Romanian Henry Coanda of later “Coanda effect” fame found himself taking off the ground –involuntarily, I am afraid- during a ground test of his revolutionary creation. Given his reduced talents to keep the aircraft aloft, the flight was very short and ended in disaster –although he escaped unscathed- , but a careful observation of a strange phenomena –the flames exiting the combustion chamber adhering firmly along the sides of the fuselage- later became one of the most important contributions from Henri Coanda to physics, specifically to the dynamic of fluids, known as the Coanda effect,
The mysterious engine was in
concept similar to the one utilized, decades later, in the Caproni-Campini
CC-2, that is, a “mixed” engine, with an internal combustion unit driving the
compressor stage of the jet.
His design, that incorporated
a great deal of innovative features, went, for no reason, ignored by mainstream
aviation history until recently.
The elegant and futuristic
lines of his design were hard to resist, so out again with the glue, styrene,
filler, sanding stick and the metal bits.
Available plans differ from
each other and all of them differ from photos, so there you are submerged in
the relentless fogs of scratch-building.
Hopefully the images will
give an idea of the materials and techniques involved in this attempt, but
perhaps most important, will render a general sense of the gleaming beauty of
the design.
Seemingly flying away from a
still of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” –by the way, a much later production- its
proud pilot could well have been Little Nemo in Slumberland.
Some of us are interested in
aviation history, some others in the constructional aspects of modeling, and
some just love these planes for their diverse, rich, alternative, disconcerting
but immensely attractive aesthetics.
Whichever the reasons that
lead you here, I am sure you will like this first jet of aviation history.
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