Aeroplanes or for the linguistically challenged, airplanes

[Tannin]

Seems worth giving this its own thread.

Tannin wrote:

As a kid, I probably had more flights in aeroplanes than I had ice creams. My family comes from Tasmania and nearly every set of school holidays it was off to Tas to stay with grandparents or various other rellies. Plus Sydney a few times, Queensland lots of times, the Reef of course, the red centre and Darwin, all over. It was routine. I always liked it, but it was just a part of life. For us, travel was ridiculously cheap. There was a massive staff discount in those days - 95% off the regular price - so we travelled a lot, and just about always by air.

They were real aeroplanes back then: DC-3s and DC-4s and a huge old DC-6B that TAA were forced to lease from Ansett in return for Ansett getting their hands on a couple of TAA's superb new tubine Viscounts; a Dove, lots of Friendships, Viscounts of course, 727s, DC-9s, a couple of 707s and a 747 ..... I never did get to fly in an Electra, which I should have liked to have done, nor the A300s.

Since then it's been boredom all the way: interchangable plastic aeroplanes that all look and smell and sound the same. The McDonaldsosation of air transport: lots of 767s, an A320, and that most boring of all possible boring aeroplanes, the ubiquitous 737. I'd rather eat dry white bread without butter than fly in a 737. Once, not so long ago, I flew to Brisbane with the now-defunct Ansett, and to most passenger's dismay and my complete delight, got one of the last two surving 727s in the fleet. They should have been retired long before on economic and fleet management grounds, but Ansett were to effective management as Stalin was to free speech, and I got one last trip in a real aeroplane to remember them by.

These days, I drive. In the first place, I need the facilities that my car has and a rental doesn't (road manners but excellent off-road capability, dozens of necessary small items secreted in nooks and crannies here and there, ranging from maps to battery chargers to water bottles to a winch, and above all the ability to deliver AC power from the second battery). In the second place, the equipment I need for a week or a month on the road doesn't even come close to what you can take by air. In the third place, I'm damned if I'm going to have anything to do with the spastic air "security" idiocy we have had inflicted on us since the end of 2001. And finally, in a car you can get out and walk around any time you see something interesting. Oh, and to travel by air, you have to start by going towards the very sort of place you are trying to avoid, i.e., a big city. Puts a bad taste in your mouth right from the beginning.

Back to aeroplanes. Which were my favourites? Only a handful of the modern craft are memorable, al lof them small ones. The Shorts 360 (AKA "the shed" for reasons which will become obvious if you have ever seen one). Different, but sooooo sloooow. I could walk faster. (Almost.) Beech 1900D. Hmmm .... it's an aeroplane. Next question. Dash 7 and Dash 8: nice aircraft, almost modern versions of the Friendship. Let's go back a few years to the real McCoy.

The DC-6 had its own unique style, of course. Unforgettable. Friendships were small and friendly and made a wonderful sound, plus you could sit under the wing and see all sorts of interesting things happening through those huge oval windows. I really liked 707s too, much nicer than uber-boring 747s and 767s. And 727s were cool. So were the DC-9s, I liked them. If I could only fly in one .... Viscount? DC-9? Nope, I'll go with the Friendship. Wonderful aeroplane.

 

[Tannin]

Mubs wrote

Gee, Tannin, you really stir old memories. I've flown a couple of times in Fokker Friendships, but I was so little then I remember nothing. Did you ever fly in an Avro? Propeller-driven. You always held your breath during take-offs; always felt like the bugger wouldn't make it into the sky. They served milkshakes made fresh (loaded up with milk before take-off).

And which one was it that had a tendency to blow up (cabins coming apart in flight) - the Viscounts or the Caravelles? My memory fails me.

I recently flew on ATRs a couple of times. Propeller-driven (turbo-prop, I think). Short haul flights - ~ 250 miles each way. Quite comfy.

 

[Tannin]

Tannin wrote:

Which Avro? Hmmm .... I guess you mean the 748 (later renamed to the HS 748 when the Hawker-Siddely combine replaced Avro and a grab-bag of other traditional Brittish aircraft manufacturers). I can't imagine that you are going back to the Tudor or the Lancastrian or the York, none of which I have seen, let alone flown in, as they were all immediate post-war types coddled together in a hurry from often unsuitable military types. (Well, the Tudor was a proper civil aircraft, and modestly successful, but sold less thgan it might have done with all those war-surplus Douglas machines about. In any case, this was a period when the American manufacturers were at their peak - Douglas, Lockheed, and Convair at this time, Boeing came along with the 707 revolution quite a bit later - and it was almost impossible for a non-American aircraft to break into the sales race.

There were three reasons for this. First, at the time, the US companies were often just a little bit better, particularly at the finer points of practical everyday civil aircraft - boring stuff like baggage facilities was often a weak point for the English and the Europeans. (There were several; outstanding exceptions, of course, but in the main the American civil types were a little better.) Second, the American makers benefited from truly massive US government subsidies, which were disguised in the form of defence contracts. For example, it cost Boeing nothing to develop the 707. Yup: not one red cent: Uncle Sam paid for the whole damn thing via KC-135 contracts. Competing aircraft from Europe, on hte other hand, had to be privately funded. And finally, racisim. American airlines utterly refused to buy anything not made in the USA. Airlines in the rest of the world, of course, bought whatever type they liked best. (Barring the USSR, which was in its peculiar way as xenophobic and racist as the US.)

So you can count the successful non-American airliners of the 2nd half of the 20th Century on one hand. The Friendship was the true star amongst them. For a long time, no-one else had anything in the same ballpark and it sold like crazy. In fact, the only real competitor it had of note was your Avro 748, which came along a couple of years later and sold around 380 where the Friendshp went well into four figures. The Japanese YAMC, a very similar looking thing to the HS 748, was prety much domestic market only.

Err .... what was the question?

 

[Tannin]

The blow up model? Well, most of them. Air safety was nothing like the fine art that it is today. But I guess you are thinking of the de Haviland Comet, the world's first jetliner by a country mile. It beat the 707, the Caravelle, and the DC-8 into production by almost a decade and was, in its own way, as revolutionary a step forward as the DC-2 and the 747. (Or the Concorde if you like, but astonishing technological achievement that it was, equalled only by the SR-72 and perhaps the F-117, that was a step into a deep blind alley, and led nowhere.)

But the Comet suffred badly as a result of its leap into the future. It was the first large, high-speed, high-altitude pressurised aircraft to clock up any significan number of air miles. (Military types don't do anything like the same number of hours, not even in wartime, as it's too expensive - the more you fly a B-47 or a AWACS, the more it costs in fuel, maintenence, and crewing, but the more you fly a 747 or a DC-4, the more money you make.)

De Haviland ran into a then-unknown form of metal fatigue and after a few years service, DH Comets started explosively decompressing, more or less at random. It was a huge mystery to begin with, but the experts eventually worked it out and did a heap of pressure testing in a sort of giant fishpond before making the required modifications, and by the time the Comet was good to go again, the other manufacturers were pretty close too. It cost de Haviland a 5 to 10 year technology lead, and they never recovered. Meanwhile, the second-generation jets (707, Caravelle, DC-8, Trident) had the benefit of de Haviland's research and that particular problem was pretty much designed out before they flew.

 

[Tannin]

I suppose the other really famous blow-up model was the notorious Douglas DC-10. They had a host of sloppy design features that the old Douglas management would never have tolerated for an instant, and there was a well-publicised cover-up scandal as well. the two primary mistakes were:

* The main cargo door securing mechanism, which was prone to letting go without notice, leading to rapid decompression and, most of the time, loss of the aircraft.
* The asinine back-up control system, which (like all modern aircraft) featured multiple control lines in case of failure, but put them all in the same conduit so that anything leading to loss of the primary control lines could be just about guaranteed to take out the backup control lines too. Result: one very rapid hole in the ground. This was a f*ck-up of the magnitude usually only seen coming out of Seattle, and I don't mean Boeing, I mean the other famous Seattle company, which has been known to make a blunder or two from time to time. Thankfully, they ain't licenced to manufacture aircraft.

 

[Buck]

Nice historical information. Thanks Tannin and mubs.

 

[Tannin]

Conversation between my father and his mother-in-law, circa 1965, when we lived quite near the airport. She was sitting near the window, he was further inside.

She: Oh, that aeroplane has turned south, towards Tasmania. Would it be going to Devonport? Or Hobart?

He: That depends. Is it a Viscount, or a Friendship?

She: I don't know.

He: Well, has it got two engines, or four?

She: Don't get technical!

 

[mubs]

Thanks, Tannin! That was quite a read!

Which Avro? Hmmm .... I guess you mean the 748 (later renamed to the HS 748 when the Hawker-Siddely combine replaced Avro and a grab-bag of other traditional Brittish aircraft manufacturers).

That it was! I had forgotten that it was also referred to as the HS-748.

 

[paugie]

excuse me while I reply. I was once up on a HS748 on a short hop from Iligan City to Cebu. Flew quite low (12000 ft if I remember correctly). The pressurization wasn't any good. My ears popped a lot and I was semi-deaf for 2 weeks afterward.

The Cebu to Manila leg was on a jet. I would have been terrified if I had known at the time that the DC9 I was flying on was surplussed by Garuda Airlines and bought by Cebu Pacific. (more than 30 years old when purchased, only recently -last year- retired?)

And those planes were used like buses. Manila-Cebu-Cagayan de Oro and back again like 2 round trips a day. Still Cebu Pacific was an on-time airline. PAL (Philippine Air Lines) other name was Plane Always Late. They were using 737's

 

[Tannin]

Plane Always Late. Cute!

Ahh, you lucky people. I've never flown of a 748. The only ones in Australia, as I remember it, were the ones the Air Force bought to use as VIP machines to fly poliicians around in. (They were used for other odds and ends too, I think.)

The airlines all went for Friendships instead. My father (who flew many aircraft before he retired, including Friendships for many years) thought the 748s were a dog of an aeroplane - an unusually strong opinion from a mild-mannered man - though I don't know why he disliked them so.

The VIP fleet 748s were retired .. oh ... maybe ten or fifteen years ago. Since then, a small freight operation has bought four or five second-hand ones and uses them somewhere in the north of the country.

I doubt your faulty pressurisation incident though Paugie. Standard interior pressure for airliners is around 8000 feet. In other words, the pressurisaton system is designed to maintain an apparent 8000 foot altitude inside the cabin at any height above 8000 feet. (Be that 12,000 or 32,000.) At 7000 feet, the pressurisation system is just a glorified air conditioner. So, even if the pressurisation didn't work at all, you wouldn't experience much difference between the outside air pressure at 12,000 feet and the design inside pressure of the equivalent of 8000 feet. It's possible you were just the victim of some bad weather or poor operating procedures. Or maybe not.

Even so, I'd take that ride just the same. I love to try out different aircraft.

My ex-girlfriend of some years ago was really, really lucky. She was at an airshow in Queensland when they picked someone out of the crowd for a short ride in an F/A-18 - and they picked her! How lucky can you get? (The fact that she was a 15-year-old blonde with a pretty face and a stunning figure ... well ... these Air Force types ... I'm sure it was just a random choice out of the crowd. (Not.))

 

[CougTek]

The Cebu to Manila leg was on a jet. I would have been terrified if I had known at the time that the DC9 I was flying on was surplussed by Garuda Airlines and bought by Cebu Pacific. (more than 30 years old when purchased, only recently -last year- retired?)

The DC-9 has been one of the safest and most reliable commercial airplanes ever built. If properly maintained, there's no fear to have.

 

[mubs]

Ahh, you lucky people. I've never flown of a 748.

Propeller-driven. You always held your breath during take-offs; always felt like the bugger wouldn't make it into the sky. They served milkshakes made fresh (loaded up with milk before take-off).

 

[paugie]

The DC-9 has been one of the safest and most reliable commercial airplanes ever built.

And one of the noisiest, AFAIK. or am I trying to remember the BAC-111? That was also one of the planes with 2 engines very near the tail.

 

[Tannin]

Noise is mostly to do with two things, Mubs: engine technology, and attention to detail. 1950s and 1960s designs had truly massive noise generation, because no-one gave a damn about it. Later on, when noise became something you weren't supposed to do, they started trying harder. The old JT3D (707, DC-8) and JT8D (727, 1st-gen 737, DC-9) engines were replaced by vastly quieter modern engines in better designed nacelles, and the next generation of aircraft were designed to minimise noise (A300, A320, 757, new models of the 737 and so on). Older models could be hushkitted: a several million dollar a pop set of modifications to reduce noise. Sometimes they even replaced the engines completely (the DC-8 got CFM56s, which is one reason why DC-8s kept on flying long after most 707s were retired), lots of KC135 tankers (more-or-less a 707) got CFM56s too, the DC-9 became the MD-80, then the MD-90, then the 717, gaining new and better engines all along the way, and winding up much quieter. The BAC-111 was an early generation aircraft and I don't think many were hushkitted, but some certainly were as they are still flying in Europe., where they are sudden death on aircraft noise.

Engines under-wing or on the tail makes no difference to noise outside the aircraft. Tail-mounting increases the efficiency of the wing and provides better performance, but adds structural weight, reducing payload. It's a trade-off. It does, however, put the noise in a different place, meaning that all else being equal tail-mount engined aircraft are quieter to travel in. And they look mega-cool. Caravelle, 727, DC-9, 717, F-28, Trident, BAC-111, and above all, the peerless VC-10 .. beautiful aircraft, every one of them.

 

[Tannin]

I mentioned that most beautiful of all jet airliners, the Vickers VC-10, a little while ago. What a crying shame that whole saga was. They, Vickers, did everything right and built a superb aircraft with good economics, outstanding performance, good relability, and passenger appeal unmatched by any other, but it failed miserably on the market, with a grand total of 54 sold. If you discount the "have-to" buyers, BOAC (British Airways under the old name) and the Royal Air Force, I think they sold just four of them. And it was all BOAC's fault.

Vickers went to BOAC, the national carrier, quite early in the VC-10 development program, and asked them what they wanted in a large, intercontinental aircraft. BOAC responded with a set of requirements that included very demanding hot & high performance (i.e., the ability to take off with a full load under the most demanding circumstances - high altitude where the air is thinner and generates less lift than it does at sea level, and high temperatures, which both decrease engine power and reduce lift).

BOAC wanted to VC-10 to be good for use in Africa, which is both hot and high in many places, and where, at the time, runways were only just long enough for large, modern aircraft. Obligingly, Vickers modified the design to suit. They put the engines at the tail to maximise wing efficiency, and kept the overall size a little smaller than ideal in order to allow full-load takeoffs from the short stips on the African plateau.

Once the design was set in concrete and manufacturing underway, BOAC turned around and said "hey - we can get better operating economics from a 707". Well of course you could - BOAC had nothing to do with the 707 design and it was optimised for good economics, not hot & high performance. (So was the DC-8.) BOAC went further, and despite having VC-10s on order, bashed the design in public, turning lots of other airlines away from the aircraft. (As if it wasn't difficult enough already to sell a non-US built aircraft in the zenophobic USA where the big buyers were.)

Meanwhile, of course, all the African airports had been extended with much longer runways to accommodate the Boeing and Douglas jets, so the extra performance of the VC-10 was never needed - but the slightly higher seat-mile cost remained.

BOAC (or British Airways as they became, BA for short, which probably stood for "Boeing Always") was now stuck with an airliner they didn't want. (They had 707s as well, of course.) So they put it into service on the trans-Atlantic and London - Australia routes, where it immediately became immensley popular with passengers, for it was a wonderful aircraft, and substantially more pleasant to fly in than a 707 or a DC-8 because it was so much quieter inside. BOAC soon discovered that, although it cost a little more to run a VC-10 than a 707, the VC-10 flights tended to be booked out, where the other flights had empty seats, and their handful of VC-10s made them a pile of money.

But it was all too late. By the time the passenger appeal of the VC-10 was a well-known thing, the market had moved on to much bigger aircraft, notably the 747, but soon enough the L-1011 Tristar, the DC-10, and the A-300 as well.

The last handful of new-build VC-10s went to the Royal Air Force for use as tankers, a role they have fulfilled with distinction. The RAF went on to buy up pretty much all the second-hand VC-10s there were, and converted them into tankers too, and so far as I can remember, they are still in service.

I used to see the BOAC VC-10s come into and out of the old Essendon Airport (now replaced by Melbourne's new one at Tullamarine) and always admired their sleek good looks, especially the longer Super VC-10 that was the second and last version. Always wanted to fly on one, never did. The last one I saw (or will probably ever see) was an RAF tanker that came out in 2001 or 2002 to provide fuel for the various other types the RAF sent to the Melbourne Airshow that year: a Tornado, a Jaguar, a Nimrod, and maybe one or two others.

That was the VC-10, a wonderful aircraft ruined by a terrible airline. RIP.

 

[Tannin]

Oh, Paugie, not Mubs. Sorry about that gentlemen.

 

[Buck]

The VC-10 has a very tall tail. Is it the only rear-engined aircraft to group two jets on each side of the fuselage?

 

[mubs]

Oh, Paugie, not Mubs. Sorry about that gentlemen.

No matter, Tannin, that was great reading. After googling for pics of the VC-10, I have to agree it's a beautiful aeroplane. Too bad about what happened.

 

[Howell]

I have only flown on the DC9, DC10, 727 and 737 or 47. Whatever would have been used by Delta for trans-pacific flights in 1995. Plus assorted turbo-prop planes from 4 seat to 8 seat. Whatever they were I could not fully stand up in them.