ROBOT ROCKET PLANE

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22318, 1 May 1947, Page 5

ROBOT ROCKET PLANE

BRITISH TESTS PENDING MAY ATTAIN 900 M.P.H. LONDON, April 29. British scientists are on the eve ‘of their greatest adventure into the only unknown realm of aerodynamics. Within a few weeks they expect a sleek small robot aeroplane, driven by a liquid fuel rocket motor, to reach 900 miles an hour in a brief flight off Scilly Isles and thus produce the first computable data on the transition stage between subsonic and supersonic flight. The chief scientist of the Ministry of Supply, Sir Ben Lockspeiser, told a press conference today that scientists knew all about an aeroplane’s behaviour at speeds up to four-fifths of that of sound and a little had been derived from wind tunnel experiments about the behaviour above the speed of sound. “But no one knows what happens in the transitional transonic stage,” he said, The robot, the wing-span of which is Bft, its length 9ft. and weight 9001 b.. will lie slung below a Mosquito and taken 36,000 ft. over the Atlantic. Two thousand horse-power from a compact, rocket engine which has been developed from one used in the Luftwaffe’s Messerchmitt 163 fighter, is expected to accelerate it rapidly within just over one minute to its maximum speed. Meanwhile, radar instruments will track it from the ground to check the speed and height and newly-developed radio apparatus installed in the robot will tell the story of its flight before it plunges into the sea. Vickers Armstrong, collaborating with the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, and many engineering firms throughout England, made the robot. The research experts plan to make as many successors as they need to uncover the secrets of a supersonic-con-trolled flight. “We will do it all right. The question is how many times we will have to try before we succeed,” said Sir Ben