se5a and re8 wings

[se5a12]

Hello,
Could anyone explain what it was about the wings on these aircraft that required additional flying wires to the top wing about 1/3rd across ? ...Thanks

[LewisS]

One could conjecture that the wires were added as additional strengthening for positive "g" forces. The SE5a was one of the few aircraft of WWI that could be dived steeply at speed.

With the RE8 being of a much longer upper wingspan, and much heavier with pilot and observer, the weight of bombs, wireless, Scarff ring and gun, the additional flying wires would also be helpful during positive "g" manuevers?

It's odd that the RE8, given it's relative modernity, still had the upper wing kingposts and upper landing wires that the BE12, RE7 and BE2e had before it.

But then the Handley Page 0/100 and 0/400 had these also..

[Chock]

When the SE5 was new, one of the prototypes (A4562), suffered an in flight break up at Farnborough whilst being test flown. It had been flying for a short while when the interplane struts were seen to fail and fall away on one side, and the wing collapsed, causing it to crash, killing the test pilot, Major Gooden.

At the time of the crash, several theories were put forward, but an exhaustive investigation on the wreckage by Dr AP Thurston of the Aeronautical Inspectorate revealed that the compression ribs at the strut attachment points had failed and made the struts detach when under downward compression, since there was no webbing to absorb the torsion in the wings. Because of this, the ribs and the strut fittings were strengthened on the production models and stronger lift wires were installed to distribute the load properly. That's probably why.

After that modification, the structure of the SE5 and SE5a gave little trouble and it is rare to find reports of failures for anything under the normal loads without combat damage. Although there is one instance of it occurring which is related in Bill Lambert's Combat Report biography, where he had a failure whilst doing aerobatics, but managed to get down in one piece, and he said that it was the only time the SE5a gave him any cause for concern, being as it was a rarity probably caused by a material fault.

I daresay it was a similar story with the other aircraft. Most likely to distribute the lift or possibly the landing load more evenly, reducing torsional forces on the wing.

If that is not the reason, then it may simply have been a 'belt and braces' approach to constructing an aircraft which could have wires shot away, allowing some redundancy in the bracing if parts were damaged.

Al