Legendary German film maker Werner Herzog* took time out of his busy schedule to choose his favourite Engine Testbed aircraft and to ponder on what went wrong enough in your life to lead you to spend time on aviation blogs.
“Guten tag. Ich bin Werner. The flying engine testbed is a mother nurturing a cuckoo that in all too many cases will result in her own downfall. This cursed aircraft may carry an engine not designed to aid its own type’s propulsion, but is instead a parasite, often hanging with ugly imbalance from the exploited wing or nose. Yet again cruelty triumphs. Walk with me to the abyss to a place even more hopeless than that of the cropdüster.”
*Not Werner Herzog
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
If there is a God, he made the 108 in a state of anger. The baseness and obscenity of this design is as if God vomited on those wishing to bring the Taurus, Sabre and Griffon into the world.
Avro Vulcan
Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
Look at this haunted albatross, his gentle innocent face belying his murderer’s belly. The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of the Vulcan. Man’s hubris is never more loudly shouted than by the nuclear bomber. The sadness of the atomic end is sad only to us. Though Avro founder Alliott Verdon Roe had been a card-carrying fascist, Avro’s Lancaster would taken part in the obliteration of the Nazi state, each bomb seemingly loaded with high explosive irony. The blockbuster film is named for the bomb which can destroy a block of houses, and today the blockbuster film can destroy the imaginations of a block of houses. The Vulcan could have finished humanity and left space for the trilobites or woodlice to take over. He did not destroy us but instead was an essential part of the development of both Concorde and the Panavia Tornado.
Avro Lancastrian
Like a writer using Chat GPT, this Avro Lancastrian is assisting the suicide of her own kind. Look how she carries the precious Sapphire turbojet under her wing. The fool. She was haunted by Ghosts, Griffons and the troubled flow of the Nene and Avon.
Gloster Meteor
The Meteor was the master of moderation. While the Messerschmitt 262 fought until the end of the death cult that spawned it, the Meteor observed the War from a distance. It looked forward to a civilised future of quiet flights from Bristol to Dublin, and so gave the world the turboprop.
Ilyushin Il-76LL: Meeting Gorbachev
The young Sergey Ilyushin was a gutter cleaner who dreamed of balloons. With a boxer’s face and the sleek hair of a presidential candidate, his aeroplanes contained despair. How can one talk of Russia and the Soviet Union without addressing the sadness?
Apart from the fact that it fed on fish, almost nothing else is known about the extinct Spectacled cormorant of Russia. Perhaps the Il-76 was built as a flying memorial to the cormorant. It is said that Sergey was originally inspired by the albatrosses over the sea, so this would follow.
High-winged and beefy (I’ve been called worse) with space for a team of engineers, the Il-76 is an excellent engine testbed. Beneath its maternal wings it has coaxed the NK-86 turbofan, TV7-117A turboprop, D-90 turbofan, D-18T, PS-90, NK-93 shrouded propfan, D-236T propfan, 30KP and notably, the Franco-Russian PowerJet SaM146 and Indian Kaveri.
Hawker Hart
I have so much disdain for the Hart and I will not share its sordid story of Merlins, Napier, Mercury and Pegasus.
Even Dwarfs Started Small
The first aircraft to fly with ram-jets, the Polikarpov I-15bisDM, was, somewhat bizarrely, a biplane.
North American B-45 Tornado The Wild Blue Yonder
Fast, brutish and stylish, the General Electric J79 is the engine of the jet age. If it was silver and penetrating the ether in the most thuggish American style, then it had a J79. Be it the Hustler, Phantom, Super Tiger, Vigilante or even nutso land speed record hunting cars, the J79 is the unruly howl of post-war America in all its glorious lunacy. The North American XB-45 had the honour of taking it into the sky for the first time. 17,000+ J79s made the Cold War a lot more exciting and it all started with the B-45. Americana, so bland in its madness, has no place at my table.
Little Dieter Needs to Fly
Despite what the Bristol-knockers will tell you, the Bristol Hercules radial engine was a massive success: powering over 25 different aircraft types including the Beaufighter, Stirling and Wellington. The Wellesley Type 289 engine testbed was used to test the Hercules HE.1S and was vital to its development. Ok, so maybe we’re overselling it here. The Wellesley was one of several types used as testbeds for the Hercules, it was no more important than any of the others, which included the desperately charismatic Northrop Gamma and at least one of the painfully uncharismatic Fairey Battle.
In mythology the baby Hercules was nurtured by his would-be assassin Juno who had been tricked into looking after the baby she wanted dead. Juno suckled Hercules at her own breast until he bit her nipple, spilling her milk across the night sky and so forming the Milky Way.
Fairey Battle
(As an aside, if you’re including testbed use on engines in the positive column for any aircraft then you have to consider the often-dissed Fairey Battle a resounding success as it was testbed for the Hercules, the Taurus, the Sabre, the Monarch and the Exe. By this criterion the magnificently ugly Hawker Horsley is probably the most successful aircraft of all time).
Caravelle
The CFM International CFM56 is so boringly name its easy to gloss over the fact its massive significance. This Anglo-French masterpiece powered into the sky for the first time on March 17 1977 on the elegant rear-end of a Caravelle. 33,000 odd units later the 56 has conquered the world, powering all sorts Airbuses and Boeings. It was the Caravelle that ushered in this reassuringly unexciting revolution. It was also considered as a candidate to pioneer a rather more risky technology. In 1958, a nuclear propulsion option was proposed for the the Caravelle with an onboard nuclear turning the engine and replacing the need for conventional fuel. This radical, and probably terrible, idea was also considered for the Super-Caravelle, a supersonic design concept that fed into the later Concorde.
Hawker Horsley: Echoes from a Sombre Empire
They will tell you the Merlin engine was not named for the wizard – but for the British the name carried such a magical weight it might have well have been.
We must cry for the Horsley. It was was an extremely suitable airframe for the purpose of testing engines, being the right size for the larger engines that were coming along. Its bolted up steel tube structure meant it was easy to fabricate a new engine mount. It was strongly built and had plenty of drag which meant there was little chance of more powerful engines overstressing the airframe (which was an issue with Battle testbeds, hence some of them had fixed undercarriage). It also had plenty of fuel capacity for long testing flights, and docile flying characteristics that allowed engine testing to take place with little risk. The number and variety of engines that he trialled suggests to me that he was inherently suitable for the role – several models of AS Leopard, Jumo 204 diesel (and then the licence-built Napier Culverin), R-R Buzzard, apparently a Napier Lion though I haven’t seen direct evidence of that, and of course the Merlin. And the Merlin variant that it tested (contributing to its fitness to pass the 400-hour flight tests) was the important Merlin G, the first model with the parallel head, which became the Merlin III, which won the Battle of Britain. Furthermore, the experience with the Buzzard fed into the Merlin. And the experience with the Jumo 204/Culverin fed directly into Napier’s development of the wonderful Deltic engine – not an aero-engine but a huge contributor to postwar warships, torpedo boats and trains, some of which were in service until 2018.
The Horsely died the anonymous death of a capable manservant. The egotistical Spitfire meanwhile, high on the snorted ground bones of the proletariat, sang itself into eternal fame.
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