Talk:Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.2/Archive 1

Archive 1

F.E.2h

Two F.E.2ds were modified by Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies as F.E.2h - variant not mentioned article. MilborneOne (talk) 15:24, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Info now added (together with the RAF5 powered version tested in 1916).Nigel Ish (talk) 21:26, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for that. MilborneOne (talk) 21:38, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Rearrangement of the development section for the "main" type (the F.E.2 of WWI)

This was rather confused. I have tried to make it more sequential - more or less finishing the description of each type (a/b/c/d etc.) before mentioning the next. We have to remember that many people reading this article for the first time won't have the background to know what the F.E.2c was before it has been described, for instance. Since only three aircraft were ever described as F.E.2cs - I have simply subtracted 3 from the F.E.2b/c total and presented it as the total for the 2b. This is at worst pretty close, as most wartime aircraft manufacturing figures (from later wars as well as WWI) are notoriously "wooly" anyway. Better than it was, anyway. I have reinstated one of the words trimmed by by our "keep it succinct" editor, as the text at that point was left bald to the point of incomprehensibility. --Soundofmusicals (talk) 19:44, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Have done some further work in the same vein - on second thoughts, as the F.E.2c was a converted F.E.2b anyway - none were specially built - I have reinstated the original figure from the source, but left it as a figure for the F.E.2b (which of course it was, even if some of them were experimentally modified). --Soundofmusicals (talk) 20:26, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

"normal "V" type undercarriage"

What is this? Jargon needs an explanation or a link. --BjKa (talk) 13:25, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Or a picture perhaps - like the one showing those ubiquitous "V" pieces from the side? Worth writing an article about - or a note in an "undercarriage" article? At a bit of a loss here... WWIReferences (talk) 21:38, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Not so silly - there is no clue at all about what might be meant in the Landing gear article - in fact nothing whatever about the undercarriages of pre-1940s aircraft. In the meantime, a reference or link to a "tricycle" undercarriage (i.e. resting on a nosewheel) is evidently totally irrelevant! --Soundofmusicals (talk) 21:59, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Description of undercarriage

This is referenced - Hare, Paul R. The Royal Aircraft Factory. London: Putnam, 1990. ISBN 0-85177-843-7, pp.208-209. An older reference would be Cheesman, E.F., ed. Fighter Aircraft of the 1914–1918 War. Letchworth, UK: Harleyford, 1960. pp. 44-45. --Soundofmusicals (talk) 22:59, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

An "oleo strut" might just be a later invention? In which case we may have to adjust the terminology used here? But it WAS definitely described as an "Oleo Undercarriage" at the time! --Soundofmusicals (talk) 00:02, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

See also: W.M. Lamberton and E.F. Cheeseman, Fighter Aircraft of the 1914-18 War, 1960, Harleyford Publications Ltd., 1960: Page 44. Lamberton is credited as the author, Cheeseman as editor. a Third Impression was run off in 1961 and has no ISBN (although my copy has lost its dust cover). I wonder if this is the same book mentined above or if Cheeseman was running two similarly-named works with different publishers?

Anyway, the illustrations show clearly that they are oleo struts and we need have no fears just because Lamberton does not use the phrase. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 08:14, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Could you please quote the relevant paragraph, Soundofmusicals?

As for Lamberton, he states on p. 44: The oleo-sprung undercarriage had a nose-wheel to prevent the machine turning over in a bad handling. Looking at the original technical drawing of the oleo-undercarriage, the drawing illustrates the telescopic steel struts, with solid metal coil springs that provide rebound/sprining forces. A rudimentary shock absorbing system, that would only see further advancement and practical realization decades later by George Dowty with the liquid spring strut. Previously in the 30s, Dowty came up with the sprung wheel.

However, these tested shock absorbing system on the F.E.2, while sharing similarities, can hardly be compared to the complex and highly efficient designs of an hydraulic damping and gas spring oleo strut. Some sources state that John Wallance, chief engineer of the Cleveland Pneumatic Tool Company, was the first to invent that kind of an pneumatic oleo strut. See also: American Engineer's Feat Proves Boom to Aviation, Aeronautical World Journal of Commerce, 1930 Vol. 3-4 p. 34. or Absorbing the Shocks US Air Services, 1931, Vol. 16, p. 48. Wildkatzen (talk) 14:52, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Per my above source: "The oleo-sprung undercarriage had a nosewheel...". The accompanying photos and drawing show a complicated strut with different diameters at top and bottom, with the junction shielded from dirt by an aerodynamic fairing.

The drawing linked to by Wildkatzen is titled "Oleo Landing Gear Arrangement", which rather underlines the point. Yes it shows a concentric coil spring in the assembly, but that is a common accompaniment to other suspension devices, owing to the complex nature of the conflicting requirements to provide resistive movement without oscillation. For example my old motor car had coil springs with air dampers; a coil spring with Oleo damper would not be an unreasonable variation and I believe it was fairly commonplace at one time.

Also, from Paul R. Hare's companion volume, Aeroplanes of the Royal Aircraft Factory, Crowood, 1999, Page 77: "The undercarriage ... incorporating sturdy Oleo legs and a small nosewheel." In the world of undercarriage design, the terms "leg" and "strut" are pretty much interchangeable.

Finally, if we stick too closely to the wording of a cited source we can be accused of copyright violation, so it is common on Wikipedia to rephrase the information being presented. An undercarriage strut with an oleo built in is an oleo leg or an oleo strut in any language and presents a good example of how to rephrase. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 16:00, 15 July 2018 (UTC)[updated 16:29, 15 July 2018 (UTC)]

Oleo struts

A search of the Flight archive for the 1910s provides a number of mentions of "oleo shock-absorber" and the like used on wartime aircraft. (An example https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1919/1919%20-%200498.html A Pneumatic version may have come later but the concept appears to have been around since the great war. MilborneOne (talk) 18:39, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1920/1920%20-%200130.html a 1920 diagram of an oleo leg. MilborneOne (talk) 18:44, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Ah, Flight, of course! Back in 1911 we find the "oleo-pneumatic spring" with, in 1916, an explanation that "oleo" in this usage implies an oil damper accompanying the coil spring. I think we can put this issue to bed, now. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 19:01, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Good find. Thanks to you both. For other colleagues that might join the discussion, the relevant passage reads: The term "Oleo pneumatic" is frequently applied erroneously to undercarriages in which the landing shocks are absorbed by springs while the rebound is checked by oil contained in a small cylinder in which works a piston. Wildkatzen (talk) 20:01, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

@Steelpillow A note about authorship, as a long-retired and rather old-fashioned and pedantic librarian - Lamberton is credited on the title page as "compiler", which on the surface means that he did most of the research - I believe he actually headed a "team" who got the basic data together, which Cheeseman basically licked into shape. In cases where "responsibility" for a work is "difuse" (librarians' jargon for when you've got several authors, credited or otherwise) the editor has primary responsibility - this is the only reason why (several years ago now!) I originally picked Cheeseman as the "author" when I did this citation. Even so, a very moot point - ignoring the implications of "compiled" and crediting the work to Lamberton has, on reflection, things going for it. In any case there is obviously only one book involved. It doesn't have an ISBN!! There was very simply no such thing when it was first published. --Soundofmusicals (talk) 07:03, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I will always bow to a librarian's superior knowledge of these things. However Wikipedia can take a more robust attitude to life. The spine attributes the work to "Lamberton and Cheeseman" and booksellers tend to list only the first author. Enabling Boolean search in my preferences on ABE Books, "Lamberton OR Cheeseman" for the author returned a good many plain "Lamberton"s, a good many complicated attributions copying the flyleaf, and only one plain "Cheeseman". I may be wrong but, given such variation, I would expect Wikipedia to run with what is printed on the spine however technically "wrong" that might be. I don't know if our templating system can cope with it, but we could attribute it to something like "Lamberton, W. M. (compiler) and Cheeseman E. F. (editor);..." — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 09:12, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

The title page (what you call the "flyleaf"?) is what we take - for academic cites as well as library cataloguing - since spine labels are often down to a whim of the bookbinder! There are actually three feasible ways (none of which is actually "wrong"). For what it is worth, I think I came very close to going for "Lamberton, W.F and E.F. Cheeseman" (ignoring "compiled" and "edited" as being a bit cryptic in this context). If you think it is worth hunting down all citations of this work in Wiki and standardising them at this I would certainly have no objections - although even for this aged pedant this borders on fuss-budget nonsense. -Soundofmusicals (talk) 09:37, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

@everyone (BTW thanks for the response to my pleas for help!) Is the current wording of the article to be taken as pretty right? In classic Wikipedia style is was based on verifiabilty, and the exact wording of sources rather than (unverified, therefore possibly OR) engineering data - even if the definition of what was probably very elementary engineering by later standards does not quite fit was is now meant by an "oleo strut". A case for a note, inverted commas (scare quotes) or a few words making it clear the term is being used in a "period" sense? --Soundofmusicals (talk) 07:03, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

As it stands I would think that "oleo type shock absorbers" is not quite right because of the coil springs incorporated. A more accurate description would be "oleo-spring shock absorbers". I am not sure if it would be off-topic to add in parentheses (sometimes referred to incorrectly as "oleo-pneumatic"[ref Flight comment]), but might it help reduce repetition of our current episode? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 09:12, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

No objection whatever to "oleo-spring (or "sprung") shock absorbers" - as it is close enough to our sources and may be more up-to-date technically? --Soundofmusicals (talk) 09:37, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Actually, I may be wrong here. Where these early versions used the oil cylinder as a damper, later systems used the compressibility of the oil as the spring and so did not need the coil spring. The phrase "oleo-spring" does not seem to appear in Flight until ca. 1936, so has probably always indicated the more recent type. So, as has been pointed out by others here, "oleo type shock absorbers" can be read as incorrect because the spring is the shock absorber, not the oleo. Perhaps "oleo strut suspension" might be safer? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 10:48, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

My only objection would be, that these elementary engineered shock absorbers do not belong in the oleo strut article (as an argument against John Wallance invention) and thus we should avoid useing too similar wording. Wildkatzen (talk) 12:33, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Before someone poke me on that; Yes, the article there describes it as: "A steel coil spring stores impact energy from landing and then releases it", but that is clearly referred to Dowty's liquid spring strut.Wildkatzen (talk) 12:45, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I don't really follow your argument about it not belonging in the oleo strut article (you'd need at the very least to redefine the scope of that article to legitimise that?) but that is really another question altogether that I'm quite willing to leave to people with a better engineering background - in the meantime can we get an acceptable form for this one? --Soundofmusicals (talk) 14:32, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Various countries at time including Brazil, Belgium, France, Germany and the US. made experiences with these elementary engineered shock absorbering undercarriages. The shock absorbing undercarriage of the F.E.2 is not an notable exception. The statment made on the oleo strut article diff implies two things:

1. It cast doubt about John Wallance's achievement

2. Only "British" engineers were able to come up with it.

This is getting complicated. The oleo strut article makes much of the "oleo-pneumatic strut", a system involving both gas and oil, being invented in the 1920s, even describing the oleo strut as a "pneumatic strut" at one point. Yet the Flight piece linked above mentions it back in 1916 and seeks a correction which may in fact be only partially applicable at best. This is all way off-topic for a humble aeroplane (and no doubt moving out of more editors' comfort zones than just mine), so I would suggest that it needs clearing up at Talk:Oleo strut before we can make knowledgeable changes here. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 15:33, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Before the discussion took place here, Soundofmusicals initiated several tp discussions because of my editing on these articles. I don't like participating at several talk pages, including mine and other tp, and express myself multiple times. However, I don't see the problematic why we can't discuss the issue from another article at the same time.Wildkatzen (talk) 16:01, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

OK, I have broken this discussion off as a new topic thread and posted a notice at Talk:Oleo strut to help direct interested editors here. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 17:23, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Modern technology

There are many differences between "former" technologies and "latter-day" ones bearing the same names - few everyday articles have not been transformed in the last century or two - and not a few (indeed) have their very origins in recent decades. It remains fair, however, to call a 1950s computer a "computer" - a 1980s (analogue) mobile phone - a "mobile" (or a "cell phone") - however little it resembles its modern equivalent. In our historical aircraft articles in Wikipedia we follow the good and wholesome custom of our sources in using the terminology of the time. A case in point is the type of "revolving" engine that powered so many aircraft before the 1920s that all others were called "stationary" to distinguish them - we call them "rotaries". Our "Rotary engine" article is replete (as it must be) with links to other engines that are, or have been, called "rotaries" - but within the articles on particular rotary-engined aircraft we use the term in its "period" sense. Similarly here. It is highly likely that something that was called (for instance) an "oleo undercarriage" in 1914 might be very different from what might bear the same names in the 1930s and later. Confusion is surely best avoided here by using the period term - linking it to the the article concerned, and giving - in that article the historical background. Just a thought from little me that people might like to consider. WWIReferences (talk) 23:48, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Indeed. "Sufficient unto the article is the terminological exactitude thereof". Not the business of THIS article to resolve the problems of another, very peripherally connected one, surely? --Soundofmusicals (talk) 00:06, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

If the "oleo-type undercarriage" of the F.E.2b is really that different in principle from an "oleo strut' in the modern sense, why not simply cut the link altogether! (all my last edit does, incidentally). We're describing the undercarriage of an early historical aircraft in the terms used at the time (and in more recent sources!) - if the relevance of this to another article is limited, perhaps they are not really connected and best not to link them. Nothing wrong with including (or not including) historical information in the "oleo strut" article - but this would only be very peripheral, non notable information here. --Soundofmusicals (talk) 00:25, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Oh, for God's sake. Just because the term "oleo" was widely used early on to describe an incorporated oil-damper, there are still substantial differences. An undercarriage utilising the compressive load of a fluid and act unison as damping and spring element, differ considerably to an undercarriage that stores the impact energy from a metal coil-spring as it is with the case of the F.E.2b. These elementary engineered undercarriage have been tested by various aviation pioneers, and can hardly be associated to what is now know under an "oleo strut", and could be well placed in the history of the article of Landing gear. Cutting the link altogether doesn't resolve the issue created in THIS article. Its current definition "oleo type shock absorbers" could be deemed incorrect, a concern shared by Steelpillow and myself. Wildkatzen (talk) 10:13, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

What exactly is the problem? Either it WAS an oleo strut in the modern sense - in which case the original text could have stood (with the reference to the oleo strut article) or it was NOT an oleo strut at all but something far more primitive (what you seem to be saying) in which case the current text - mentioning "oleo type shock absorbers" (we do not and have never described them as "oleo struts" here) without any linking to the oleo strut article is surely unobjectionable. Whether the (early) historical aspects of "oleo type" springing are adequately covered elsewhere is another problem altogether (which I am determined to leave to you and steelpillow - in any case it is THERE where such technical details belong - it would be only very marginally relevant HERE. Without endorsing WWIRefers' little homily 100% I do think he has a point you might like to consider. --Soundofmusicals (talk) 23:17, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

An "oleo type shock absorbers" implies that the energy was absorbed by an oil-damper, instead of the coil-spring - which is an issue HERE. THIS was already explained by Steelpillow to YOU in June. But whatever... Wildkatzen (talk) 05:27, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

Not a hope, IMHO, oh sounding one! But maybe, just maybe, this footnote - essentially a disclaimer of what was never claimed (!) will settle the matter for this article. What they do elsewhere is up to them. --WWIReferences (talk) 02:20, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

On an 'oleo' leg ('oleo' = 'oil') the springing is supplied by a spring enclosed within the leg whilst the rebound damping (what is erroneously called a 'shock absorber' in some places) is provide by an oil reservoir that allows the oil to return to the leg cylinder at a reduced rate via a restricted aperture. On a 'liquid spring' system the place of the spring is taken by a reservoir of air that compresses with the load on the leg, with damping provided by by oil in a similar way to the standard oleo leg. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.55.68 (talk) 12:30, 5 March 2019 (UTC)