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J.C.
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-Real motors?? You want REAL motors??? Round is beautiful |
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J.C.
Milliman
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-Real motors?? You want REAL motors??? Round is beautiful |
If you're old enough to have worked P-2s, C-1s or the "Stoof with a Roof," or you go to air shows for the same reason I do, you know what I'm talking about. Hint: it ain't for the dudes in gliders doing "aerial ballet." Please!
The flight line music I'm talking about even led off music and TV scores - like the opening of my favorite show way back when, "Baa Baa Black Sheep." Sure, it had forgettable plots and cheesy acting (Robert Conrad??? Sorry, no Emmy for you, bud), but it had some great music right at the beginning.
An 18-piece orchestra provided the memorable tune. The bandleaders were a couple of dudes named Pratt and Whitney. Yesssss, it's coming to you now, isn't it? You know what I'm talking about.
Cubic inches, baby! Twenty-eight hundred of 'em, to be exact.
Remember the tune? It started with a whine, a couple of coughs and then an almost melodic throaty rumble. Beautiful.
My dad turned me on to this music by taking me to the big air show at Owl's Head, Maine way back when. We walked in and he stopped me in back of an FM-2 (Eastern Aircraft version of the Grumman F4F) whose pilot was (apparently) going through his pre-start checklist.
Dad flew P4Y-1Ps during the Korean "police action" and he knew what was coming. I wanted to go on but he gently told me to stand fast and listen. The wonderful sound of that Wright Cyclone bringing 1,350 horses to life remains as vivid as if I heard it this morning. I was hooked!
That's what I go to air shows for. The warbirds. And listening to a big round motor sing me a tune.
Sigh. Sadly, the music is gone from most flight lines anymore, especially the one I work on here at Patuxent River, Maryland.
Call it the "Sound of Freedom," if you must find a euphemism for your eardrums bursting, but there is no music, or romance, to a jet engine. Sure, here at Pax we've got all kinds of neat stuff being put through research, development, acquisition, test and development every day. Same Brayton cycle, but it's all blower stuff.
My office is right behind the Strike hangar and we hear F/A-18s (A through F), F-14s, T-45s, E/A-6Bs and the JSF. There was even a British Nimrod out there recently. When they light off an F404 or F414 motor, it just hurts your ears and it smells bad. There is absolutely no musical quality to a jet engine - none. Even the neat little T700-GE-401C that my program's AH-1Z has is just pure harsh noise when it lights off.
The closest thing, I guess, are the S-3s with their TF-34s. Fans are sort of cool in a geeky way - when an S-3 Viking is "Hoovering" around the pattern, the darn thing really does sound like a vacuum cleaner going over your head. More humor than romance, though. You whack your buddy, point up and smirk.
The Pratt R-2800 doesn't sound like vacuum cleaner. And to be fair, the Hoover sound, admittedly, was there to put a smile on the Soviet hydrophone operator's face right before he got a Mk 48 up his gazoo. Weren't we the clever ones?
Yep, the ole TF-34 doesn't quite have the dulcet, melodious tones of a round motor, but it's a lot more efficacious in dispatching Soviet Alphas and Typhoons. Or at least it used to be until the greatest flying sub hunter ever got relegated to handing out groceries. Oh man, let's not get started on THAT one... I digress.
Every so often, we get to see warbirds come here for the folks at the U.S. Naval Test Pilots School or Force Warfare Test and Evaluation Squadron to train on "exotic" aircraft for different handling qualities. All the ones that came in had round motors - and lots of them, too. The most beautiful one, though, was the Super Connie.
At the time, my "office" looked out on the taxiway and I got to hear that beautiful airplane taxi by four times a day. Our building practically emptied because guys like me (who appreciate a fine-sounding machine) were rushing outside to hear four monster Wright Cyclones, and their 72 cylinders, crank over.
It was practically a religious experience. Missing only were the lighters being held up.
At Pax, we see the world's best combat airplanes,
helicopters and even the occasional blimp up close and personal everyday. It's
ho hum.
F-14? Great. B-1? Whatever. F-117? Yay. Joint Strike Fighter? Yawn.
And then a PBY comes in. Oh golly, you'd have thought it was the Second Coming! We even had a Junkers Ju 52 (or was it a CASA 352-L?) that visited for the air show one year. It stayed late and spent a few days clattering around the pattern, it's three 830 horsepower BMWs roaring away.
Bimmer power - Ja, bitte! Auf deutsche or in English, it's still pure music and there were a legion of aerospace engineers, logisticians and program managers who stopped what they were doing just to listen.
Sadly enough, it's all business anymore. Don't kid yourself - the cold, hard reality is that my business revolves around hurting people and breaking things. There is no romance in turbine blades. Not that there should be, I guess.
If you stand there listening to turbine blades doing their work, you go deaf quickly (or some ill-tempered Chief comes over and slaps a cranial on your grape). Jet engines make a lot of thrust, but in doing so, they make a lot of noise. Noise, not music.
I'm with my friend Pat who says, "Real airplane motors are round."
While you could argue that he means, "have pistons," I know better. I've heard the big Packard V-12 in a P-51 or the Yak-3 replicas up close and there's just no comparison to a Pratt or Wright round motor. And there will never be another engine that sounds as thunderously beautiful as the 28-cylinder Pratt and Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major. Waaa hoo!
Gas turbines are about as musical as radio static - you might as well run a wood auger through your eardrum. Build my orchestra around a 2,804 cubic inch Pratt, a three-bladed Hamilton Standard, folding wings and a tail hook. Bend the wings a little (okay, a LOT) and I think you know what I'm talking about.
Yeah well, romance is fine but I guess we'd have looked pretty silly going to Baghdad in F4Us instead of F/A-18s. Then again, given the warfighting ability of the Iraqi Air Force, it might not have made much difference...
Anyway, when it comes to the brutish, ugly, and sometimes necessary, business of death and destruction, we'd better stick to noisy blowers.
We'll save the music for post-war patriotism, air shows and nostalgia fests.
Losing the romance? Take it from me, war loses it's "romance" as soon as someone shoots back at you. As it should. Still...
"We are poor little sheep who have lost our way.... Baa, baa baa..." (Pratt whines, coughs, starts).
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