[EveningStar]

Aviation and Aerospace ping

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[Talisker]

What a newbie. /s

[Lorianne]

So he was short. I read another history of British pilots in WWII and a number of them did not meet the height requirements, yet they became excellent pilots and Britain needed all the pilots they could get.

[RayChuang88]

Eric "Winkle" Brown was the British equivalent of Charles "Chuck" Yeager. And would have been the first human to exceed the speed of sound had the British government not foolishly cancelled the Miles M.52 test plane in middle 1946 (and Miles was proven right when a scale model of the M.52 built by Barnes Wallis at Vickers-Armstrong easily broke the sound barrier in a 1949 test flight).

As such, Brown was assigned to the de Havilland D.H. 108 Swallow test program. It his test flying that proved that D.H. 108 was too dangerous a plane to fly at trans-sonic speeds because the plane was dangerously unstable as it approached the speed of sound (it was that instability that killed Geoffrey de Havilland during a test dive). It's likely if the British government went ahead with the TSR.2 that Brown would have done a lot of the test flying before the plane entered service.