On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 01:37:57 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Mary Shafer wrote:

Someone asked about a refueling receptacle back by the tail on the
F-8. First, receptacles are on the forebody, not at the back end.
Secondly, the F-8, being a Navy airplane, has a probe, not a
receptacle. It's on the left side, just below the cockpit, I think.

I think it was a reference to a ground refueling point; but it clearly
is hydraulically related given the writing on the data placard.

It wouldn't be on the top, up at the back. The Crusader is a Navy
airplane, operated off carriers. The Navy doesn't make the mechanics
climb up and stand on the airplane to refuel it, because even super
carriers develop quite a lot of deck motion in high sea states.

We put a flight control computer in that space, after removing the
probe, on our F-8, so I'm going by memory of the dummy probe we
strapped onto the airplane for my PIO suppression filter testing.

Ever see the cool looking supercritical wing test F8? Or is this the one
you are referring to?

Naturally. It's parked on a concrete pad right beside my F-8, which
was the Digital Fly-By-Wire. They're both F-8Cs that we got from the
Navy. In fact, we asked for an F-8 for the supercritical wing.

We also had some plans to put a skew wing on the F-8 DFBW, jointly
with the Navy. Because all you have to do is disengage the jack screw
at the front of the wing and remove the pin from the hinge at the back
to lift the entire wing structure right off, the F-8 is a natural for
putting new wings onto. Using the DFBW would have let us use a flight
control system that greatly reduced the cross-axis effects (pitch
maneuvers causing roll and yaw movements and vice versa).

This would have been a transonic airplane and the major advantage of
the skew wing would have been the reduction in spotting factor. The
skew wing spotting factor would have been 0.7, while a regular F-8 had
a spotting factor of 1.3 (I think the A-4 was still the standard,
although it may have been the A-7). That's a substantial reduction,
one that the Navy would really like to see. But Dryden and the piece
of the Navy advocating this couldn't get approval at the higher levels
of our respective agencies, so we never did it.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer