Recent content by LCharnes

Aha! So that's what that is. I have the B/W photo and couldn't tell what that lever was for. Thanks so much for deciphering it!

Did that. I have an otherwise good video of a check flight for Iolar, the Irish DH.84. The problem is, it's shot from the cockpit door to the pilot's right, and it's impossible to see what he's doing to his left, where I suspect the hand brake lever is. The rest of the Dragon videos I've found...

Yeah, you found what I found. I've got the DH.89 Pilot's Notes as well as another cockpit schematic that shows a different-looking control in roughly the same place. Neither correspond to anything I've found in the DH.84 so far. Thanks.

I sent a message to the De Havilland Heritage Office and am waiting for a reply. When I was last in England, I tried to see the DH.84 at the Science Museum in Wiltshire, but it was all in pieces in their restoration facility. The one at the National Museum of Flight in Scotland has no interior...

Thanks.

Back again, working on the next book. I have a very obscure question: did the DH.84 have a parking brake? If so, how was it controlled? If not, how were the main brakes controlled? Would it be possible to jam something against the lever/pedal/whatever to keep the brakes engaged while the pilot...

This more than answered my question. Thanks! Why I asked: This is for my novel-in-progress involving an aviatrix-turned-spy trying to get secrets out of the Condor Legion in 1937. The first He-111s to reach Spain have just landed in Seville. She's supposed to get all the information she can...

If this isn't the right place for this post, please let me know where that place is... Does anyone know why the Russians didn't build a copy of the He-111 the way they did the A-20, B-25, B-29, Do-17, C-47, yadda yadda? Or did they, and it's very obscure?

Thanks! That's one less thing for her to complain about. (She doesn't like flying the NiD 52.)

Now that I'm writing the scene, I noticed #47 and #48 in this diagram. Are those the shoulder straps for the parachute (#49), or part of a 3- or 4-point seat harness system? They appear to be attached to the aircraft's structure (look just below the aft cockpit coaming). If they're part of a...

You have a point -- they're supposed to be on standby.

The engine immediately in question is the Hispano-Suiza 8Fb, a V8. I'll assume "mixture" is the right reference unless someone has other info to the contrary. Thanks so far for your help!

Thanks! That answers a couple of questions. It gets us back to the question: is it reasonable to assume the NiD-52 had one of these systems since the NiD-62 did? Dramatically, this system is a mess -- by the time Our Heroine has the system pumped up, she'd be arrested or strung up from a...

Yes! That got more elaborate than I expected. Thank you, everyone. So the operation would've been for the pilot to pump air into the starting system to get the engine to turn over? Once the air reservoir was full, how was the system triggered? Was the pump attachment in the cockpit (like the...

Very obscure and possibly unanswerable. In blueprints and diagrams of 1910s-1920s British aircraft, what we Yanks would call the "choke" is usually marked as the "mixture adjuster" or something similar. Question: what would a 1920s-30s British pilot call that control in everyday language...