Shipbucket

Very unortodox design of a trasport.

Developed H.P.75 airliner

Even though the H.P.75 transport programme lost official support in 1944, an airliner development of the aircraft was published in the Italian magazine "L'Ala" in 1949 as the illustration for an article on canard developments.



There appears to have been no development of the tailless transport project at HP, but records from 70 years ago are potentially missing. An interesting aspect of the illustration that could perhaps suggest it was from a genuine design is that the aircraft is not a canard, but is fitted with a Lachmann rider-plane, a design feature not mentioned in the article.
Even if the illustration in the magazine was merely Italian journalistic fantasy, IF the design project had been continued, and IF the aerodynamics worked as designed, then the Hastings/Hermes series of aircraft would not have been developed from the Halifax, and instead the Hermes would have been built looking like this design.

Do you have any further reading on this "rider-plane" control system concept? I am wholly unfamiliar with it.

Here is HP's patent for the rider plane, the full text of which is available at the European Patent Office via the Espacenet search.



As can be seen from the patent diagramme, the initial design was changed by 1945 when the rider plane was completed and ready for installation on the H.P.75. While fitting flight controls to a canard foreplane for increased efficiency is an obvious concept, the ability to miniaturise controls and components available in the late 1930's was a major stumbling block. Advances in aerodynamics for wing design in the 1940's addressed the problems that the rider plane was designed to solve - but that being said a modern rider plane fitted to an aircraft like the Piaggio Avanti may have enabled that design to dispense with the rear horizontal tailplane.

Very nice additions.
I agree the L'Ala design looks plausible to be a real design. I assume a trawl through the Flight archive didn't bring anything up?

_________________
Hood's Worklist
English Electric Canberra FD
Interwar RN Capital Ships
Super-Darings
Never-Were British Aircraft

The archive is an exciting research tool, particularly for British and empire topics, but couldn't find anything there.

Sorry for the delay guys, but stuck in a bit of a knowledge black-hole at the moment, which I'm hoping to get some info to be able to illustrate out of.
After the initial work on the H.P.75 HP, along with most other British heavy aircraft designers, provided designs for the RAF 75-ton and 100-ton super bomber projects. The Bristol and Vickers designs are well known (I hope to illustrate them later), but as mentioned in the Avro tree some of the other manufacturers designs appear to have disappeared from the record - I really want to see a 10-engined mega-Lancaster, but even the Avro historical society has no info . That being said, the Avro designs didn't lead to anything, and had no noticeable impact on future designs.
Not so with the HP designs though. HP designed an "orthodox" super bomber and two canard super bombers, all three of which appear to have likewise disappeared. But the canard aircraft were the linking designs between the H.P.75 Manx and the eventual H.P.80 Victor, so I really want to include them here.
But I may have found RAeS documents that may yield some details, so please bear with me for a while, and hopefully I may get a result.

HP 75 ton bomber proposals

In 1942 the RAF called requested designs for 75 ton and 100 ton superbombers. HP responded with 3 designs in the 75 ton class that they referred to internally as 70 ton bombers. None of these designs were given HP design numbers.
After being lost from sight for many years, these designs have only just come to the public domain.



The first design submitted bears more than a passing resemblance to what would become the USAF B-36, using information supplied by Consolidated through HP's liaison officer in the US.

Developed from the H.P.75 Manx, the second design was a tailless pusher equipped with a rider-plane. The fuselage very deep but narrow, allowing for carriage of the bomb-load stacked in two rows, 5 high. Unfortunately the original HP general arrangement diagram does not show the bomb-bay door arrangement.

The third design was a further developed pusher, fitted with 8 Metro-Vick jet engines, and a modified wing for higher-speed flight. With the lower power available from the initial version of the F.2 engines, take-off augmentation with RATOG would be required.

The 75 ton and 100 ton bomber designs were considerable step-ups from the heavy bombers then in service, and of all the designs from the various British manufacturers, only a transport version of one of the Bristol bomber designs was ever built as the Bristol Brabazon.