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If y'all don't mind, I'm gonna  out a bit over the Douglas DC-3. The Douglas Cargo (DC) series of aircraft was first designed after TWA approached Donald Douglas asking for an aircraft to compete with their rival United. United had bought 60 Boeing 247's, and Boeing refused to sell to any more airlines until that order had been completed. The design Douglas came up with in 1933 was the DC-1, and then a year later they made the DC-2. Both were great starting points, but in 1935 a call from American Airlines CEO C. R. Smith convinced Douglas to improve on the aircraft to replace American's Curtiss biplanes. Douglas agreed only because he was led to believe 20 airframes would ever be made. (In the end, 16,079 airframes would be built or licensed over the 17 year production run, making it the most produced airliner) The first flight of the DC-3 (there was no prototype other than a sleeper variant) was on December 17, 1935, which happened to be the 32nd anniversary of the flight at Kitty Hawk. The DC-3 and the sleeper variant (the DST, or Douglas Sleeper Transport) could cross the US in 15 hours at a cruising speed of 200 mph with only 3 refueling stops (17 hours if you went westbound). Before then, one would have to take several trains as well as a few short flights if you wanted to fly from coast to coast. The DC-3 entered civilian service in 1936 under American, but soon everyone was picking them up, including United, TWA, KLM, Piedmont, and Eastern. The DC-3 is mostly known for being one of the most important military transports, designated the C-47 Skytrain by the US Army Air Force. It was also used by the RAF, RCAF, and... gently caress it here's a list of the like 96 countries. Over 10,000 Skytrains were built, and were used for troop and cargo transport all across the globe. These were the guys you saw carrying gliders and Airborne troops during the invasion of Normandy. After the war, most all of the surviving C-47s were converted to civilian use. In fact, so many C-47's being given to Europe post-war it ended up cementing the use of the American imperial system in international aviation (Knots, nautical miles, etc). DC-3s are still in use today, which says something about their reliability. Most have been converted to turboprops for better speed. These aircraft now see roles in aerial firefighting, cropdusting, freight, and pretty much everything goddamn else. Hell, here's a picture of a DC on loving FLOATS  Motherfucker's versatile and a great aircraft. Let me know if you want more plane poo poo. I worked as a tour guide at an aviation museum for years so I know way too much about them. Spaced God fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Feb 3, 2016 |
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Feb 3, 2016 20:41
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Jaguars! posted:Absolutely! Although there aren't many planes introduced until the 1950s. I wish I had know about that plane mod earlier, getting some more early airliners would have been great. There's only a few differences between the -3 and the -47. The one surefire thing I can remember off the top of my head are the tailcone being smaller for gliders to be strapped onto it. Also the Skytrain was developed into one of the first gunships, Puff, the Magic Dragon, which had 3 miniguns and 10 30-cal machine guns. Because gently caress you, that's why
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Feb 3, 2016 21:10
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I emerge from Midterms and Spring Break (And my college winning a great basketball game) in a drunken stupor. Time to teach y'all about airplanes, and a two-for-one special no less! Most refer to the 60's as the "Golden Age" of air travel, and they'd be pretty loving right. Tickets were finally becoming relatively affordable (I say relatively because the price was still five times what it is now. Tickets back then often costed 5% of a year's salary  ), and the planes were able to get more people and things to their destinations faster. It also acts as good point in time to describe the split in the thinking of aircraft designers: going fast or going big. Each have their own problems, and those problems get exponentially amplified the more in one direction you go. So, let's explore two of the most iconic aircraft of commercial aviation (note: each aircraft has a fuckton more history about the design and in some cases lengthy arguments about the usage of the letter e. But, you have lives so I'll skip that):Part 1: GOTTA GO FAST  The idea of a supersonic transport (SST for short) had been around for about as long as we had been flying, since the concept of "go faster" is apparently human's instinct when it comes to travel. The first serious looks were given to the idea in the beginning of the 1950s, not long after Gen. Yeager took the X-1 past the sound barrier with two broken ribs and a broomstick (a story for another time). Supersonic fighter aircraft were becoming more and more commonplace, and the designers and engineers were starting to understand what effects supersonic flow had on designs. Welsh Engineer Morien Morgan had been commissioned to perform a study on SSTs in 1950, in which he determined one of the main sticking point would be the amazing amount of power and fuel required to propel a passenger plane beyond the speed of sound for long periods of time. He said it would "result in some horribly large aeroplanes," and considered the idea unfeasible. Six years later Morgan (under directive by the Crown) put together a new committee called the Supersonic Transport Advisory Committee to figure out how the gently caress to make these aircraft feasible. Their goal was to make an aircraft that was economically comparable to its subsonic counterparts (assuming that the massive fuel costs would be counteracted by a greater number of flights in a given time), fly across the atlantic at Mach 2, carry 150 passengers, and cost about 75-90 million pounds. Contracts were awarded in 1959 to the British Aircraft Corporation (comprising of several UK aircraft companies), who in turn started discussing the idea with and Sud (later named Aerospatial). In 1960 the French (who had SST ideas of their own) joined up with BAC via government-owned Aerospatial and the SST aircraft was dubbed Concorde, meaning unity. Two prototypes were built in 1969 -- one British, one French -- and Concord went on a world tour to demonstrate its capabilities and sell aircraft. Before the wheels had even left the ground, BAC and Aerospatial had 74 orders from 16 airlines. Here's where I have to mention some problems of flying past the sound barrier. I mentioned a big one at the beginning: it's loving expensive to maintain, fuel, and design. On top of that, poo poo gets hot at Mach 2, so you have to account for thermal expansion and other fun heat things (Concorde grew 6 inches during flight and had refrigerated windows so passengers didn't burn their hands on the 100C skin). The engines were massively loud, and the sonic booms were feared and despised. Most everyone thought fought Concorde landing at airports near their houses, and backed up their concerns with strange claims (deafening their children, giving them x disease, and even disrupting someone's rhythm method and getting their wife pregnant). There's one last big gleaming issue that helped kill the idea of SST, more on that later though.  Concorde gets loving hot Concorde entered service in 1976 with London-Bahrain, Paris-Rio, and Paris-Caracas routes. US Congress banned the Concorde due to protests over noise concerns, but made special exception for JFK and Washington-Dulles airports. Tickets were ungodly expensive (about $12,000 round-trip) and even then the airlines were taking heavy losses on the flights. They tried to make the price seem more appealing by offering lavish services such as a menu of caviar, lobster, champagne and Cuban cigars. Moreover, an SST was seen as a gimmick and airlines didn't want one even if it was profitable. And there lies the biggest problem: no one WANTED the loving thing. Airlines cancelled their orders and put BAC/AS up poo poo creek with no paddle and no money. Post-9/11 air travel fears, rising maintenance costs, and other better rival aircraft all tightened the noose more and more on the aging aircraft, until it was finally retired in 2003. Only 14 aircraft ever flew commercially, and all but two are either under restoration or on display in museums. Private rich dudes are trying to bring the aircraft back into charter service, but private rich people have more dollars than sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeEB2Lxbfa4 A flight from inside the Concorde, featuring a very informative pilot Part 2: Let the Queen Fly, or Seattle Fall Across the pond, Boeing was in dire straits. The company that was one of the biggest employers in the Seattle-Tacoma area had just lost out on a big heavy lifting contract for the USAF to Lockheed's C-5 Galaxy, and rumors were abound that Congress was cancelling their rival SST (aptly named the Boeing SST) before prototypes could even be built. Orders on their airliners were falling, and many thought the company may not be around much longer at this rate. Not to be counted out yet, Boeing bet their company on an idea: Make their heavy lifter an airliner. Changes were made, seats were added, and a full-length double deck was turned a half-length one to create a distinctive top-bulge. By mid-1966, the nicknamed "Queen of the Skies" began to take shape, and airlines liked what they saw. Pan-Am bought one, with a delivery date by the end of 1969. Boeing had to finish designs of an entirely new aircraft, test it, certify it, and deliver it all in 28 months. I think this is the definition of "crunch time." The prototype was absolutely massive: 60 meters wide, 70 meters long, weighing more than 162 metric tons empty and capable of taking 480 passengers intercontinental in luxury. The plane was both wider and longer than the Wright's first flight at Kitty Hawk. The aircraft was so big, in fact, a new 100 acre building had to be built to accommodate an assembly line for these aircraft. But, there wasn't enough time to finish the building and build the testing vehicles, so the latter were built before a roof was on the former. Money was running low and employees were working 80 hour weeks to finish the project. By the end of September 1968 the first prototype rolled out on display to the public. 26 airliners placed orders, and the airliner entered service in January 1970. Orders were coming in, and maybe in a few years the project will break even. Boeing had even begun to recover some of it's $2B dollar debt it accrued from the project. The gamble looked like it had worked.  The first 747 on display But of course something had to gently caress up. In 1970 there was a massive recession and the aviation industry came down with it. From September 1970 to March 1972 there were 2 orders placed for a 747. The SST was cancelled for realsies in 1971, cutting Boeing employees from 100,000 to 32,000. The unemployment rate in Seattle was double what it was elsewhere in the country. The situation looked so dire someone bought a billboard on the outskirts of town by the Everett factory: "Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights"  Engine deficiencies had crippled deliveries of the new orders, but Boeing persisted. It modified the design, giving it better economy and more carrying capacity. As the recession ended, more and more people began to take to the skies and the order poured in. Contracts were given from NASA, the DoD, The Air Force (including the two aircraft used for carrying the President), and any rich dude with $350M. Seattle bounced back, and along with it Boeing. 1,500 aircraft have been delivered to date across 8 major variants. The 747 is considered to be one of the biggest airliner successes in recent history. The gamble finally, truly paid off. So there you have it. Two very different aircraft, each at opposite ends of the spectrum. One was seen as the future and projected to be a success, the other an underdog from a dying company with massive carrying capacity. Hopefully you guys don't mind me writing 1500 words ing out about airplanes, but I find it fun. Gives me an excuse to let out my alter-ego as a mild-mannered airplane museum tour guide. And yes, this was all a roundabout way to say "747's over Concordes, Jaguars!" Spaced God fucked around with this message at 03:16 on May 23, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 08:44
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Loxbourne posted:And when we talk about fear of sonic booms, we mean massive, hilarious fear. Part of my work involves sifting through old 1960s/70s land documents and leases, and a common clause in tens of thousands of commercial and residential agreements back then was a ban on any creation of sonic booms! My favorite thing about Concorde and noise abatement is that there were always sound measuring equipment every so many miles from the runway, and it would trigger an alarm to yell at/fine an operator if their aircraft exceeded noise abatement limits. Because Concorde has four afterburning turbojets (because Concorde), they couldn't fly normal departures for fear of tripping the alarms. Instead what they did was learn where the sensors were placed and turn away from them in such a way that the Doppler effect lessened the noise and didn't trip the sensor. Also the whole "these things are gonna put a hole in the o-zone layer with their sonic booms and jet fuel" concern while people were going to town on their CFCs
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Mar 21, 2016 19:56
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PurpleXVI posted:I love these technical/historical info interludes. Thanks!  I know I really dig the train stuff Paul talks about. My fear is that I get too long winded and the interludes take up more than the actual updates. You guys should also let me know if you prefer the history or the design decisions and stuff. I know a stupid amount about both but I can't tell what's more interesting for the thread.Also, if you want stuff written by someone better at explaining poo poo than me, the OP of the Aeronautical Insanity thread has a bunch of little vignettes
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Mar 21, 2016 22:21
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Galaga Galaxian posted:I didn't realize Concordes were banned in all but two US airports. I always thought it was just restricted to ocean crossing flights. Oops! I made a mistake. Concorde also had an IAD-DFW (subsonic) route for some loving reason under Braniff up until May 1980. Despite being only scheduled in 3 airports, they made visits to Florida, including Miami in 87. Maybe they could've had a plan for that visit?  Anyways I'm gonna stop replying to every planepost like a dumb nerd. Maybe next ~episode~ will be about the De Havilland Comet, since Jaguars! unlocked that a few updates ago and that plane both revolutionized the industry and killed a fuckton of people because squares
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Mar 21, 2016 22:52
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Jaguars! posted:Now you've got me wondering whether a modern turbofan engine would work at supersonic speeds too... Work? Yes Work efficiently? Compared to turbojet engines, they're better up until Mach 1.6, at which point they drop off drastically. Afterburners help, though.   Spaced God fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Mar 25, 2016 |
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Mar 25, 2016 21:20
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Instead of doing classwork, I’m writing dumb stuff for a thread on a forum. Let’s chat about an aircraft that both revolutionized civil aviation, and is a great engineering case study. Squares need not apply: The De Havilland Comet Back in 1943, the Brits were optimistically already looking forward towards the post-war aerospace industry. They established the Brabazon Committee to figure and flesh out the five type of aircraft England needed postwar. This Committee is super fascinating, and a lot of really cool planes (and monstrosities) came from this committee and I could probably write a post just on this committee alone but you guys have lives. Also think the Comet is the only one in the game anyways. Anyways, the fourth type outlined in the report was one that brought skepticism: a jet powered aircraft capable of carrying 100 people. Moreover, it was suggested it could carry an imperial ton of payload at 350 knots (~640 kph) and have a pressurized cabin. Jets at the time were fairly new, and were known to guzzle fuel, waste money, and catch explode if you looked at it wrong -- AKA great features for an aircraft designed to fly transatlantic carrying very rich people.Sir Geoffrey de Havilland liked the idea (in fact he used his spot on the committee to ensure a jet aircraft was included on the list), and his company was granted a contract to develop a Type IV aircraft in February 1945, except carrying only 24 passengers instead of 100. Appointed to lead the project was chief designer Ronald Bishop of Mosquito fame, who was known for his creative designs. Moreover, despite the untested technology and high cost with little proof of a return on investment (and despite the unusual designs Bishop had), the state-owned airline BOAC ordered 10 Type IV aircraft from de Havilland in December of the same year.  Designs for the Comet. The first two were what made BOAC say “Yes, I want this.”: Over the next year, designs became more and more like the “standard jet aircraft” we know today. 20 degree wingsweep for high speed flights, extra seats added to bring total count to 36, and powered flight controls all make their appearance in their final design. If you look at the above image, though, you’ll notice there are no engine nacelles similar to normal aircraft. The jet engines instead were built into the wing roots, with large intakes at the leading edge. For some reason, British aircraft do this for quite some time and though it looks cool as hell it leads to some strange consequences. Had an engine had one of those explodey moments, you’d lose the wing rather than just the nacelle. Moreover, it required anyone maintenance crews to dig around in the wing rather than simply detach the engine from the nacelle. Anyways, things were tested, pieces were built, and the first Comet prototype made its public appearance at the 1949 Farnborough Airshow (one of the largest airshows in England). The first flight was made in 1950, and a second prototype was built and put through over 500 flight hours for training. More tests, more construction, and finally the first fare flight of a jetliner occurred on from London to Johannesburg on 2 May 1952, carrying three dozen passengers and equal bags of mail. The 5-stop trip took only 21-and-a-half hours. From the start, the aircraft was beloved. Comet flights cut travel time in half compared to the fastest competitors. The jets were quieter than pistons and produced less vibrations, which increased the passenger experience by orders of magnitude. In the first year, 30,000 passengers were carried to various destinations in style, including the first British Royalty to travel by jet when the Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret traveled via chartered Comet. By the end of 1953, 8 airliners had put orders in for Comets, including three American airlines (Pan-Am, National, and Capital). … And theeeen poo poo went wrong. In January 1954 a BOAC Comet crashed shortly after takeoff from the Italian airport of Ciampino. It had broken up in-flight over the Met with a loss of all souls aboard. There had been some hull losses in the past year, sure, but most were pilot error or easily explainable; every time the aircraft was not at fault. This was different though: there was nothing to indicate a fault. Quoth a de Havilland test pilot: “It was a perfect airplane as far as we were concerned. We were absolutely puzzled by the problems.” Some assumed sabotage, others assumed an engine had failed, taking the rest of the wing with it. All were hoping a cause would be found, and that it was a one-off tragedy. And then it happened again. The scenario was very similar. The aircraft, operating as a South African Airways flight, was examined and preflighted by the same team as the previous mysterious BOAC, and took off on 7 April from London bound for Johannesburg. The stop in Rome was nominal, barring some minor faults. But, after fixing them, the aircraft left en route to Cairo for another refueling stop. The aircraft broke up at 35,000 feet over the Met, and all aboard were killed. Like the BOAC flight, no immediate cause was found. The entire fleet was grounded, and engineers from across the globe threw themselves at the problem to find the root cause of these tragedies. Churchill even famously said “The cost of solving the Comet mystery must be reckoned in neither money nor manpower.” The aerospace industry of England was at stake, and a solution needed to be found fast.   HOVERCRAFT INTERLUDE Hovercraft are vehicles that can travel over most any terrain using fans or turbines to create a cushion of air upon which the vehicle rides. It’s hard to distinguish when hovercraft first were thought of, because a lot of early thinkers thought of craft more as hydrofoils than hovercraft proper. The difference is that a hovercraft can, as the name implies, hover, whereas a surface effect vehicle requires motion to get ground effect. But, with that being said, in 1929 a Ford engineer named Andrew Kucher started blowing air through a hole in a metal disc. This “Levapad” is considered an ancestor to the modern hovercraft, but it never reached any major use other than a cool demonstration piece. During World War Two Charles Fletcher, an engineer for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, built a hovercraft the size of a small car named the Glidemobile. Many (including myself) consider it the first hovercraft. It wasn’t patented, however, because the US Government was working on a similar design through a classified project. A man in black’s visit to Fletcher’s door later, and the Glidemobile was locked in a shed for a while. Years later, when a Brit by the name of Cockerell was trying to claim he invented the first hovercraft, Fletcher dusted off his craft to strike down the Brit’s patent. How do I know all about this? Well what I just wrote was more-or-less what I told people as I did tours at the museum I worked at, where Fletcher’s Glidemobile currently resides.  The Glidemobile at the Aviation Hall of Fame and Museum of New Jersey. Since this photo was taken, restoration improved the condition of the vehicle. Also, I worked here! ANYWAYS, where was I? After a few weeks, investigators on the Comet Mysteries discovered something about the metal in the fuselage: It showed signs of severe metal fatigue. That didn’t make sense, though. Pre-production testing had shown airframes could last tens of thousands of hours before fatigue would begin to show. The airframes involved only had a few thousand or so hours on the airframe. But then the investigators remembered something important about the jetliner, the fact that it was pressurized. In Italy, autopsies on the passengers had shown injuries consistent with that of an explosive decompression. The investigators began to piece the clues together. No other aircraft had gone through pressurizing cycles as fast and as often as the Comet. That cycle incurred stress on the airframe which weakened it over time. Testing the effects pressurizing cycles had on the airframe concluded that fatigue occurred forty times faster than expected in airframes. A prime suspect was discovered. To double check their findings, investigators put a pressurized Comet fuselage into a tank full of water to simulate spending time at cruising altitude and pressure. 9,000 simulated hours in, a loud bang was heard and the pressures inside the fuselage fell; their theory was confirmed. The tank was drained, and what they saw horrified them. Starting from the window frame, a crack extended to the top of the radio antennas and back along the other side of the fuselage, nearly bisecting the craft with results looking more like a bomb than anything else. Upon further research and calculations, engineers discovered that the strain put against the square windows at the corners were astronomically high, leading to the formation of a crack. From that point on it was clear: Square windows on pressure vessels would not work.  Fuselage fragment from the South African incident. Note the square windows and point of fragmentation The Comets were immediately rebuilt with rounded windows to fix the issue. The first variant of Comet never flew a passenger flight again. Meanwhile across the Pond, Boeing had completed development of its own jetliner, the 707 -- this time with rounded windows. De Havilland had started a jet race, and everyone was pumping out their own jetliners. They competed for a while, with the last Comet flight taking place in March of 1997. They continued to make small jets like the Trident and the Heron, but nothing as innovative as the Comet. For de Havilland, they were gobbled up by Hawker Siddeley in 1960 as a subsidiary until HS went under in 1992. So that’s the story of the de Havilland Comet. It changed the entire landscape of commercial aviation, and brought the world into the jet age. We’re getting into the modern era in game now, so I’m not sure what other aircraft are left to unlock, if any. If y’all have any questions or requests for things I should cover in the remaining time of the LP, just give me a PM or post in the thread.
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Mar 30, 2016 00:24
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Glazius posted:At least they died long before they hit the ground? Here's where it gets morbid! Depending on the method of decompression, there's between a 15-60 second period of "useful consciousness" at the Comet's cruising altitude. Useful consciousness is determined as how long you're capable of performing flying duties, but it's a good measure for how long a standard person will be self-aware. Explosive decompression usually puts you at the low end of this timeframe, as the air is basically sucked from your lungs by the air rushing from the cabin. Moreover, from last useful breath to brain death is on the order of 4-5 minutes, which is more than the time it takes for you to fall from 36,000 feet. So, unless you were hit by debris and killed by blunt force trauma, you'd not only know you were hosed, but still be alive on the way down. Unconscious, but alive. Morbid tangent, we know this happened during the Challenger disaster. Several spring-loaded switches were moved in what's assumed to be an attempt to restore power to the intact crew capsule, and at least three of the four astronaut emergency air systems that we found were manually activated. If you're into that kinda poo poo, you can find more out here. Which leads me to the only irrational fear I have: knowing you're gonna die in the immediate future and that there's nothing you can do to stop it. As a palette cleanser, have this pug dressed as a slightly larger pug. 
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Mar 30, 2016 05:00
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I'm working on a [hopefully] three-topic bonus effortpost to release as a thank you to Jaguars! for the LP and y'all for reading my ramblings. The planes are related to some of the designs in the game in one way or another, but not included, so I hope you don't mind about that... 777's and 737's and 321's all don't really have anything effort-post-worthy about them. I'm sort of taking this post to heart: Glazius posted:I don't have any requests other than, before this is done, find something else you feel is worth talking about. I love me an effortpost.
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Apr 30, 2016 02:57
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Aw man, the A380. It is to extreme capacity what the Concorde was to extreme speed... and look where that ended up. ANYWAYS:Glazius posted:I don't have any requests other than, before this is done, find something else you feel is worth talking about. I love me an effortpost. Glazius, my friend, you have no idea what you just unleashed. So Jaguars! is wrapping up his LP (which I can’t thank him enough for doing! TT-type games deserve more LPs) and I felt like I wanted to show him my thanks for not running me out when I sperged out about airplanes. So, have a personally-inspired piece or two…. Or three: Part one: The Fastest Airliner in the World* *for a time So the running theme for these pieces is going to be “aircraft with which Spaced God has worked,” just because I feel that some stuff I’ve worked on has some interesting history behind it. They also were in the shadow of the big guys that got to get featured in the game. Our first exhibit has us going back to only a few years after when we left off from the Comet piece, around 1956. The Jet Age was now well and truly “a thing,” and in America companies like Boeing and Douglas had thrown themselves at the idea of an American jetliner. Meanwhile, Convair existed. Convair was a subsidiary of the aerospace conglomerate General Dynamics (bought in 1953-ish), and they were mostly known for making things with one of two properties: unique, fast things or extremely boring things. On the former end, you had your delta wing fighters and bombers like the F-106 and the B-58. They also had the B-36 Peacemaker, the only American aircraft to carry an operational nuclear reactor and also one of my favorite airplanes. On the other end you’ve got their only forays into civil aviation, which were regional turboprops like the CV-240 family, which is only notable for killing Lynyrd Skynyrd. But Convair saw the jetliner revolution we talked about last post and how much bank it was capable of making, so they threw their hats in the ring. They saw that the Comet, 707, and DC-8 were all hitting the same market: large people movers over long distance, and that the regional market was being left out. Logically then, there must be a market for a small, low capacity, short-to-medium range jetliner that can get people to places fast! Thus, an idea was born. The aircraft was pretty neat. It took four civilian-converted J-79 jet engines (the same jets that powered military aircraft such as the F-4 and B-58 to supersonic speeds) and strapped them to a 39 meter long fuselage with wings spanning 36.5m. It could carry 110 pax 4400 km at 535 knots. You’ll notice I have yet to actually say the name of the aircraft, and that’s where things get funny. Over the three year design period of the project, Convair went through like a half dozen goddamned names. The first sketches were named the Skylark, then the Golden Arrow (but it was too close to Continental’s trademark on Golden Jet), then the Convair 600, and finally the Convair 880. Those two numbers both are because the aircraft cruises at 600 mph/880 feet/second, the fastest cruise speed at that time for a jetliner (granted there were only, like, 3  ).Convair presented their idea to several airlines, and when Howard Hughes (who owned TWA) saw the 880, he was loving in and ordered 3 on the spot. Hughes got involved in the design process (as he was wont to do), helped fly some test flights, and by 1960 the first 880’s were in service with Trans-World. A couple other airliners picked up on the plane, including Delta, Cathay Pacific, Japan, and a few others. Hell, the Navy converted one for a tanker and Elvis even picked one up for his own personal plane.  A Convair 880 on the takeoff roll. A lot of times when the 880 took of, the four CJ-79s would belch smoke in their wake So by now you’re probably wondering where everything goes wrong and why you haven’t heard of this thing, and to be honest things went bad from square one. The engines they used were ungodly loud, inefficient, and smoky. This is because those engines were originally used on military planes which were mostly designed to go fast and not give a gently caress about fuel efficiency. Moreover, the 5 abreast seating setup wasn’t particularly liked by any flight attendant. The biggest problem, though, was that the niche Convair tried to fill existed, but it was REALLY small. In total only 65 -880’s were built, and only 37 -990’s (Convair’s desperate attempt to make their design better) saw flight. At the end of the day, the Skylark/Golden Arrow/600/880/990/whatever project produced a whopping $190M…. In losses. Convair got out of the air transport market forever to go back to making missiles and rockets and fighters and do cool poo poo like land on the moon, meanwhile the remaining 880’s were left to rust. Of the 65 -880’s built, I only know of six-ish airframes that are still intact-ish. Elvis’s plane, though not airworthy, is still floating around somewhere near Graceland. A few airframes were turned into corp jets until they either crashed or got scrapped, and one was even turned into a stripclub. The airframe I worked with was N803TW -- the same in that photo up there. She was a preproduction model (serial number 3) flown by Hughes to help sell the airplane. The museum owns the cockpit and the first-class bulkhead, and I did work restoring it to approximately what it looked like when it rolled of the assembly line in 1959.  3TW’s cockpit circa 2013, before restoration. I had started working at the museum in 2014 and by Summer of that year the restoration work really picked up. I remember scrubbing out the inside of the bare metal in August when it was 30C outside and 60C inside. Not a fun memory.  The exterior of 3TW, probably around six months earlier than the above photo. Exterior work was done in Summer 2013, including the paint. Now, there’s a made-to-fit end cap on the cut end of the fuselage with power and ventilation holes implemented. Part two: The Martin 2-0-2 (equals 0) Let’s flash back earlier to 1945. There were a lot of post-war cargo airplanes coming back from the Pacific and European Theatres and converted to civilian use. The aircraft doing this in the biggest amounts was our good old friend the Douglas DC-3. Glenn Martin, president of the aircraft company bearing his name, wanted to build a replacement for these pre-war-era aircraft. Enter the Martin 2-0-2 (don’t ask me why it’s hyphenated). From the outside, it seemed like a pretty good design. 71 feet long, 93 feet wide, 40 pax/9,270lb capacity, and two Pratt and Whitney R-2800 Double Wasps produced 1,800 HP each to pull the plane to a cruise speed of 178 mph at 12,000 feet over 630 miles. An interesting note is that the horsepower could be increased by about a quarter through water injection, which was common on military aircraft but not civilian propliners due to weight issues. Here’s where things get weird. Not necessarily bad (yet), but weird. The design of the aircraft also had some quirks. You see, most aircraft around this time (including our friend Convair’s CV-270 and Douglas’s DC-6) were starting to become pressurized to give passengers more comfort and to allow a higher cruising altitude. The 2-0-2… didn’t... for some reason. Moreover, the aircraft lacked batteries. This meant to operate the electric airstairs in the back after a flight, you would need to keep at least one engine running -- because everyone knows nothing can go wrong when you have a bunch of civilians on a tarmac with running engines.  The interior of a Martin 2-0-2. Note the very small overhead bins -- they weren’t for luggage, but for hats!   The same airplane as above circa July 1962 flying for Allegheny Airlines. Electrical and pressurization issues notwithstanding, orders for the 2-0-2 flowed in. 137 orders were placed in the opening months from airlines big and small alike, including hard hitters like TWA, Northwest, and Delta. And now here is where things go wrong. The end of the 2-0-2 was a swift one-two punch. The first issue was the fact that the alloy used in the wing spars were prone to metal fatigue and corrosion. This led to a few instances of the wings just falling off mid flight. The entire fleet had to be grounded to fix this. The other issue was the fact that Martin had a clause in their contracts allowing the airlines to cancel their contracts at any time for any reason without penalty. This is dumb. These two issues, combined with the increase in faster, pressurized aircraft, put a nail in the coffin of the 2-0-2. Neither it or it’s successor the 4-0-4 were ever as successful as their competitors, and they faded into obscurity. A total of 47 2-0-2s were produced in a span of about 11 months. After they had been rendered obsolete they lingered around with charter airliners, but by the end of the day most all of them were turned to pots, pans, and tin cans. And by “most all,” I mean exactly 46. Today, only one 2-0-2 airframe exists in anywhere in the world, and it’s at the museum at which I worked. In fact, it’s also the same aircraft in the pictures up there... again! She served for Allegheny in the 50’s and 60’s, and was donated to the New Jersey Aviation Hall of Fame in the 80’s. Today, she’s not in the best of shape: her interior is cracked and faded, her paint chipped, and her wings clipped to fit her into the exhibit area. However restoration is actively underway to bring her back to her former near-glory.  The exterior of 93204, from about 10 years ago. The paint’s since chipped and decayed, sadly.  The cockpit of 93204 now. Hopefully we’ll get her back in shape. As an aside: I could rant for days about how the shapes of the knobs are completely different in this aircraft, which makes flying it at night super hard but I think this post is already getting long enough Part Three: The Castle, the Porcupine, and the Gamble, all rolled into one Okay, so this isn’t an airliner. BUT! I feel that this should be covered because A) this is connected because it involves a gamblin’ company we’ve talked about before, and B) I am in love with this airplane. Let’s talk about the B-17! In 1934, the Martin (deja vu!) B-10 first entered service with the Army Air Corps (Air Force didn’t exist until 1947). It was the first all-metal monoplane bomber to be used by the USAAC and was pretty cool. The same year (don’t ask me why), the Corps wanted to prepare a replacement for their shiny new bomber. They had some pretty lofty (pardon the pun) requirements, too: Carry a useful payload for 10 hours at 200 mph for a period of ten hours, with “extra credit” goals including a range of 2,000 miles and an extra 50 mph to the cruise speed. The contract was sent to three companies -- Douglas, Martin, and Boeing -- with the winner to be determined via fly-off. A few years prior, Boeing had lost a contract (see a running theme with these guys?) with the Corps to make the B-9, a really loving slow, ungainly bomber converted from a mailplane. They had put a lot of money into that, and its rejection put the company perilously close to the financial brink. This time Boeing knew they had to do it right, and so they threw everything they had into this contract to create a design known as Model 299. The 299 took inspiration from the prototype XB-15 bomber and Model 247 transporter to create an absolute behemoth of a bomber. For comparison, the Douglas and Martin prototypes both were underpowered twin-engined designs which barely met the contract specifications. The 299, on the other hand, sported four P&W 1690 Hornet engines producing a total of 3,000 HP which could carry 6,000 lbs of bombs 2,000 miles to a target. While the competitors each were armed with three 30-cal (7.62mm) Brownings and very thin armor, Boeing’s original design bristled with six 30’s (this was later upgraded to thirteen 50-cal’s) and armor plating. It also featured the a nifty, top-secret targeting device called the Norden Bombsight. I could talk about this guy for another four or five paragraphs, but I’ll shorten it by saying it is the most accurate mechanical bomb sight of all time, capable of putting a bomb in a 75ft circle from 36,000 feet. At the first public display in Everett, WA reporters were baffled by the sheer number of guns and amount of armor, with one exclaiming “Why, the thing’s a flying fortress!” Boeing engineers heard this, and jumped on the name… the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. While getting ready to fly out to Ohio for the USAAC’s contest, the Fortress not only beat the other competitors to the airport, but also broke the world record for sustained speed during a cross country flight (2,300ish miles in 9 hours at an average of 252 mph). I can’t find any source to confirm this, but I assume the phrase “oh gently caress” was said in certain aerospace company meeting rooms. During the fly-off, it became clear quite quickly that Boeing’s entry was miles ahead of what Douglas and Martin had put together. The four-engined bomber demonstrated super-long range capabilities at speeds and altitudes which were unheard of at the time. Despite the setbacks of the B-9, everything was coming up Boeing. And then something awful happened. Again. (Last time I’ll type that, I swear!) During the second evaluation flight, the crew neglected to remove the gust lock before beginning their flight. Gust locks are devices which prevent winds from moving the control surfaces, potentially damaging them, so they’re basically trying to drive a car with one of those steering wheel locks. The plane took off, lost control, and crashed killing all aboard. Boeing’s only prototype (and only chance at financial salvation) was quite literally going up in smoke. It also turns out that “crashing your airplane” is one of the things that immediately disqualifies you from winning a USAAC aircraft contract. So now Boeing was, like, quadruply hosed: No contract, no plane, no test pilots that knew how to fly said plane, and no money.  Pictured: how not to sell airplanes However, the Corps were so impressed by the Fortress that -- even though the contract was awarded to Douglas -- 13 Fortresses were ordered. These aircraft were delivered in 1937 for operational testing, including the first intercept of an unknowing ocean liner by Curtiss LeMay. Some engine and fuselage upgrades later, the B-17A became operational in 1939. Over the next six years, this plane would become the posterchild of Allied airpower. We first starting giving them to the RAF under lend-lease, who instantly fell in love with the design. Once America got involved in the war, a total of 4,500 Fortresses were spread to bases in both theatres. Through daylight raids consisting of thousands of bombers, over a 580,000 metric tons of ordnance was dropped on targets in Europe, the most of any aircraft in the war on either side. German pilots were so intimidated by the aircraft’s defenses, they referred to them as fliegendes Stachelschwein, or flying porcupines.  A daylight bombing raid. Raids often consisted of as many as 1,000 aircraft loaded with bombs  A Luftwaffe model showing the cones of fire for each of the B-17’s 13 guns. Not a whole lot of safe places to be if you’re on the outside… 12,731 aircraft were built from ‘36-’45, and a lot remained in service for years after the war. Others were converted for civilian use, including airliners, firefighting aircraft, cropdusters, and cargo carriers. However, despite being the third most produced heavy bomber of all time, there are only 10 flying in the world today. I had the privilege of working with three of these guys when they flew into airports I flew out of, EAA’s Aluminum Overcast, Yankee Air Force's Yankee Lady and Collings Foundation’s Nine-O-Nine. I even got a chance to fly one, which is my only aviation-based claim to fame. You can see some of these flying relics too if you’re in the states. EAA, Collings, and CAF fly all around the country and offer rides and ground tours (There are airworthy -17s in France and the UK but I don't know their operations). Supporting these aircraft is very important, because most cost an exuberant amount of money to keep flying (EAA’s bird runs them somewhere around $2M a year) and we need to keep these wonderful pieces of history in the skies.  Nine-O-Nine, one of the last flying B-17s in the world. The symbol and letter on the tail was used to indicate the squadron the aircraft belonged to. The "A" in a triangle means she belonged to the 91st USAAF Bomb Group. So, there you have it: a lotta words (this ended up being WAAAY longer than I expected it to be) and a little bit of self-indulgence. As I said up top, big thanks to Jaguars! for the thread, and everyone for liking my little spice I threw in between updates (in this case it’s less of a little spice and more the entire spice rack, though). I hope I taught y’all a little bit about aviation history, because it’s super cool. If you want more, go to an aviation museum and talk to people because that’s how I learned most everything I know. Or, if you’re too lazy to leave the forums, hop on over to the Aeronautical Insanity thread. As always, if you have questions about anything I’ve talked about, feel free to ask or PM. But, I think the most important lesson we learned today is... Glazius posted:I don't have any requests other than, before this is done, find something else you feel is worth talking about. I love me an effortpost. Don’t give me free reign, or you’ll get a long, rambly effort post tangentially related to the game
Spaced God fucked around with this message at 03:23 on May 23, 2016 |
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May 7, 2016 03:54
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