#ryan aeronautical

[humanoidhistory]

Concept art by Robert Watts for Teledyne Ryan, ca. 1967-1977.

[thegikitiki]

First on the Moon...

   Ryan Aeronautical Company, 1966

[humanoidhistory]

A 1972 Ryan Aeronautical diagram illustrates the data and communications technology behind an unmanned aerial vehicle, better known today as a drone. At a later date, I’m sure they’d rethink the AIDS acronym.

(San Diego Air & Space Museum)

[humanoidhistory]

Cockpit mockup for an experimental vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft made by Ryan Aeronautical.

(San Diego Air & Space Museum)

[humanoidhistory]

1970 concept art from Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical shows Apollo 13 astronauts exploring the Moon with the lunar module in the background.

(NASA)

[toofarforgracie]

[something-boring]

In the earliest days of jet development, jet engines tended to have sluggish acceleration.  That is definitely not a desirable trait for a carrier plane, which needs to take off as fast as it can - especially in the days before steam catapults were fitted to carriers.  Still, the US Navy knew it wanted a jet fighter - jets were clearly the aircraft of the future, after all.  In the interim, the Navy hit on a solution - make a plane powered by both prop and jet!

The initial contract was placed in February 1943, calling for prototypes to be delivered in fourteen months; Ryan missed that deadline, with the first prototype delivered in June 1944.  Wind tunnel tests showed that Ryan's engineers had miscalculated the center of gravity of the Fireball, so a new tail had to be designed.  Three prototypes were lost, in part due to problems with compressibility: at speeds approaching the speed of sound, air behaves differently than at lower speeds, requiring a stronger design.

It wasn't until March 1945 that Fireballs entered squadron service... and even then, training and carrier qualification took too long for the Fireball to see combat.  In November, orders for 1,044 FR-1s were canceled, leaving the Navy with 66 aircraft.  A second squadron attempted to qualify on the FR-1, and ran into troubles.  For one, pilots kept slamming the nose gear down after landing on the main gear, breaking the nose gear; for another, the design itself continued to show problems, limiting maneuvers to 5Gs max.  When one Fireball split in two on landing, it became clear that the plane was in trouble - inspections showed early signs of structural failures among other FR-1s in service, caused by the stresses of repeated carrier takeoffs and landings.  In March 1947, the FR-1 was withdrawn.

What went wrong?  The Fireball was probably going to be a dead-end design from the start - it's unlikely that jet development would always stay stagnant, would always make it so that jet acceleration was too slow and fuel consumption too high for carrier operations.  But the type seems to have been an inadequate design for a carrier plane in the first place.  Ryan Aeronautical, designers of the Fireball, had previously mostly built trainers; perhaps they were the wrong contractor to ask to develop a carrier prop/jet fighter?

[oleprimdahl]

First flight of the Ryan FR Fireball fighter 25/6 1944.