America Refused to Build This British Aircraft (Then Begged for 100) скачать в хорошем качестве

America Refused to Build This British Aircraft (Then Begged for 100)

The Americans took one look at this aircraft, called it "plywood and glue," and refused to build a single one. Three years later, they were begging Britain for as many as they could get.That's not folklore. That's not internet mythology. That's documented history, preserved in rejection letters and procurement records and the quiet humiliation of officials who discovered their absolute certainty had been absolutely wrong.The story begins not with the rejection, but with the vision that made rejection possible. In 1938, Geoffrey de Havilland—founder of the de Havilland Aircraft Company, a man who had been building aircraft since before the First World War—began contemplating a design that would strike most aviation experts as deliberately perverse. While every other manufacturer in the world was racing to master aluminum construction, de Havilland proposed going backward. He wanted to build a fast, twin-engine bomber primarily from wood.This was not desperation. This was calculation.De Havilland understood something that escaped the aluminum evangelists who dominated aviation thinking on both sides of the Atlantic. Wood was not simply an inferior substitute for metal. It was an engineering material in its own right, with properties that could be exploited by designers who understood its nature.