Shorts wind tunnel schematic, 1955

[smudge]

Found this in the Flight archive for 1955.

Driven by three Nene 101s for Mach 1.2 air flow.  Was it actually built, I wonder?

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[Brunki]

Hi smudge,
Im sorry your prob fed up with my reply's my dad this my dad that but was just chatting to him and yes it was built there were 2 wind tunnels a low speed one which was dismantled and brought from Germany after the war and was used for aircraft development whilst the high speed one you mentioned was used in the development of the missile's program. It was situated away at the eastern end of queens island as it was a noisey piece of kit. I seem to remember guy warner had a pic and short article about it in one of his books about aircraft manufacturing in the north. Hope this fills in a few blanks.
Cheers k

[smudge]

Great stuff Brunki, thank you!  That coincides well with the separate factory for Seacat that was established around that time too.

You two should really write an (e-)book! 

[Brunki]

Oh believe me he's been threatening to put pen to paper for years. He flew for shorts for 30 odd years and flew everything from the queenair to the Canberra and would share his stories with a dog in the street if he thought it was interested. 

[Dr Draken]

There's photos in one of the Shorts albums in PRONI of the wind tunnel being built.
Saw them there last year

[smudge]

By a strange cosmic coincidence it transpires that I know a chap who worked on this tunnel! He never thought to mention it, being boring work stuff....

I shall quiz him next week.

Apparently it was well equipped for interferometry to detect flexing and stressing of the tested airframes.