Any pilots out there?

I'm not a pilot, but I do know that the Junkers was not a turboprop aircraft. It had three radial engines. Turboprops didn't fly until after World War II, at least according to the Wiki article.

Radial engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4Dg7JuH-48

Turboprop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teICr3Yg14U


WW2-era airplane engines needed a lot more manual tuning than the more modern airplanes we see today. That's why it's not unusual to see a 'third' pilot - called the flight engineer - in the cockpit of the larger aircrafts and whose role was to supervise the engines and related systems. Fuel flow. Oil temperature and pressure. Hydraulics. Cylinder temperature. Exhaust gas temperature. Manifold pressure. Carburetor flow. Propeller RPM. Carburetor mixture.

If you want to have a taste of what it's like to operate a WW2-era cargo plane, I suggest you watch the reality-TV show "Ice Pilots NWT". It's the story of real-world Buffalo Airways who operate Douglas DC-3 and DC-4 airplanes in the Canadian Northwest territories. You can find many episodes online on YouTube. Many of those have in-cockpit sequences in which pilots explain what they are doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2aP1NthbVY&list=UU2lOE9zII8N1wGZPjIix4xw


-cb

What do you need specifically? A bit of flavor for a cockpit scene? A full run down on all the instruments? A general understanding of how the plane was flown? etc

I used to be a private pilot and might be able to help a little, but I don't know anything about flying a WWII era tri-motor. The biggest problem with a multi-engine plane is losing one engine on take-off.

Just let me know if I can be of any help.

They used to bring an old Ford Tri-Motor to air shows and give rides. If I remember correctly, if that plane lost just one engine it was in big trouble.

Again, I don't know anything about that plane or tri-motors.

Generally, losing one engine in flight isn't that bad on a multi-engine plane (assuming calm weather conditions). These days the propeller of the engine that is out is "feathered"--that is, the blades of the propeller are turned so that they produce less drag. Losing the central engine of a tri-motor should be less of a problem.

I would have to do some research myself to understand the controls in the picture you linked. I might guess that some of those valves are fuel tank valves, but I really have no idea. Fuel tank management is a bigger task on planes with multiple fuel tanks, at least on smaller planes and possibly older planes.

The bottom three levers on the pilot's side are fuel mixture controls (the top three being power).

This video might be on some interest to you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOW4GR4M0LM

I found a photo of a similar cockpit with the controls labeled, but unfortunately they were numbered and I couldn't find a legend for what each number was. You might have better luck; I only make a quick search. I also found a better photo with the control labels clearly visible but they were in German.

I just did a Google search for the Junkers "cockpit controls" and looked at the photos. There are a number of photos of similar cockpits, some of them better than the one in the wiki link.

euclid said:

Alleycat: How would you turn right? I'm assuming this would take a combination of stick movement to the right and some action with the pedals?

JJ

Click to expand...

The cockpit photos show a control wheel, not a stick. So to turn right, you would rotate the control wheel to the right. If you did nothing else, this would cause the airplane to roll to the right and begin a turn. The steepness of the turn would depend on the bank angle you rolled to. However, due to the aerodynamic properties of aircraft, the nose of the airplane would try to rotate away from the direction of turn as you rolled into the turn. This kind of turn is called an uncoordinated turn, and pilot's don't like it.

To coordinate the turn, the pilot would "add rudder" by pushing on the correct pedal in the cockpit to compensate. He would be able to see that his turn was coordinated by looking at the slip-skid indicator. If the slip-skid indicator is centered, the aircraft is making a coordinated turn. From the pictures I found by googling, I can't tell if the Junkers had a slip-skid indicator and I don't know much about that era of aircraft. It's a fairly simply instrument, and from the level of instrumentation in that cockpit I would guess they did have one. I just can't say for sure.

Aerial

euclid said:

Thanks for that Aerial. I have numbered list of all the instruments in german. I'll translate them and see if I can find a "slip-skid".

Do you have any idea what the handles in front of the co-pilot are for?
They look a bit like ski poles with loop handles on.

Click to expand...

They look like they're probably engine controls of some sort (if I'm looking at the same thing you are) since there are three of them. The pilots would need to be able to regulate things like fuel mixture, prop pitch (if they were variable pitch props, which I don't know), prop speed, etc.

Sorry, prop is short for propeller.

A little bit about engines: Many aircraft, especially older ones, use piston engine technology fairly similar to car or truck engines. These engines turn propellers to give the aircraft its thrust. Propeller aircraft today use avgas, which basically aviation-specific gasoline. Some aircraft have used diesel, but I don't know any details, and I don't know for sure what your Junkers would have used. The term "turboprop" refers to a turbocharged engine (the technology is just like a turbocharger in a car) used to turn the propeller. Radial engines are also piston engines but have the cylinders arranged in a circle instead of in rows like a car engine.

Jets are an entirely different type of engine. They do not have cylinders and pistons and instead depend on the burning of the compressed fuel-air mixture to generate the necessary thrust as it's expelled. Jets use a different kind of fuel, more akin to kerosene than gasoline, and do not have a propeller on the front of them.

Aerial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NANgA3gaPak

-cb

Not a pilot, just grew up around aircraft.

The Junkers 52 has three radial engines, so anything you can see three identical ones of is to do with the engines. That takes care of a lot of the centre console and the instruments just above it. (Turboprops are not piston engines, they're jets, despite having a propellor; these are piston engines.) Radial engines are powerful but bulky, ideal for aviation but difficult to shoehorn into the more limited space available in a car, and have a very distinctive sound.

It's difficult to work out what some of the other instruments are from that picture; the compass is the pilot's centre-top flat thing, turn-and-slip is the centre-middle and attitude is centre-bottom. The others I'm not sure about, but altitude and air speed indicators will definitely be part of it, along with any navigational instruments this thing has - VOR/DME, for example.

In this as in several other aircraft of the era it looks as though the copilot also got the engine and fuel management jobs, and the daisy-like turny things on the right are almost certainly to do with plumbing, so probably fuel (those are classic plumbing fixtures, so there almost have to be pipes of some sort involved; coolant with radials is IIRC usually dealt with in the individual engine and only monitored from the cockpit and oil works likewise, leaving only fuel to be supplied). The co-pilot needs a set of the pilot's instruments, so anything on that side but not mirrored on the pilot's is probably to do with engines and fuel.

Hope that helps!