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Vulcan bomber pics * electrics by Joe Lucas?


MennoR

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Over on another forum, a guy posted some pics of a Vulcan bomber. He also added some pics of the 'intestines' of that plane. The colour coding looks remarkable familiar... so does the routing of the cables. The absence of grommets where the wiring goes through the metal housing, worries me... I'm proud to say that my TR's wiring loom looks a lot tidier than this!

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A Vulcan was a very early stage in the electronification of aircraft.

The now late and lamented Airbus was possibly the pinnacle.  

Here's just the back of the cockpit's main control panel, a few meters of the 550 Kilometers of wiring!

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And here's a 'see-through' look at the fuselage

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John

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Blimey - that's nearly as scary as the loom on an Audi A8 (D2), which looks like a nest of anacondas under the dash.......  Many colours there

My brother in law works for Airbus as a production engineer and a few years ago (maybe more than a few now) he had a project to create a machine to mark unique cable ID on the insulation of length of wire more or less continuously repeating along its length.  Was hard to do.  Especially quickly enough to be useful.  The answer involved lasers.....

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3 hours ago, GT6Steve said:

Damn!  I well remember doing that lacing on wire bundles.  Was very satisfying to view when complete however...

 

Me too, my gaffer at the time was rather anal that the lacing spacing had to be exactly the same, I blame him for my OCD.

Edited by RedRooster
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JohnD 

Vulcan was the first fly by wire plane amazingly advanced for its time. If you lost the engines you had to rely on a couple of batteries to power the plane while you got the engines restarted, the batteries did not last very long so they developed a air driven generator that could be lowered out of the wing to provide power to be able to continue to fly/control the plane!

BTW The rate of development between the Lancaster and Vulcan was astonishing and there is a very good book (Vulcan Test Pilot by Tony Blackman) on the development of the Vulcan and the problems they had to overcome. Worth a read for the engineering and stories. He tells a story about taking the Vulcan down to Farnborough for the airshow. Afterwards he gave his wife a lift back to factory in the Vulcan with her sitting in the copilots seat and helping fly it home!

Re Airbus wiring, impressive.
You would think that with bus based systems that the amount of wiring would decrease but I guess the functionality has increased so the amount of wiring just keeps increasing...

mike

 
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1 hour ago, mpbarrett said:

You would think that with bus based systems that the amount of wiring would decrease

Do they actually use bus-based systems though?  Not sure it's trusted in commercial aviation context?

Certainly has reduced the wiring bulk in modern cars though brings other challenges, especially diagnostics.....

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35 minutes ago, JohnD said:

Thanks, Mike! Learn something every day!

But how do you compare the development of the Lancaster and the Vulcan?   A generation apart, in "electronics" and propulsion.   

John   

John

what I meant was that there was  a leap in plane development between the Lancaster and Vulcan. It wasn't just one technical advance but a number that all came along at the same time. WW2 greatly increased the development of electronics, this enabled developments in control and instrumentation which were key to the fly by wire systems in the Vulcan.
The development of jet engines allowed for faster planes and new designs, you cant image a Vulcan with props...
Building from new materials allowed  for  a light weight pressurised cabin (and the ability to fly high for longer).
Finally aerodynamics, understanding how plane fly, was developing this allowed for more advanced plane designs such as the delta wing Vulcan.

Finally the government wanted a plane to drop nuclear bombs on Russia and were willing to support companies (all British) to develop planes that fitted the requirements.  Three planes were developed the Vulcan, Valiant and Victor. The V bombers.

The Lancaster was developed with the technology available at the times,  it was successful as a heavy bomber due to the engine technology development (RR Merlin engines) without powerful engines the long range bomber wasn't successful.

With all of this you also need a visionary leader/managment to push the envelope of whats possible. In the case of the Lancaster and Vulcan it was the AVO company.

mike

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12 minutes ago, Nick Jones said:

Do they actually use bus-based systems though?  Not sure it's trusted in commercial aviation context?

Certainly has reduced the wiring bulk in modern cars though brings other challenges, especially diagnostics.....

I don't know but they certainly do for the passenger car Info system (media, phone sat nav, window control etc).
I am sure I read somewhere that in vehicles the info systems now use more processing and wiring that all the car control systems!

 

mike

 


 

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