Geoffrey TR Hill

Geoffrey Terence Roland Hill (* 1895 - † 1955 ) was a British test pilot and aviation pioneer.

He flew at No. 29 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps and was later also a test pilot during the First World War . He worked for Handley Page with his brother Roderic .

He became known as the British flying wing pioneer of the 1930s for his pterodactyl flying wing aircraft built by Westland Aircraft . Its constructions were mostly controlled by a completely rotating wing tip. In 1933 he became a professor at the University of London .

In 1939 he led a balloon cable cutter project in Pawlett, near Bridgwater . He was then a scientific liaison officer at the National Research Council (NRC) in Canada , where he helped develop a flying wing test glider in 1946. This project ended in 1950.

To research the so-called aero-isoclinic wing, he worked with David Keith-Lucas at Short Brothers , where the Short SB.1 test glider was first created, followed by the jet-powered SB.4 Sherpa . This project should lead to the development of the "fourth V-bomber ".

Hills planes

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  Experimental glider 1923

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  Pterodactyl Ia 1928

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  Pterodactyl IV 1931

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  Pterodactyl V 1932

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  NCR Glider 1946

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  Short SB1 1952

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  Short SC4 1954

Derivatives

Other flying wings with rotary wing control influenced by Hill's designs were the Granger Archeopterix and Halton Meteor , a twin-engine flying wing racing aircraft project with a tandem engine arrangement and a propeller arrangement at the front and rear of the fuselage nacelle.

Another flying wing aircraft with rotary wing control was the Farrar X1. The machine was designed and built in 1950 by Prof. Franklin Farrar at Vanderbilt University (USA). It was first presented in 1951 at the National Soaring Meeting in Grand Prairie / Texas. As with the Ho X, the pilot was lying on his stomach. Entry was from behind through a removable tail cone, from where the pilot had to crawl into the wing. The 9.2 m spanning glider was only controlled by the rotating wing tips, which, in contrast to Hill's constructions, were equipped with additional spreading brake flaps on the trailing edge of the rotating wing tips.

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  Granger Archeopterix 1930

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  Halton Meteor 1932

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  Farrar X1 1951

literature

• Rudolf Storck among others: Flying Wings. The historical development of the world's tailless and flying wing aircraft. Bernard and Graefe, Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-7637-6242-6 .
• Derek James: Westland-Hill Pterodactyls - Database . In: Airplane Monthly September 2010, pp. 59–73
• Flight Magazin March 1930 p.323

Web links

• Unusual aircraft ( Memento of December 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) December 17, 2007
• Models of brushless British experimental aircraft
• Video flight recordings