Daydream Notes

Airliners are a paradox. On the one hand they are these incredibly engineered devices that transport people with amazing speed, safety, and efficiency. If you are on a newer airliner, for most of us that's when we get to experience the leading edge of technology. On the other hand, they are (in some senses, anyway) boring - brilliantly engineered white goods that even a nerd like me can't readily tell apart. I suppose that boring is a feature, not a bug: airliners that tend to cause excitement also tend to be the ones that are rare, blow up a lot, or both. Success comes with efficiency and safety and ubiquity - I guess we shouldn't be surprised that this makes them anodyne as well. The A320 is a fine example of the breed: a brilliantly engineered airplane about as titillating as the phrase "PowerPoint presentation." I started this Revell kit nearly two years ago, and left it half finished in my closet when I couldn't find any Air Canada/Canadian decal...

The R101 project was in a bad way. The effort by the Royal Airship Works to construct an airliner had been troubled since R101's first flight the previous October. Now that her rival, the R100, had made a successful demonstration flight to Canada, it was impossible for R101 to do anything but attempt a similar flight. She was not ready for this. She had never been flight tested properly, both in the practical sense and in the sense she had not met various government requirements to be considered safe for such a flight. She was also not ready in that when R100 returned from Canada, R101 was in a shed in Cardington undergoing extensive refit. In order to give R101 the useful lift she would need to even fly in the tropics, she was being extended and given a 500,000 cubic foot lifting cell. She was also have most of her outer cover replaced, and her lifting cells replaced, and this work had to happen at a grueling schedule thanks to political pressure. The Labor government of ...