A month ago I mentioned (I think… that was a lifetime ago) that I thought it odd how tolerant the Russian soldiers were of Ukrainian civilian protestors. That has clearly come to an end. With Russian military defeats, failures and frustrations, the soldiers are falling back on old school barbarism… rape and murder on a virtually industrial scale. Once again, reality teaches us that people who screech about Nazis are not to be trusted… they stared into the abyss and the abyss didn’t just stare back, it moved in and set up shop.
Putin has liberated Hostomel Airport of it’s functionality, its infrastructure and its AN 225, in much the same way “racial justice” protests liberate businesses from the ability to do business or prevent their inventory from being looted or going up in smoke.
Now Putin can bleat and whine about those awful, awful Ukrainians attacking Russia. Putin will be forced to respond/escalate.
That said, alternate take: this was done to *make* Russia retaliate, to throw more bodies into the war effort. Why might this be a good idea for the Ukrainians? The war so far has been so monstrously incompetent that it’s a safe bet that the retaliation for this will be even more filled with unthinkery and dumbassery, leaping into the fire without making the least bit of a plan. If the Ukrainians planned this far ahead, the Russians might dump a buttload of troops and equipment directly into a big woodchipper made of RPGs, Javelins, Stingers, NLAW and snipers.
More likely, thought, some Ukrainians just got pissed off and took their shot.
I’ve just made the March 2022 rewards available for APR Patrons and Subscribers. This latest package includes:
Art: A poster of the 1990’s German Sanger II two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane
Document: Bell-Boeing “Pointer” brochure… full color brochure describing the proposed tiltrotor UAV
Document: Cessna EV-37E STOL: 1964 presentation on battlefield recon/surveillance version of the T-37
Document: History of the Juno Cluster System: conference paper on the early satellite launching system
CAD diagram: work-in-progress layout of the Aerocon Wingship. General arrangement diagram with brief description of how much trouble I have to go through sometimes…
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
The two aircraft are unrelated, apart from the fact that I have uploaded scans of each to the 2022-03 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for $4 and up patrons/Subscribers. The first is a brief magazine writeup showing illustrations of the Boeing and Ryan designs for the Compass Cope unmanned recon vehicles from the early 1970s; both of these would end up actually being built, though not quite in the configurations shown in the concept art. The second is a Convair inboard profile/plan view of the B-58A bomber, because why not.
The full-rez scans are, again, available to $4 and pup Patrons/Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
I have long bemoaned the fact that interesting aerospace history stuff sometimes sells on eBay at painfully high prices and sometimes even to people who aren’t me (the outrage of it all). Such is the case with this listing:
Two nice vintage lithographs… one of the Martin SV-5D (AKA, X-23) subscale lifting body, and one of the NASA-Langley HL-10 (an early concept with a raised cockpit, possibly also a Martin interpretation). The initial bid price for these was $100; after a number of recent eBay expenditures, that was more than I was willing to go for. So it’s just as well that the final selling price was $384, which seems really, really high. Perhaps the bidders thought that these were the original paintings? Or perhaps the market for lithographs has skyrocketed.
Well, I guess it’s time that I unload some stuff. Not that I necessarily want to, but the bills lately…. uuuuugh. I recently saw a modestly cruddy Convair F-106 joystick go for well over $700. Well, guess what I have: a *really* *nice* F-106 joystick. Anybody want to bribe me before I put it on eBay? If so, send me an email with your insanely generous offer…
So yet another Boeing 737 crashed, this time in China, taking more than 130 people with it. little is known yet about the cause, but the thing seems to have lawn darted straight into the ground. Unless Russian separatists whacked it with a Buk or the Chinese operator *really* bungled maintenance or the pilot decided that Today Is The Day, the chances are real high that once again this one is on Boeing.
Boeing was for a long time the premier American manufacturer of jetliners, with “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going” being a sincerely held opinion among many. And then… Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas. In the process, the successful Boeing management approach, which was engineering-centered, was replaced with a more management-centered approach. Since then, Boeings ability to get *anything* successfully done, from the 787 to the 737 Max to the Starliner capsule to the SLS, seems to have been seriously compromised. Boeing is unlikely to produce a new jetliner within the next *generation.* They, the designer and manufacturer of the B-47 and B-52, are unlikely to ever again build a fighter or a bomber. The Delta IV launch vehicle is yesterdays news; the SLS is a hideously overpriced and underuseful dinosaur, the Starliner is so far behind schedule and over budget that if it ever carries out a manned mission it’ll be a miracle. All of this is Boeings fault.
Nobody else in the US is likely to build a jetliner anytime soon. Lockheed stopped trying with the L-1011, decades ago; Northrop-Grumman aren’t into jetliners. Nor-Grum are building the B-21; Lockheed is building the F-35. And… that’s pretty much it for the foreseeable future. Boeing is, for all intents and purposes, done. if this crash turns out to be the result of more Boeing incompetence, they could well find themselves is *serious* trouble quite soon. The phenomenally successful 737 line might end up a sky-pariah.
Having Boeing either go belly-up, or turn into an ossified tax-dollar sink that provides nothing usable in return are both bad results. This would be bad for Boeing employees, Boeing stockholders, American taxpayers, the US military, the US economy as a whole. So is it time to consider breaking Boeing up? Instead of one complacent conglomerate, take its various parts and pieces and separate them, give them separate and unrelated managements set them to compete with each other. Make the Phantom Works – formerly McDonnell Douglas turf – into its own thing. Turn Boeing HQ in Chicago into… I dunno, a WalMart or something; can all the business majors who have turned Boeing from a rampaging engineering success story into a freakin’ joke. Boeing has factories in Everett, WA, Renton, WA and North Charleston, SC. Make them separate companies. Set them to compete against each other for the next generation jetliner… BWB, LTA, electric, what-the-frak-ever. If one fails spectacularly, it doesn’t mean the others will suffer at all; indeed, a failed company could be seen as instructive. The failed former division could be picked up for a song by, say, the USAF and DARPA; the people responsible for the failure can be fired, better people brought in and the division set the task of cranking out experimental types.
The US used to have a *lot* of major aircraft manufacturers. Perhaps the days when the economy could simultaneously support the likes of Boeing and Convair and Lockheed and McDonnell and Republic and Grumman and Douglas and Martin and North American and Bell and Curtis and Sikorsky and Vought and Northrop and Hiller and Fairchild are over… but now we have *one* jetliner manufacturer, *one* fighter company, *one* bomber company. This is intolerable.
An ok-quality youtube documentary on the Inflatoplane (it caused me to twitch a few times, such as when the “airmat” material was several times called “airman” for some reason). The Inflatoplane was pitched as a way to rescue downed pilots, a role it could still serve. Also potentially useful as a way to infil/exfil special ops forces; if it could be made practical with a quiet propulsion system (electric motors? distributed propulsion?), then it could probably be *really* good for that role. At the end of the mission it could be fairly easily destroyed to keep it out of enemy hands. Another proposed role was as a light aircraft for the commercial market; this one I’m less thrilled about. A rubber aircraft would be necessarily not a long-lived aircraft; basic wear and tear, everything from scraping on the ground to repeated inflations, temperature cycling and ultraviolet light would cause the rubber to degrade over time. if the rubber parts could be made *really* cheap – a few grand, perhaps – such that the owner could swap out the rubber bits and retain easily-swappable propulsion, controls, avionics, seats and such, then maybe it would be ok. Might make a dandy battlefield recon/ missile platform if made to be unmanned… a sizable aircraft with a decent payload that is small on radar and IR, difficult to shoot down shot of a direct hit, and dirt cheap. Replace the original nylon and rubber in the original airmat material with kevlar, carbon fiber and, say, teflon, and you could have a *really* tough little airplane you could fold up and stuff into the back of a car. Might be interesting to study the design pressurized not with carbon dioxide and water vapor engine exhaust, by *hydrogen* for added lift. Sure, it’d be a risk of catching fire, but if enemy action is already poking it full of holes it’s lost anyway. Might as well have it burn up before the enemy can get to it.
A simulation of what *could* have happened had an A-10 gone up against that kilometers-long Russian convoy in Ukraine. Note: The Russians would have had to have been particularly accommodating for this to happen… stay bunched up on the road, don’t shoot back, no air cover. Still, it’s interesting the sheer volume of destruction that could have been unleashed.
