Fiasco: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1955

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(Photo credits are Navy, Air Force, and a Vickers-sourced advertorial that  I consider to be public domain. Look, you pretend that it's journalism, I pretend that it isn't proprietary.) 

Three technological objects, three fiascos, two countries, two lessons, one post!

USS Norfolk was the first postwar major US Navy warship design, an "anti-submarine hunter killer ship which could operate under all weather conditions and would carry the latest radar, sonar, and other electronic devices."

A ship that can operate in all weather conditions? What will they think of next!? Maybe this is some kind of jab at escort carrier concepts or the various antisubmarine frigates and destroyers that roll in bad weather? Full displacement was only 5600 tons, and Norfolk was technically deemed to be a destroyer leader. The obvious comparison is the Daring class, so that's what 2800 tons gets you. (By way of contrast, I've heard the 9800t 1918 Hawkins class that blew up the Washington Treaty regime in advance, defended as having the minimum displacement for "Atlantic" operations. but honestly no-one knows what the thinking was with most of the late -WWI British cruisers because Tennyson D'Eyncourt tore up the plans and swallowed them before Parliament had time to call him in.) 

I'd look it up, but the part that's interesting this month is the failure of the propeller shaft bearings, leading to the replacement of same on every new USN warship class. Whoopsie! There's nothing about that in the Wiki article, but the fuller veterans' association homepage history (linked by Wikipedia) does have an account, noting that "four members of the engine room crew were burned by hot steam." If I recall Friedman correctly, Norfolk's plant saw a further escalation of  Harold Bowen's extreme-steam machinery installations, in which case Norfolk's troubles were yet another example of Bowen's madcap misadventures coming home to roost. Norfolk was deemed excessively expensive, so that, instead of ordering sister ships, the Navy cut the design down to create the Mitscher-class, better known for machinery problems. The USN then went on to lay down 18 Forrest Shermans, but essentially left the field fallow while the Leanders ate the American industry's export markets with their own PAMETRADA Y-100 plants, which, as I have opined before, makes it extremely frustrating that the story of mid-century naval high pressure steam installations is still told in terms of American innovation and British conservatism. Easy enough to do when you edit this kind of stuff out of your narrative!

 

The AIM-47 Falcon was a Hughes missile developed from the AIM-4 of Vietnam notoriety. Intended for the North American XF-108 Rapier, it was repurposed for the Lockheed YF-12, an aircraft of familiar mien, because it was just a two-seat version of the Lockheed A-12, of which the SR-71 was a longer variant carrying more fuel and camera payload. The SR-71 is a Cold War icon, and evidence that nothing bad can ever come of inflating an intelligence agency' s budget to the point where it can afford its own fleet of UFOs. All of three YF-12s were built and were the only customers for either the AIM-47 or the Hughes FCS that the press is being shown on the (alleged) assembly line at the Hughes plant in L.A. To be fair to Hughes, the FCS, or AN/ASG-18, was a successor to a  less sophisticated system, and the company was delivering AIM-4s by this point, so it wasn't a completely futile effort, and there really wasn't a good reason to keep the YF-12 programme on track when it was so expensive and the ICBM was coming along, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a pretty comprehensive failure. Hughes was able to flog on both systems as the AN/AWG-9 and AIM-54 Phoenix, but those are gone now, too, along with the F-14, unless the Iranians have it flying, and I'm personally inclined to consider Iranian F-14s as urban myths these thirty years gone., and probably for the best considering what beasts this iteration of air intercept radar technology was. The first AIM-4 was only cleared for service in March, 1956 on the F-89, and incremental improvements were swallowed by the failure of the F-102, which was apparently to lift it so high and fast that it couldn't miss. In any other applications, the AIM-4 most certainly did miss, which was how mid-Vietnam-era air combat devolved into gunfighting. The AIM-47 never got a chance to prove itself since there no fighters big enough to carry it, but trials don't suggest that it was any more accurate than its predecessor. (Though two AIM-47s were launched in what a taxpayer might deem anger, against renegade Matadors, fortunately practice rounds without the nuclear warheads that were at one point intended for the AIM family, to achieve neutron poisoning of attacking atom bombs.) This is, by the way, a short summary of an enthusiast's website:

https://ausairpower.net/Falcon-Evolution.html

I am glad to have further confirmation that warhead poisoning was a thing in the Fifties. I wonder if it ever came up in connection with silo busting? 

Which brings me to the Vickers V-1000, of which pictures are few and far between on the Internet, so instead I am using a Vanguard to break up the monotony of my text. Fresh off the success of the Valiant and the Viscount, Britain's most successful aircraft manufacturer at mid-century is working on both a Viscount follow-on and the first turbofan airliner. As we have seen, the Americans were able to catch up with the British "lead" with the Comet by leveraging a tanker that would support B-47/52 operations. On the other side of the Atlantic, the VC7 was to overcome the cost barriers that made the financing of new airliners such a perilous proposition by following on an aircraft denoted on the Wiki as a "jet-powered cargo aircraft." It, in turn, was based on the proposed Valiant 2 low-level penetrator. The received history is that jet-powered cargo aircraft were an expensive luxury, and that at mid-century the only conceptual use of a low-level penetrator was as a pathfinder, and how WWII can you even get? In reality, V-1000s had been ordered as tankers to support the V-force and people in 1955 had already noticed that low level penetration was a useful tactic. 

News of the cancellation of the V-1000, which left the Rolls Royce Conway without a customer in the same month that the existence of the Pratt and Whitney JT3D, threatening British occupation of the coveted "airliner, but quiet" niche that did not even exist yet. The tragedy was perhaps mitigated at the time by the fact that the VC10 was coming along, but the quote from George Edwards cited at the Wiki to the effect that "We have handed to the Americans, without a struggle, the entire world market for big jet airliners," is true enough in retrospect. Citing one of Derek Wood's inside-the-industry histories, Wiki lists an increase in all-up weight (from 230,000 to 248,000lbs) and the fact that it was the biggest ticket item that the Air Force could cancel as an explanation, but the role of special interests invested in the Bristol Britannia is also noted. What isn't noted is the way that the V-1000's proposed trooping operations would impact the bottom line of the British charter airlines, then being taken over by the great shipping lines, with their deep Conservative connections. 

What brings these projects together across countries and continents is government's role in funding what seems to have been a maverick operation at Bowen's Naval Research Laboratory compared with the more careful and institutional programme that gave rise to the Y-100; a miserable tale of technological failure that encompasses airframes, "weapon systems," and even electronics implementations at Hughes Aircraft once it had secured a virtual monopoly on the important aspects of the 1954 Interceptor, and the fecklessness of the British cancellation based on costs. Even had the VC7 been a sales disappointment, the expenditure would have been swallowed up in seconds by the costs of Rab's income tax cut of spring 1955, or, even more extravagantly, the omni-fiasco of Suez. The general consensus about postwar government support for the British aviation industry is that is an excellent example of how industrial planning and state capitalism don't work. I do not see planning here! 

But, if I squint, I can detect some deindustrialisation. Oh, well, Nigel Farage might well be completely unsuited to the  premiership, but, like Donald Trump, he is by all accounts pretty lazy, so what's the worse that could happen?