Here's a little info from the list... Harry
Subj: JATO Coupe Date: 4/15/99 6:08:28 PM Eastern Daylight Time From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mack, Don) Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ([EMAIL PROTECTED] Net (E-mail)) I was browsing around Air and Space's web site and found the following about the JATO Coupe at: http://www.airspacemag.com/ASM/Mag/Index/1995/ON/roff.html I had seen pictures (via the net) and thought this part of the article would interest you folks (kid's do not try this at home): The Air Force's jets-on-trucks concept had its roots in the early days of aviation, when a few forward-looking aeronauts first mated rockets and gliders. In Germany, first Friedrich Stamer (in 1928), Julius Hatry, and finally Fritz von Opel (both in 1929) flew gliders that were boosted aloft by solid-propellant rockets--the earliest known examples of jet-assisted takeoff. The first flight of a conventional aircraft boosted by JATO was made in 1929, when an overloaded Junkers W33 seaplane took off from the Elbe River near Dessau, Germany, with the aid of six black-powder rockets. In 1941, Homer A. Boushey, a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot, achieved a milestone when he took off in a two-seat Ercoupe solely on the power of a rocket. Boushey, a Stanford graduate and former airmail pilot, had been so gung-ho about rocketry that in 1939 he'd written to Robert Goddard at his Roswell, New Mexico testing location and later traveled to the site to visit the pioneering rocket scientist. While he was stationed at Wright Field in Ohio, Boushey was assigned to the aircraft lab to investigate rocket propulsion. Meanwhile, at the California Institute of Technology, Theodor von Karman and his staff had, after several failures, managed to produce small rockets reliable enough to be attached to a light aircraft. Boushey came up with the idea of putting them on the Ercoupe. "The idea was we wanted to get as light a plane as we could," Boushey remembers. "The Ercoupe belonged to the Army Air Corps. I flew it out from Wright Field to March Field in California, where we made the test." The tests, conducted in August 1941, were highly successful: three solid-propellant rockets were strapped under each wing of the airplane, and the Ercoupe took off in about half the length of runway it normally used. At the end of the tests, Boushey recalls, "von Karman said, 'Just for history, let's unscrew the propeller and be the first to fly an airplane with rocket power alone.' " To be sure of getting off the ground, they doubled the number of rockets and started the airplane rolling by towing it with a rope attached to a truck. Boushey left the cockpit canopy open and held the end of the rope in one hand. Thus was born the little-known and short-lived concept of Rocket-'n'-Rope-Assist. "I guess I must have gotten 30 or 40 miles an hour before the tension got too great for me to hold onto," Boushey says. "Then we lit the rockets--we put 12 on instead of six--and it took off in a hurry." Don Mack N2051H
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