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Alertkin.. you assume too much... I agree entirely with your valuable comments that you make in response to my half finished post.. the board at Bristol was amazingly awful. How Hooker managed to get a flyable Proteus 2 and a Proteus 3 out of the doors with the board he had was amazing if not heroic. Of course some of the credit must be given to the team he built up at Bristol. Some were Bristol-grown but pre-Hooker lacked responsibility and some migrated to Hooker from his old team at Derby. One of the Derby people was a lubrication (what we now call tribology) expert by the name of Robert Plumb, who had worked on the Merlin and then the early Derby turbine engines. He soon joined Hooker at Bristol and was appointed chief development engineer - Olympus and Proteus. When Bob Plumb realised they were redesigning the Proteus yet again he asked whether the lessons of Derby's gearboxes should be taken into account. He meant, of course, the redesign of the Trent, Clyde and Dart gearboxes to adopt helical gears in preference to straight spur ones, so eliminating the vibratory force input as each tooth engaged- a source of excitation on all three engines(helical gears engage gradually along the teeth thus reducing the shock loading of the straight spur) Hooker pointed out that the Proteus gearbox seemed to have performed well throughout the Proteus's life, unlike the rest of the engine and so they stuck with spurs. As would have happened at Derby, Plumb carried on and developed a helical gear set anyway....thank goodness!In January 1954 the second prototype, with Proteus 705 engines, G-ALRX commenced her series of flight trials for a certificate of airworthiness from Filton. Disaster struck on the morning of 4th February 1954, when Bill Pegg, the company chief test pilot, was demonstrating the Britannia's capabilities to KLM officials. The aircraft suffered an oil fed engine fire, the result of a failure in the input pinion of the reduction gear of number three engine which caused the compressor turbine to overspeed and disintegrate. The fire raged for 19 minutes as Pegg headed back towards Filton. A few miles from his destination he decided that the wingspars might burn through and elected to belly land on the mudflats. As he touched down the mud covered the aircraft and extinguished the flames. Unfortunately the aeroplane was damaged beyond repair as the salvage crews spent 2 days trying to pull her out of the tidal estuary.Once it was determined the gear was the culprit, Hooker ordered the switch to double helical which was done without delay due to Bob Plumb's anticipation.The photo below is from the RRHT archive.
Alertkin.. you assume too much... I agree entirely with your valuable comments that you make in response to my half finished post.. the board at Bristol was amazingly awful. How Hooker managed to get a flyable Proteus 2 and a Proteus 3 out of the doors with the board he had was amazing if not heroic. Of course some of the credit must be given to the team he built up at Bristol. Some were Bristol-grown but pre-Hooker lacked responsibility and some migrated to Hooker from his old team at Derby. One of the Derby people was a lubrication (what we now call tribology) expert by the name of Robert Plumb, who had worked on the Merlin and then the early Derby turbine engines. He soon joined Hooker at Bristol and was appointed chief development engineer - Olympus and Proteus. When Bob Plumb realised they were redesigning the Proteus yet again he asked whether the lessons of Derby's gearboxes should be taken into account. He meant, of course, the redesign of the Trent, Clyde and Dart gearboxes to adopt helical gears in preference to straight spur ones, so eliminating the vibratory force input as each tooth engaged- a source of excitation on all three engines(helical gears engage gradually along the teeth thus reducing the shock loading of the straight spur) Hooker pointed out that the Proteus gearbox seemed to have performed well throughout the Proteus's life, unlike the rest of the engine and so they stuck with spurs. As would have happened at Derby, Plumb carried on and developed a helical gear set anyway....thank goodness!
In January 1954 the second prototype, with Proteus 705 engines, G-ALRX commenced her series of flight trials for a certificate of airworthiness from Filton. Disaster struck on the morning of 4th February 1954, when Bill Pegg, the company chief test pilot, was demonstrating the Britannia's capabilities to KLM officials. The aircraft suffered an oil fed engine fire, the result of a failure in the input pinion of the reduction gear of number three engine which caused the compressor turbine to overspeed and disintegrate. The fire raged for 19 minutes as Pegg headed back towards Filton. A few miles from his destination he decided that the wingspars might burn through and elected to belly land on the mudflats. As he touched down the mud covered the aircraft and extinguished the flames. Unfortunately the aeroplane was damaged beyond repair as the salvage crews spent 2 days trying to pull her out of the tidal estuary.
Once it was determined the gear was the culprit, Hooker ordered the switch to double helical which was done without delay due to Bob Plumb's anticipation.
The photo below is from the RRHT archive.
