El Clavel, Machaquito, before recording this video?
I like it's side profile, tbh.
The vast majority of naval fighter combat took place and fairly low altitude. Which makes sense. That is where thr ships are and hitting them from high level wad a pipe dream. Hence the Bearcat. Having a fighter with a 40k altitude limit would have been pointless.
Didn't some bombers and patrol aircraft ("snoopers") fly high? Those seem worth intercepting.
The plane was already obsolete by the time it finally flew. It was certainly not superior to the F4U _Corsair_ , and definitely inferior to the F7F _Tigercat_ .
Please tell me why you called a V12 an in-line engine. That's almost sacrilege LOL.
Only a minority cannot see a V-12 as an inline. Even a H or an X is inline. _Single bank_ is different.
Simply unbelievable. A single bank is different because that's an in-line engine. I finally figured out why the majority of you guys do it. Because of Laziness and indifference have a good day.
@@flyer5769 perhaps your perception is excessively blinkered. You would not accommodate _multi-bank inline._
Fairey Gannet ..that has gone a diet and worked out at the gym :)
lycumming?
I'm not sure I'd call it 'almost completely forgotten aircraft'. Almost any book on the F6F will at least mention if not illustrate the Curtiss competition.
Interesting pronunciation of “Lycoming”.
Yes - usually 'Lie-Comb-Ing'.
LOL! You know, I just assumed that was how it was said and didn't think to check. Should have realised American's have a different pronunciation. My bad
@@EdNashsMilitaryMatters 😋
As an Australian I found you pronounced the name very strange and for once agreed with the American way.
They should have sold it as a attack aircraft instead
Definitely in the line of not looking right... (trying to be polite)...
ahh yes we all grow old and die, it is the way
There's something unusual about your voice today. Dentist or "sauce"?
Bronchitis
Get well soon! I've had that and it's no fun. Well done for narrating despite suffering!
@@EdNashsMilitaryMattersget well soon💪🏻🙏🏻
You been boozing Ed?
That is pretty disappointing performance for a contra-rotating aircraft.
It's pronounced (Lie-comb-ing)
What clunky looking design. It looks slow and clumsy.
:)
I don't like Jets, I didn't like the jet age, the jet engine has ruined airplanes and made them two similar to rockets and missiles. Boring
From it's looks they could have sold it to the Royal Navy! ;-)
it is a kind of beautiful ugly plane
That's one hell of an ugly looking aircraft.
1, yay.😁😁
fairy gannet much
1st