Tag: Aircraft

Rockwell Advanced Bomber Study

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With the B-1(A) cancelled, Rockwell took a look at a variety of bombers that ranged from “deliberately low technology for the sake of development time and risk” to “LASER GUNS” (seriously). The bomber needed to have a payload of 50,000 pounds, mostly in the form of sixteen nuclear-capable cruise missiles. It needed a strategic mission range of about 5,200 nautical miles with said payload.

The five main examples were:

  • Subsonic, low technology/cost
  • Subsonic, lowest weight
  • Supersonic
  • Stealth
  • LASER GUN

The resulting report makes for very interesting reading. One of the more interesting proposals that’s mentioned but not elaborated on there is the modular plane that could be a bomber, an AWACS, a transport, and more.

What implied stats emerge (I’m not an aviation engineer) show the cargo version of the bomber as having neither the raw payload capacity of a heavy airlifter (the payload charts only went up to about 40 tons/80,000 pounds) nor the ruggedness of a light one (the takeoff distance, though impressive for a heavy bomber, is less than a dedicated airlifter). And that’s even before considering the issues with a modular pod (there’s a reason why very few transporters like it have been built). Still fun to think about.

Review: American Military Helicopters

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American Military Helicopters

E.R. Johnson’s American Military Helicopters is one of those giant encyclopedias of aircraft that appeal only really to a certain group of people, but which appeals a LOT to said group. This is a huge catalog of everything that has either had a rotary wing or a vertical takeoff feature that either entered or was considered for American military service.

So you get stuff like the UH-1 and F-35B. But you also get obscure projects from the 1950s and 60s that ranged from gargantuan lifters that challenged the Soviet monsters in size to literal flying jeeps. The history nerd in me complains that it didn’t go as far into the VTOL weeds as it could have, but as an expanded “coffee table book”, it’s excellent for what it is.

Review: Falling

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Falling

TJ Newman’s Falling is a thriller about an airliner pilot faced with an ultimatum on a previously routine flight: Crash on purpose or your family gets killed. Reading it gave me a weird feeling. Not a bad feeling, but a weird one.

I’ve seen reviews that have said “this book was clearly trying to be a movie”. And this is a very, very blatant example of this. It’s not a bad example, and neither is it a bad book. I was reminded a lot of the movie Speed, which is not exactly a horrible thing for a thriller to remind you of. But at the same time, people remember Speed a lot more than they remember the novelization of Speed, because it’s the kind of thing that’s far better told in visual format.

Not surprisingly, this book is being made into a movie. I’ll have to see how that turns out, but I’ll just say that if being too much like an action movie is the worst thing in a thriller, it’s a good thriller. Especially if it’s written by a veteran flight attendant who thus knows a thing or two about airplanes.

A Thousand Words: The Starfighters

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The Starfighters

Generally speaking, to make a good Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, the movie itself has to have some redeeming qualities. Obviously not good qualities, but signs of basic competence and the ability to do something memorable. The Starfighters is the exception to this rule. For it is simultaneously one of the best MST3K episodes and one of the worst movies shown on the program.

The movie can be summed up as “lots of stock footage of F-104s, intercut with terrible stiff acting to fill out the movie.” Famously there are two long scenes of the planes refueling in midair. Which is about as exciting as it sounds. And stock footage of them flying. And stock footage of them bombing, as well as stock footage of them firing AGM-12 Bullpup missiles.

There is one genuinely interesting thing in the movie, and that is a line that accurately shows the 1960s approach to aviation safety. Given the F-104’s infamously high accident rate, it rings even more ironically. Basically, back then the dominant theory was that every crash was the pilot’s fault and the solution basically amounted to “git gud”. Said mindset is blatantly stated in one scene where people discuss the safety of the plane.

But other than that, this is a great mock of a bad, bad, bad movie.

Review: Shadows of the Empire

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Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

In the mid-1990s, an unusual multimedia product occurred. George Lucas and company released Shadows of the Empire, a Star Wars side story set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The results for Steve Perry’s primary novel were… interesting. First off, the book itself is not so bad that it falls into the tier of “horrible tie-ins”, but is nowhere near good enough to overcome the problems which every anime fan would know.

Yes, I said anime fan. Because this is like one of those movies that are based off a sequential anime (which is itself based on a sequential manga). In other words, everything has to be completely self-contained, every loose end has to be either tied up or cut loose, and the status quo for the series overall can’t really change. That every major character introduced in this book is killed off at the end shows the limitations it was working under, and Perry could not write his way past such a major obstacle.

I supposed it works if you just want Star Wars filler, but there’s better choices even in that regard.

A Thousand Words: Eco Fighters

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Eco Fighters

Capcom decided to make an arcade “shmup” with an environmentalist science fiction theme. The result was Eco Fighters, a very well made game with one massive flaw. And no, the massive flaw was not the environmental theme. The massive flaw has to do with how you aim.

See you control a spaceship that has a rotating arm/turret. It sounds good, but in practice it’s a gimmick that’s hard to work and control. This and the fact that you’ll often unavoidably run into a weapon change that you don’t want (which gets rid of something you do) sours it a little.

But only a little. It’s still a good side scrolling spaceship shooter, and the graphics and music are typically excellent for the time period. It just tried something distinct and fell short in that regard.

Review: Inheriting the Bomb

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Inheriting The Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine

I’ve looked forward to few nonfiction books as much as I anticipated reading Marina Budjeryn’s Inheriting The Bomb, about how nuclear weapons were removed from Ukraine after the USSR’s breakup (the word choice is deliberate). I was not disappointed. This is an amazing book that can for all intents and purposes clear up the “could Ukraine have kept its nukes” confusion.

I’ve already posted about WMDs and the non-Russian SSRs. Short answer is “They never had control or the necessary pieces to maintain the arsenal of nuclear weapons on their territory, but they nonetheless had the raw technical ability to make an arsenal”. Raw technical ability but little else. Budjeryn doesn’t go into that much detail on counterfactuals (though she does wisely defer to credible experts in that regard and cites them).

She does go into lots and lots of detail on the political twists and turns and not just for Ukraine itself. Yet it was far more reticent than Belarus or Kazakhstan were and viewed itself as a legitimate holder of the weapons. Factors from the fact that Russia was threatening Ukraine almost literally from day one (and by Yeltsin officials and not Zhirinovsky-ist fireeaters) to the desire to preserve jobs in the giant Dnepropetrovsk missile plant are mentioned. This is a great, indispensable book about a very important topic, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Review: Aircraft Projects of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation

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Aircraft Projects of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation

I’m a sucker for big historical reference books, so I got Aircraft Projects of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, a detailed look at Australia’s aviation company from WWII to its buyout postwar. Everything from the semi-improvised military aircraft of the war to their license-built airplanes designed by other firms (ie Sabres and Mirages) to their ambitious designs is covered.

The last segment includes some pretty crazy things like a trainer/low-end ground attacker that’s swing-winged and an interceptor powered by four very small engines. The latter is a good example of how much the designs had to fit the parts rather than the other way around. This book is a well written, well-laid out treat and I highly recommend it.