Daydream Notes

R 100's control car. While the story of how the Imperial Airship Scheme got to the end of 1929 took lots of words, summarizing our story is very simple. The British wanted to build a fleet of passenger airships, to serve the British Empire. Due to political shenanigans, the development of these airships was turned into a competition between the government backed Royal Airship Works (RAW), and private industry in the form of Vickers.  Each set out to build an airship, and whoever built the best airship would win the contract for the rest of the airship fleet. The RAW airship was the R101, and it was very ambitious, looking to pioneer new technology whenever possible; in contrast, the R100 was built on a very cost conscious budget, and used existing technology whenever possible. By the end of 1929, both airships had started flight testing, with the R101 having racked up more than 70 hours. The results of R101's flight testing were disquieting, to say the least: the governmen...

OK, so the Cons did a terrible job in the F-35 procurement. They did less thinking about details than I did preparing these posts, and did no due diligence whatsoever on what is potentially the Dominion of Canada's single largest ever purchase. So the F-35 comes with a series of hidden costs and financial risks. Before moving on to what else we could possibly get (and the good news is that it is a buyer's market) I have to mention the series of technical risks the Cons couldn't be bothered to assess. The essential problem is one that I alluded to last time - that there has been no assessment of what Canada actually needs. This issue is key with the F-35, as the Cons have decided to pay vast sums of money for the F-35 over less risky alternatives for an aircraft with Stealth - and it is not at all clear 1) Canada's next fighter plane needs this capacity, and, somewhat more comically, 2) that the F-35 has a durable and reliable stealth capacity. Let me present the pr...