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...

Last week, for the first time in Canada's federal election, a defense issue was actually addressed by candidates. Trudeau of the Liberal party said  if elected he'd back away from the F-35 as a replacement for Canada's CF-18s.   Harper said Canada needed the F-35 to remain military relevant. And Tom Mulclair used the opportunity to say Trudeau was inexperienced, and what was really needed was a fighter competition and some sort of assessment as to what the RCAF actually needs. This is all politics as usual, though Harper's statement on the subject is interesting in a few ways - first, it seeks to deflect the discussion away from the Con's total incompetence in finding Canada a new fighter jet; second, it is actually the first time the Cons have stooped to justify their decision of procuring the F-35. Despite all the vitriol I'm going to be displaying toward the F-35 and the Conservatives, Harper's argument has some merit in the question of what fighter p...

Mid-sixties Life has really taken off. The Vietnam War, generating stories since Kennedy's time, has entered into the public consciousness, as has the protest movement against it. Two stories worth sharing: The Great Blackout of 1965. In November 1965, a faulty relay circuit in Ontario caused a blackout across southern Ontario and New York State. This blackout naturally happened at rush hour, stranding millions of people in New York City.  Somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 people were stranded in darkened subways, but all of the commuters were out by midnight thanks to the efforts of the police and the fire department. Restaurants (if they had gas burners) stayed open by candlelight. Respectable people ended up sleeping in hotel lobbies and the buses that were supposed to take them home. It's a disaster story that wasn't; the people of New York City demonstrated an amazing amount of solidarity. A few issues later, there's a profile of a Broadway de...

Last time on "posts as big as airships" we read the background for a fantastic engineering competition, where private industry and the British Government would try to build the best airship, and the winner would get a nice fat contract to build four more airships to create a unique skyship airway system to connect the British Empire. We also met the R100, the scrappy underdog of the competition. Somehow, Vickers took a leaky hanger you could hide a cathedral in, some aluminum sheet, some Yorkshire farmers and almost no machines, and managed to construct a seven hundred foot airship that worked. The overdog when this project started was the R101. The men of the Royal Airship Works (RAW) had it all - a blank check and the overt support of their government in this competition, and the engineers of the Airship works saw the R101 as England's big chance to take the lead in LTA technology. The R101 flew before the R100, and did a minimal amount of flight testi...