Landing a Storch on Admiral Scheer?

German Kriegsmarine 1935-1945.
phylo_roadking
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Post by phylo_roadking »

recall reading somewhere 60 meters of road to take off
These are always measured against a standard ~5kts wind, I think. This 60 metres is thus the speed the Storch needs to run up to take-off speed in a very light head wind. The distance would change with the ship steaming into an oncoming wind, and as has been suggested some sort of rubber catapault arrangement.

P.S. I know the 32 mph stall speed mentioned there is different from Kermit Weeks' 25 mph - given Weeks' professional experience of a wide variety of wartime types and aerobatting them I'm inclined to go with him. If you think about it - 7 mph MAY not seem a lot of a difference, but its a big chunk of 32!
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Paul Lakowski
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Post by Paul Lakowski »

phylo_roadking wrote:
recall reading somewhere 60 meters of road to take off


P.S. I know the 32 mph stall speed mentioned there is different from Kermit Weeks' 25 mph - given Weeks' professional experience of a wide variety of wartime types and aerobatting them I'm inclined to go with him. If you think about it - 7 mph MAY not seem a lot of a difference, but its a big chunk of 32!
It may be that both figures are accurate, but we just need more info to flush out specifically which figures apply to what.

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/pe ... 0088.shtml
phylo_roadking
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Post by phylo_roadking »

....and that takes me above my mathematical level LOL Does anyone know the top speed of the Grille?

Srgt., in the clips you saw, was the Grille MOVING when the Storch landed?

Oh! nearly forgot - Paul, is there a set of similar calculations for carrier aircraft, by any chance? Taking windspeed, and carrier speed into account?
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Tiornu
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Post by Tiornu »

Grille was good for 26 knots--as long as her boilers weren't blowing a tube.
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Post by Srgt Rock »

Phylo-

Grille was underway. It appeared that the Storch was approaching with about 5 to 10 mph speed differential. The problem with landing on Grille is wind vortexes generated by the ships superstructure. In the film clip, the storch was just off the stern of the ship when she encountered one of these vortexes. It pitched the plane up and rolled it to the left and the plane stalled.

As far as the idea of reeling a storch in like the Germans did with the Fa330 pictured or a Fl 282 is not feasible. A storch is not dymananically stable against an unexpected pitch or roll like these two. A helo's spinning rotor provides this stablization.

When calculating landing distance of any a/c on a ship, you need to talk about wind over deck speeds. In the USN in WW II, wods was 22 knotts. Many times our carriers would have to SLOW DOWN to land a/c.

With this in mind, a storch or a Fi167 could have been nearly stationary with respect to Scheer. A land deck of 2-2.5 times the plane's lenght would probably been enough to land AND take-off with some accelleration assist.

When I read about Adm Carls' idea, I looked at Scheer and thought he ment to land aft of the Bruno turret by having the plane approach at a diagonal but the more I thnk about it, landing on the bow seems like a better possibility.

Mark H. seems to have access to better source materials on aircraft performance. If anyone has contact with him, see if he has any material on this subject.
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Post by phylo_roadking »

Srgt., I can certainly understand about WODS, because for landing the cumulative speed of the ship and turning into the windwould mean the ship would have to slow down...

Question - anyone know the stall speed of a Swordfish? Just as a matter of interest. Or the Fi167? Just for comparison.

I had thought about vortexes from the superstructure, I take it the Scheer would have been physically longer than the Grille, thus giving the turbulence room to dissipate before it troubled the air over the fantail?

I didn't mean to reel the Storch IN....but rather to stream it out, like a kite, for take off? ;-)

But here's a thought - the Storch could have its wings folded back and parked for road transport....which gave ne an idea. Can anyone check a three-line drawing of the Scheer - are there any major obstacles would prevent the crew pulling the wings and tail and actually manouvering the plane in sections from a rear landing to a bow takeoff into the wind? ;-)
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Paul Lakowski
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Post by Paul Lakowski »

When the issue of first mounting Helos on these ships was explored it was decided that landing as close to mid ship was desirable due to the masssive pitching of the hull , which is less at mid ship. But in the trials with the Drache the landings are closer to the fantail. Would this position relative to the hull pitching up and down have made that much difference?
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Post by phylo_roadking »

Well, only in as much as in weather conditions THAT extreme at sea level noone would be trying to land a Storch anyway ! :D But as for slow pitching, the Storch's 18 inches' of undercarriage travel could soak up quite a bit of throwing about.
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Srgt Rock
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Post by Srgt Rock »

All landings of the Fl282 were on fantail. The Germans developed a novel method of doing this. The 282 would hover over the fantail. They would then have the 282 drop a rope from its' underside where a deck crew could attach it to a block and then warp the 282 down to the deck. They did this in reverse during take-off calling it a "jump style take-off".

The stall speed of a Fi167 is 35 mph.

Wind buffetting as the storch approached Scheer would be limited if approached into the wind with Scheer moving in a cource about 15-20 degrees right of the wind direction.

As far as landing aft and moving forward. The only area I can see where the storch could land would be aft of the Bruno turret. Even then I believe there would have to be extensions installed to provide enough deck space. But if they could, they might have been able to move the storch forward. It would be very tight in the area of the 15 cm guns. Hovever, if you plan to launch of the bow, why not land there also?

How I see it being done is the storch approaches the ship from the stern offset to port at 35-40 mph. Scheer is moving at a speed to provide 25 knot wods. Once the storch passes the forward turret, it starts to slow down and Scheer would shift to port to place the ship underneath the plane. The storch would be hovering over the landing platform and just need to pitch down slightly to land!!
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Post by Paul Lakowski »

By no means am I an expert ,but is this that doable? Would it not require good weather to pull off such a maneuver ?

Just seems a bit iffy to my inexperienced vision. :shock:

This was done but any one know how much it was trialed and were there any conclusions about the experiments?
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Post by phylo_roadking »

By no means am I an expert ,but is this that doable? Would it not require good weather to pull off such a maneuver ?
The issue is more WHY it was tried! Yes, any landing of a land-based aircraft on a ship would have been considered only in extremis during the war - EVEN on a carrier, such as flying off RAF fighters to Norway and recovering survivors later. Better to mount one of the Graf Zeppelin's planned rocket-assisted dollies on the fantail and launch an Fi167, have it drop its undercarriage (if they bothered to mount it) and make a sea landing as they were designed to withstand, and try to winch it aboard, service it and have it ready to go again. Because the chance of a Storch successfully doing this more than once or twice, with all the margins for error accumulating, is bound to drop to zero the more times its tried....

Does anyone know was this just a way of getting someone important on/off a capital ship, or to use the Storch as an observer?
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Srgt Rock
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Post by Srgt Rock »

At the time Adm Carls proposed this, they were desperate. The surface units were looking for ANY additional help. GZ was months away from completion.

The storch would have been used to provide an additional recce a/c for Scheer. It would have been only a fair weather option. (wind and sea state to force 3 or 4)

I was interested in finding out if this had actually been tried or if it was something that the naval officers had just talked about just as we have been doing.

I do think we have established that the Germans had two VSTOL a/c available to them. I will use this in a new thread I plan to start next week!
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Post by Paul Lakowski »

Srgt Rock wrote:At the time Adm Carls proposed this, they were desperate. The surface units were looking for ANY additional help. GZ was months away from completion.

The storch would have been used to provide an additional recce a/c for Scheer. It would have been only a fair weather option. (wind and sea state to force 3 or 4)

I was interested in finding out if this had actually been tried or if it was something that the naval officers had just talked about just as we have been doing.

I do think we have established that the Germans had two VSTOL a/c available to them. I will use this in a new thread I plan to start next week!
Thank you for you efforts and I look forward to finding out more.
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Post by phylo_roadking »

Personally, I would have gone for a dolly-launched Fi167 - the only "advantage" the Storch enjoyed was the very problematic landing ability...and no combat ability and almost NO chance of surviving an emergency sea landing - whereas the 167 was designed for that. The point would have been to get it UP in an emergency, rather than landing it back on deck...so surely they'd have preferred an assured take-off...

Very much a One Time Only shot....but you possibly get more out of that one time?
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Paul Lakowski
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Re: Landing a Storch on Admiral Scheer?

Post by Paul Lakowski »

Sorry to drag this old thread out of the past....

http://forum-marinearchiv.de/smf/index. ... 894.0.html

I came across this site some time ago and realised I should post it here. It looks like some prewar tests of Storch landing on slow steamer Greif. Some dozen landings happened sucessfully before one veered off the deck. The deck was inclined 12 meters wide and about 25 meters long.

If one was to transpose such an effort onto a Cruiser/Panzerschiff design I could see a much wider deck plus some netting over the side to catch planes that over shoot. Maybe some basic tail hook and wire arrangement to improve the odds. I recall reading somewhere that the Fi176 could land nearly vertical on a ship able to make 30 knots or into a 30 knot wind or some combination of the above?
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