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Aircraft in the 1632 Universe
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The essence of the Ring of Fire was the knowledge, ideas and information that it provided to the Early Modern period. Perhaps the least predictable aspect of the Ring of Fire was the order of inventing. In our own history the railroad (1804) came a century before the airplane (1903). Now, I know someone is going to correct me here. They will point out, quite accurately, that the Englishman George Cayley made a glider flight in 1856. That the Montgolfier brothers flew in a hot air balloon in 1783. That several other people are credited with the first powered-flight in various parts of the world any time from the late 1880s to 1905. All true, all true. So what? If you go back and look for information on the railroad, you will find the first rut roads (an ancestor of the railroad) were in existence around 430 B.C. Yes, again, I know they weren't "real" railroads and they didn't have steam-driven locomotives. But the when of their invention depends on where you draw the line. For the railroad, we draw it in 1804 with the first steam locomotive. For aircraft, we draw it in 1903 with the first powered heavier-than-air flight.
The important questions are: when did the world wake up and realize that there would be choo-choo trains? And when did the world wake up and realize there would be airplanes? And the answer is: about a century apart. By the time the first consistent, documented, repeatable powered-flight occurred, the Iron Horse had already conquered most of the United States, Western Europe, also large chunks of India, parts of Africa, China . . . Well, you get the idea. According to family history, a great-grandfather of mine who was, by all accounts, not a very nice person, once ordered a young woman from his home for having the effrontery to claim that man would someday fly in a powered heavier-than-air aircraft. This was in 1904. Apparently, the stiff-necked old coot was an honest man, because when an airplane flew over the house only a couple of years later, he went and looked up the young woman to apologize. There's actually a reason for me telling that story. Even after something can be done, whether it's railroads, airplanes or submarines, you still have to convince people that the attempt is worth the effort. From 1804 for the steam-powered railroad, and from 1903 for the airplane, that process really began and proceeded apace.
In the 1632 universe those processes were separated by two years. It is a safe bet that when the first airplane flew over Magdeburg, there were still people in town that did not believe railroads worked. People like my great-grandpa. For all practical purposes the first functional railroad engine and the first functional airplane might as well have taken place at the same moment. So why does that matter? Because this article is not about how to build an airplane. There are lots of articles that go into much more detail than I ever could; there are even kits. If you have the time and money you can build your own. I know several people who have. This is not even an article about how to build an airplane in the 1632 universe, though of necessity it will touch on that using two examples: The Jupiter, built by TransEuropean Airlines by S&M Aircraft and the Gustav built for the USE Air Force. (For the Jupiter, see "The Monster" in Grantville Gazette, Volume 12.)
This is an article about why to build an airplane or whether to build an airplane. Why invest the resources in such an expensive undertaking? Both for the government and for private enterprise, the resources necessary to make something fly in a controlled way will buy a lot of guns and, for that matter, quite a bit of butter.
Militarily, aircraft have proven both their worth and their limitations in the twentieth century, as scout platforms and weapons platforms that can observe and hit the enemy from the highest of high ground. They are an important, perhaps even vital, part of a combined arms approach to warfare and offer those who have them rapid reconnaissance and communications. Those advantages are quite clear to the generals of the USE. What isn't clear at all is how much are they going to cost to produce and how long it will take. Those questions get answered in 1633 when the Las Vegas Belle takes its first flight. And the only reasonable reason that it takes that long is because the New US government was unwilling to make a significant investment in aircraft production until they knew for sure, not just that it could be done, but that they could do it in a reasonable amount of time. While the Las Vegas Belle is answering that military question, it is also answering the parallel civilian question.
In our timeline, the first attempt at a for-real passenger plane happened in Russia. Not in the United States or England or France, but in backward, barbaric Russia. I don't mean to insult Russia or Russians when I say that, but that is pretty much the way most of Europe and America thought of Russia at the time. And they weren't totally wrong. In 1913, when the 16-passenger, four-engine Ilya Muromets was first flown, Russia was a nation of contrasts. There was both great wealth and knowledge and grinding poverty and ignorance. So why there? Why not the good old USA or England, France or some other "civilized" country? Well, part of the reason was that Igor Sikorsky was an honest-to-goodness genius, but I submit that that wasn't the whole reason. Curtis was a genius too; so were lots of other people working in the newly-born field of aircraft design. And Sikorsky didn't build the Ilya in his basement nor from his own funds. He was a wealthy man from a wealthy family which supported his efforts, but that would not have been enough by itself. It was enough to get him started and enough to let him win some prizes and come to the attention of the elite of Russia. But his wealth alone was not enough to build the Ilya. He was able to raise significant money for the project. I submit that the reason he was able to raise that money was because Russia was backward.
Imagine the conversation when some bright-eyed enthusiast in the good old USA started to wax poetic about his plans to build a multiengine passenger plane:
"It will never work!"
"It will, sir. I'm convinced we can build this plane."
"Don't interrupt. Even if you did manage to get it to fly, what advantage would it have over the already existent network of railroads and roads. Will it be faster than the trains?"
"Well, yes, probably. Most of them anyway. It should go about fifty to eighty miles per hour, depending on a number of factors. (Remembered this is the early teens to the early twenties. Airplanes just weren't that fast then.) There are some express trains that go faster than that. But most are slower and the plane will travel as the crow flies. That will help some."
"Will it be safer than trains?"
"Well, no. Not at first. Trains are a proven technology."
"Will it be cheaper than the trains?"
"No. It will be much more expensive."
"So I should invest a medium-sized fortune in a device that won't work and, even if it did, would be more expensive, less safe. And not much faster or even quite as fast as the fastest trains?"
This not the sort of conversation likely to produce large investments in the development of commercial aircraft.
Sikorsky, on the other hand, was in Russia. Russia did have railroads, however the rail network was much less extensive with larger gaps. He was not asked how a working passenger plane would compete with railroads because his potential investors already knew the answer. "What railroads?"
That lack of existing solutions also had a secondary effect: The potential investor was not as likely to focus on reasons why his designs wouldn't work. They were looking for a solution, not for a reason not to invest. When the Ilya Muromets first flew, the reports were met in the west with skepticism. The experts in Europe and America had, for the most part, convinced themselves that a plane that large would never get off the ground. Even after WWI when the Russian Revolution caused Sikorsky to leave Russia and come to the USA, he was not able to build planes as big as the Ilya Muromets. This was after more than forty Ilya Muromets had been built by Russia and used as heavy bombers during WWI.
With a proven track record and improved technology, and even with a prototype to show, Sikorsky's first effort in the USA, the Sikorsky S-29-A, failed to find service as a passenger plane. It—only one was ever made—was eventually sold and had a varied career, ending it's life in the movie Hell's Angels. Because of the lack of interest, Sikorsky then had to switch to smaller aircraft and wait for the market to catch up. His first American passenger plane that was actually put into service in that capacity, the S-38, first flew in 1928, nine years after Sikorsky arrived in the USA. Sikorsky first learned of the Wright Brothers flight in 1906 and didn't switch to fixed-wing aircraft till 1910 and the Ilya Muromets carried its first passengers in December of 1913.
What does all this have to do with the 1632 world? In 1632 there is a tremendous concentration of technology but very little in the way of infrastructure outside the Ring of Fire. Yes, they are building railroads. But by 1634 the main rail line out of Grantville has not yet reached Magdeburg. "What railroads?" is an even more valid answer to the question of how a plane will compete with railroads than it was in Russia in our time line. And it will continue to be—in the USE for years, and the rest of the world for decades. This gives aircraft of all sorts a tremendous advantages, because they don't need infrastructure.
Yes, I know someone has to build the planes. Someone has to drill the oil and refine the fuel. But the difference in investment in infrastructure is so great that the cost of airports gets lost in the noise of the cost of a rail line. The oil will need to be drilled and refined anyway. There are too many other products that need it. Aircraft don't need rails, tons of iron per mile. They don't need roads or canals. They need approximately what ocean-going ships need: places to build them and places to dock. Well, a bit less than the ships. The ships, after all, need open water, an ocean—or at least a river—between their ports.
That means that aircraft aren't going to compete with railroads or, for the most part, even the improved roads of the USE. They really won't be competing with barge traffic on rivers or canals, either. If someone builds a railroad or a canal along your route, you smile, thank them for making it easier and cheaper to get your fuel. Then move your route, or one end of your route, to somewhere where the competition doesn't go. Ships can compete with you between ports. They are slower but cost a great deal less per ton mile. But you will still get much of the luxury trade and virtually all of the trade in perishables. For most of the things that an aircraft will carry, the primary competing transport is going to be mule trains. That is, horses or mules traveling over roads that are not much better than paths through the woods.
So, let's take a look at mule trains. According to "Hither and Yon," Grantville Gazette, Volume 11, a mule train can do "15-30mpd easy terrain, 5-15 mpd in mountains.(See note 2)." Split the difference between terrain types and call it 15 miles per day. To carry a ton of goods, you need about ten mules and two packers leading them. So, ten animals and two men. The cost is figured in ton miles and comes to 10d or around $17.50 in New US or USE dollars. That's for every mile traveled. For three hundred miles, that comes to $5,250. Why is it so expensive? Because you have to pay the packers, you have to pay to feed and care for the mules and the packers for days or weeks.
For an airplane to break even charging the same rate per ton mile, you need one or more aircraft that can carry one ton of cargo for three hundred miles at the same rate. The aircraft must be built, but the cost of building it is amortized over the projected life of the aircraft. Be conservative and call it five years of flights. Assume two flights a week and fifty weeks a year (everyone needs a vacation and even though they are only spending a couple of days a week flying and the rest of the time being maintained, it's still wise to do a full takedown twice a year.) Three hundred miles a flight makes six hundred miles a week. Fifty weeks a year gives thirty thousand flight miles a year, times five years gives an amortized aircraft cost of X/150,000 with X equaling the cost of building the airplane. So, if your aircraft cost $150,000, your aircraft cost per mile is $1.00. If the plane cost $450,000.00, then the ton mile cost is $3.00.
Of course, money costs money, and half a million dollars (more or less), costs quite a bit. The cost of money in the mid 1630s is a tricky issue. A safe portfolio or a mutual fund might reasonably be expected to have a return of as much as fifteen percent a year or as little as five percent. However, much of that return is not reflected, or expected to be reflected, in immediate productivity. The money is being spent on industrial infrastructure and the investors know it. As that infrastructure gets nearer completion, the values of the stock that represents it increases. In other words, the market is anticipating, as markets tend to do. Investment in automobile manufacturing plants probably started in late 1631 with no expectation that the first car would roll off the assembly line before 1636. What the investors do expect is that when the cars start rolling off the line in 1636 or 1638 or perhaps even 1640, they are going to make whole heaps of money. So the value of the stock is expected to increase, but it's not expected to pay dividends for a while.
What does this mean in terms of financing aircraft production? In terms of military aircraft like the Gustav, not much. They will be built on military contracts, with government cash on the barrelhead. In terms of private investors, it makes it harder in some ways and easier in others. It's harder because there are a lot of places where they can invest their money and expect a significant return. So the cost of money is going to be on the high end, somewhere around ten to fifteen percent per year. On the high side, by our standards. The availability of loans from the First National Bank of Grantville and the credit union are going to push the cost of secured loans down by seventeenth-century standards. Again, not everyone agrees on this subject. How much a loan will cost will depend a lot on who is borrowing the money and on who they are borrowing it from. Whether you invest money in an aircraft is a related question. If your other option is to loan money, you will want a higher return because you're not getting ownership. It stops paying. Ownership has more risk, but at least the potential to pay you back and leave you with stock that will continue paying you for much longer.
There are two ways of calculating the cost of money—how much will you have to pay back over a given period of time and how much would the money make you over a given period of time. Generally, how much it would make you is a bit less than how much it would cost you. My best guess about the cost of money over a five year period is that $450,000.00 will represent a cost of $600,000.00 to $650,000.00 over the course of five years. Which brings us to the plus side. The car factory won't even start paying off for years, neither will a lot of other investments. But the aircraft will start paying for itself as soon as it's delivered. Thus, hope makes it a more attractive investment Assuming $650,000.00 paid over five years that's $4.33 per ton mile. If the plane is still in good shape after that time, your profits go up. And the plane probably will be in good shape.
The planes are only one part of the cost. There is also fuel, maintenance, flight crew, and interest. Also airport or station fees. Still, flight mile gives us one major component of the cost.
So, how much is fuel going to cost on a per ton mile basis? The best I can do is make a WAG (Wild Ass Guess) It's probably going to be a methanol-gasoline mixture, perhaps 90% alcohol and 10% gasoline because alcohol improves octane. The engines will, of course, have to be modified to run on this mixture. How much per ton mile is impossible to say across a range of aircraft. You can work it out partly for a single airplane, but even there it's a constantly changing number. As the plane flies, it uses up fuel and gets lighter, reducing induced drag. So every mile it travels, it needs a little bit less fuel for the next. Obviously, the degree to which it is loaded affects the amount of fuel used. The airspeed and so on also affect fuel use. Still, it can be worked out with reasonable accuracy for a single plane.
The plane I'm going to use is the Jupiter from and my and Paula Goodlett's story, "The Monster," which is based on the Ilya Muromets built in 1913 by Sikorsky. We did make some reasonable improvements focused on reducing drag and improving laminar flow. And we added air cushion landing gear that was developed in the late 1960s.
Even if you knew to the inch how far a gallon of fuel would take you, there is still the question of how much a gallon of fuel costs. The best we can possibly come up with is a WAG. My WAG is about 10 dollars a gallon for standard 1634 aviation fuel. That's not the aviation fuel used in 2007, because, at least at first, people in the 1632 universe won't be using the sort of aviation engines used in 2007. What they will be using is converted automobile engines, most of which will be heavier than a modern aviation engine, and less robust. Don't misunderstand, these engines will be better than anything the Wright brothers or Sikorsky had, even if they have steel rather than aluminum blocks. They just won't be up to modern aviation standards.
A pretty good gas mileage for a year 2000 automobile engine is around twenty-five miles to the gallon at a highway speed of fifty-five miles an hour or a bit over two gallons an hour. I assume you will lose about half that in a rigged-out aviation engine that uses about four gallons an hour. Four such engines on the Monster gives a fuel consumption of sixteen gallons per hour. Absent headwinds or tailwinds, the Monster can reasonably be expected to travel about sixty-eight miles per hour. (Bill Wathen, the aviation engineer and aircraft designer that I checked this stuff with says sixty-eight miles an hour is too slow. It will probably go faster than that.) That figure gives us four and a quarter miles per gallon for the Jupiter. On the Jupiter, that means not quite a quarter of a gallon, .23529gal, of fuel per ton mile. Or $2.35 in fuel cost per ton mile. So $4.33 aircraft cost plus $2.35 gives us $6.68 per ton mile. Please note that the Gustav single engine plane has only one engine but has a cargo capacity that is probably less than five hundred pounds. It carries an ordnance load of three hundred pounds, so while it's cheaper to build and operate, it's more expensive when measured in ton miles.
Maintenance ...
That ends the preview. Probably in the middle of a sentence. Sorry.
That ends the preview. Probably in the middle of a sentence. Sorry.