COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

CHAPTER THIRTEEN FRONTIERS OF WHAT?
Henschel Hs 129 ground attack aircraft and he had tested the concept
himself on a FW 190 and an Me 262. The flying side of his career had
come to an abrupt end on a flight from Berlin, when his Me 110
suffered a double engine failure and deposited him in the municipal
rubbish dump at Augsburg. It must have been quite a prang, because
only the tail was left sticking out, and it put him into hospital for
months.
During his time at RAE I had come to respect him - in the
difficult role which he had to play, almost, but not quite an internee
- and to enjoy his company. Of necessity much of his contribution to
the Lightning had to be indirect, and unattributable, but I believe it
to have been considerable.
Professors are highly regarded in Germany and Karl was no
exception. Moreover he had continued to work on advanced flight
control systems, almost without a break since 1945. As a result he was
in great demand as a consultant, and a potentially valuable point of
contact for Elliotts.
When the Viscount replacement exercise was at its height Ron
Howard and I visited him to talk BAG One-eleven certification. He
and his family received us with typical German hospitality, took us on
a tour of the Harz mountains, and looked longingly towards Broken
which lay behind the Iron Curtain.
In Karl's early flying days it had been customary, possibly
obligatory, to perform aerobatics above Broken's eleven hundred metre
peak. Now it was impossible and he made no effort to hide his
resentment. He saw it as the brutal obliteration of a youthful and
romantic memory. But I suspect it ran much deeper than that.
Our visit did little enough to help the cause of the BAG
One-eleven with Lufthansa. They were already against it, for reasons
which had nothing to do with the flight system, such as fuselage
corrosion below the toilets on their Viscounts. So they bought Boeing
and 20 years on seem likely to be faced with similar problems all over
again - and BAG got it right on the One-eleven with plastic sealing
behind the fuselage stringers!
Gliding was the most constructive aspect of that trip. Karl took us
round the workshops of Akafleig Braunschweig, where the students
were building an ultra high performance fibreglass sailplane. He told
us that a similar exercise was under way at Darmstadt - evidence of a
German led revolution in design.
VJ 101, which I had discussed at length with Ken Powell in Bad
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