Sounds great fun! I’ll come along.
All the Hackney crowd will be up for it for sure…
presumably it’ll be a weekday - try for summer hols (up to 2nd September) or autumn 1/2 term (26 - 30 October) and you’ll get more response…
That’s a good point - if it’s during the week I’ll need pretty lengthy notice if I’m going to make it.
Rob
I think you would be guessing wrong. In the old days, airplanes were extremely light, and didn’t have much to them. In the jet age, you have plenty of power to lift more aircraft, so it can carry more equipment, more weapons and (most importantly to the pilot) more armor. Big fighters like the old F4 Phantom and later F14 Tomcat (think Top Gun) have a crew of two, both are about 70’ long, and basically pretty huge and quite heavy. But even a large fighter jet, because they are perceived as small, would be less impressive than something different/larger. I like the Vulcan idea because it’s such a unique-looking plane. And it doesn’t have to be airworthy. You could tow a museum plane too, but it might not weigh what an operational one would. Many museum planes have bits missing, like engines…
Compared to a lorry, the rolling resistance of even a much heavier aircraft is probably much, much less. Road vehicles need a lot more traction.
I looked a couple of weights up: An F-15 apparently weighs 36,450kg/81,000lbs (so similar to a really big fully-loaded lorry), and an F-16 is only about half that weight. A Harrier (AV8B) is really light - less than 6 tons.
Rob
(not arguing with you John - I was just interested :))
I wouldn’t say really light. 6 tons sounds quite heavy considering we are going to be on unicycles 
Maybe light compared to a heavier plane 
Pushing wheeled things along on hard flat ground is pretty easy - think how easy it is to push a car around in a garage. The heavier it is, the slower the acceleration would be, but if a load of us all hold onto ropes and lean forwards I reckon it wouldn’t be hard to move a 6-ton object as long as the tyres were hard and the ground was nice and smooth.
If we had multiple rows of unicycles with a rope per row we could hold hands across the rows for balance - it’s really easy to do a stillstand in pairs. Then all lean forwards against the ropes and the thing should pick up speed - slowly. I envisage it being more of a “lean and wait” operation than spectacular burnouts and worrying about the traction we could get.
Rob
Count me in.
I think that some careful planning would be a good idea before we went for the BIG PULL.
There’s no reason why we shouldn’t practice on something like a truck, but we shouldn’t assume that a truck of a certain weight will have the same rolling resistance as a plane that weighs the same.
If the RAF are involved they should be able to tell us the force necessary to tow a plane (unless it’s a state secret) and from there we could determine the appropriate load and truck to pull.
I could probably provide a truck with a large load and a suitable practice venue (WW2 USAF runway) but it’s not ideally placed being in deepest darkest East Anglia.
There’s a Vulcan just down the road from me at wellesbourne, it doesn’t fly anymore so would be perfect to tow. I’ll have a think about the physics tomorrow.
There’s a Vulcan just down the road from me too. I don’t think that a non-flying plane would be a good choice though, as the chances are that the wheel bearings have not been greased for a while, and even the tyre rubber might not be up to minimal rolling resistance.
Was thinking earlier about handy venues in Central London though, and pretty much anywhere is suitable for a Harrier Jump Jet, and those must be light enough to tow surely?
STM
im liking the idea of towing a plane with significance, like the vulcan because those thing are awesome or an old ww2 bomber and duxfored sounds like a good place because they have alot of space and unlike the london airports its not an operational airport so we would have longer i guess.
loving the idea of this whatever we tow would raise the awareness of unicycling a bit more.
If you can find a B-17, it seems like a good one to tow. It’s 34,000 lbs. That may seem like a lot, but as rob.northcott showed, it weighs less than half of the F-15. It’s also HUGE, and very recognizable. I think a big crowd would form to watch this spectacle.
I’ve looked at that table a bit more and noticed that some of the weights are maximum take-off weight and some are empty. That’s possibly why the F-15 seems so much heavier than some of the others. It’s probably still a fair guide, but not quite a direct comparison.
Rob
they fire it up and drive it down the run-way once a year so it’s not a complete junker