On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 23:50:50 +0000, Grimly Curmudgeon
wrote:

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember Savageduck
saying something like:

The Merlin 61 was built in the US & the UK
but used the Packard designed split head and ended up in Spitfire Mk IX
and P-51s.

That reminds me of something else he told me. Before the separate
cylinder head was introduced, RR had a problem with porous castings and
once glycol got into the combustion chambers it produced a dense smoke
which the pilot couldn't see through on landing. He said it led to quite
a few aircraft and pilot losses on landing.

You can't see much round a spitfire's engine cowl anyway. It used to
be common to side-slip in to get the cowl out of the field of view.
Once you got close to the ground it was a matter of straightening up
and landing by feel. If you had a cylinder head leaking glycol you
could always side-slip away from the smoke, unless you were unlucky
enough to have glycol leaks on both sides.



Eric Stevens