The Triplane Bomber That Failed To Fly | Tarrant Tabor [Aircraft Overview #27]
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
- The Tarrant Tabor was the only aircraft to be designed and built by W.G. Tarrant Ltd. It was built as the next 'big bomber' that could be used to bomb Berlin during World War One, but the Armistice came before it was completed.
Built with six engines and three massive wings, it was an imposing sight to behold. Unfortunately it was a complete failure and is probably why Tarrant never attempted to make aircraft again.
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Producing these videos is a hobby of mine. I have a passion for history, and personally own a large collection of books, journals and other texts, and endeavor to do as much research as possible. However if there are any mistakes, please don't hesitate to reach out and correct anything :)
Sources:
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F.A.Q Section
Q: Do you take aircraft requests?
A: I have a list of aircraft I plan to cover, but feel free to add to it with suggestions:)
Q: Why do you use imperial measurements for some videos, and metric for others?
A: I do this based on country of manufacture. Imperial measurements for Britain and the U.S, metric for the rest of the world, but I include text in my videos that convert it for both.
Q: Will you include video footage in your videos, or just photos?
A: Video footage is very expensive to licence, if I can find footage in the public domain I will try to use it, but a lot of it is hoarded by licencing studies (British Pathe, Periscope films etc). In the future I may be able to afford clips :)
Q: Why do you sometimes feature images/screenshots from flight simulators?
A: Sometimes there are not a lot of photos available for certain aircraft, so I substitute this with digital images that are as accurate as possible.
Feel free to leave you questions below - I may not be able to answer all of them, but I will keep my eyes open :)
Martin Baker MB5 - possibly the finest piston engined fighter to never see operational use.
Wittemann-Lewis NBL-1 "Barling Bomber". Follow on design to the Tarrant Tabor.
Barlng went on to produce the "Barling Bomber". It did fly but only just. Also, about the "Christmas Bullet", it is one of the stories that starts off with "You can't make this s**t up!" with a "Hold my beer..." in the middle!
Gotha G.I. First twin engined aircraft built by Gotha and introduced one of the first twin tails for differential thrust in case of power to one of its engines was lost. The Gotha G.I was used in bombing raids and recon in France and Russia. A seaplane variant of the G.I became the first twin engined aircraft to bomb London on March 10th 1916.
could you cover some more saab aircraft? I quite enjoyed the last video on the saab 17
I can only imagine how time is needed to adequately research all this material you present. Really enjoy the content and all that goes with it.
My local Cafe makes a small fortune from my coffee orders 🤣
Yep he does a superb job doesn't he? Deserves far more subscriptions. Researching so many weird planes must be tough. Delivery of info is brilliant.
I think if it had one more wing and two more engines it would have flown gracefully.
Without the upper wing the airplane looks pretty "modern".Shame it couldn't have been redesigned with more powerful engines and just two wings.Thanks for a look at an aircraft I'd never heard of.
That's exactly what I was thinking too...
@@jonas053 as was I.
How about deleting the upper wing and moving the upper engines outboard of the other nacelles between the middle and lower wing? It would certainly fix a lot of issues and end up with an engine arrangement thats almost conventional.
Pre-WW2 masive-flying-machine projects are just fantastic, unique in aviation history. I am totally enjoying your channel, Rex, especially this subject.
Every time i hear that engine start up at the beginning of your videos I am reminded of the time, many years ago, when I inadvertently installed the wrong carburetor on my long suffering 6 cyl 73 Chevy Nova.
Marcel lobelle would go on to design most fairey planes before WWII, and he (and ernest tips, of tipsy aircraft) established a daughter company in Belgium, avions Fairey at Gosselies.
the more you look at some of these aircraft the more you think that those in the cartoon series Dastardly and Muttley were not as far fetched as it looks.
The body shape did remind me of that of the later de Havilland Mosquito. It also reminded me of some of the airships contemporary with the Tarrant Tabor, such as the Royal Navy airship SSZ class.
I am looking forward to the next trip into the history of long forgotten aviation.
Stop that pigeon NOW!
As always a very interesting historical documentation. My late grandfather was a mechanic during and after the war and witnessed the demise of the aircraft. He described the rotation at take-off as a vivid memory (80+ at the time) and that he and his colleagues had taken a "trophy" from the crash site, but unfortunately its been lost in time. Excellent.
G'day,
From memory, Tarrant was the Money, Lobelle was the Aerodynamics and Structures, and Barling was the Lunatic obsessed by extremely tall Triplanes.
The Tarrant pitched over when they tried upthrottling the Top two Engines, and their Thrust - versus the Drag of the loaded-up Wheels on the Turf, caused it to nose-over and deconstruct itself.
Barling then crossed the Atlantic to motivate a scaled down version called the "Barling Bomber" which flew - but only just, barely, and it was deemed to be useless.
Your account dovetails with what I read in Aeroplane Monthly magazine back in the 1970s.
I thought one Wheel of the Tarrant Tabor was in the London Science Museum, saved for Posterity (!) ?
Such is life,
Have a good one ...
Stay safe.
;-p
Ciao !
Absolutely your videos are always a delight.
It's Sunday and you just made my weekend. I usually save my favorite channel's videos for Saturday mornings because I'm a giant child
Walter Barling would go on to make a similar aircraft known as the Barling Bomber at the behest of Billy Mitchell. All the engines were moved to just above the lower wing to avoid the Tabor's problem. However it was slow, under powered, and was unable to fly very far with its full payload. In fact it could only fly 700 miles if it didn't carry any bombs.
Thank you
I like finding out about aircraft I've never heard of!
"Bigger is not always necessarily better" seems to be the motto of a lot of these videos.
Magnificent.
Not good, but magnificent.
This thing looks like something out of 'Wacky Races'. Huge tri-plane with some very impressive stats. Great video yet again
Hm, I hadn't thought of that one yet, good one. I already read about the plane in the "Aircraft encyclopedia part 2", but now that I see it in more detail in contemporary pics, it looks like a heavily over-designed piece of furniture to me 😂
Did you miss the mention of Walter Barling? He crossed the pond to America and convinced General Billy Mitchell to finance something called the Barling Bomber, which was essentially an larger, better-powered, less crashy version of the Tabor. It was expensive to maintain and dangerous to fly, but it impressed the heck out of little boys at State Fairs for about five years.
Now it came to me, your intro. Waking up @ 3am in Lake Ockeechobee Fla to the sound of Airboats getting started on Duck Season Morning . Great intro & sound.
A patent and a lot of work in making the fuselage into a streamlined bullet, all wasted by 3-storeys of scaffolding clutter on the wings.
How does a designer bear the memory, when a bizarre construction of his own fancy, kills the test pilots? At least the 'Bonny Gull' killed its own designer (who flew against the advice of his friends).
@@johnjephcote7636 Hell, the designer of HMS captain caused like 600 deaths and his own
Many thanks for posting. I recently discovered your channel and have been catching up with your videos which I have been thoroughly enjoying.
Great video! Fascinating to see a design that looks strikingly modern and anachronistic at the same time. Almost looks like a DC-3 fuselage sandwiched into a crazy Caproni-esque wing structure.
with a senior engineer and good plan i believe we can build this monster today to fly just fine! with a full kitchen gally and master chef!
Can’t believe they mounted those two engines so far above the centerline. Even to the casual eye, that’s a mistake.
No, see, the tail is heavy so the turning moment is to counteract that
Another fascinating vid! Love this channel.
Yet another one I've never heard of - thanks, and please keep 'em coming.
You can see a lot in these photos (besides just how staggeringly big it was) to suggest some pretty good ideas went into it. The construction is clearly very sturdy, and the fuselage looks like a leap ahead in aero design.
On the other hand, great engineering doesn't guarantee a great aircraft. My one thought is that maybe if that top wing and engines were set back a bit, the overall balance might have been better .
Looks like a torpedo with wings stuck on
The shot of the fuselage on its own looked more like a submarine to me!
Rex.. Fantastic channel. Love all your odd ball planes and the great research. Hope you get much wider distribution of your channel. A hidden gem. ❤️
5:31
"That makes it taller, but shorter than the Caproni 90"
I know what you mean by this, but it still sounds funny.
Looking at three view drawings you could say, by adding up all of the wing spans, the Tarrant Tabor had an effective wingspan of 300 feet!
Is it just me or does "tail heaviness" sound like exactly what you would want to counteract the pull of upper engines?
They NEVER should have added that extra weight without letting the pilots know. Never.
One thing during the Normandy Landings was they had a General coming in in a glider. Some bright boy decided the General needed extra protection - so they added some armor plate to the glider floor ...
When the glider was disconnected from the tow plane - it was going down. The pilot managed to keep everyone from dying - but not the General.
People who don't know what they are doing shouldn't make modifications to aircraft ....
The problem is - you sometimes have people with more power than sense telling people to do things.
.
Thank you
I suspect that the extra ballast put in the front section of the airplane pushed the CG too far forward and made it have a tendency to nose down. Thus causing the plane to pitch the nose downward upon leaving the ground. Causing the unknowing pilots no time to correct and the plane then crashed back to earth quite quickly.
The nose down moment the upper engines would cause would be substantial. I suspect the “tail heavy” assessment was correct but the ballast decision was incorrect, because the tail being heavy counteracts the twisting moment the upper engines would create at low air speeds. (At cruising speed you could trim it easier, or throttle down the upper engines) it’s still a stupid design, but back then, they didn’t know anything compared to even 20 years later. Yet, someone should’ve seen that, it’s not hard, and they’re issues that don’t require much aerodynamic knowledge to identify.
@@joseiten3647 Even back then, management ruled over the engineers. “A new design is too expensive, just add a wing and make it work!”
Who "nose"...?
Very good! 😷@@JTA1961
The photo suggests that the 'ground crew'/riggers should have been recruited from the sailing ship merchant marine.
My ears perked up when I heard the name "Barling" mentioned in the group that proposed the design.
Perhaps you could make a video on the "Barling Bomber" for the USAFC in the 1920s.......
Imagine this just as a biplane with its intended engines. It would have been quite the thing
Im surprised it wasnt the Germans who built this monster.
It looks very Russian but they were doing things other than building a Tsar aeroplane in 1919.
@@davidwright7193 It looks very German who historical have built huge military machines
The thought that they may have added the balast after the designer told them not to and without even informing the pilots is both shocking and infuriating.
"So, we have a completely untested aircraft with an already dodgy stability and unknown handling characteristics.
"Let's significantly change its mass and center of gravity and not tell the guy who will fly it. There's no way this could go wrong..."
I can't get over the idea that a way of making an aircraft more airworthy was to add a massive weight to it! Was the undercarriage actually built of wood, or was that that just artistice licence? I can't imagine those wooden struts lasting two seconds under the impact of that beast landing - lead or no lead.
!31 ft wingspan was larger than a B-24.
Even if it was 31meters(101 feet) the b24 has a 110 foot wing, lol.
Edit: rewatching I found 131 feet, yes larger than a b24.
PLEASE do a video on the Mannesman Giant Triplane. With size comp.
Thanck you for your good researches…I like too…olds aircrafts projects( flying or not) and I follow all yours subjects.👏👏👏
0:20 imagine getting this huge plane ready thinking you'll hit plenty of targets only to hear literally hours later that the war was about to end
(Not that the war ending is a bad thing of course)
That literally happened with the Handley Page HP V/1500. The first examples were on the runway, ready to take off on their first combat mission to bomb Germany when they got word about the armistice being signed. The mission was scrubbed and the type saw only limited service in the post-war RAF.
So maybe I missed something. The aircraft crashed because……….Someone forgot to mention to the pilots that this thing was incredibly nose heavy and light on for bomb simulation weight. Perhaps they may have been hasty in dropping this concept?
A disastrous giant interwar aircraft so obscure that it didn’t make it into a Miyazaki movie .
I've long known of this aircraft as a rather ridiculous folly; I did not know that there was a serious amount of experience behind its design and construction. Very much like the Caproni nine-wing wonder; a failure, but not a ridiculous failure (nor a scandalous one like the Christmas Bullet).
This is like the five turbo four cylinder with a supercharger I just got done watching.
Number of wings? Yes
Number of engines? Yes
Hotel? Triwingo
Hearing the phrase "wind tunnel" is not something I expect alongside designs like this.
W. H. Barling wasn't finished with oversized bombers, yet. He emigrated to the U.S. where he designed the gigantic Whittman-Lewis XNBL-1, popularly known as the "Barling Bomber", for General Billy Mitchell. Unlike the Tarrant Tabor, the Barling Bomber actually did manage to fly, although not very well.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witteman-Lewis_XNBL-1
To me, that's a very beautiful plane.
Maybe, if it lost the top wing and engines. It had a aerodynamic fuselage with wings that create too much drag .
A good follow-up video would be Walter Barlings next project which was a long range bomber built for the US Army Air Corps
WH Barling moved on to design the very similar Barling Bomber for the U.S. Army. He addressed the obvious main problem with the Tarrant Tabor - not enough wheels!
That landing gear looks dangerous as hell on its own. On any surface other than a completely hardened one, that strut in front of the wheels could dig in and lead to the gear being torn off on landing.
The dimensions kind of match the Transall C-160, which is a bit bigger than the C-130... Amazing.
The fuselage was great.
The rest of the aircraft, however..🤪
28 ft in the air???
What the hell were they thinking???
I think we all agree that without the top wing, this would have been a handsome aircraft.
Would've looked a bit HP Heyford-like, but less boxy...
Love the video. For an airplane about the same time developed in the United States that was only slightly more successful, maybe you could do a video about the Barrling bomber. It did fly. But not well
The same Barling associated with the Tabor went on to design the "Barling Bomber."
@@dancahill8555 makes sense. He probably should've done something else for a living
That certainly wasn't Ta-boring!
They should have just called it "the dirigible with wings!" lol
Barling took the basic design to America and convinced the US Army to fund its construction, named XNBL-1, (also refereed to as the Barling Bomber). The two upper engines were moved to the gap between the mid and lower wing. It flew successfully, but had performance problems and the design was not pursued.
...And then there was the Barling Bomber!
This the era of big EGOS big airplanes.
Good grief! It looks like something Klunk would have built in the ‘catch the pigeon’ cartoons!
My memory is pretty scant, but I remember the dog was called Mutley.
@@krajmutfak8940 - It was indeed! Dick Dastardly and his sidekick Mutley! 😂
There's the old saying "The path to success is littered with failure". None more so than early aviation.
Marcel Lobelle later joined Fairey and his last design being the Barracuda
Being an Engineer as soon as I saw this craft I said, if you engage the upper motors this plane will nose dive hard! No matter if it was in the air or not. With the 3rd wing and the motors mounted on the first wing the arrow dynamics will turn it into a un-flyable Kite or rip the plane apart. Only computers could have made this fly and it's such a poor design it might have great in the great war but it was garbage. Too slow even then and the weight would have hampered it's ability so much rifles would have brought it down. It's like Jenga, remove just one part and it would collapse in on it's self fast. Great video and I gave a thumbs up! Cheers
The Tarrant Tabor concept had a second life in the United States Army Air Corps as the "Barling Bomber" also known as the Wittemann-Lewis NBL-1. U.S. Air Corps Gen. William "Billy" Mitchell brought over Walter H. Barling to design an experimental strategic bomber in the early 1920s based on his experience designing the Tarrant Tabor. The Barling Bomber looked a lot like the Tarrant Tabor with a cigar shaped monocoque fuselage, three wings and six engines. But this time they used war surplus Liberty 12-cyclinder engines. The Barling actually successfully flew, but it was so slow and lumbering that it was never effective as a bomber. It pretty much ended up as a hangar queen and a nuisance. You should do a follow up video on the Barling and it's ultimate fate.
Where do you come up with this stuff? I've studied aviation for 50 years and have never heard of that. I would love to see your library of reference books; probably puts mine to shame.
@@mikearmstrong8483 I think I originally read about the Barling Bomber in an issue of "Air Power" magazine back in the 1980s. But I refreshed my memory by looking it up in Wikipedia, which has all the same details.
I didn't know any of this thank you Great Video
With the drag generated by all of those struts, empennage and undercarriage, one has to wonder why they went to such efforts to make the fuselage so streamlined.
Could you do a video on the (pretty much completely) forgotten P-36 Hawk?
Looks like a cross between a Zeppelin and a torpedo!
Good Evening everyone
The German R Plane, Poll Giant was a try plane with a fifty metre span and ten Engines. Not completed.
So would it have flow just fine without the front ballast or was it a flawed design from the start?
Somebody sabotaged the aircraft by adding that thousand pounds of ballast without the builder's and pilots' knowledge. i'd like to see a modeler attempt to recreate the aircraft and see who was right.
An airplane that crashes and is completely destroyed by just revving its engines while still sitting stationary on the ground.
Amazing!
Great video, but, please, convert royal units to metrical - including those lbs.
Maybe give out both as he is English & we mostly still use Imperial measurements. I think Americans use Imperial practically exclusively! 👍
Yes! More weird wacky stuff!
Excellent review of a very obscure type. TFP. A minor matter at 6:12. It's National 'Physical' Laboratory, not 'physics'.
In those days a door maker could retool for aircraft production without a hitch.. sometimes.
with this sleek fuselage, plane would look excellent if you dicard the 3rd top wing.
Not being an aviator or an engineer, it still seems to me the sheer bulk of size on this bomber with additional weight of extra wings would not be conducive for successful flight.
So it might have flown if not for the ballast?
Great ☺️ story please keep it up.
That thing looked doomed to fail from the beginning.
It's funny bc the fuselage itself looks the most modern part.
I would have hated to be one of the ground crew assigned to start the engines on that plane. Everyone of them would require a ladder or platform to get up to them to crank the engines or spin the propeller.
Can you make a video about dornier do x?
At birth I was mis-specied as human but now I identify as a triplane. I demand to be officially recognised as such and provided with a hangar and runway.
Did they realize back then that adding another wing added a lot of drag?
I am surprised that by 1919, they didn’t see that one coming. They must have had a good idea of thrust lines at that point. All things aside, the parasitic and induced drag of that would have made it a complete non starter.
Well I'm sure Tarrant was furious.
Never heard of that type. The biggest british bombers of that time where the Vickers Vimy and Handley Page V/1500.
V/1500, yes; the Vimy though was far smaller (and more practical, ending up having a long career, many spinoff designs, and several famous distance flights).
This is going to take lots of measuring, BBQ skewers & foamboard . . & if it's lucky, 2 motors & 4 freewheeling dummies!
@RexsHangar >>> 👍👍
This is a great video about a time when aircraft design was "hey let's try this". Two wings and two engines not enough? OK we can just add another wing and two more engines. What could possibly go wrong? Oops.....
You'd need nerves of steel just to be an engine fitter on this thing, let alone to fly it!