Jordan River Is Deep and Wide: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1956

 

So we are sorted at work about how this humble blogger is going to be plugged into our current workplace "the retail emergency is forever" scheme:

Saturday: 6-230; Sunday, 10-6:30 "Need experienced people in the mid shift on our busiest day," until Saturday at 3PM, at which time it was changed by text message to 6-2:30: Monday, 6-2:30: Tuesday: 6-2:30: Wednesday, 1:30-10 "The DM will visit tomorrow, we need the department in good shape." It's good to be wanted at work, but if I asked you to guess what I did on Thursday, and you answered, "Managed to sleep for six hours, then sat on the couch eating stale chips and watching Youtube clips, taking a break every hour to nap," you would be right! As it turns out, I wouldn't have been able to finish it on Sunday morning, either.

And this is why this post is largely in response to things Newsweek will cover in our next installment of postblogging, which was about one quarter done Saturday afternoon when I gave up and went out for dinner.  

Math time:

+

=

The point of this week's technical appendix is that some people say that British Airways ruined the British aviation industry by rejecting British planes, and some people say that British aviation ruined British aviation by forcing the Britannia on British Airways. In the spirit of the Internet these days, I'm going to present the case that it's actually "both"! And along the way I'm going to drag in some infrastructure projects of the mid-Fifties that are also having a continuing impact in a little part of the world that I like to call "the Middle East," which you probably haven't heard of. We're very geographically educational around this blog! 

Arguing with Wikipedia is watchacallit a thing you can do. I was just reading about "Smith's Rebellion," an episode on the Pennsylvania frontier in November 1765 in which James Smith and his militia intercepted and destroyed an 81 horse pack train headed to Pittsburgh with trade goods for George Croghan and others to disperse to the nations. A great deal of the Wiki article is taken up with explaining why the so-called "Black Boys Rebellion" is called that for anything other than the obvious reason that Smith and his lot were Blacks. I mention this because I'd like to argue with the current interpretation of how the Valiant 2, V-1000, and VC7 were cancelled one after another at mid-century, but what's even the point? If you want to argue that Eden's government was feckless and incompetent, why would you even waste a breath on planes? This is just not a story that's even worth a real historian's bother, so if you want to leave it to the amateurs giving cover to the feckless corruption of long-dead politicians, no particular  harm is done except possibly to those of us alive today who might be suffering the consequences of having the Keynesian interlude  written out of history. And if you care about that, I have some much more substantial, but purely political  news about "the moderate Stevenson" lined up. (Kefauver couldn't even beat Nixon!) 

The story is that, as soon as the Avon was out of the woods, Griffith and Constant persuaded Rolls Royce to return to the high bypass gadgets they'd been working on in the Thirties. (Because, thanks to steam turbines, all the gadgets that you could elaborate out of the basic combustion type had already been imagined, and possibly prototyped or even put into service.) The upshot was the Conway, a two-spool compressor arrangement with a four-stage low-pressure and eight-stage high-power compressor with two two-stage turbines. The first Conway was to go into the Valiant 2, and was type-tested in July 1952 at 10,000lbs. A new design with six and nine compressor stages and one and two stage turbines was first run in July 1953 to give 13,000lbs for the V-1000. With no customer after the V-1000 was killed sub rosa in the fall of 1955, a Victor 2 was conjured up, and 14,500 and then 16,000lb developments for the new Victor and also the long-hoped for American airliners with British engines. 

The final variant of the Conway, now no longer required to be embedded in an engine, had a bypass of 60% and powered the VC10 at up to almost 22,000lbs.  The VC10 was roughly the plane that the VC7 was supposed to be with the same virtues of light runway loading and good high-and-hot performane, and when everyone proceeded to not buy it, you had roughly the end of big all-British airliners and supposedly the death of the state-sponsored aviation sector, proving that In The Grim Future Of Now, There Is Only Free Enterprise. 

Speaking of uniquely British sensibilities. I wonder what the overlap of Warhammer 40k players is with Green voters? 

Meanwhile, John Foster Dulles is busy fumbling the Aswan High Dam project. A 1955 picture of Dulles in a VFW cap looking half-past senile is coming next week.) It's OK, though. What could the worst thing that could happen if U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East ended up hijacked by Israel for a few decades? I've talked about the Aswan Dam around here before, because, come on, it's just damming a river, how hard can it be? We dam rivers all the time!

The images from the Naugatuck River flooding in August 1955 tell another story.  So do all the other statistics and images from this narrow river valley that stretches just 40 miles up behind New Haven, to create one of the parallel Connecticut communities in its various river valleys running down into Long Island Sound. In the summer of 1955, almost two hundred factories ("mills") lay along its bank,  sited well out into the stream to take maximum advantage of its water power, and because riparian law had never been amended to stop them. So all it took was two hurricane storm surges in a row to wipe them away and teach a dramatic lesson about the way that humans live in the world. 

Egyptians, in contrast to Yankees, were five thousand years into the lesson that you can't just live along the river banks; you have to interact with the river collectively, as a society. Which is why, in 1955, they wanted to build the Aswan High Dam. In December, 1955, Britain and the United States  joined to guarantee the dam, but then the Eden government reneged and the U.S. followed, and the Soviets proceeded to successfully back the dam in the face of Western skepticism. It has all been quite as successful as the Corps of Engineers' Thomaston Dam (and five other dams along the Naugatuck.) the long term upshot, as I've alluded to facetiously and in the title, was the way in which the parallel project in the Jordan River valley somehow turned into a diversion of Jordan valley water from the Sea of Galilee, outside the river basin, leaving the Palestinian refugees originally slated to farm the new fields in Jordan high and dry, where they remain today. (Plus there's the Golan Heights.) 

Not a word so far about London Airport. But it's important! Look, I don't know if a half-remembered boyhood anecdote is dispositive or anything, but I have a half-remembered boyhood anecdote about students in our Marine Biology 11 (aka "Get a scuba certificate") course talking about the astronomical hourly wage of the underwater welders then working in the drains underneath Vancouver International. When you spend a billion dollars of infrastructure money on a dam, at least you see it. Or, at least, the reservoir. When you spend it on an airport, apart from some nice terminal buildings, you only see what your money has bought with X-ray vision. All the drainage is down there somewhere!

The Wikipedia listing of the Conway RCo.12 dry weight is 4,544lbs, and hanging four of those bad boys off the spar of a swept wing means a lot of weight. Insofar as a rationale for the cancellation of the V-1000 has trickled out of Whitehall, it's the plane's all up weight rising to 230,000lbs. I'm looking at the table of 707 variants right now and I see that the -120 hit 247,000lbs, and the final variant 333,600lbs, which is even more airplane.

It also says that at this point, the Conway had a bypass of only 40%, and since it is the flow of bypassed air over the outside of the working bits of the engine that suppresses most of the noise, the Conway-powered 707s and DC8s were the loudest planes to take off from Heathrow until Concorde. That's a lot of noise!  and the issue with these narrow swept wings with podded engines is that the undercarriage is, er, not good, and the load on the tarmac rises commensurately, as does the length of takeoff and landing run. 

It's amazing that Heathrow is so close to London! I mean, not "amazing" amazing. I used to pass YVR twice a day on my bike commute from my place in Kitsilano to our store in north Richmond, but, I mean, that's just Vancouver. London is world-class! Heathrow, the Wiki says, ended up with two east-west runways in part because modern runways are so long and expensive, but also in part because Atlantic flights used to take off westbound so that they didn't pass over London during their climb, when the engines are loudest.  Heathrow happens to be in the flint-and-clay region above London in the Thames Basin, and was relatively underdeveloped because buildings, and everything else human-made, tends to sink into the mud when it's wet. Fortunately, if you put enough money into paving it with something, that problem can be ameliorated. When British aviation first fixed its attention on the hamlet, the "something" was potato fields and orchards. Now, it's concrete, but it's basically the same. 

To make a quieter engine, and for other reasons, it is best for a civil airliner design to  hang the engines off the wing in a pod. The reader will note that that is not how it is done in military aviation, and the reason for that is that the aerodynamics really are better if you put the engine in the wing. The VC10 was the last airliner with really "good" aerodynamics, and, for that reason, a near-ground performance that allowed it to use runways that weren't miracles of civil engineering. This is a point that Flight is all-too innocently making in 1955, to the effect that the modern airliner/engine combination was likely to leave modern flying limited to routes between two first-class airports, and, notably, to the New York-London route. Don't worry about Rolls-Royce, though, as first there was the Spey and then there was the Tay, and then there was the Government stepping in to save it from bankruptcy, and, oh, wait, that actually worked! I wonder what Milton Friedman thought of that? (From a Google wander, it looks as though it's that aviation is special and different unless it makes airplanes instead of engines.)

Obviously, for the world as a whole, that's a bad thing. We've spent a lot of money on airports that could have been spent on other things, and we're hooked into using air freight for things that really shouldn't go air freight. But for London? And British Airways? It's been great! Wait. British civil aviation died because it was opposed to the interests of London and British Airways? Now there's a take. 

 Civil engineering: As important as it is boring.