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This is far short of a definitive comment on the "Cuzaux Effect,' which most certainly did not refute the bomber orthodoxy, since it is a myth (I think). According to a letter to _Flight_ (bibliographic reference pends a good long trawl through my crawlspace storage) by John North in refutation, was so dubbed for its alleged discovery at a French Armee de l'Air proving ground at some point. The physical supposition behind the effect is that due to conservation of angular momentum, spinning objects react in non-intuitive ways to outside forces that tend to move their axis of rotation. Hence, tops and allegedly bullets moving through a slipstream at an angle to their trajectory will behave in ways described by the gyroscope equations, which apparently do not include any measurable loss of accuracy in this case, although I did not persist long enough in mechanics courses to have any hope of comprehending the problem. That said, John North was not just another letter page crank. He was the chief designer at Boulton Paul, then engaged in three major turret fighter programmes, the Defiant, (Blackburn) Roc, and the more visionary testbed P-22 (I think the reference is right, and certainly more official than the "Wolverhampton Dreadnought" nickname that comes to mind) and a generalised turret weapon research programme. Clearly the Cuzaux effect, if legitimate, undermined the rationale for all of this work. and by extension raised questions over his contracts. Which may have been the point. In 1938/9, the British aeronautical community was taxed with spending almost 200 million pounds, in no small part on new aircraft. Cutting-edge research obviously bore heavily on many people's interests when they pertained to major aircraft and engine procurement programmes. This is hardly the only such rumour refuted in the editorial pages of _Flight_ without ever being explicitly addressed. (Other rumour campaigns that come to mind targetted alleged stability issues in the DC-3 and Hampden, landing/takeoff problems in the Lockheed Hudson, and, I suspect, so on). Erik Lund Elunderik@Netscape.Net
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