A Parable About the Dawn of Commercial Aviation and Government Action in Promoting Innovation
The catalyst was the implementation of appropriate Government regulations that pushed the American aviation industry to make necessary changes and created a market for innovation in aircraft design. Today, in the aftermath of the economic chaos of the coronavirus pandemic, the same dynamic can be seen at work in the electrification of national economies. Some nations are pushing ahead with the implementation of renewable energy plans and proposals to electrify transport by banning internal combustion engined vehicles in the near future. Australia, on the other hand, is ignoring the new technology and risks later being swamped by it, rather than harnessing its potential, in much the same way that the world’s aviation industry became followers of US commercial air transport after the American breakthroughs of the early 1930s.
Today’s Australian Government is, instead, failing in every principle of how to ensure the nation benefits from technological innovation.
In 1927 the Westland Aircraft Works began supplying an aeroplane it called the Wapiti to the RAF. It was a technically undistinguished aircraft that, apart from its radial engine, could have looked like anything that had flown nine years earlier in the Great War; indeed, its top speed of 129 mph (208 km/h) was a minuscule increase on its First World War predecessor.
There was no need for it to be anything else. For the Wapiti was a colonial aeroplane, equipment issued to British forces administering the more remote areas of the Empire. It was intended to be useful in keeping an eye on things, maintaining communications between remote outposts, assisting the advance of civilisation through aerial survey and to do nothing more bellicose than occasionally drop light bombs on the villages of fractious tribesmen. Status quo aerodynamic technology for a status quo empire in a period of interwar torpor.
This work had been done, particularly in newly acquired territories formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, by the de Havilland DH9A, a World War I light bomber. Westland had had a long-term contract to maintain these aircraft so when it came to designing their replacement the company saw little need for technological advances. Indeed, it even transferred the existing design for the tail planes of the DH9A directly to their new aircraft.
Six years later the Wapiti’s successor, the Wallace, began to enter service. For its efforts to modernise, the RAF got a pair of wheel spats, a Townsend ring (an early form of cowling that covered the dynamic components at the top of the cylinders of a radial engine) and an engine of 60 percent more power. All of this allowed for an improvement in maximum speed of only 29 mph (47 km/h), although a specially modified version was able to claim the honour of being the first aircraft to fly over Mount Everest. But why would the most powerful empire in the world want more? At 158 mph the Wallace was only 20 mph (32 km/h) slower than the RAF's standard fighter aircraft, the Bristol Bulldog.
The problem was that, for 1933, both were hopelessly out of date. The Bulldog dated from the same year as the Wapiti and only a year after entering service had been surpassed in performance by the Hawker Fury, the first RAF aircraft to exceed 200 mph (207 mph/335 km/h). However this was a year into the Great Depression, government finances had crumbled and economic problems outranked defence considerations. Only a few squadrons of Furys were procured and the Bulldogs were to serve well into the middle of the 1930s.
Similarly, the armed forces of the US had a limited role in stimulating aviation development. The US Army Air Corps (USAAC) was institutionally part of the Army, which controlled both its budget and concepts of its role in the defence of the United States. In general, the army’s focus was on the state of its land forces and it saw such little relevance in air defence of the continental US that flying training was a “business hours” activity. USAAC fighter (pursuit) aircraft were on a par with European counterparts but at the beginning of the 1930s its bombing forces were antiquated. The line of Keystone bombers it acquired in the early 1930s were cathedrals of wood, canvas and bracing wire that, apart from a bomb load of 1,100 kg, both looked and performed like their predecessors in the First World War and lagged in velocity behind even the Wapiti.
The US had won the Schneider Trophy for sea plane racing in 1923 and 1925 but lacked funding for further development and lost in 1926, just one win away from gaining the trophy in perpetuity. After that, the Army and Navy ceased funding the joint services effort and the US withdrew from further Schneider contests. Extending aerodynamic performance became the province of rich individuals, who commissioned special designs to fly over remote regions or break international transit records. The continuing interest of the US government remained the air postal service, which continued to underwrite commercial operators and fund the development of new “mail planes”.
Emergence of New Technologies
Aeronautical progress continued to be made in this period, particularly through long-distance flights and sporting contests. In 1931 the Schneider Trophy was won outright by Supermarine’s S6B which, the day after claiming the trophy, went on to become the first aircraft to exceed 400 mph (407.5 mph/655.8 km/h). Nevertheless, these racing seaplanes were far from practical and the competition's demands for technology at the limits of existing science had seen the event almost collapse, with Britain the only entrant for the ultimate 1931 contest. Even here, the effects of the Great Depression had been almost fatal, with the British government withdrawing financial support and Supermarine participating only with finance from private benefactors.
In the United States more practical advances were being made. In mid 1931, the Lockheed Model 9 Orion entered service. With 6 passenger seats in the fuselage separated from the cockpit on top of the aircraft, the Orion followed the standard commercial aircraft concept of the day. In aerodynamic configuration, however, the Orion was radically different. It was a low wing cantilever monoplane of stressed skin construction with no external bracing. The undercarriage retracted flush into the wing. Lockheed slung the largest suitable engine, a 550 hp (410 kW) radial, off the front in a full chord NACA cowling that streamlined the dimensions of the engine directly into the shape of the fuselage.
It was little wonder then that the Orion was faster than any military aircraft in existence. Even its cruise speed of 205 mph (330 km/h) was faster than the maximum speed of the USAAC’s then current fighter aircraft. Not as fast but of similar configuration, Boeing’s Monomail had flown a year earlier. However, whereas the Orion was constructed from laminated wood the Monomail was of all metal stressed skin construction. The Northrop Alpha and the Northrop Gamma had elements of both.
The essential elements of advances in aviation over the forthcoming 15 years were in place.
The Great Depression
The problem stifling advances in aviation, indeed in any sphere at that time, was that the global economy had collapsed. The Great Depression might have been dramatically announced by the Wall Street stock exchange crash of 29 October 1929 but its impact unrolled as an intensifying crisis that continued to worsen until well into 1932. Its consequences in the United States were severe. By 1933 US industrial production had halved, unemployment had risen to 15 million (some 25% of the workforce) and one third of the banks in the US had failed. Falling consumer demand led to a drop in prices of agricultural produce of up to 60% and the effects of this were compounded by a severe drought in the American central west. The conjunction triggered the largest internal migration in US history.
The collapse of America’s banks caused not only catastrophe for ordinary citizens but made it difficult for industry to revive. When the rout of the banks ended in March 1933, the US money supply had contracted by 35%. In these circumstances finance to support new enterprise and new production was difficult to obtain.
There was an exception to this landscape. By the end of 1932 passenger miles flown by US commercial aircraft had tripled from 1929. The same was true for the number of passengers and commercial aviation employees. The reason was that commercial aviation was sustained by flying government-subsidised airmail, not passengers, for whom the experience was tiring, cold and dangerous. The system for awarding airmail contracts allowed for much gaming of payments, to the extent that it was unprofitable for many carriers to sacrifice mail capacity for passenger accommodation. In 1930 the Hoover administration introduced a new Mail Act to reform the system, to encourage the use of more modern and better equipped aircraft and to prod the carriers to place more emphasis on fare-paying passengers. Nevertheless, expansion of commercial aviation continued to be on the back of government subsidies for mail.
The sharp division of fortunes between aviation companies that had mail contracts and those that did not and the way airmail routes were allocated under the Act sparked a political uproar that played out in Congress during 1933. A year into its first term, the Roosevelt Administration reacted by suspending commercial delivery of airmail and ordering the USAAC to perform the task until a new Act could be legislated.
Named the “Air Mail Fiasco” by the media, the USAAC operation lasted from 7 February to 12 June 1934 and revealed how antiquated and underprepared US Service aviation had become. Flown through one of the worst winters on record, it suffered 66 major accidents including 13 deaths as obsolete USAAC aircraft lacking in modern navigation and communications equipment and flown by inexperienced crews attempted to replicate the work of the commercial sector.
The Beginnings of Modern Commercial Aviation
Just before the suspension of commercial mail flights was due to begin, two of the companies involved staged a publicity stunt. World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker flew out of Burbank, California, with a load of mail, executives and news reporters and flew across the continental USA in 13 hours and 5 minutes. This was 5 hours faster than the existing record.
The aircraft involved was the Douglas DC-1, one of the first results of regulatory changes in 1931 that initiated the use of metal structured aircraft for mainline passenger carrying air services. It had first flown the previous July and had only just been accepted by Transcontinental and Western Air. The USAAC returned the compliment just before the end of the military mail operation, flying the west-to-east-continental route, with 6 service stops in only an hour longer than it had taken the DC-1. The mission was flown by Martin YB-10 bombers, the aircraft still undergoing prototype testing, but already being heralded as representing a revolution in aerial warfare.
The two aircraft types were technically similar. Both were twin-engined, fully cantilevered monoplanes of entirely stressed skin metal construction. Their undercarriage was retractable, their engines were enclosed in full-chord NACA cowlings and accommodation was within enclosed cockpits. Their supercharged engines were equipped with controllable pitch propellers, providing maximum efficiency for both takeoff and cruise. Thus the aircraft could take off and climb away in the event of an engine failure, massively increasing the safety of passenger carrying operations. Both were faster than most of the fighter aircraft then serving with air forces around the world.
The wood and canvas Fokker F-10 aircraft that crashed in March 1931 was carrying an American football legend, Knute Rockne, who was so prominent that his death sparked a national outcry about the safety of air travel. The then regulatory authority, the Aeronautics Branch of the US Department of Commerce, determined that the failure of glue attaching wooden components of the wing structure had been an element in the crash, and mandated stringent inspection and maintenance procedures for wooden aircraft that drove up operating costs. As well, the air transport operators realised that the image of their existing trimotor fleets (even when these included the metal constructed Ford trimotor) had deteriorated rapidly and was undermining their prospects of future operation.
The issue was addressed in mid 1933 when Boeing launched its Model 247 airliner. Conceptually identical to the DC-1, the advent of the Boeing 247 was not to be everyone’s solution. Boeing was part of a vertical conglomerate supplying aircraft to Boeing Air Transport and would not equip other operators until this need was met. Consequently, Transcontinental and Western Air, the operator of the crashed F-10, approached the Douglas Aircraft Company for an alternative and the line of Douglas Commercials (DC-x) was born, particularly after May 1934 when the single DC-1 was translated into multiple orders for the larger DC-2. The position of the twin-engined airliner in commercial aviation was fully cemented in October 1934 when the Aeronautics Branch prohibited the use of single-engined aircraft for passenger services on major routes and stipulated the need for air crew to include a co-pilot. By the end of the Air Mail Fiasco the regulatory focus in commercial aviation had shifted to the safety of passengers.
That the emerging class of airliners represented the creation of a new dominant aerodynamic paradigm was demonstrated by the contemporaneous appearance of the Martin B-10. The design commenced in 1932 when the Glenn L. Martin company made an unsolicited offer to the USAAC to provide a bomber developed around the latest emerging aerodynamic principles. While the commercial aviation companies acted almost immediately to operate their new fleets, it took two years of iterative testing for the USAAC to finalise development of its new aircraft. By then, the benefits of the new technologies were undeniable and the case for procurement irresistible. The B-10 was almost twice as fast as the Keystone bomber force which preceded it, could outrun most fighter aircraft and made existing bomber aircraft suddenly obsolescent.
More Than Technology: A New Industry Focus
Something else important was happening in those early years of the 1930s. Although it was earliest into service and laid claim to being the first modern passenger aircraft, the Boeing 247 made fewer sales than its counterparts. Seventy five aircraft were built, 60 of them going to Boeing Air Transport and 10 to United Aircraft Corporation. Douglas sold nearly 200 DC-2s before embarking on the DC-3, of which 607 had been sold before the US joined the Second World War and the type became the most widely produced transport aircraft of the conflict. The 247 was also outsold by its Lockheed counterparts, the Model 10 Electra and Model 14 Super Electra, even though the first of these began operating some 18 months later than the Boeing aircraft. The two Lockheed models sold over 500 aircraft before around 2,941 were produced as Hudson bombers. The reason for this disparity, it appears, was that the Model 247 did not make the leap from commercial aircraft to airliner.
A conceptual switch was occurring, reshaping the understandings of what air travel was about. The changes in the government’s regulation of air transportation and a public conception that air travel should be safe had made the passenger the crucial measure of success in commercial aviation. Widespread restructuring of the industry occurred at the end of the Air Mail Fiasco, and companies that had been described by names with “Transport” or “Airways” became “Airlines”. Transcontinental & Western Air, the owners of the unfortunate F10, became operators of the DC-2 with its heated, soundproofed cabins, refreshment galley and flight attendant for its 14 passengers, and would subsequently be renamed Trans World Airlines.
The 247 had these features as well but its design had been compromised. Early on, the 14 seater design had been scaled down to minimise contrast with the trimotor aircraft that had proceeded it. It ended up as a 10 seater rather than offering the greater flexibility of the 14 seat DC-2. It was more narrow and cramped and the wing structure intruded into the cabin space, obstructing movement around the cabin. Arthur Raymond, the chief engineer on the DC-1, understood the change that was occurring in the industry following the Fokker F-10 crash and that it demanded transformation rather than continuity. Arguing that people should not be treated as cargo, his philosophy for designing the DC-1 was to “build a comfortable enclosure and put wings on it.” (http://jack-frye.blogspot.com/p/dc1-development-and-history.html)
Selling comfort was not an entirely new idea in air transport. In the late 1920s the Germans had sought to emulate the accommodation of an ocean liner or luxury train service with the Graf Zeppelin’s dining service and sleeping accommodation, even if cabin temperatures were somewhat chilly. Because of the long hours involved in flying across the continental USA, several operators had offered sleeping services. In 1933 the concept remained sufficiently attractive for the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company to developed the Condor II specifically for this type of service. It was a twin-engined wide fuselage biplane of little technical merit except that it could accommodate 12 sleeping berths.
In 1935 Douglas was approached by American Airlines to provide a more modern sleeper aircraft replacement for the Condor II. Douglas expanded its DC-2 design with a cabin around 30% wider and the resulting DST (Douglas Sleeper Transport), which first flew in December 1935, could accommodate 14 to 16 berths. By the same token, when equipped for normal operation it could accommodate 21 to 32 passengers. This version became the DC-3 and Douglas simply started building them on the same production line while it was building the DST.
The most startling aspect of the DC-3 was that it had reached the critical size where money could be made by flying passengers alone. Between its introduction and the US entry to World War II over 600 were built by Douglas and more were licensed for production around the world. The aircraft was largely responsible for the seven-fold increase in passenger numbers in the latter years of the 1930s.
The era of truly commercial air transportation had arrived. Success lay not just in applying technology to a problem but in seeing how that technology had changed the nature of the problem.
Extending the Paradigm
Translating the technological developments that transformed air transportation in the early-mid 1930s across to the military sphere was to prove not entirely easy. As might be expected, the design of bomber aircraft, as an aeronautical platform similar to a passenger airliner, proved the most easily influenced. Indeed, such was the performance of some of the passenger carrying aircraft of the mid-1930s that several bomber proposals of the period were revised passenger designs.
Among the earliest and certainly the longest lived of the new metal stressed skin technology designs was the Boeing B-17, which first flew as early as mid-1935. The four-engined heavy bomber was clearly superior to anything proposed to that time and gained early support from the USAAC. However, it crashed due to pilot error in October 1935 and an extensively modified version, with innovations such as turbocharged engines, did not enter military service until April 1938. Even so, it was to take much exposure to the realities of combat to refine the design to a level where its official title of Flying Fortress was appropriate and the capability of the aircraft was adequate for the daylight bombing raids over Europe with which it became synonymous.
An even earlier and initially more successful application of the new design principles was the Soviet Tupolev SB (SB for fast bomber). Flying first in mid-1934 and entering service little more than a year after the Martin B-10, the SB was much faster than the Martin design, at 250 mph (402 km/h) with more developed versions reaching 277 mph (402 km/h) by 1938. By this time, production of the SB had made it the most numerous bomber in the world and many had been supplied to the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. Its speed meant the SBs could not be intercepted by the biplane fighters with which they were opposed. This was an advantage also enjoyed by the Heinkel He 111, which first flew in 1936. At this time Germany was ostensibly abiding by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that forbade it the possession of military aircraft. The He 111 first appeared in the guise of a fast civilian airliner, with the bomb bay being presented as a four-seat “smoking compartment”. Nonetheless, by the beginning of 1937 He 111s of the German Condor Legion were openly bombing targets in Spain.
The fast stressed-skin monoplane bombers were able to attack targets with impunity and were seen, particularly in the popular media, as inflicting horrendous damage on unprotected civilian locations. This led not just to a popular perception of impending Armageddon (invoked by Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica) but an official policy best summarised by the words “the bomber will always get through”. As Europe rearmed in the late 1930s, much effort was put into production of light and medium bombers in the expectation that they had the capability to thwart an opponent’s war machine. Yet the combat effectiveness of nearly all of this class of military aircraft was to prove disappointing once they were exposed to the realities of the Second World War.
By that time, the same design principles had been applied to enough fighter aircraft types to relegate bombers to their traditional place in the air combat food chain. The near-ubiquitous squadrons of 270-280 mph (440-455 km/h) monoplanes with only a few light machine guns for defensive protection were revealed as easy targets. Sustainable bombing operations in this conflict were shown to require a combination, or all, of assembling forces in overwhelming numbers, sacrificing bomb load for heavy armament, persisting fighter escort, conducting operations at night and almost unbelievable stoicism and heroism on the part of aircrew. The only alternative was to develop something truly revolutionary and call it the de Havilland Mosquito.
Ending the Paradigm
It took longer than might have been expected for fighter aircraft design to reflect the revolutionary advances of the 1930s. By mid-decade most air forces were still equipped with biplanes and early attempts to introduce monoplane fighter aircraft were compromised by only partial adoption of the technologies. Industrial processes were not easy to establish, causing Seversky to lose long-term orders for the P-35 when it failed to build them at an acceptable rate. At other times design competence was insufficient, as when the British Air Ministry issued specification F7/30, expecting to procure a monoplane. Instead, when the contenders flew in 1934 the RAF was forced to contend with offerings so inadequate that a private offer of a biplane design (the Gloster Gladiator) was accepted instead.
Eventually, the paradigm for the classical Second World War fighter aircraft settled almost overwhelmingly on the cantilever low wing all-metal monoplane, with retractable undercarriage, an enclosed cockpit and the most powerful engine possible (preferably over 1000 hp (760kW)) hanging off the front. There were exceptions, such as the pod-and-boom construction of the P-38 Lightning, that illustrated the difficulties of obtaining the desired performance within existing technological limits. There were also indicators, for instance in the variety of solutions for getting the undercarriage tucked away, of the difficulties in achieving cantilever construction of a highly loaded aerofoil subject to extreme stress.
Engine power was critical. Sydney Camm, chief designer of Hawker, had contemplated a monoplane version of the Hawker Fury throughout the early 1930s but could not find an engine of enough power to make it feasible. The failure of specification F7/30 was largely due to the inadequacies of the engines available at the time. It was only with proposals from the Rolls-Royce that signalled the inception of the Merlin engine that Camm decided to proceed with his high speed monoplane.
The resulting Hurricane was an imperfect design in that the fuselage was a fabric-covered conventional framed structure with the outer wing panels covered in the same material. It was not until after the 500th aircraft that Hurricanes with a fully metal wing were delivered. By the time the RAF deployed to France in 1940 some Hurricanes still retained biplane-era fixed pitch, twin bladed wooden propellers. Nonetheless, the basic monoplane configuration with the 1030 hp (768 kW) of the Merlin up front was sufficient for the Hurricane to gain 60 percent of the RAF’s victories during the Battle of Britain.
The same results were achieved by Germany with the Daimler-Benz 600 series engine. Fitting the new power plant to the Messerschmitt Bf 109 upgraded it from the 290 mph (470 km/h) aircraft deployed with the Condor Legion and allowed the “E” variant to compete with British fighters during the Battle of Britain. Successive upgrades kept the type viable to the end of the war. The DB 600 series did even more to improve the quality of underpowered, radial-engined Italian fighters.
In much the same way, fitting a licence-built version of the Merlin to the P-51 Mustang changed a mundane aircraft to one of the best fighters of the conflict. So important was the issue of engine power that output more than doubled over little more than half a decade. By the end of the Second World War some designs were sporting engines of around 2500 hp (1865 kW), and the technical challenges of keeping power and aerodynamics pointed in the same line were becoming complex.
And then it all ended. In 1935 leading aircraft designers had just started to grapple with the problems of building fighters to the principles of stress skin metal construction. By 1945 no one was designing propeller driven fighter aircraft. The problem now was to master the new propulsion source of the turbojet and explore the aerodynamic possibilities it offered. Some countries continued the struggle to develop propeller driven designs initiated during the war, like Australia with the CAC CA-15 Kangaroo. By 1950 it was glaringly obvious that the future lay with jet propulsion and the project was cancelled.
To the Next Revolution
It had lasted barely 10 years but the era of the classic World War II fighter aircraft was over. Initially, the development of the new aeronautical paradigm and the complex raft of technological issues that it raised was focused on fighter aircraft but, inevitably, the potential of jet propulsion was extended to bombers and, eventually, to commercial aircraft. Ironically, it was Boeing that built another groundbreaking passenger aircraft, and one that initiated a revolutionary change as profound as that begun by the Model 247.
And, once again, the role of government was crucial. For this was the period of the Cold War and lavish US defence budgets. Boeing had designed two archetypal Cold War nuclear bombers in the B-47 and B-52, aircraft with swept wings and suspended podded turbojet engines. Using the same principles, Boeing built the Dash 80, a company owned research and development aircraft to enable it to bid for a USAF desire to procure the world’s first jet powered aerial tanker. Boeing won the contract for what was to become the KC-135 Stratotanker and then turned its attention to producing an airliner version of the Dash 80.
This time, Boeing chose to widen the passenger cabin. The result was the Boeing 707. With six-abreast seating facilitating accommodation of over 180 passengers and high subsonic cruise speed, the 707 dramatically increased airline capacity in revenue seat miles per hour/per day. Over 1000 were built and the 707’s high productivity demanded changes not only to airline operations but to the entire range of air transport procedures and infrastructure - from baggage handling, to terminals, to air traffic control.
The age of mass air transportation had begun, this time courtesy of technology transfer from the military arena.
In little more than a decade the new paradigm was locked-in with the launch of the Boeing 747, presaging mass international travel, airports becoming dominant issues in urban planning and globalised economic interaction. The disruption caused by the current pandemic only illustrated how complete had been the impact of jet-powered commercial aviation.
And that is how governments play a role in starting technological revolutions. Revolutions that don’t just change the technology available but change people’s options, their views of the world, and ultimately the way they live their lives.
It is the nature of such revolutions that they have dramatic impact but then merge into the fabric of everyday life, even where that is a fabric created by the revolution. The opportunity to shape the nature of that fabric is usually fleeting as the dominance of the technology is taken by those quick to see its implications and thereby profit most until the onset of the next cycle of innovation.
The way that US governments did not act during these cycles of aeronautical revolution was to take contrary policy stances that simultaneously promoted and impeded development of the technology they supported. They would not have, for instance, place new taxes on the operation of electric vehicles that would penalise new operators between $300 and $375 each year for adopting the new automotive technology. (https://www.caradvice.com.au/909605/draft-of-federal-governments-electric-vehicle-strategy-leaked-report/)
The US government acted decisively and promptly made decisions that allowed commercial entities to make similar timely decisions. The US Defense Department selected the KC-135 within the space of a year, allowing Boeing a similarly quick decision process on the 707 and thereby delivering the US long-term domination of commercial air transport. It would not have, for instance, promised a policy paper on electric vehicles, fail to deliver anything for two years, transmogrify the subject to ‘future fuels’ and the fail to elaborate any policy on the future of electric vehicles in Australia. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-15/federal-government-draft-paper-into-electric-vehicle-use-slammed/12983416)
And the US consistently understood the importance of, and need for, technological change. It would not have missed the blindingly obvious by remarking like Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack that electrification of Australia’s transportation system was not an issue because “at the moment we’ve got perfectly good petrol cars that many people choose to drive.” (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-16/can-australia-do-more-to-encourage-electric-cars/12988492?nw=0)
That’s the type of complacency that leaves you with the Westland Wapiti when the new world is preparing for the DC-2.
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