by Phil Delnon
Penrose was at once installed as pilot "to hold the fort" in Paget's absence, and in view of his married status, Westland upped his insurance cover to a massive £2,500. His pay remained the same, however - which did not worry Penrose, delighted to be paid at all for doing what he wanted most: flying. And within a very short time he had another narrow squeak...
A Wapiti had been fitted with a new steel propeller, and to balance the heavier front-end load the tail had been weighted: but no-one had thought to compensate for the increased longitudinal inertia. The upshot was that when Penrose eventually came to try the plane out in a spin, it refused to recover. The standard test was six spins from 8,000 feet: after eleven spins Penrose decided to bale out, and by the fourteenth spin he had managed to stand up in the open cockpit and reach up to the hand grips in the trailing edge of the upper wing... and by so doing, altered the airstream: it was all that was needed to stop the spin. So now he was merely diving towards the ground as fast as the Wapiti would go. With 1,000 feet to play with Penrose sat down again, hauled back the stick and flew home. Westland promptly made him their chief test pilot. He had exactly 460 hours' flying on his log.
Westland did not hesitate to throw him in at the deep end: very soon he was test-flying the Pterodactyl IV.
It's hard to know what to say about this beast. A description might help. Visualise a short fuselage with engine and propeller at the back - which is known to be more efficient than a conventional, front-mounted version. The motor is inverted, rather like those fitted to de Havilland types, which adds to the streamlining. The cockpit is sited right at the front, affording excellent vision. It is a high-winged biplane with a small lower wing and a huge upper wing cantilevered above the fuselage. The upper wing is swept back at around 45 degrees, giving a good centre of gravity and reduced wind-resistance: the sweep-back is variable, too, anticipating the F-111 by over thirty years. There is variable wing-configuration - the way birds fly: conventional aircraft use ailerons and tailplanes, but the Pterodactyl has no tail at all. Instead there are small fins at the end of each wing. Just for spice, the two wheels of the undercarriage are placed in tandem instead of in parallel, and the front wheel is steerable because there is no propeller-driven airflow to exert force on the rudder. Come to that, there is no rudder either. It is 1931; and to compare the Pterodactyl with aircraft typical of its own day, you might imagine a Harrier jump-jet timeslipped to 1940.
Penrose not only got the thing to fly, he professed to enjoy it. Rather more he enjoyed trying out Westland's latest toy, a low-wing monoplane interceptor whose higher speed had led Westland to devise a smoother blending of wing-root and fuselage. It was a foretaste of the future.
Westland next produced a variant of the interceptor with a huge 37mm gun mounted to fire diagonally upwards. The idea was to fly below the target aircraft and shoot it up whilst remaining unseen. The plane was never developed: Penrose has the opinion that its protagonists were gun-freaks rather than airmen. Presumably he never heard of the German Schrage Musik: twin cannon mounted diagonally upwards in a night-fighter Me-110, used against Bomber Command over the Reich in WWII.
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