America Paid Britain to Scrap This Fighter (It Was the Fastest Thing They Had) скачать в хорошем качестве

America Paid Britain to Scrap This Fighter (It Was the Fastest Thing They Had)

In 1944, a team of engineers at Miles Aircraft in Woodley, Berkshire, were building something nobody had built before: a plane designed from the outset to exceed the speed of sound. The Air Ministry's specification was designated E.24/43. The aircraft was the Miles M.52. Its design incorporated a straight, thin bi-convex wing and an all-moving tailplane — both considered essential for surviving the aerodynamic violence of transonic flight. For a brief, genuinely extraordinary period, Britain led the world in this field. Then Britain shared everything it knew.Under an Anglo-American data-sharing agreement entered into in 1944, researchers working on the M.52 began exchanging technical information with their American counterparts. American engineers visited Woodley. Data moved across the Atlantic. The arrangement was framed as mutual — a wartime alliance pooling knowledge at a common scientific frontier, both nations racing toward a breakthrough that neither had yet achieved.On 6 February 1946, without warning, the British government cancelled the M.52. The Emerald aeronautical engineering journal documents the abruptness directly: the cancellation came without warning or explanation. The Miles engineers, by the Cambridge aeronautical journal's own assessment, were temperamentally well-suited to take on the novelty of the supersonic project. The official justification cited concern about pilot safety in transonic flight, and the recommendation was to pursue unmanned rocket-powered models instead. The aircraft was at an advanced stage of development. It never flew.