Sunday Fail : VFW 614

The VFW 614 is unusual for a couple of reasons. It was a German designed and built jetliner (though not the first) and also had it's engines on top of the wings instead of underneath like everyone else. The VFW 614 was designed to be a small regional jet and the engines were mounted above the wings to allow usage from rough airstrips. The first VFW 614 took off in 1971 (same as me incidentally).

Sales were slow however, glacially slow for a number of reasons. The VFW 614 was born into the early 1970s oil shock and also was affected by Rolls-Royce's troubles at the start of that decade.

By the time of the first delivery to a customer in 1975 only 10 had been ordered. In the end only 13 were bought by 3 airlines and 3 were also bought by the Luftwaffe, 21 being built in total though only 19 flew. The VFW 614 programme was cancelled in 1977. Those in airline service apparently did not last very long though the Luftwaffe examples remained in service until 1999. One remained in service into the 2000s with the German Aerospace Centre as an "in-flight-simulator" and had been fitted with Fly-by-Wire control systems though was replaced by an Airbus A320.

Picture from Friends of the VFW 614 website

It is a shame the cute little VFW 614 was not a success, in many ways it was ahead of it's time. The market it was intended for did not really take off (pardon the pun) until the 1990s. The programme was a costly failure for VFW Fokker but it did in the end prepare VFW for working on the Airbus project and we all know how well that has gone. A number of these good looking airliners are on display and one has been restored and cleaned up by the Friends of the VFW 614!

Sunday Fail : Nuclear Bazookas

Sometimes people joke about a "nuclear hand grenade" well here is the nearest thing to it, the nuclear bazooka, a weapon that did enter service but maybe we should be thankful that it never had to be used...

The idea is simple: a very short range tactical nuclear weapon that can be used against fast approaching enemy troops. Weapons like the Davy Crockett (US Army) and Wee Gwen (British Army) were designed in the 1950s as a way of halting Soviet ground forces and buy time for NATO to regroup.

Davy Crockett was amazingly thus a nuclear recoiless rifle projectile with a range between 2-4km. Obviously the nuclear warhead of such a device had to be very small otherwise it would be destroy the defenders too. Davy Crockett had at it's core the W54 warhead which was the smallest ever produced by the US. The warhead had a yield of between 10-20 tons of TNT (0.01-0.02 kilotons) but a major part of the weapon's effect was the radiation produced that would leave the area of impact uninhabitable for 48 hours. As such it was one of the first neutron bombs though the term was not used at the time.

This radiation hazard proved even more important when the weapon was tested and found to be highly inaccurate. Anything 400m from the blast was likely to receive a fatal dose of radiation even at the lowest yield setting though 550m was considered the minimum safe distance for friendly troops. The margins were a bit tight though as 500m would cause sterility and a lack of co-ordination. Contrary to myth the blast radius was not greater than the range of the weapon so it was not a suicide weapon, in fact the blast radius could be as small as 200m

Davy Crockett was used by the US Army between 1961 and 1971. The British Wee Gwen never entered service and proved very controversial with the Army who considered weapons like it and the Davy Crockett unsound because of the difficulties it would create with command and control.

The inaccuracy was maybe the main problem with the Davy Crockett, because the blast radius of the weapon was small it was likely the defenders would have to fire a lot of the weapons to try and halt a determined mass Soviet attack. The further the projectile was fired (and thus safer to defending soldiers) the more inaccurate it got too. Well you see the problem there.

Because of the inaccuracy troops would have to fire more against concentrations of the enemy to try and ensure a hit and lets just say there were cheaper warheads they could have fired. Never mind less hazardous!

Sunday Fail : Convair 880

As well as the miltary-based Sunday Fail series i am also going to recycle my "Not Classic Airliners" series which was on yet another now defunct blog and presented commercial airliners which never made it. And here is the first episode...

It is pretty much forgotten these days but back in the classic days of Boeing 707s, Douglas DC-8s and Vickers VC-10s you also had Convair's attempts at a jet airliner. The Convair 880 was not a success though and only sold 65 examples. The 880 was faster than the 707 but also more expensive to run and even back in the cheap oil days of the 1960s that was more important. General Dynamics made a huge loss on the 880 and it's sister airliner the 990 athough one was sold to Elvis as his personal plane. By 1975 none were still in service with major airlines though a few continued in service as cargo airliners or with smaller airlines and in one case a test plane for the US Navy until the late 1990s.



I've always thought it was one of the best looking jet airliners. None are flying nowadays but a few still exist around the world, one in Portugal now serves as a strip club apparently. Despite only 65 being sold it was involved in 17 accidents and 5 hi-jackings so it was not a lucky jet.


Photo from ConvairJet.com