Flying Failures - Armstrong Whitworth AW.55 Apollo
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- Опубліковано 7 вер 2024
- Greetings! :D
In this episode of Flying Failures, we return to the UK, and the Armstrong Whitworth AW.55 Apollo, a four-engined turboprop conceived under the Brabazon Committee that would go head-to-head with the Vickers Viscount, or at least it would have done had it been fitted with dedicated powerplants built specially for airliners rather than making do with four under-powered units which had been designed for small single-seat fighters and trainers, leading inevitably to its downfall.
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References:
- Key Aero (and their respective references)
- Wikipedia (and its respective references)
Folks, cherish every UA-cam Channel that doesn't give us robo-voice narration. This is awesome stuff! Between this channel Rex and Ed Nash, it's like the old Discovery Wings channel is back! :D
Dark Skies is good too !
Agreed. The auto voice combined with the use of stock photography is annoying and impersonal.
God knows why they insist on using those robot voices...hate them.
Totally agree. Can’t stand error laden robo-fluff AI clickbait voiceovers.
This is much better than wings though. Wings was always very light on info and technical details, too focused on us military, and always rah rah and rarely critical.
This is the about cutest small commercial aircraft ever seen. It looks like my little drawings in the back of my grade school notebooks.
These history videos are a treasure
Pretty sure many of the multi-engined prop planes I drew as a kid looked exactly like this.
Yeah it looks like default prop plane
I love how it looks! The long nose, big tail, and tiny engines make it look like a toy.
Beat me to it.
How does this channel remain a little known gem? Always simple, well research and presented with great content.
Except for not having a clue what the Empire Test Pilots School does in spite of its name.
@@neiloflongbeck5705 Explain?
@@andysedgley the ETPS only trains test pilots or since 1974 flight test engineers. They do not train aircrew. That would be done by one of the many Flying Schools.
@@neiloflongbeck5705 Gosh I hope somebody got fired for that blunder!
It's amazing!!
AW.55 Apollo design was pleasing to the eye. A novelty no doubt because I'm familiar with the Vickers Viscount flying our domestic sky's during the late 1950s - early/mid 1980s. New Zealand's National Airways Corporation (NAC) flew this type on their trunk and inter Island routes. A nice example can be seen at the Ferrymead Transport Museum outside of Christchurch City NZ.
I recall, as a kid, watching Viscounts at altitude over New Plymouth as they headed north or south on the trunk. They had a very distinctive sound.
Yes it's looks are very nice.
When you mentioned the insistence of the company continuing to use their own engine I imagined a 90+ year old engineer today still sticking with the line “Those engines were fine! I just needed to tweak things a bit more. It would have worked!” It is interesting the number of planes back in the late 40s and 50s that fail solely due to under powered engines.
Cool series. The L1011 is another well designed plane that failed from engine delivery issues.
Bear in mind that Lockheed ran into a great deal of expensive problems designing what was, in the L1011, the first of the wide-bodied jets. They were in serious financial trouble and had to be bailed out by the US government. At the same time, Rolls-Royce were having problems developing the cutting-edge RB211, due to problems with the carbon-fibre turbine blades, as initially the fibres were laid longitudinally. which worked fine in all applications except that of bird-strike. It took a lot of time and money to find out how to cross-hatch the fibres and produce a blade that was strong in all respects. This led to R-R going bankrupt and unfortunately the British government refused to do what the US had done and bail out a major defence contractor.
The old saying is that if you want something to be well designed, don't entrust a committee to come up with a good product!
Or, as they used to say: A camel is a horse designed by committee.
Don't put it into he hands of the accountants either.
@@gorillaau Death by bean-counters?
@@stevie-ray2020 They say that the pen is mightier than the sword.
@@gorillaau Also don't expect it to be profitable if you leave the whole design process to the engineers.
just by looking at the image of it i got a sense of "those engines arent big enough". Surely enough, the engines were what killed it
yes
Engines killed almost every aircraft project that failed it seems. Still a problem today, but much less so.
@@MrArgus11111 The De Havilland Comet was killed not by engines but the squared corners of the windows causing metal fatigue cracking, and then explosive decompression.
@@gorillaau ... and THEN the engines fell off! See?
Just wondering how a drawing of the Vanguard in Trans Canada Airlines crept in. It is also worth pointing out that the production Balliol/Sea Balliols were powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin not the Mamba; although intended to be a turboprop powered trainer, the fact that the Ministry had a large stock of WWII surplus Merlins meant that it was cheaper to use those and only the prototypes were Mamba powered.
Beautiful design for sure.
I still can't over the two radio aerials behind the cockpit looking like snail eyestalks. Just can't unsee it now.
I'd never heard of this aircraft type before. To me, it looks somewhat out of proportion (fuselage too short), but maybe with the right engines it could've worked as a proto "biz-turboprop"
I think AW as a company, had their fingers in too many pies and could have still been around today if instead they had remained focused on key core products that they were actually good at.
Nice video, many thanks!
AW kind of deserved their fate when there doesn't appear to be anything in the development contract keeping them from dropping the Mamba and either mounting four Dart's and expanding seating greatly, or with the far greater SHP of the Dart, redesigning the plane for 2 which would still be more than twice the available HP expected from the Mamba in the application and keeping the lower seat count filling a niche as a smaller feeder airliner.
At that time what a company did was very much controlled by the Ministry of Supply, if they determined as they did hear that they wanted an alternative powered airliner to the Dart Viscount, you could not simply drop the Mamba without securing their prior approval. Had you deviated without that they would have cut funding of the project and also not allocated supplies of aluminium etc had you attempted to continue with private money. All this was a throw back to the Communist like Central planning war time economy that continued with the UK aircraft industry to varying degrees until the 1980s, the BAe 146 being the last example of a "Government" commissioned and funded project.
The factory was located in Baginton (pronounced bag-in-ton) near Coventry
Pronounced "Cov-en-tree"
@@andysedgley I only highlighted that because he mispronounced Bagington.
@@davidcronan8698 Just joking with you 😄
@@davidcronan8698 You sure.? I lived in Cov and went to the airfield as a spotter most weekends. Baginton was little more than a village and a tiny airport certainly no factories. Of course I don't know prior to the mid 60's.
@@jeremyfine1464 There were factories, we lived quite close to the airport and can remember in the 1950s hearing them testing jet engines in the factory. Also nearby was the old Whitley aerodrome where Armstrong Whitworth had another factory where the Argosy freighter was built in the 1950s and 60s.
IN appearance, it compares favourably to the Vickers Viscount, a very popular aircraft through the 60s along Australia's Melbourne and Sydney route, as well as the Adelaide one. A short haul craft Which served with distinction, due to the reliability and relative simplicity of the Turboprop engines. Compared to their Pratt & Whitney drive units, each an oil and hydraulic fluid dripping behemoth of a radial engine, then still being phased out as gradually as possible, allowing the maximum amortisation of their purchase price. As much as I enjoyed the sound of radials clattering overhead, the whistle and prop noise of the Viscount was a unique one at the time. Till the later arrival of the Lockheed Electra on our shores. (if my memory stands up, it stood taller due to broad and long prop blades, The width and their black colour prominent, and their great fuselage height, perhaps a predictable Lockheed feature after the Constellation?) With the venerable Lockheed Electra eventually taking on the role of Anti-submarine and search and rescue aircraft for many NATO and aligned nations, under the Orion name, till fairly recently.
The EFTS was an excellent destination for the thing. Test pilots need to learn how to identify a dog when it's barking at them, and the courage to tell a company, (and its designers, who may be friends), "Sorry, but it won't hunt, and this is why".
Now we need a video on the AW52, Ruairidh!
Very interesting. Hadn't heard of this one.
It is a shame that this lovely airplane had it's carrier cut short by the big problems with it's engines. Thanks for sharing about this very little known airplane...
The Double Mamba engine, notable for me, as the power for the wonderful Fairey Gnat. An aircraft I can see great beauty in, for its practicality and extended history of use in its naval. The beauty demonstrated in great engineering is another step, which differs from traditional aesthetic considerations
Remember seeing glossy adverts for it in my aviation mags of the time.. often wondered about its fate.....very good video
Bag-in-ton !
aka Coventry Airport, took over from Whitley when the the new Coventry by-pass (A45) rendered the grass runways unusable in 1935.
Excellent history
The odd thing is that the 1475hp ASMa.3 Mamba was available by 1952 and the aerodinamically more efficient ASMD.1 Double Mamba (you only need two of those instead of 4) was giving 2950hp by 1953, when entering service with the RN. The Viscount entered service also in 1953 (4x 1380hp RR Dart engines). So the lack of power should not have been an insurmountable problem after all.
Excellent work! Thank you!
I have a suggestion for your Flying Failures series. You might want to investigate the story of the Rutland Reindeer and its metal fatigue problems. This aircraft was documented in "No Highway In The Sky", starring James Stewart. It would be a great story if you ever decided to cover fictional aircraft!
What’s most amazing about that film was that it was released a year before the comet flew.
They even included the fatigue testing of the fuselage with repeated pressurization as was done with the comet post crash.
Life imitating art…!
Hi ... very interesting. It sounds as if you are calling the base airfield Baignton ... I think it may actually have been Baginton near Coventry where AW were based ?
At around 2:15 that's a Vickers Vanguard powered by RR Tynes. Great video nonetheless!
What may have been had The AW-55 Used Rolls-Royce Dart engines instead of The Mamba type we can only conject.
Excellent! Thank you.
Older planes looked sexy and elegant. Even if they were a failure they were still neat.
Excellent presentation,and what a beautiful aircraft the Apollo was.Shame about the engines though....
Another Denbeigh Superior!
I know the Viscount was a commercial success but its safety record was horriffic, with a hull loss rate of 30%.
Yes - Vickers had not learned about metal fatigue when they rushed the Viscount into production. You'd think they might have learned something from the de H Comet . . . They did better with the Vickers Vanguard - but by then the Lockheed 188 was in wide service. It had a problem with propeller whirl mode, but that was fixed - and it was much better in regard to metal fatigue. I flew in both Viscounts and Electras; the Fokker F27 was not as fast, but infinitely better designed.
Remember the Raindeer passenger plane with the double horizontal stabilizers? LoL
3:32, the AW.52 was actually a design for a flying wing airliner, I think the one that flew was meant to be half scale
Nice work, fascinating info.
The old adage if it looks right, it’ll fly right comes into play here… it just looked like it had been designed by a committee that didn’t meet.
I reckon the outcome is usually worse when the committee meets more frequently!
Interesting video. Don't recall knowing of the Apollo. If only they went for the Darts.
An elegant looking aircraft - pity about the powerplant choice insistence.
Great video...👍
Considering that the Mambas look like pre-pubescent little projections it's amazing that they produced even 800HP. The power turbine in them must be no bigger than a dinner plate.
Very interesting.
Perhaps, at core, lay the problem of the Brabazon committee, which was the coming developments and race for dominance in the aviation field became anything but civil. The trusted present day formula has become to use RR whenever in doubt. A procedure much favoured by the Soviets from early on.
How about a video on the Armstrong Whitley Albemarle, Ruairidh? There is nothing on UA-cam about this aircraft!
Work started at the Bag-ing-ton not Bainton factory.
Given the whacking they took in WW2 the Brits really turned out some fantastic aircraft and cars afterward
Which fantastic aircraft are you talking about. Most all aeroplanes built and designed by UK terrible and deadly aircraft.
@@JDAbelRN What about the Sea Harrier, Concorde,VC-10 and the Siddeley Hawker Trident
Who thought attaching Lasko fans to a shrunken Constellation would do well?
There was a military transport version of the Vickers Viscount the Type 850 Viscount Major which for whatever reason would have been a better option that the slow Handley Page Hastings
Hmmm, and if they'd used the Dart, should've only needed two engines for such a small airframe?
Had the Apollo used the Dart, then it might done better enough to replace the De-Havilland Doves and Vickers Viking on inter-UK routes but I don't think it would have done as well as the Viscount
Very well done. An interesting fact is that no aircraft could ever travel around a spinning globe. Pilots are trained to fly across a level horizontal stationary surface. True.
Sunk Cost Fallacy?
The Brabazon Committee. Yes, some of the aircraft from that useless meeting did actually sell more than others. But on a whole, the entire committee was basically a flash in the pan first class. As even those who actually sold, sold only in laughable numbers and have disappeared within a very few years since obsolete or dangerous and deadly.
There is a photo of a Vanguard in there. Ten years to early
noticed the square Comet windows @ 9:54 min mark.
A version with two Rolls Royce Darts would have looked nice and slick.
She was a cute and pretty little thing, if a bit chubby, wasn't she?
I had no knowledge of this one....
Does the Convair 990 Coronado qualify as a Flying Failure?
Wow, 5-6 passengers to pay for running each engine. Today, 150 is nothing special.
First rate review of this interesting flop and a telling time in British aviation history. TFP
The brits used to be awesome, what happened? They used to lead the world in aircraft design and production.
And what's left? A Housing Estate just outside Bristol
There was also the twin-engined Aviation Traders Accountant...not a very romantic name.
State planning in British aircraft industry was a disaster. A common theme was that aircraft were too small and had limited range; this little gem was no exception. One of the greatest national failures was and is that the state owned BBC would not look critically at these projects and the population remained ignorant; the BBC still trumpets the disastrous Concorde.
The BBC gave plenty of air time to the many criticisms of Concorde throughout its development as well as the patriotic angle the Government pushed (both Conservative and Labour). What has to be said is that when Concorde orders started being cancelled (in total 72 were ordered by airlines) in 1973 following the fuel crisis, most of the money had been spent on its development. Remember that the 747 has the high mounted cockpit, because airlines were ordering it as a stop gap on long haul services with the intention of making them freighters when the SSTs arrived into service in the early 70s.
Concord only failed because of McDonnell Douglas particularly a DC-10 dropping things in the runway and the French not maintaining them correctly.
You can't blame the British aircraft industry for that it was the mostly the american's fault and partly the fault of the French
@@geocachingwomble Concorde failed when everybody cancelled their orders, the 14 built were split between BA and Air France and sold for £1 and 1 Franc each respectively. This was in the early 70s just after the fuel crisis, it cost the British and French tax payer billions in development for which they receive £7 and 7 French Francs, it was thus a massive failure long before the crash.
@@geocachingwomble There was a punctured wing/runway debris incident when a Concorde was taking off from Washington in the late '70s but it didn't seem to have initiated any moves to strengthen the undersides of the planes' wings. Maybe it was played down, as was the DC-10s' proven susceptibility to catastrophic hull-failure (in a 1972 incident, after which the FAA allowed the makers to take their time in carrying out the protective hull mods that might well have saved hundreds of people from being turned into mincemeat in a forest outside Paris).
@@None-zc5vg I know that Dunlop provided the BA fleet with a revised tyre after a tyre fragmented causing under wing damage. However I think it was only a recommendation from the (UK) CAA and so Air France and Michelin continued with the original tyre specification.
Surely BAGINTON??
Maybe they should have added another engine, which would be Mamba No. 5.
Airspeed Ambassador 23 built
Sadly, another aircraft that failed because of engine developement issues. It is a good looking aircraft though.
4 Turboprops to lift 30 passengers?
For some reason your videos often refuse to load. YT switches servers after the adverts, which seems not always to work. One inadequate workaround is to refresh the page using the browser, another stranger and more reliable one is to wait for the new adverts selection after midnight, when suddenly the server switch works and the video loads (as here).
Glad to be early.. soon it will be loopy views before I see, 666, then 667.
"...its elegant design...". Hmmm, I'm not so sure, it just looks wrong to me, the proportions just don't seem right. The Viscount on the other hand, looks just right. Obviously the problems with this plane weren't its looks or its aerodynamics, but its engines, so proportions don't come into it, but nevertheless "if it looks right, it is right" do seem to apply here.
The Empire Test Pilots School trains test pilots and since 1974 flight test engineers as well. They do not and never have trained aircrew. There's a big clue in the school's name.
Looks like a turboprop 737
Such a shame that they didn't have the common sense to scrap the four stupid Mambas and just bolt on two Rolls Darts. The aircraft as such was good and pretty.
Pretty doesn't always win
let's build a plane that can barely get itself off the ground empty. brilliant!
If it looks right…….this one doesnt
Britain was hopeless making passenger airliners.
"Form a committee to design airplanes, get to work, guys."
0:44 Dudes are straight up doodling instead of being productive.
Such a stodgy design, especially the tail area. It screams failure.
Looks like those inflatable plane toys they sell at the airport
Design by committee is always a disaster.
When you are reciting aircraft registrations, it's unnecessary to use words like yankee, romeo, etc... those words are only intended for use in radio communications. I imagine most people just quote them as letters.
Not a bad looking airplane. Too bad it didn't make it.
Quando Inghilterra era Inghilterra.....
British aircraft where let down badly by engines , and not the aircraft themselves .
If one single failure caused the entire company to eventually collapse then surely it was in a somewhat precarious situation beforehand?
It isn't unusual with projects that carry very heavy development costs. It's very common for the survival of shipyards to literally hang on the profitability of a single ship, and for property developers and their contractors to live from one single major building project to the next. That said, Armstrong Whitworth was such a diversified engineering business that they must have made a succession of poor decisions to lose the whole lot.
as usual britts air industry is its own worst enemy. another turkey.
aka. the plane was just too underpowered. The vastly higher power of the Rolls-Royce Dart engine made the Viscount a vastly superior plane.
I hate Armstrong Whitworth so much because of the Albemarle. An aircraft made with bits from many, many firms; most being woodworkers. Armstrong Whitworth had to organise them and ensure the bits fitted; and then make the aircraft. The did it slowly, and badly. The Albemarle was hardly better than the Bristol Blenheim. All of the sub-contractors could have been making something useful. The Armstrong Whitworth management were either lazy; idiots; or both. The story is like a vision of 2022 England.
Cute little bugger...
this is scare, take cat to basement now
Everything De Havilland designed was beautiful. Everything Armstrong Whitworth designed ....wasn't!
Yes but the Comet failure was partly weight savings trying to use their own crap engines
@@nigelalderman9178 I didn't say the DH aircraft stayed in one piece- just that they looked nice... There was a book called Adventure Stories for Boys, in which an A.W. Whitley is in a terrifying dive- and the caption was- 'but a Whitley's wings never came off!'
@@nigelalderman9178 In point of fact, there weren't any better jet engines available anywhere in the world. Initially designed during WWII with the Goblin, then uprated to the Ghost, the Comet (the world's first jet airliner) was fitted with the R-R Avon in 1950 when it first entered service. The Comet's failure was due to structural issues caused by failure of cabin integrity brought about by the square windows. It should be noted that square windows were used by all commercial aircraft manufacturers up to that time; it was only after the Comet losses and subsequent research that they all switched to an oval configuration.
@@chrisweeks6973 I believe that shipbuilders intuitively understood the danger of square windows a century before that, and hence portholes are always circular.
@@andrewjarvis3516 Nice try, but... Portholes originated in the time of Henry VII (reigned 1485-1509); he fitted oversize guns to his ships' fore and aftcastles, which couldn't be secured normally. Henry commissioned French shipbuilder James Baker to solve the problem, which he did by creating round holes in the hull, c.1501. They were covered when not in use. 'Port' is a corruption of the French word 'porte', meaning door. Later vessels had heavier guns which had to be mounted lower because of CofG issues and square gun-ports down the sides of the hull came into being.
It makes me sick to hear all these young guys with zero real experience of aviation coming onto UA-cam trashing daring , innovative engineers who made so much that we accept today as possible aircraft, that we accept without hesitation. Hindsight is so f...... easy when you are looking back in time to an era when there were people with the guts to try to do difficult things. The channel is NOT well researched, get real!
Typical British propaganda . . . . . lol . . . seriously . . like @ 9:10 . . . . "one of the most successful airliners in the world" !? . . . . I hadn't yet finished laughing over the comment made at 1:55 comparing their turbo prop 'post war' designs with the DC-3 designed in the early 30's being 'leaps and bounds better' . . . lol . . . just one year during this era made the previous year designs obsolete let alone over 15 years. It is endless, the examples of British UA-camrs trying to re-write themselves in a much better light in history than the truth will allow. It is amazing, some of the claims made will surely entertain most viewers as pure comedy.
LOL NO ONE wants their airplane to appear on this channel!