A Technological But Also Economic and Engaged Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1953, II: The Bee Problem

 

I hope there's some of the bee scenes I remember from my slightly traumatised junior high viewing of this documentary based on Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive, because the "problem" here is the old saw about how science doesn't know how bees fly. The joke being that of course science knows how bees can fly. The airliner business, on the other hand . . . ? See? I knew there was a reason to read Fortune! 

Since I used this ad last week, I didn't want to put  it above the fold, but it is definitely worth a think. The vague impression I had of the airline and airliner business was that there was a long-established consensus on how to to do the business, with established participants, airlines and builders, and that this industrial sector was ablated away by the expense of modern jetliners to the current duopoly of builders and ever-evolving ecosystem of airlines scrambling for profit. Hurricane Hilary led to the cancellation of 3000 flights in the United States. That's just an inconceivable scale of activity, and, needless to say, really bad for the planet. 

"Jetliners, Part II," and this humble ad, put it another way, putting us back in 1953 and reminding us that airlines, and airliners have only been stable and profitable since the DC-3, and that attempts to move past it have been tentative and exceedingly expensive. Critics of the British "airminded" industrial policy are upset at the size of the aggregate public subsidy and the scant number of profitable British airliners. Fortune's staff writer reminds us that massive losses are the rule for American builders, too, and there has been no shortage of public subsidy through air mail, the Air Force, the bail out for Martin, and what was probably a cross-financed RFC bailout for Convair, orchestrated by Floyd Odlum.  From this perspective, the airliners up to the present have been gawky mutants, even the DC-3 a more deformed creature than we generally realise once the marginal navigational status of its cockpit crew is appreciated. (Captain and co-pilot in the actual cockpit, the mandatory radio officer/navigator in a side cabin from which the job can't really be done, and often omitted to add more seats, with navigation "by the beam," utterly unsatisfactory anywhere but in the Wild West world of nonskeds and charters.) 

The end of that evolution is the "well-tempered airliner:"

Intended as a rival to the Super Constellation and the Stratocruiser, the 338 DC-7s built by Douglas would be a healthy run for any plane but a Douglas (more than twice as many DC-6s were built). Given the high, even egregious costs of jigging and tooling for an American airliner run, Fortune's writer is pretty sure that even a single jetliner failure will knock the minor two West Coast builders, Douglas and Lockheed, out of the market, and propliners aren't that much cheaper. Failure, or near failure, with the DC-7 is probably an important reason (probably, as I am no corporate financier) that McDonnell-Douglas  isn't around any more. On the other hand, Lockheed survived the failure of the Electra and the 1011, so what do I know?

The DC-7 started out as a stretched DC-6B, a gargantuan plane that the Association of Airline Pilots was already dubious about, in part because it could not realistically make the sub-eight hour nonstop LA-New York flight that safety regulations required. But what were you going to do once it was in the air? (As with the DC-3's cockpit size, the Douglas machine got a pass that locked out foreign competition that could do the job.) Why this plane, and why then? Probably to use the Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone "turbocompound" engine which had been percolating at Wright-Patterson since the Twenties. America (and industrial Ohio) had spent a lot of money and effort on the turbocharger, and it was damn well going to sell some. 

The ultimate ideal of the turbocompound system is an internal combustion piston-and-crankcase engine that worked solely to provide hot gas under compression to run the turbine that drove the prop. The Napier Nomad comes closest to the ideal, and honestly Banks and Ricardo should wear that fiasco more  prominently than they do. Range, and power, combined to make the double-stretched DC-7C capable of a reliable London-New York single stage trip, and per Wikipedia "forced" BOAC to respond by buying DC-7Cs due to delays in the Britannia, part of the chain of decisions that led to BOAC operating bypassing the VC7, failing to order an economical number of VC10s, and leading the world industry in a detour around the Britannia, the three failures cumulatively ending the all-British airliner business. 

And all of this in spite of the incurable unreliability of the Wright Turbocompound. It is all just a bit implausible, and ultimately fratricidal, in that Boeing was the only winner.

  Which is all the more amazing considering what a fiasco the Stratocruiser was, with 13 hull losses and 139 fatalities between 1951 and 1970 out of 56 built, and the biggest problems being exactly the one that kept the American airlines from ordering turboprops --concerns that the power train could not absorb that much engine output. Which isn't to say that that wasn't exactly the problem that kept the Britannia from entering service in  a timely way, even if the main difficulty through its career was an equally predictable icing problem. 

The conclusion here is fairly clear. These crazy gadgets would never have made their own way in the world. As fire roars down the Kelowna sidehills, it is time for the taxpayer to accept that we did that. That said, the other moral is that the neo-liberal criticism of "industrial policy" seems even weaker and dumber when we realise that the American industry was just as heavily implicated in state policy as British, to the point where much of the early history of American aviation played out in America's  swing state for a reason. (Thank you Senator Taft for the 143-wing air force and intercontinental mutually assured destruction!)  I guess the moral of the story is that the British aviation industry was doomed once it moved to the Red Wall? If it did --I can't plot giant aircraft factories by the voting pattern of their constituencies, and I am not going to today, because I have a summer bike trip to get ready for.

(Somehow Ohio doesn't have a song in Stephen Foster's songbook? I mean, I approve of replacing "Beautiful Ohio" with just about anything, but I'm not sure I  like the modern alternative.)