SNCASE SE.1010

hesham

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nice bird ! the real one was to be France very own Republic Rainbow long range reco aircraft but was actually a bitch that went into a flat spin and killed its entire crew in 1949...
 
Did anyone diagnose the problem that caused the loss?
 
Lots of things... France was ruined, so was its aircraft industry and its wind tunnels. What's more, the Government of 1946 had been way too ambitious and ran full speed into jet propulsion, swept wings, supersonic flight, very large pressurized airliners, and many others advanced technologies... that the WWII winners already had difficulties mastering, be them GB, USA or URSS. France had been occupied and looted by the Germans, and then bombed into the stone age in 1944-45. The aircraft industry laid in ruins.
It took until 1952 before it recovered.
1948 by contrast was very much the year when all the advanced 1945-46 projects... crashed and burned.
SO-90, in a demo in Argentina - lost one wing, killed the crew. SNAC CORMORAN, dived into the ground, crew dead. This bird -another crew kick the bucket. The first NAVAL jet fighters (without a decent aircraft carrier in the fleet - but that's not the problem, damn it !) - VG-90, NC-1080, Nord 2200 - four prototypes build, three crashes, three pilots dead.

For the SE-1010 it was an aerodynamic flaw not detected in ruined wind tunnels, that killed the crew in flight...

Note that unfortunate bird was to go to the IGN - National Geographic Institute, the french US Geological Survey. It was replaced by a handful of... B-17s, straight out of post-WWII storage. They were so good at the job, the last one was retired in 1985 !
 
I have somewhere a good plan of the SE 1010 in an FANA of August 1987, I think ... In the meantime, I put you one of the tracks of the SE 2010 taken from the excellent work of Laurent GRUZ "SE 2010 Le Géant oublié" so that everyone has an idea of the crazy French ambitions in air transport. Even the P & W R-4360 (3500 hp in Civilian power!) lacked power to give this aircraft a truly transatlantic capability with an acceptable commercial load !
613343 SE 2010 ARMAGNAC003.jpg
 
Did anyone diagnose the problem that caused the loss?
To complete (very modestly) that Archibald wrote, it was during a test flight in 1949 october 1st with one external engine at low power that SE 1010 stalled because a lack of stability despite the electical compensator. Jacques Lecarme was the test director and would like a test of this improbable configuration with a model in wind tunnel before the real flight but the study engeneers had decided of the flight to satisfy a scientific curiosity as useless as unhealthy ... we know the rest ...
 
Did anyone diagnose the problem that caused the loss?
To complete (very modestly) that Archibald wrote, it was during a test flight in 1949 october 1st with one external engine at low power that SE 1010 stalled because a lack of stability despite the electical compensator. Jacques Lecarme was the test director and would like a test of this improbable configuration with a model in wind tunnel before the real flight but the study engeneers had decided of the flight to satisfy a scientific curiosity as useless as unhealthy ... we know the rest ...

No need to be "modest". A very interesting, detailed account of what went wrong. Lecarme was and still is a legend among french tests pilots (and one of the few of that era that died of old age and not in a smoldering wreck - aged 80 in 1986).
What you say must have driving him crazy "wind tunnel ? meh. what's the point ? " (the aircraft crashes and everybody dies) Lecarme "Maybe, to avoid disasters like THIS ?"
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lecarme

Incidentally, I like very much Latécoère quote at the bottom of your post. A looooong time ago when i was a kid I went to Biscarrosse flying boat museum and brought back a giant poster with a Laté-521 and that very quote . It was on my room wall for quite a long time. "Notre idée est irréalisable ? pas grave. ne reste plus qu'à la réaliser."
 
Well, wikipedia has THIS to say about the flight https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCASE_SE.1010

Le samedi 1er octobre 1949 vers 14h00, le prototype décolle de Marignane pour son 34e vol comportant deux essais. Le second essai consiste à couper deux des moteurs 14R sur une aile, et à pousser les deux autres à fond. Le gouvernail se bloque et l'avion part dans une vrille à plat. Les deux moteurs coupés refusent de redémarrer, et moins de 20 secondes plus tard l'avion s'écrase dans des vignes près de Carcès, Var3.

Wow. Some words about the 14R engines: they were 1600 hp radials from before WWII (MB-157 and many others) , brought back from the grave after WWII... and that engine was a complete disaster. In the end France took an Hercules licence from Bristol to replace that piece of junk. The Noratlas for example switched from 14R to Hercules after the prototype phase.
It was a bit like the RR Vulture for the British or the J-40 for US Navy jets. Whatever aircraft got that engine, was doomed. So were the unfortunate pilots.

In that peculiar flight, the SE-1010 was to fly on two engines at full power, and cut the other two engines on the other wing (!!!!). Lecarme hated the aircraft, he felt the tail could "blank" and then the aircraft would go into a flat spin, and a non recoverable with that. hence his desire for a thorough wind tunnel testing.
And well, the flight testing was insane, considering how shitty the 14R were, plus the stall risk warned by Lecarme... And guess what happened ?
- the vertical tail blanked out
- the aircraft went into a deep spin (how surprising !)
- the crew abandonned the suicidal test, hence they tried to restart the two engines they had cut (and save their lives)
- the 14R being... the 14R, the two engines stubbornely refused to restart
- the aircraft fell like a brick led into a vineyard, killing everyone onboard

Geez, what a stupid waste of lives, aircraft and money. As stupid as the Cormoran crash, or the loss of Kostia Rozanoff on a demo flight of the Mystère IVB, barely missing a tribune packed full with French and British aviation heavyweights and politicians, among them Duncan Sandys (for you fellow british whatifers outraged by the 1957 white paper: that day of April 1954 poor Rozanoff missed the politicians stand by only a hair breadth)
 
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There is an excellent article on the SE.1010 by Joel Mensard in Aviation Historian, issue 25.
It covers the development and the short and tragic flight testing programme.
 
I would posit that the SNCASE SE.1010 bears no real relationship to the SNCASE SE.2010 Armagnac other than they are both SNCASE products.

The SNCASE SE.1010 is obviously a product of the "Lioré-et-Olivier" Marignane part of SNCASE; it even has Mercier oblique ailerons!

The SNCASE SE.2010 Armagnac is obviously a product of the "Dewoitine" Toulouse part of SNCASE; an earlier design version even had a very "Dewoitine"-shaped tail-fin.

Terry (Caravellarella)
 
A few weeks ago I tried to see for an electric model of the SE-1010. My conclusion was that the wing was too rejuvenated at the end and I had considered increasing the wing chord to secure the stall. The horizontal stabilizer, on the other hand, appeared to me to be usable as is ... But let us admit that this betrays a little the lines of the beast !View attachment SE 1010 VUE EN PLAN.jpg
 

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