Props to the bros

Relative to the average YouTube vid, the one embedded below is a bit long (50 mins+), and it's quite a deep dive, but it's also worth your time for the way it unpacks an interesting tale of historical and technological contingency.

tl;dr*: the Wright brothers were the first to fly a heavier-than-air craft** and did so using an engine which was, by subsequent standards, pretty feeble (12-16hp). One innovation which helped them to translate this miserly amount of power into powered flight was figuring out how to build an efficient propeller.

On the other side of the Atlantic, aviation pioneers in France were struggling with stumpy, inefficient paddles for propellers, but building ever more powerful, efficient engines in an attempt to overcome this limitation and get their creations off the ground.

Then, in 1908, Wilbur Wright rocked up in France to demonstrate one of his aircraft. French customs unpacked the machine for some sort of check and managed to damage it in the process. Wright had to get his aircraft repaired and rebuilt with the help of locals, some of whom had been working with French aviation pioneers. This was the moment when the secret of the Wright's propeller technology stopped being a secret.

The fortuitous combination of Wright propellers and powerful French engines quickly became one of the main drivers of the aviation firsts of pioneers like Louis Blériot and Henri Farman, the early French dominance of the aviation industry and the swift evolution of the aeroplane from astonishing novelty to a useful device with practical applications.

It's an interesting tale, far more so than the abbreviated list of "firsts" in less detailed accounts and I like the way it both does justice to the Wrights' genius and the contribution of French engine makers who, in struggling to overcome the limitations of primitive propeller design turned a disadvantage into industry dominance.

*I guess the video equivalent should be tl;dw.

**Not Alberto Santos-Dumont - the video examines the claims that Santos-Dumont was the first to achieve powered flight and demolishes them pretty convincingly. What I particularly like about this video is that it treats Santos-Dumont's actual achievements with seriousness and respect, rather than dismissing him completely for not having achieved this world-changing first.

Finding Nemo (again)

 

From my blog post We all live in a retro submarine from April 2010

I just had a reminder of this photo, which I took in Brighton over a decade ago. A few things have changed since then. My son, who was just about the right size to captain this hobbit-scale sub is now as tall as me (give or take; it's hard to tell when his default posture's the stereotypical teenage slouch). 

But I'm still coming across subs out there which look like takes on Jules Verne's fictional Nautilus. A more or less unrelated search recently came back with this:

Image Credit: H I Sutton's Covert Shores blog

Although it dates from the around  same era when I took my picture, this is no cartoonishly cute sculpture, or theme park attraction, but an attempt at an actual working submarine (well, a semi-submersible, anyway), designed and built with deadly purpose by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better known as the Tamil Tigers, in the closing days of the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Like the sculpture, this is on a far smaller scale than Nemo's Nautilus (it's a midget semi-sub, probably only around a 10th of the length of the fictional 70 metre Nautilus). Interestingly, Hutton also compares it to a Nineteenth Century submersible, but a real one. That's because, like the Confederate Civil War-era sub the Huntley, the Tamil Tigers' vessel looks as if it was designed to attack ships by ramming them with a spar torpedo attached to the pole sticking out of its bow.

This isn't the only interesting oddity to be found in the Covert Shores blog, which features a compelling selection of unusual naval tech, both current & vintage. Highlights include Russia's huge, terrifying nuclear powered/armed torpedo, named "Posiedon" (Посейдон), after citizens were given a vote on the name of Russia's latest weapon of mass destruction (can't help feeling disappointed that they didn't end up with a doomsday weapon called Nukey McNukeface). Then there's quite a bit of stuff on (mainly Latin Ameican) narco subs, the use of marine mammals for naval operations, the mysterious death of Lieutenant-Commander "Buster" Crabb, a prohibition-era moonshine-smuggling sub and the James Bond-ish hardware of Swimmer Delivery Vehicles underwater "chariot" attack craft and various stealthy/low-profile vessels.

Another treat from Covert Shores is Hutton's own interpretatation of Verne's Nautilus, which is closer to a visualisation of what was described in the novel than the Harper Goff's looser, but nonetheless wonderful, visualisation. 

It wasn't a search for this iconic proto-steampunk design which originally led me to Hutton's blog, though. I was initially looking for information on another a piece of retro futurism from a later era, namely this sleek deco-looking experimental helicopter design from the 1930s:

Like the Tamil Tigers' mini-Nautilus, the  Dorand G20 Gyroplane looks like something that's sprung out of the pages of vintage Science Fiction into real life. In this case, if you ever had a mental picture of the ubiquitous helicopters which flitted around the art deco skyscrapers in Huxley's Brave New World, carrying the Alphas and Betas to and from their places of work, consumption or leisure, it probably looked like something like this.

Like the Tamil mini sub, though, this helicopter was orignally built with more aggressive intentions - there was an idea that the Dorand would replace the spotter plane which was kept on board France's massive inter-war Surcouf cruiser submarine (that's the link which originally brought me to the Covert Shores blog).

The Dorand Gyroplane isn't quite as insanely art deco as the never-flown Bugatti racing plane from the same era, but it comes pretty damn close.

Definitely at the more elegant end of the very wide spectrum of French aircraft designs from the 1930s. As somone once said:

When one looks at French aircraft of the period immediately before and during World War Two, it is evident that there were two schools of thought when it came to aircraft design! One school was to design elegant, graceful and beautiful aircraft. The other was to see just how ugly they could make the airplane and it still fly and perform the duties it was designed for.

Mon Dieu, quel bordel!

 Now there's a design that wouldn't ever make it it into fiction. Oh, hang on...

The Canadian Air Force (according to South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut).

Aircraft of the day

Oh hai. How time flies - you take a wee blog break & before you know it, a couple of months have passed. But, yes, this thing is still on.

It's been even longer - over eight years - since I did an Aircraft of the Day. And I only ever did two of 'em, anyway (here's the other). So here, by total absence of popular demand, is another, the aeroplane I've been obsessing about most recently, a 1930s design, the Mignet Pou-du-Ciel, better known to anglophones as the Flying Flea:

Mignet HM.14 Pou-du-Ciel

Henri Mignet's concept was simple. A small, basic home-built aircraft which could be constructed by anybody with a few craft skills and safely flown by a novice pilot. It was meant to bring aviation to the masses in the same way that Ford's Model T had brought motoring to the masses. Indeed, according to the Wikipedia article the name Pou-du-Ciel ("sky louse") was a nod to the Model T:

The odd name comes from the French nickname for the Ford Model T automobile, "Pou de la Route" or "Louse of the Road" because Henry Ford's economy car was so common and initially came only in black.

Which might be true, although my brief attempts to find a direct source confirming that the French ever called Model Ts "road lice" has drawn a blank so far (although a Belgian car site does seem to suggest that what looks like a post-war microcar, Hippolyte Delimal's Carabe was also nicknamed the "Pou de la Route" - presumably named after the Pou-du-Ciel, which isn't a lot of help, either entomologically or etymologically).

The Pou's unusal design, more like a two pairs of wings than a conventional wing and horizontal tailplane was intended to be a safety feature. The tandem-wing design was designed to be stall proof,* as explained here:

The wing enters a stall. But here, in tandem wing configuration, the front wing will stall. What happens now? Well, the nose drops a bit. The rear wing is still holding the airplane up a bit. But it cannot hold it completely, so the airplane will sink while its nose drops a bit. But, the nose that did drop makes the angle of the airplane (and its wings) less, so ...the wing lifts again once the angle of the airplane is good enough. The nose rises again. You get another change to react to the stall.

The result is that you enter a wave like movement, you sink while you have your nose going down and up again. You can keep on to this situation and even use it as a kind of hard controlled descent. Or you can get more time to react to this situation and give more power or lower your nose. Anyway, you are given a chance to live and tell.

Also, the controls for the all-moving front wing and rudder were simpler than those for a conventional aircraft (just a control stick, no rudder pedals), making life easier for a rookie pilot.

All great. Unfortunately, Mignet's HM.14, the original Pou, had an unsuspected design flaw which caused the aircraft to pitch nose downward when pilots attempted to recover from a shallow dive. A series of fatal accidents meant that, instead of becoming known as the safe, reliable "people's aeroplane" the Pou ended up with a reputation as a death trap - for example it makes 9th place on Hush Kit's list of the 10 Worst French Aircraft (just over 4 mins into this vid)

After these crashes all Pous were grounded by the authorities in France and the UK, pending investigations. The accident investigations were aided by the diminutive size of the Pou - small enough to fit inside wind tunnels which were usually only big enough to accommodate a scale model of the aircraft being tested. Testing revealed that, at certain angles "the front wing's downwash would accelerate the air over the rear wing and cause it to gain lift more quickly than the front wing, resulting in an ever-increasing nose pitch-down and flight directly into the ground."

The good news was that, once diagnosed, the problem was easy to fix, by simply moving the rear wing six inches backwards. But by the time modified, safe Pous were taking to the air again, it was 1939 and hobby fliers in France and the UK would soon have more pressing concerns on their minds than joy-riding in tiny home-built planes.

There's a bit of a "what if" hanging in the air here. What if the original Pou design flaw had been spotted before people started building and flying them? What if the war hadn't intervened when the design had been perfected?

I don't think we'd have seen huge swarms of Pous in the skies. It was only ever a one, or two seat pleasure craft, a really cool hobbyists' project, as opposed to a practical form of transport. Moving back from alternative history to real history, flight did eventually become more egalitarian, but not in the way Mignet anticipated. Instead of ordinary people taking to the skies en masse in tiny home-built machines they could construct or buy relatively cheaply, ordinary people got airborne once seats on huge, complex multi-million dollar jets became affordable to people outside what they used to call the "jet set."

The future doesn't always work out the way we expect. Although I do have a sort of yearning for Mignet's original vision - there's something about the simplicity, the minimalism and the do-it-yourself ethos that makes me wish for a Wallace and Gromit world where folk spend their weekends making their own aircraft or flying them around their neighbourhood. Although in an age where a mere radio-controlled drone, or possibly just the rumour of one, can shut a major international airport, that's probably more whimsical than wise.





*A concern shared by Juan de la Cierva, who had invented the autogyro in the previous decade in another successful attempt to devise a stall-proof aircraft. Some irony fans like to say that De la Cierva was killed when the conventional plane he was travelling in stalled in 1936, but a quick visit to Wikipedia debunks this neat story - it looks as if the aircraft drifted off course while taking off in foggy weather, accidentally flew into the chimney of a house on some high ground adjacent to the aerodrome and crashed.

Rocketman, the retrofuturist

"North Korea's Military Is Straight Out of A Sci-Fi Movie", screamed the clickbaity headline...

... right next to a picture of a 1950s-vintage MiG-15.

I guess the sci-fi movie they had in mind was Back to the Future.

Ship of fools

Admiral Sir Philip Jones is jolly proud of his new toy:

HMS Queen Elizabeth is the nation's future flagship; the embodiment of Britain in steel and spirit. In the years and decades to come, she and her sister ship will demonstrate the kind of nation we are...

And, by jingo, he's right. What better to symbolise the state of the nation than an unwieldy, massively expensive status symbol?

It's a ship specifically and exclusively designed around one of the most misconceived, overpriced, under-performing warplanes in the long, murky history of defence procurement ("The JSF is a terrible fighter, bomber and attacker — and unfit for aircraft carriers").

It's vulnerable to attack, although if the Navy ask the French very nicely, they might help to defend it (in return for borrowing its sister ship occasionally).

And talking of borrowing, the US Marine Corps have told the UK they'll be using its new aircraft carrier to fly their F-35s over the South China Sea on its first deployment (I guess that's only fair - after all, it was the USMC's input that irretrievably screwed up the F-35's design in the first place, so it would be rude not to thank them for saddling the UK with one of the most expensively useless military aircraft of all time).

A ruinously expensive, ill-conceived boast that's supposed to impress the rest of the world but, in reality, only highlights the UK's vulnerability, subservient status and dependence on the good will of others. Truly, HMS Queen Elizabeth is "the embodiment of Britain* in steel"...



*Apologies to Northern Ireland although, to be fair, Northern Ireland will be increasingly easy to miss anyway, now that it's being fitted with an innovative stealth border, as part of an ambitious project that promises to be every bit as trouble-free and successful as the F-35.

Anodyne death from the skies

It's political correctness gone mad ... apparently:

New British flying robot killer death machines renamed 'Protector' 

'Reaper' and 'Predator' were too aggressive...apparently

The Ministry of Defence has tried to re-brand its latest batch of airborne death machines as “Protector” drones rather than their actual trade name of Reaper.

grumbled Gareth Corfield at The Register recently.

This comes as no great surprise to me, as the Brits have got previous when it comes to making America's winged weapons of war sound a whole lot less cool and frightening. Back in the Second World War, the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm acquired a load of relatively fast and modern American planes to supplement the slow and antiquated British designs its carrier squadrons had been using at the outbreak of the war. These new planes included the Grumman F4F fighter, which the Americans called the "Wildcat" and the Grumman TBF torpedo bomber, known in America as the "Avenger."

The British authorities decided that these names were good enough for our American cousins but not quite classy enough for us, so they renamed the Wildcat in British service the "Martlet." What's a Martlet?

 Image credit

A martlet in English heraldry is a heraldic charge depicting a stylized bird similar to a house martin or swallow, with stylised feet. It should be distinguished from the merlette of French heraldry, which is a duck-like bird with a swan-neck and chopped-off beak and legs.

Great name - if you spent your childhood years nerdily obsessing over The Observer's Book of Heraldry. For almost everybody else, ridiculously obscure and a bit rubbish. Still, I guess that a few of the officer class might have got it, given that the Royal Navy boasted some senior officers of startlingly impressive aristocratic pedigree, including Lord Mountbatten (born "His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg") and that scion of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark.

Maybe people who were born a "serene highness", or had a family name that was longer than the average commoner's postal address, lived in a world where knowing your heraldic devices was a day to day life skill, like being able to wire a plug. Perhaps the person who came up with the name "Martlet" was just used to hob-nobbing with nobs like this?

To be fair, although "Wildcat" was a far better name, it wasn't a very good fit with the appearance of the F4F, a tubby machine which looked more like an overfed domestic moggie than a rangy, untamed predator:

Bagpuss takes to the skies!*

OK, it looked slightly less like an aeroplane from a Rupert Bear cartoon than its stubby radial-engined near-contemporaries, the Boeing P-26 and Polikarpov I-16, but not much.

Still, appearances can be deceptive - the legendary Eric "Winkle" Brown (who went on to fly more different types of aircraft than anybody else ever has, or probably ever will), flew the innocuous-looking Wildcat/Martlet in combat and thought pretty highly of it (Michael Gove may think that people are "tired" of listening to experts, but I still have this perverse, old-fashioned preference for listening to the opinions of people who might actually know what they're talking about, rather than the noisily uninformed wibblings of virtually fact-free political rent-a-gobs).

As for the aggressive-sounding Avenger, the British decided for ... reasons, to rename it the "Tarpon", after a big fish that most British people had probably never heard of (although the name would have meant something to, say, Florida game fishers). Bonus points for choosing a name that sounds almost like "tampon." I'm not entirely sure whether the unintentional schoolboy humour is anachronistic - Tampax, apparently, first hit the US market in the early 1930s and whether tampons were a thing in 1940s Britain, I don't know, although if I had to guess, I'd imagine that the supply of innovative feminine hygiene products was low to non-existent in a U-boat blockaded country where stocks of everything were low to non-existent.

Later in the war, in a tacit admission that their naming abilities had been pretty woeful, the relevant British authorities relented and retrospectively decided to use the original American names for the Royal Navy's Lend-Lease Wildcats and Avengers. By the time the RN were adding the late-war US Corsair and Hellcat aircraft to Fleet Air Arm squadrons, nobody even thought about mucking around with the planes' names any more.

So, considering the British authorities' previous attempts at re-naming American kit, they could have done a lot worse than "Protector."

I'm not even sure that "Protector" even marks some sort of new low in the art of military euphemism. When the RAF got its hands on some American B-24 heavy bombers during the Second World War and wanted to name the big beasts, the name it came up with was "Liberator." Even in that undeniably just war, it's stretching credulity to imagine that the recipients of a stick of high-explosive bombs from a Liberator's capacious bomb bay would have looked around the smoking ruins and considered themselves liberated, any more than the survivors of a wedding party accidentally blown to hell by a Protector's Brimstone missile would feel themselves protected, but there you go.


*Updated - original Wildcat / Martlet image (nicked from Wikipedia article), replaced by relevant illustrations from British Air Forces, a wartime picture supplement / collectable, published by The Illustrated London News.

Queen drones on

Why are unpiloted flying machines called drones? The Online Etymology Dictionary explains, sort of:

drone (n.)
Old English dran, dræn "male honeybee," from Proto-Germanic *dran- (source also of Middle Dutch drane; Old High German treno; German Drohne, which is from Middle Low German drone), probably imitative; given a figurative sense of "idler, lazy worker" (male bees make no honey) 1520s. Meaning "pilotless aircraft" is from 1946.

OK, but where's the link between bees (whether of the striving or skiving variety) and uncrewed aerial vehicles? It's not obvious, but Wikipedia has a plausible explanation going right back to the 1930s, involving the famous Tiger Moth biplane:

A radio-controlled gunnery target version of Tiger Moth appeared in 1935 called the DH.82 Queen Bee; it used a wooden fuselage based on that of the DH.60 Gipsy Moth (with appropriate structural changes related to cabane strut placement) with the wings of the Tiger Moth II. There were nearly 300 in service at the start of the Second World War. It is believed the name "Drone" derived from "Queen Bee". These aircraft retained a normal front cockpit for test-flying or ferry flights, but had a radio-control system in the rear cockpit that operated the controls using pneumatically driven servos. Four-hundred were built by de Havilland at Hatfield, and a further 70 by Scottish Aviation.

Some Queen Bees, produced for the Fleet Air Arm, were mounted on floats for water operations - here's a picture of one being demonstrated to Mr Churchill:

Of course, this was long before the days when drone jockeys started flying via computer screen and joystick, or video game-style controller. As a contributor to The Aviation Forum explained:

Radio controlled, they were launched by catapult, then radio controlled using pulse signals from (honest) an old-style telephone dial.
Dialing nine or ......... gave you a dive.
Six or ...... gave you climb
Five or ..... left turn
Three or ... right turn

...which is wonderfully like playing a game using the keys of your mobile phone, only you get to control a real Tiger Moth, instead of a few pixels on a screen.

In other news, the Queen was 90 (again) yesterday and apparently said some stuff. Prince Harry looked unamused...

... although, to be fair, the photo probably puts those paternity doubts to rest or, if not, at least makes me think that nurture must trump genetics in some cases.

Meatbox

Being a fighter pilot -- for that matter, simply taking off in a single-engine jet fighter of the Century series, such as an F-102, or any of the military's other marvelous bricks with fins on them -- presented a man, on a perfectly sunny day, with more ways to get himself killed than his wife and children could imagine in their wildest fears. 

Wrote Tom Wolf in The Right Stuff. But you didn't have to be an all-American hero to dice with death up in the burning blue. Look what Wikipedia has to say about the RAF's first jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor. When reading this paragraph, bear in mind that the total number of British service personnel who've died in the recent Afghan war is 456.

A total of 890 Meteors were lost in RAF service (145 of these crashes occurred in 1953 alone), resulting in the deaths of 450 pilots. Contributory factors in the number of crashes were the high fuel consumption and consequent short flight endurance (less than one hour), causing pilots to run out of fuel, and difficult handling with one engine out due to the widely set engines.

Almost as many deaths from just flying one type of plane as from a decade and a half of brutal fighting in a country already notorious for being the graveyard of invading armies. No wonder they called it the Meatbox.

The flying canvases of Paul Klee

I've always liked Paul Klee's semi-abstract geometrical paintings, the ones that you could see as 2D impressions of architectural townscapes or just harmonious arrangements of pleasing blocks of colour. There's a sense of tranquility, rhythm and order that's both satisfying and very easy on the eye.

Red/Green Architecture (yellow/violet gradation), Paul Klee, 1922

I never knew much about Klee's biography, but in this Great War centenary year I've discovered something that suggests he got some of his inspiration from a less-than-tranquil source:

After finishing the military training course, which began on 11 March 1916, he was committed as a soldier behind the front. Klee moved on 20 August to the aircraft maintenance company in Oberschleissheim, executing skilled manual work, such as restoring aircraft camouflage, and accompanying aircraft transports. On 17 January 1917, he was transferred to the Royal Bavarian flying school in Gersthofen ... to work as a clerk for the treasurer till the end of the war. This allowed him to stay in a small room outside of the barrack block and continue painting.

To give you some idea of the connection I'm seeing, take a look at the patterns on the fabric covering this restored World War I German aircraft:

Fokker D VIII, covered in camouflage fabric featuring repeating irregular polygons, 1918.

Quite Klee-esque, don't you think? It's not a complete clincher, as Klee was camouflaging aircraft in 1916 and this sort of pattern above only became widespread in 1917-18, but if we take a nerdy look at the development of aircraft camouflage in the Great War, I think you'll agree that the connection still looks compelling.

In 1914, the air arms of the various belligerents were made up of mainly fabric-covered aircraft. The fabric, along with metal engine covers and visible wooden parts, was left unpainted. The fabric was stiffened with clear dope and the wooden bits were varnished. The first change came when the various other powers started to follow the French practice of applying national markings, in order to discourage friendly fire. Only when their aviators and aircraft were (relatively) safe from being shot by their own side, did  the various authorities turn their attention to using camouflage to protect them from the enemy.

The British took a minimalist, utilitarian approach, leaving the undersurfaces of their aircraft in unpainted fabric and painting the upper surfaces a uniform dull green or brown, which was probably reasonably effective, although the British colours were about as aesthetically appealing as a palette of ruminant dung samples from animals fed on varying amounts of fresh green grass.

The French moved from unpainted fabric, first to silver dope (this wasn't a really bad attempt at camouflage - the silver was there to counteract the degrading effect of the UV in sunlight on the fabric, not as a misguided attempt at concealment), then to various painted wavy, splotchy disruptive lines in the sort of greens and browns that we associate with military camouflage.

The Germans were more inventive and tried a number of paint schemes, from relatively conservative finishes (light greys and patches of greens and browns), to more interesting effects, like a streaky olive green finish over a turquoise base, or this rather pleasing purple and green combo, as seen on the wings of a blazing Albatros, in this painting by Airfix box art legend, Roy Cross:

'Take that, Red Baron!' (from "Biggles is Colour Blind")

Anyway, a lot of these sort of schemes were in use in 1916, when Klee was based in Oberschleissheim. But another, more complex, scheme was being developed, a pointillist-inspired pattern of coloured polygons. It would probably have been in the development stage at the time when Klee was serving as a skilled tradesman-cum-camoufleur, and would have been painstakingly hand-painted, but there is photographic evidence of this being done on an aircraft of the right vintage - an E IV monoplane produced by the Pfalz company, shown here, complete with hand-painted polygons.

As Wikipedia helpfully relates, those time-consuming early experiments with hand-painted  polygons eventually led to some bright spark realising that you could save time and weight by printing the complex pattern onto the fabric beforehand, like wallpaper or curtains, rather than painting it on later (if I'm reading this thread at The Aerodrome right, that bright spark was one 'artist working at Idflieg named Ltn. Reimschneider', although it may be that Reimschneider was just the originator of two particular types of flugzeug tarnstoff, known in English as five colour day and night lozenge patterns, not the concept of printing all such patterns). By 1918, Halberstädter Flugzeug Werke's textile mills were covering most of the Kaiser's military aircraft with pointillism-inspired camouflage fabric, printed with repeating abstract patterns, made up of irregular polygons or regular hexagons.

So I'd say that there's at least as much credibility in the notion that camouflage influenced Klee's art as there is in Picasso's anecdotal declaration that cubists invented camouflage:

I very well remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso amazed looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.

Gertrude Stein, Picasso

While we're (tangentially) on the subject, polygons eventually caught on with the Austro-Hungarians as well, as can be seen on this restored aircraft, formerly the property of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Aviation Troops, currently in the Prague Technical Museum:

Knoller C II (photo by Alfvan Beem, Wikimedia Creative Commons)

According to my sources, though, the Austo-Hungarians never got round to producing printed polygons and were hand-painting these complex patterns on their aircraft right up to the bitter end of the war. If so, this is one case where that lazy cliché about German efficiency actually seems to be true. If the reserved occupations were tied up in labour-intensive processes like painting complicated honeycomb patterns onto aircraft and the conscripts were anything like the ones portrayed in The Good Soldier Švejk, it's no wonder the Ausro-Hungarians lost not only the war, but their whole country.

Hi Ho Hi Ho , It's Off To Work We Go!!  (partly-polygon-painted Berg D I fighters in a factory somewhere - photo lifted from a Czech language website)

Mind you, the process may not have been efficient, but the flamboyant end result looked great.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre...

But for something even less warlike, get a load of the one aircraft camouflage fabric that I know the Austro-Hungarians did get round to printing. And this time it's not polygons:

Swirly whirlys

And in colour:

Man, that's trippy!

Printed by Johann Backhausen und Söhne, manufacturer of tablecloths, rugs and suchlike, as applied to aircraft like the Austro-Hungarian manufactured version of the Abatros D III, seen here in model form. From the art of war to the soft furnishings of war...

Droning on

Augustine's Law no. 16 states that defence budgets grow linearly but the unit cost of a new military aircraft grows exponentially, therfore:

In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.

Because I wibbled that cost and capability problems might get the F-35 do-anything combat aircraft project downgraded or cancelled which, in turn, might lead to air forces deploying a lot more drones a lot more quickly, in the certain knowledge that someone out there would have said some of it more wittly, with citations and a graph.

Others aren't convinced, although the scepticism seems to be directed towards the sort of high-end drones that might supplant something like an F-35, as opposed to the less capable types already operating in areas where local air defences are weak to nonexistent (or have been told to look the other way), a distinction missing from a lot of media drone punditry.


Graph created by Autopilot under this Creative Commons license.

Tell it to the Marines

Whilst exquisite technology has been protected...manpower has been seen more as an overhead

Lord Vader, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Forces General Sir Nicholas Houghton, (Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Commander of the Order of the British Empire , Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, yada, yada) on the state of Britain's armed forces.

You wouldn’t put it past him to use the word “exquisite”...

Terry Pratchett, describing the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork

Two thoughts on the word 'exquisite' in this context:

1. Fire your speechwriter, unless you really want to come across as a camp Hollywood villain (or if you wrote it yourself, I believe the proper form is for a chap to brace himself with stiff G and T before putting his trusty service revolver to his temple and doing the decent thing).

2. Have a think about the end products (eventually) delivered by the mind-bogglingly expensive defence procurement process and ask yourself whether 'exquisite' (in the sense of 'extraordinarily fine or admirable; consummate' or 'of rare excellence of production or execution') is really the best word you could have come up with.

Thought 2. was prompted by the troubled F-35, the aircraft around which Britain's mighty force of two multi-billion pound floating job creation programmes aircraft carriers (or possibly one part-time aircraft carrier, HMS Austerity Queen Elizabeth) has been designed.

David Axe at War is Boring gives a convincing account of how the Royal Navy (and most other Western air arms) ended up in a queue to buy a terrible combat aircraft that 'can't climb, can't turn, can't run'. It's a perfect storm of inter-service rivalry leading to an unworkable specification, aided and abetted by the monopoly power of a defence aerospace industry that's gone through generations of mergers, driven by the spiralling cost of producing new warplanes. Axe traces the whole sorry story back to the Pacific beachheads of World War Two and the US Marines' need for more air cover than the Navy were then providing, getting from then to where we are now via a winding trail of path dependency, littered with unintended consequences.

Looking on the bright side, the F-35 does provide a few decent jobs for people with the right skill set (like my wife's brother-in-law, who really enjoys his current job, working on the F-35's landing gear at the project's Dutch subcontractor Fokker Landing Gear). But, on the whole, I buy Axe's negative assessment and take away two broad conclusions:

1. There are worrying times ahead for people troubled by the idea of flying killer robots - whether the F-35 programme struggles on to produce many hundreds of inadequate aircraft soon, or is cancelled, leaving any new potential replacement decades of development away in the future, the military are probably going to plug the capability gap with smaller, cheaper drones (perhaps launched by cheaper platforms than aircraft carriers).
2. We wouldn't see crazy decisions resulting from inter-service turf wars if countries adopted the sensible idea of one unified defence force, rather than bickering rival service fiefdoms.

Libya - a world record holder

Sadly, it's a record nobody else would want to hold. Record(and ceasfire)-breaking activity seems to be continuing today.

Helicopter view

Because everybody likes pictures of helicopters. At least that's what I conclude from the fact that this is by far the most popular photograph I've ever posted on Panoramio, with 4,970 views to date, (over three times more views than any other photo I've posted). The location, in the Shetland Isles, probably helped (the most popular six photos were all taken there).

Which is all slightly annoying, as the Shetland photographs are the only ones I didn't take myself - my partner took them whilst on a trip to Lerwick, where she was overseeing an Open University degree ceremony. Ho, hum...

The whole comedy smelled of the slaughterhouse

You may remember this summer's top story of weird animal cruelty, when an unfortunate Russian donkey found itself being towed through the air on a parasail as an advertising stunt. Well, to top that, here's a parachuting sheep.

This sheep was the victim of warfare, not advertising. During Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia in the  mid 1930's Italian troops crossing Ethiopia's Danakil Desert were supplied by air drops. The rations dropped included fresh meat, in the form of live animals on parachutes. In all, seventy-two sheep and two bulls were parachuted to keep the hungry Fascist legions on the march.

There's an undeniable element of cruel comedy here although, as operation sheep drop was devised by evil Fascists, the whole comedy smelled of the slaughterhouse.* Even if you don't care about the fate of a terrified creature in what was not a naturally tenable position for a sheep, some of the other stuff the Fascists were dropping wasn't remotely funny - not unless you were Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator's son, who thought dropping bombs on people was hilarious:

We arrived upon them unobserved and immediately dropped our load of explosives. I remember that one group of horsemen gave me the impression of a budding rose as the bombs fell in their midst. It was exceptionally good fun and they were easy to hit as we were not too high up. They offered a perfect target.

Quick biographical note - Vittorio Mussolini scuttled off to Argentina after World War Two, returning to Italy after the all the fuss died down. He lived on until 1997, dying in Rome at the ripe old age of 81. His niece, Alessandra Mussolini, is currently a member of the European Parliament, and leads an Italian neo-fascist party. Memorials to the Fascist war criminals survive to this day.

By accident or design, the Fascist aviators also managed to bomb ambulances belinging to the Swedish Red Cross.
Not content with dropping convectional bombs, Fascist planes also dropped mustard gas bombs and powdered chemicals which blinded, choked and caused skin burns. About 15,000 people are estimated to have been victims of this chemical warfare.


In between dropping sheep, high-explosive bombs and poison gas, the ever-busy Fascists also found time to throw live human beings out of flying planes - unlike sheep, these human beings didn't have the benefit of parachutes. This was General Graziani's novel way of executing captured guerrillas.


 Parachuting sheep article from The Atlantic, via.

* phrase stolen from Josef Škvorecký's magnificent novel, "The Engineer of Human Souls".

Aces High - Battle of Britain Day

It's still (just) Battle of Britain day, so I thought a few words about the top scoring Battle of Britain pilot are in order. For all the valiant efforts of British and Commonwealth airmen, the pilot who downed the most enemy planes in the battle was a Czech - Sergeant Josef František. 

František's achievements during one intense month of air combat with the RAF were all the more remarakable, considering that they followed a desperate journey across wartime Europe, fighting and fleeing the Nazi advance all the way.

František was born on 7 October 1914, in Otaslavice, Moravia.. He joined the Czechoslovak Air Force in 1934 and became a fighter pilot. After the German occupation in March 1939, he escaped to Poland and joined the Polish Air Force.

After the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, he flew reconnaissance missions in an unarmed aircraft and attacked the Germans with hand grenades tossed from his plane. He was shot down, but was rescued by Polish aircrew who landed nearby.

When Poland collapsed, František's unit was ordered to withdraw with their remaining aircraft to Romania. František escaped from an internment camp in Romania and reached France via North Africa in October.

In France, František flew alongside escaped Polish pilots. He may have fought in  the Battle of France and may have shot down several German planes, but the records from that time are unclear, contradictory or lost (according to one theory, he may have temporarily been flying under an assumed name in order to protect his family from Gestapo persecution).

After the fall of France, in June, František fled to Britain, trained with the RAF and, in August 1940. joined No. 303 (Polish) Squadron flying Hawker Hurricanes from Northolt.

Although often reprimanded for being undisciplined (both in the air and on the ground), František was a skilled and determined pilot. Within the space of one month, between 2nd September and 30th September he destroyed 17 German aircraft and 1 probable (including 9 Messerschmidt Bf 109s).

Josef František died on 8 October 1940, when his Hurricane crashed in Surrey. The cause of the crash is unknown, although battle fatigue and / or an aerobatic manoeuvre that went wrong have been suggested.

There's more info on the Battle of Britain's top ace here.

Big budget airline

Via

A bargain from EasyJet

The ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano cost EasyJet alone £50-£75 million. They're testing infra-red ash-detection gear, as a possible alternative to shutting down huge areas of airspace. The pilot study - if it works - will have been a bargain at £1 million.

EasyJet Plc said it will fit a dozen aircraft with ash-detection gear within the next 12 months in order to minimize disruption from volcanic eruptions.

Equipment that uses infra-red technology to evaluate the density of dust particles in the air will be attached to the tails of the jetliners, Luton, England-based EasyJet said today at a press briefing in London.

The program will cost about 1 million pounds ($1.46 million), EasyJet Chief Executive Officer Andy Harrison said at the announcement, which was attended by Andrew Haines, the head of the Civil Aviation Authority, Britain’s air-safety regulator.

More about AVOID (Airborne Volcanic Object Identifier and Detector) here.

Aircraft of the day

If you don't have enough votes to govern solo, you can always slap two parties together and hope the resulting coalition flies. If a single-engined aircraft doesn't have the range to do what you need, stick two of 'em together and ditto.

One result of such thinking: the P-82 Twin Mustang*.

During World War 2, long-range P-51 Mustang escort fighters provided the most effective protection for US bombers over Germany. With a range of over 1,500 miles, the Mustang was one of the few aircraft up to the job. In the Far East, however, even the Mustang's impressive range wouldn't take it far enough to escort US bombers on two thousand mile missions from their bases to Japan and back.

The solution - stick two P-51s together. The resulting aeronautical duumvirate looks odd, but it worked. In the end, the Twin Mustangs were never used against Imperial Japan's dwindling fighter squadrons. Before the Twins were ready, the atom bombs had been dropped and the war was over.

The US Air Force used some of their Twin Mustangs as radar-equipped night fighters in the Korean War.

There's a rather ironic British angle to this story. The P-51 Mustang first became an effective long-range escort fighter when it was fitted with a licence-built version of the high-performance British Rolls Royce Merlin engine. After the war, the Americans baulked at the increasing cost of the licence to keep producing the Rolls-Royce engine and fitted their production Twin Mustangs with inferior, US-built, Allison V-1710 engines.

Meanwhile, the British had decided to allow the Soviet Union to build the Rolls-Royce Nene jet engine under licence. By the time of the Korean War, the Soviets had reverse-engineered the Nene and built it as the Klimov RD-45, used to power the MiG-15 fighter, used against Western forces in Korea. So Britain's enemy used the best of British engineering against Britain and her allies at the same time as her ally was giving US pilots inferior kit, because British engineering cost too much.

There's probably some sort of moral here about alliances making strange bedfellows, but I'll leave you, the reader, to work out the details.

*later re-designated F-82, following a change in US military nomenclature

Plane crazy

Today's ironic aerial mishap got me thinking about famous air crashes in history. I have a personal favourite air crash of all time, a little gem of poetic justice.

Some background; it was July 1936. A junta of Spanish Generals had just launched their plot to overthrow Spain's democratically elected government, starting a bitter civil war that was to cost around three hundred thousand lives, a war prosecuted with such brutality that even Ciano, Fascist Italy's Foreign Minister, was shocked by the viciousness of his Spanish allies. They're still digging up the bodies of people the death squads threw into mass graves to this day.

Anyway, the ringleaders of the military coup were Generals José Sanjurjo, Emilio Mola and Francisco Franco. Sanjurjo was the figurehead of the uprising. Mola was chief planner and second in command. In July 1936, Franco had been secretly flown from the Canary Islands (where he was military commander) to take charge of the rebel Spanish Army of Africa, based in Spanish Morocco and a coded radio message had signalled the start of the putsch.

Sanjurjo, the nominal leader of the coup, was in exile in Portugal, scheduled to fly back to Spain to assume command on July the 20th. Sanjurjo was a very heavy man and, it seems, a rather self-important and vain one. Despite his pilot's warning that their little Dragon Rapide airliner was dangerously overloaded, Sanjurjo insisted on taking a large amount of heavy luggage, including a lot of fancy uniforms, dismissing his pilot's advice with the words:

I need to wear proper clothes as the new caudillo of Spain

Well, you can pull rank on your pilot, but ye cannae break the laws of physics. The plane took off packed to the gunnels with trunks full of spiffy uniforms, was too heavy and crashed, killing the narcissistic Sanjurjo.

Incidentally, by the time Franco became caudillo, his career advancement had been aided by not one, but two, air disasters - less than a year after Sanjurjo, General Mola was also killed in a plane crash.

Aircraft of the day

PZL-104 Wilga (Golden Oriole), as used by UKIP's Nigel Farage in today's disasterous election day stunt. Rant, rant, bloody Polish planes, coming over here....



Image courtesy of Michał Derela, published under a Creative Commons license.