Tricycle Undercarriage Development

Abstract

IN the U.S.A. the development of the tricycle undercarriage has made very rapid progress. Low‐powered aeroplanes fitted with a nose‐wheel have exhibited remarkable properties and led to investigations on the application of this type of undercarriage to larger and faster machines. These investigations covered several years, as the influence of the nose‐wheel on modern high‐speed aeroplanes was not fully understood; a new principle of design had to be obtained for which complete calculation was not possible, since no details of the loadings were available (first methods proposed for reception of loads—1938) and finally there remained the difficulty of finding room for the nose‐wheel since the nose of the aircraft was utilized for other purposes. For these reasons firms sucli as Boeing and Glenn L. Martin have not produced any tricycle undercarriage design up to the present. On the other hand, almost all the firms in the neighbourhood of Los Angeles, which is the centre of production, have included nose‐wheels in their design and even for military aircraft it does not appear likely that the tail‐wheel will be used in any new design.