Friday, May 8, 2015

FW-190 First Flight At GossHawk Unlimited.

The Flugwerk FW-190 is essentially a high-end kit-plane, requiring a sophisticated approach to assembly, and a good deal of customization. A lot of GossHawk’s energy has gone into reworking the parts so that they fit properly.

Much of this effort has focused on the wing leading edges, which required a complete rebuild. Custom fillets for the wing-joins also needed manufacturing on site as well, as the parts supplied with the kit did not fit what GossHawk had already built. GossHawk engineers also had to trim the wheel wells so that the landing gear would fit properly too, and fabricate entirely new gear doors.

Given the prior experiences of other groups working on Flugwerk FW-190s, a lot of thought has also gone into the cooling issues that these aircraft suffered from, just like the original Focke-Wulf Fw-190s did in the early stages of their development in WWII.

In addition to the Flugwerk-supplied oil cooler which sits in the forward fuselage compartment where the machine guns would normally be installed on a real Fw-190, GossHawk Unlimited fitted an annular oil cooler, custom-designed by Pacific Oil Cooler, in front of the engine just behind the nose cowling. 

This project had a Russian-designed ASh-82 engine as its powerplant, like most of the Flugwerk FW-190s, and the beefed-up oil cooling system has performed well throughout the engine runs and taxi trials that GossHawk has performed over the past few weeks.



Klaus Plasa airborne for the first time in Dan Kirkland’s FW-190A8/N following its construction at GossHawk Unlimited in Casa Grande, Arizona. The aircraft is marked to represent the Fw-190 flown by Josef ‘Pips’ Priller during his flights over the D-Day beaches on June 6th, 1944. (photo by Zdenek Kaspar)


http://www.warbirdsnews.com/warbirds-news/fw-190-flight-gosshawk-unlimited.html

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