You are absolutely right. Drag is a combination of factors like frontal area and C[sub]d[/sub] as well as total surface area.
I was talking specifically about the Supermarine S6B but the same could be applied to other floatplanes. The photo I linked to showed the floats, each of them, appeared to have as much frontal area as the fuselage. As you said one problem with the Gee Bee was the large frontal area necessitated by the radial engine. If they wanted to it wouldn’t have been difficult to make a low drag landing gear arrangement using narrow tire spoked wheels. Trivial to cover the wheel with doped fabric to make a nice aerodynamic disk wheel. Those wheels wouldn’t be good in the Tundra granted but a bungee cord shock arrangement would make them adequate for smooth runways. Curtiss built biplane racers with inline engines and simiar type landing gear.
FWIW I once read that a formula one pylon racer has about as much drag as a single balloon tire on a J3 cub.
Sam, there is a Sea Dart on display in front of the San Diego air and space museum.
Back to the OP since we strayed pretty far from it. Can anyone think of a jet aircraft that could be converted to float operation? I don’t mean purpose designed plane but could one be converted as a really expensive Junkyard Wars type experiment?
My vote, A-10 Warthog Lots of power, excellent low speed flight characteristics and very high mounted engines. Imagine a Warthog on a scaled up set of Supermarine floats. Maybe with an auxialiary hydrofoil wing between them to help lift up on the step and out of the water. That baby’d rattle a few windows when you took her to the lake for the weekend.
Wonder if the floats on the Supermarine had any lifting capability? In which case they wouldn’t be totally nonfunctional drag while in flight. (Although generating lift also always generates drag, too…)
Sure, the float frontal area looks similar to that of the fuselage, but a lot of the drag on an airplane can come from the joints between the the wing and the fuse - and the floats don’t have wings. It may be that the floats actually have less drag than the fuse. But I’m wandering off into speculationland here.
I didn’t realize it has a 30 foot wingspan. That’s not a lot for an airplane pushing 5000lbs. Given the horsepower of the engine, I’m guessing it achived speed in part through sheer brute force.
Broomstick, I think we were arguing two different things. You were trying to explain WHY the S6B was so fast, and started getting into radial cowls vs. inline cowls, etc. But I wasn’t arguing that. It’s no mystery why it was faster. Lower drag, more power. Lower drag because it’s lighter and therefore has less induced drag, and it’s smaller so it has a lower overall frontal area. Sure.
The question, however, is why did they fly the inline planes on floats? Why weren’t landplanes also being built with this superior design? It wasn’t impossible, because that’s what the Spitfire became. It seems that the seaplanes could have gone even faster if they flew off of conventional gear. Because I am almost certain that properly faired landing gear would almost certainly have less drag than a pair of floats for an aircraft of equivalent size. After all, a properly faired wheel has about the same shape and Cd of a float, but it’s an awful lot smaller. And floats of that era required twin struts and flying wires to keep them rigid, which made them even draggier.
And yeah, I know that flying wires have an incredible amount of drag. That was my point. In fact, some of the race planes back then had specially formed flying wires that were streamlined to cut down on the turbulence created by the circular wires.
I think the answer is, “Just Because”. The Schneider Trophy specified floats, so that’s what it was. Look at race cars - some classes are faster than others. The Schneider planes were the bad boys, so that’s where the money was spent, and where the technology evolved.
They are incredible airplanes. I grew up near the Ft. Campbell airfield, and they would come over the house every once in a while. I wanted to join the Air Guard and learn to fly one, but my eyesight didn’t hold up.
Now, if I can just figure out how to mount one of those Avenger cannons on a 172…
Back in college I was having a late-night bull session with a friend of mine and we started wondering what you could do with all the old 727s that were being phased out of service. We figured you could tow really big banners over sporting events, or crop-dust an entire field in two passes. But what the hell, I’d be willing to put one up on floats.
There was a proposal called HOW the Hercules on Water project. which involved putting hydro-skis on the C-130 and sealing the fuselage so it was water tight. I have a thought of taking doing the same with the Lockheed C-141 Starlifter with perhaps mounting the jet engines above the wing. Wait a minute lets do the same to the C-5 Galaxy.
Lots of power, excellent low speed flight characteristics and very high mounted engines. Imagine a Warthog on a scaled up set of Supermarine floats. Maybe with an auxialiary hydrofoil wing between them to help lift up on the step and out of the water. That baby’d rattle a few windows when you took her to the lake for the weekend.