The Aircraft That Could Split Itself In Half | Blackburn B-20 

Can we have a video on the Ki83 or J4M please?

My first thought - Oh no - RR Vultures!!!

A short-form video of the Westland Whirlwind and a Long-Form of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

I'd love to see some video on 1920s racing floatplanes ( supermarine s26, macchi M.39, ecc..)

Love your channel ❤. Id like to see a video about the first italian, french and japanese jets

I like the weird and the underdog.

They were always rather imaginative !

Replace "Blackburn" with "British".

Daft & impractical you mean 🤡

Imagine being a fly on the wall of a Blackburn design meeting. 😅

​@@anzaca1You could compare Blackburn to Kel Tec

Blackburn: Why would we think about boxes? They have terrible aerodynamics! 😂

@@ZaphodHarkonnen 😆🤣😆 Good one!

It makes zero sense to have a fuel bomb underneath a plane, every emergency landing could be deadly, due to sparks and such, and that's one aspect.

@@andredeketeleastutecomplex ,you don't know much about amphibian aircraft,do you?

@@andredeketeleastutecomplex You might want to look at conventional designs, because a large ratio of both fighters and transports had fuel in the lowest parts of the hull, or even in blisters outside of it, and would be among the first to touch the ground in a gear up landing. But fuel tanks burning aren't common (and then almost exclusively the work of incendiary projectiles), fires are normally engines or munitions. Fuel tanks are also ventilated (or on later types, actually inerted with a ullage gas like CO2), so don't contain explosive conditions... and in a flying boat (the Blackburn shown wasn't even an amphibian) its being mostly submerged in water (which actually makes ventilating more difficult, but it somewhat rules out "sparks" from contact), and reduces fire risk.

Often wondered how they kept getting contracts. Not only did the company produce duds, but some of the ugliest aircraft I've ever seen were produced by Blackburn. I understand that aesthetics aren't important, but it doesn't hurt.

​@@juliancate7089I'm rather glad they did survive. They did indeed produce some duds by way of Skua/Roc and Firebrand/Firecrest, granted. However, there wouldn't be the superb Buccaneer, without Blackburn. We all know what an excellent a/c it turned out to be.

Don't assume that an aircraft company makes all its money from manufacturing its own aircraft. As canny Yorkshire folk, they undercut a lot of the other aircraft companies for sub-contract work. They also had a series of successful types for the Fleet Air Arm in the 1920s-30s. The Dart, Ripon, Baffin and Shark were built in considerable numbers. Their B-2 trainer was a little beauty that equipped their own flying school, training RAF pilots. Their engine division made the Cirrus engines, a popular alternative to DH's Gypsy engines. During the war, they turned out Fairey Swordfish and Barracudas and built Short Sunderlands at the flying-boat factory at Dumbarton. Where they lost out was in keeping young, talented, aircraft designers and draughtsmen. It was hard to keep anyone with talent at their windswept site next to the Humber when the aircraft companies down south offered better working conditions and higher wages, so the quality of their own design work declined during the 1930s. It was getting Barry Laight from Hawker Siddeley that gave them the talent back to build the Buccaneer.

@@markfranks1329 Calling the Buccaneer an air conditioning unit is stretching things a bit, though.

@@markfranks1329 The Skua was not a dud, it was just obsolescent in 1939 - it actually did fairly well in the opening year of the war and I am genuinely at something of a loss to understand where it's poor reputation comes from. So it was 109 fodder... Name my any aircraft of it's era and type that wasn't? It's main problem was that it as more of a dive-bomber than it was a fighter and the FAA had decided they needed a something weighted more heavily to the fighter role so no effort was put into upgrading it. For example, it should have been possible to fit the Taurus engine into the nose of the Skua which would have given it parts commonality with the Albacore and an extra 250 hp for only a 200 lb extra weight. Alternatively, if you think the very idea of a dive-bomber/fighter hybrid is stupid then I'd like to know your opinion on the Douglas SDB Dauntless, as it's conceptually identical to the Skua - it just flew three years later than the Skua with all the advantages in technical advancement that brought, including having 50% more horsepower. Both aircraft were designed to be primarily dive bombers with the secondary capability to shoot down maritime patrol craft. Given an upgraded engine as I outlined above, the Skua could have had performance quite close to the SBD - it was only about 30 mph slower than the SBD as it was and the Skua was considered pleasant to fly and fairly agile for it's size.

I'm now imagining an RAAF B-20 sitting on the waters of some Pacific atoll in between anti-submarine patrols, its crew sitting on folding chairs on the pontoon with magazines and fishing rods :P

I cannot believe that anime' hasn't picked up on the B-20. It seems perfect for that genre.

As soon as I saw retractable pontoon design, I started an imaginary countdown waiting for Rex to casually describe the first catastrophic strut failure. Sadly, it never made it that far. It is a fascinating design to me, mostly because it actually made it past the drawing board and into a flying prototype. I guess Blackburn is known for that sort of thing. Back to your idea of the extra deck- I don’t think I could get comfortable sitting in a space that looks like a waterborne trash compactor.

@@yetanother9127 add some jerry rigged tarp awnings, and that's exactly what I was imagining

who?

oh, flex tape splitting boat in half guy

“To show the power of flex tape…”

​@@NoNameAtAll2​>>> Oh, THAT _"Phil Swift."_ 🤭

I believed it was Inspector Gadget :/

It was designed around a contraprop Napier Sabre but conceptually based on a modified Blackburn Firebrand. The Firebrand started with a single prop Sabre before moving to a single-prop Bristol Centaurus radial. The most detailed plan views and artists renditions show the B-44 with contra-prop

Yeah that’s a great aircraft one of my favorites.

Noticed your name tsr that would have been awesome if project was pursued further.

Years if producing awful aircraft then a world beater never dull at Blackburn.

And served with the South African Air Force.

@@yetanother9127 Martin pioneered the rotating bomb bay on the XB-51, not Blackburn. I question that the Buccaneer was "good". The fact that it stayed in service for so long is more due to the UK's unwillingness to spend money on defense than a testament to it's quality. Anyway, it's pointless to discuss whether something is "good" or not unless there is some objective measure rather than someone's subjective opinion. Thanks for commenting.

@@juliancate7089 Are you nuts?! The Buccaneer was excellent.

I ❤ only God and myself. Obviously.

@@joaoalbertodosanjosgomes1536 I thought that masturbation was supposed to be a sin. Or isn't it when you think of God while stroking little Joao? 🤔

didn't he say it was an X24? I would consider X engines to be radial, maybe I'm wrong about that.

@@tissuepaper9962 The Vulture consisted of two V-12 Peregrine engines bolted together. Of course it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the _very_ short explanation. A radial engine works very differently.

@@MrLBPug I suppose I would concede if the two Vs are smaller than 90°. If they're evenly spaced then I'd still want to call it radial but I know that radial engines normally come with prime numbers of cylinders, which 4 is not. Going to take this as an opportunity to learn about a new type of engine.

Hardly. Dazzling gimmickry and over-engineering tend to fail at the most critical moment. Imagine being attacked while on the water, having to scramble away at full speed, and that maze of struts and pistons failing to retract. You would be a drag-laden sitting duck. Or, having to land and the system failing to lower, either through malfunction or battle damage. Your plane would be a sure write-off in the best of cases, in the worst it´d be the crew which was to be written off! The Germans learnt at Kursk, and well before that as well, that fancy technical toys were a disaster in the harsh realities of war. The same would happen with this contraption, which couldn´t hold a candle to good ole Sunderland!

Scaled composites?

@@brucebaxter6923 idk much about Blackburn cause I just recently found them but I know Blomm and Voss made a fair amount of prototypes which is surprising ngl

Yeah, the BV 138 was a lovely aircraft

Blohm & Voss was originally a shipyard and thus their engineers thought the concept of a float-plane or a flying boat from the sea up, when the aircraft designers often gave the seaworthiness of their amphibious designs only an afterthought. But if one is after _really_ weird then seek no further than B&V land planes, like the BV-141.

@@senioravocado1864 Look up what “scaled composites” designs are like

Doubt it. Dazzling gimmickry and over-engineering tend to fail at the most critical moment. Imagine being attacked while on the water, having to scramble away at full speed, and that maze of struts and pistons failing to retract. You would be a drag-laden sitting duck. Or, having to land and the system failing to lower, either through malfunction or battle damage. Your plane would be a sure write-off in the best of cases, in the worst it´d be the crew which was to be written off! The Germans learnt at Kursk, and well before that as well, that fancy technical toys were a disaster in the harsh realities of war. The same would happen with this contraption, which couldn´t hold a candle to good ole Sunderland!

It was half-way between a flying-boat and a float-plane: those Vulture engines would have been the kiss of death for any production hopes, whatever the design's other shortcomings

10:55 Is that a German cross on the pontoon?😅

I think quite a few seaplanes had fuel in the floats - thinking Schneider racers (though those weren’t the epitome of practicality, either)

@@chrismartin3197 yes, quite a few did in reality. I'm still not sure it's wise

Everyone seems to have missed that - around the same performance as a Mk1 Spitfire.

Probably meant 350kph, no way is that thing going 350mph

Russians have jet flying boats which are quite aerodynamic without this gimmick

taking off and landing a floatplane/flying boat is hard enough with a rigid hull. I think a flexible hull might just make it way more difficult.

Maybe you could revisit this with some kind of dropstitch tech.

@@edevans5991 Exactly what the air ministry said as they dialed the asylum.

To keep the crew fit, it should have been cranked up and down manually, just like early Spitfire undercarriages. 500 turns each way. Time for my medication...

Assuming the actuators are hydraulic I think it might have done better than regular flying boats/seaplanes. The actuators could act as shock absorbers.

​@@henrikgiese6316 they could even be plumbed into a tuned hydraulic circuit for ideal damping.

Its really no different than any other pontoon plane but with the addition of powered jacks and the provision to make the struts fold. Fixed pontoons and flying boats were the norm prior to ww2 and were rather well understood. It was only really the explosion of WW2 era airfields that made land based planes more practical. Prior to this there were developed port facilities near almost every major city in the world and very very few official runways. Most planes has to be designed to basically land on an open field or a dirt track prior to this.

​@@henrikgiese6316 Alex Moulton? ;)

@@jimdavis8391 I was thinking more like the classic Citroén. 🙂

It's a Type "B" low-visibility roundel, only red and blue with the white missed out. See 3.29 for a better view.

Hand in your badge please and stand in that corner over there.