Royal Aircraft Establishment
Aerospace companyWikipedia
18
MENTIONS
9
EPISODES
5
PODCASTS
Search complete. 18 mentions across 9 episodes found for "Royal Aircraft Establishment".
Sep 13, 2026
ClaraHOST
The protagonist is a man named Theodore Honey.
ClaraHOST
He is an aeronautical researcher at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough and he is the furthest thing from a swashbuckling hero you could possibly imagine.
ClaraHOST
What's he like? He is an eccentric, absent-minded widower.
ClaraHOST
He is socially awkward.
Tail DraggerHOST
They had it in the air within days.
Tail DraggerHOST
The test pilots at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough flew it hard.
Tail DraggerHOST
and what they found confirmed everything the operational pilots had been saying.
Tail DraggerHOST
The roll rate advantage was real.
7 MINS LATER
Tail DraggerHOST
You are watching the past refuse to be entirely forgotten, history that only exists on paper eventually becomes abstract, history that exists in metal and oil and the sound of 14 cylinders firing in sequence, that stays real in a way that nothing else can replicate.
Tail DraggerHOST
Don't miss them if you get the chance.
Tail DraggerHOST
I drew primarily on the writings of historians Robert Forsyth and Eddie Creek for the development history and the original evaluation reports from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough.
Tail DraggerHOST
More on all of it at RadioHangar.com. I'm TailDragger.
Tail DraggerHOST
Now here's where it gets interesting.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, England was tasked with finding out what was killing these airplanes.
Tail DraggerHOST
The man who led that technical investigation, Sir Arnold Hall, faced a problem that would have defeated most engineers.
Tail DraggerHOST
He had almost no wreckage.
7 MINS LATER
Tail DraggerHOST
And out of that wreckage came the framework that keeps hundreds of millions of passengers safe every year.
Tail DraggerHOST
Britain invented the jet age, and the price of that invention, as it so often is in aviation, was paid in the worst possible currency.
Tail DraggerHOST
Sources for today's segment include the 1955 Court of Inquiry report into the comet accidents, the technical papers published by the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, and Neville Shute's No Highway for anyone who wants to feel the concept in fiction before the history hits.
Tail DraggerHOST
More at RadioHanger.com. I'm TailDrager.
Ian PollGUEST
John actually put me on a contract from Farnborough, which had been dreamt up whilst I was at Kingston, and I had already been to meetings at Cranfield with the famous Dietrich Kuckermann, where this particular project was discussed, not with me as the researcher, but with me as somebody from military future projects at Kingston who had an input into what the whole thing was about.
Ian PollGUEST
So I ended up on a project which I already knew its purpose and so I had the great good fortune of having monitors from RAE Farnborough Jeremy Smith from AE5 and Lionel East I don't know I don't know where they are now perhaps not with us anymore but these were really high-level first-rate characters And at the first monitoring meeting, I told them that I thought we hadn't quite got the focus of this right and could we change it? And there and then they got their pens out and we changed it.
Ian PollGUEST
They didn't sit there and say, oh, well, this is what it says on the paper, so you get on and do it.
Ian PollGUEST
It was a proper, you know, this is a problem area, we need to dive into it.
Jules HudsonHOST
[dramatic music] I'm here in Farnborough, the birthplace of British aviation, and it's said that no other single location in the world has contributed quite as much to the evolution of aeronautical science as this place over such a long period of time.
Jules HudsonHOST
Aviation development in Britain and was the site of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, the military science research facility.
Jules HudsonHOST
During the 20th century, the testing of observation balloons and airships by the Army quickly developed into groundbreaking experiments.
Jules HudsonHOST
It remains world-famous for its airshow and specialist aviation knowledge.
9 MINS LATER
IanGUEST
It certainly does.
IanGUEST
The aircraft industry was established, and Farnborough was then dedicated to pure research, um, and development and test.
Jules HudsonHOST
During World War I, Farnborough had built over 500 aircraft and repaired thousands more, and by 1919 with the conflict over, the emphasis for the Royal Aircraft Establishment was now on science and research.
Jules HudsonHOST
The interwar years saw development continue at an incredible rate.
Tail DraggerHOST
Spitfire pilots learned to half-roll before diving, which cost precious fractions of a second when fractions of a second could get you killed.
Tail DraggerHOST
The fix came from a Royal Aircraft Establishment engineer named Beatrice Schilling.
Tail DraggerHOST
She designed a simple diaphragm restrictor, a small washer with a precisely sized hole in it, that was fitted to the carburetor float chamber and substantially cured the problem.
Tail DraggerHOST
It was officially an RAE flow restrictor.
Tail DraggerHOST
This time, Prime Minister Winston Churchill personally ordered the most thorough investigation in British aviation history.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Comet's certificate of airworthiness was permanently withdrawn, and the investigation was handed to Sir Arnold Hall, director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough.
Tail DraggerHOST
Hall was a meticulous and systematic man.
Tail DraggerHOST
He did not speculate.
10 MINS LATER
Tail DraggerHOST
That's the Comet's legacy.
Tail DraggerHOST
Bought dear and never forgotten.
Tail DraggerHOST
Technical details in today's program come from the official Court of Inquiry report of 1954 and from the historical archives of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough.
Tail DraggerHOST
More at RadioHanger.com.
Tail DraggerHOST
What followed was one of the most thorough technical investigations of any aircraft in the entire war.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough took that FW190A3 apart piece by piece, rebuilt it, and flew it.
Tail DraggerHOST
They flew it against spitfires, against hurricanes.
Tail DraggerHOST
They measured the roll rate at every speed, climb rate to every altitude, top speed at low level, medium altitude, high altitude, cockpit visibility, gun harmonization, engine behavior at extreme angles of attack.
Tail DraggerHOST
Think about what Kurt Tank was trying to do, then watch it take off.
Tail DraggerHOST
That is not an aircraft that needs any introduction.
Tail DraggerHOST
Much of what I've shared today draws from Alfred Price's work on the air war over northwest Europe and from the archived test reports of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough.
Tail DraggerHOST
Both are worth your time.
speaker_3HOST
Armed with this, Thane keeps fighting.
speaker_3HOST
Finally, the British Royal Aircraft Establishment runs a simulation.
speaker_3HOST
They flood a runway with slush and run an ambassador aircraft through it.
speaker_4HOST
And the results were undeniable.