Okay, I’ll admit I’ve been caught in a vortex of simple fluid mechanics and am drowning, but I know I heard the damned story from a guy who wouldn’t bullshit me.
You know, a pilot.
How do you quickly and easily reverse the torque on a Le Rhone engine by flipping and/or changing the propeller and/or the rotary?
Okay, I think I figured it out. Check my work, please.
[list][li]The engine turns clockwise. The propeller, mated to the engine which turns around a fixed crank, also turns clockwise. The plane wants to pull hard to the right, and–I don’t know, maybe down somewhat?[/li]
[li]The engine turns counterclockwise. The propeller also turns counterclockwise. The plane wants to pull hard to the left, and–again, I think–down somewhat.[/li]
Reversing the propeller doesn’t work unless you reverse the engine as well. So you set the engine on the crank in the desired direction, put either put a right-hand or a left-hand propeller on the plane as warranted and start it forward in the direction of traction. They must have had to flip the engine and the propeller, which should have been fairly easy given perpendicular teeth on the crankshaft.
Does this sound correct, or have I been taken in?
Dammit, I should have said, “flip the engine and change the propeller.”
Well that explains the hoards of French propeller carvers that made their living on the fringes of French aerodromes. Left handed propellers just to throw off the guy you may have seen the day before…
Most of Richthofen’s victories were scored while he was flying an Albatros, by the way. I guess I have to Google for the paint scheme now.
And of course I mean the first remark in a humorous way…
The Baron was also vain, he had silver trophy cups made for every plane he shot down.
About rotary engines, I found to my own surprise that these are NOT two-cycle engines. See Bill Gunston’s “World Encyclopedia of Aero Engines”, where the cycle of the Gnome rotary is discussed in great detail. (pg. 72 in my 2nd edition). There may have been 2 cycle rotaries, but in general, rotaries wouldn’t have run backwards.
Like I say, it surprised me just as much as you.
Oh, BTW, if you want a new take on rotaries and which way they turned that will absolutely curl your hair, Read up on the Siemens Sh-1, which Gunston discussed under “Bramo” (pg. 29, my 2nd ed.) The cylinders turned one way, the prop turned the other. Since big props were the order of the day and they could only turn so fast before getting into compressibility effects at the tips (which were no doubt all mystery to them), yet everyone knew that turning an engine faster gave more power, the solution was this Sh-1, which got twice as many power strokes at the same physical rpm of the heavy parts. Don’t ask me exactly how they did it. I would just have to invoke a work of God, or of a coven of witches in the factory. Somewhere on the net there may be a cutaway of the Sh-1, but it is likely to be as confusing s my description.
Simple gearing of two spur gears, the one on the prop shaft with twice as many teeth as that on the crankshaft. The drive gear turning clockwise will turn the prop gear counterclockwise at half speed.
I didn’t know that about rotaries, though.
As for your username, did you really work for NACA?
Can anybody find a link to a list of Richtofen’s confirmed victories? I seem to recall reading that one of the distinctive things about his career is that all of his victories were over RFC aircraft and that he had no kills of French, Americans, Belgians or any others.
The majority of the planes are British, but there are several S.P.A.D. VIIs and Niueport 17s listed. The British (or, at least, the Canadians) did use the Nieuport. I do not recall whether the British ever used any S.P.A.D.s.
On the other hand, the type of plane one shot down was determined by the enemy one faced. The British held a long section of the trench line and Richthofen might simply have never been posted far enough South to encounter the French or Americans or far enough North to encounter the Belgians.
(I don’t recall Bishop or Mannock shooting sown any Austrians or Turks.)
Which of course would baffle the enemy pilot so much that he may even choose to shot himself down. 
Hey, dropzone…
Indeed I did work for the NACA! For about six months, then it changed over. With vast arrogance, I figure that allows me to define a real old-timer as someone who was there when the conversion took place. We still have get-togethers, and there is one fellow left from my group who was at Ames Aero Lab during WW2 and was in on the tests that solved the P-38 compressibility problem. Dumping all pretense of arrogance, those were amazing people! I am incredibly lucky to have worked with them, even in the tiny newbie way I did.
And on the Siemens engine, I would guess that it might have been a planetary gear system. But I’d probably have to sit an look at the problem for a while to figure our a plausible solution
Now, an additional comment on rotary engines that writers seem generally to miss: don’t forget, these are big gyroscopes, with a mass that was a significant fraction of the whole aircraft mass. If you apply a torque to a gyroscope at right angles to the axis of rotation, you get a reaction in the third orthogonal axis. i.e, in a rotary-engine aircraft, if you haul back the stick, a stationary-engine pilot expects the nose to pitch up, but he actually gets a yaw, direction dependent on the direction of rotation of the engine. (I’ve been retired a long time: I sit here with my hand up doing the “right-hand-rule” maneuver, but I can’t remember the sign convention and what the whole thing means. Upshot, I don’t know what the direction of yaw actually was.) Once you learned this, you could get incredible agility out of your rotary-engine bird in one direction of turn. In the Sh-1-engined Siemens-Schukert aircraft, though,you would presumably have been able to turn with equal facility in either direction. Fortunately for the allies, very few were built, or they might have been the ones mentioned in the armistice documents instead of the D-VII.
I might have a Wyman drawing of that engine at home. I’ll have to do some digging. My memory is starting to suggest it was a plain ol’ radial and not a rotary, though.
dropzone…
Bill Gunston in his “Encyclopedia…” has about the most tortuous explanation I’ve ever seen him write, in trying to explain the Sh1’s operation, but Wagner/Nowarra in their “German Combat Planes” and the Kenneth Munson series both support the notion of these engines as true rotaries. And the next stage, the Sh-3a, developed 240 horsepower. For comparison, the Bentley BR-2, the most powerful conventional rotary, produced 234 hp, but that was at 1,300 rpm. (Want gyroscopic effects? Want stresses in the machinery? Just turn 50% faster!) Other than the water-cooled Salmson’s, I can’t think of any high-powered (for the era) radials. It seems not surprising as the cooling problem took a long while to solve. Aside from that, I read at one point that the time between overhauls for one of the WW1 rotaries was something like 10 hours. (Not sure which, but it was one the British used.)
Take a look at a photo of the Siemens-Halske D-4. It has a big 4-blade propellor that looks like it belongs in WW2, now WW1. The comment was made that it was tricky to land: looking at that U/c and ground angle, I could imagine it being a ground-loop waiting for someone to happen to, but that comment does seem to be at odds to my suggestion that it would have less treacherous torque and gyroscopic effects than the conventional rotary.
I’ve got another good engine book I’d like to look into, but at the moment I can’t find it. “I’ll be back,” as the next governator of California once said.