When I was a young kiddo, up through high school, I had two passions: biology and airplanes. You can guess which one won out, but I still sometimes dream of flying. In those days, I’d bicycle out to one of the local airports — Boeing towns had no shortage of them — and just hang out at the chain link fence by the end of the runway, or bike around the hangars. It was a treat to take a long bike trip to the Museum of Flight, which at the time was a big hangar where people were reconstructing a biplane, but has since expanded into a magnificent complex with all kinds of planes.
I am suddenly reminiscing about this because YouTube randomly served up a video about one of my favorite old-timey airplanes, the P-26 Peashooter.
That great big radial engine, that lovely post-war color scheme, and it’s wearing pants! Before retractable landing gear became a must-have for any high performance plane, they were outfitted with aerodynamic coverings, which I find irresistibly charming. Planes from the 1930s hit a sweet spot for me, so this random video in which nothing really happens was something I had to watch. It’s an odd trigger that reminds me of being 15 years old again.
So why did I give up my fascination with planes? One factor was that I only learned in high school that I was extremely near-sighted, and needed glasses — that felt like discovering that I was broken, and nature was telling me that certain pathways were closed to me. I was also getting deeper and deeper into that scholarly stuff, reading constantly, which probably contributed to my optical failures. I still sometimes think it would be awesome to take flying lessons, except a) no time, b) no money, and c) age has taught me that there are many things that look easy, but actually require a great deal of skill and discipline to do well. Flying is one of those things that is unforgiving of dilettantes.
But still, those aircraft from the Amelia Earhart era give me a little tingle.
Oh, and Gee Bees are an almost pornographic hyperstimulus.
It sounds like you might have some fun with a good flight simulator.
I can relate to your disappointment when you found out that you needed glasses and nature through a spanner in your plans. I kept it a secret for over a year that my eyes got so bad / near-sighted that I couldn’t read what was writen on the blackboard anymore because I know that with glasses I could not become an astronaut. That denial in this case would not help me achieve my goal was somehow lost on me at the time – I was 8. :-)
Ended up with glasses and in biology as well btw.
I was a junior in high school before I got an eye exam. I had no idea what was going on on the blackboard until then.
In compensation, the first day I got glasses was glorious. You can see individual leaves on trees? I had no idea.
I have actually flown a Gee Bee — in a sim. Granted it was only a sim, but pshaw! what a squirrelly, difficult aircraft to control, even with a complete bells-and-whistles yoke. Neato looking little plane though.
I think the landing gear arrangement is called a spatted or ‘trousered’ landing gear.
Later non-retractable landing gear only have streamlined cowlings around the wheels, the suspension does not anymore require the kind of thick ‘legs’ we see in a brief period in the 1930s.
If you read Tintin albums in your childhood you might have seen the French competitior to DC-3 flying in the background with this kind of landing gear.
The 1930s was an exciting era of very rapid aircraft development. For long range travel, flying boats were generally used. The heavy fuel load coupled with the still feeble engines meant a very long take off run and land airfields were not long enough.
If you look at Sikorsky’s flying boats, there is a huge technological leap between his first one and the sleek airliner he produced just a few years later.
At the time there was a lot of experimentation. Some ocean liners had a catapult for air mail planes to be launched when the ship was halfway across the Atlantic- the aircraft were still not capable of regular transatlantic flight all the way.
PZ -Maybe try flying a sail plane? Or an ultralight? They are dependent on good weather but I assume you are content with recreational flying.
Some designs have an in-built parachute to land the whole aircraft in case of catastrophic failure.
That plane looks American to me. In those days planes had personalities and you could sort of tell which country they came from just by looks, a bit like cars.
Progress in the ’30s was crazy fast. There is an interesting book the secret horsepower race by Calum Douglas about piston engine development in the 30s and during the war.
One could argue that the P-26 was outdated a couple of years after entering service.
Both the Me-109 and the Hurricane had their first flight three years after the peashooter.
I bet the ground crews just loved the inertia starter on the Peashooter, although they were quite common at the time. I think even the earlier marks of the Me-109 and FW-190 used them.
It’s never too late. I learned to fly gliders in the late 1990’s at age 55 with 20/400 far vision. I stopped flying after 9/11 at my late wife’s request.
The Pea Shooter is a fine looking airplane, many from that time are, but for real beauty see the Bugatti airplane.
I got my first glasses in 3rd grade, was also amazed how much more stuff I could see. It wasn’t until graduating Navy nuclear power school I learned my vision kept me out of submarines.
I temporarily stopped flying lessons in about 1988, could start again any time, but not sure I would want to get in an airplane that I was going to be the pilot.
profpedant @2
I can barely afford my Xbox Series X, but it does give me access to a decent enough flight simulator. A high-end PC with a great AR headset, a fully hydraulic seat, and with replica flight controls and yoke would be a great thing to try if I could afford it.
Ah PZ, Zebra Fish and Spiders are a lot less likely to kill you than aeroplanes.
The Bugatti was never finished and never flew — a replica was built and I think crashed & killed its pilot within minutes of takeoff. Really, really pretty but not at all practical.
@6 It’s not just the suspension. If you look under the wings, you can see three big ol’ cables running from midwing to the landing gear: they’re using that sturdy column to help spread the wing loading. You can’t do that with retractable gear, obviously, so the retractables don’t need to be sturdy in three directions, just two.
This is related to the reason biplanes lasted so much longer in military than civilian service: if you’ve got two wings, you can, with cables and a few struts, get something approximating the structural properties of a box, which are of course much much better than the properties of a plank. So biplanes could handle aerobatic loads that would snap the monowings of the day right in half, and the engines of the time didn’t really get fast enough to make the increased drag impossible until the (very) late 30s. Hence why there were perfectly respectable (albeit generally not brand new) combat biplanes in the second world war, and a downright startling number of biplane aces.
PZ@15
The Bugatti 100P replica crashed during its third flight in 2016, killing the pilot and destroying the plane.
From an independent report written by the team that built the replica, problems with the drivetrain (probably slipping of a clutch built-in to the unit construction motorcycle engines used) led to a loss of power and airspeed which caused a stall. It was already known (and CFD confirmed) that the 100P design has unsafe stall characteristics leading to loss of aileron control.
But the root cause of the accident was the powertrain and insufficient funding to do proper full-power testing on the ground. Apparently, the pilot was well aware of the risk and this third flight was supposed to be the end of the program.
Interestingly, the original Bugatti powertrain was ground tested at full power. But those engines were financially unobtainable.
True story – I also really wanted to fly in an old school open cockpit airplane. And I did! Not as a pilot though. X-D
Many years ago – I guess I was about 19 – on a holiday to Queensland’s Gold Coast there was a company offering joy flights in a Tiger Moth. You could just have a genteel scenic flight, or you could go full aerobatics. Being 19 and therefore considering myself invincible, as you do, of course I paid for the full aerobatics.
And it was awesome! You sit in the front, the pilots in the back, in this tiny open cockpit aircraft, wind in your hair, performing loops and barrel rolls and deliberate stalls where you just pull up at the last minute and so on; and all of this is over the Pacific Ocean off the sunny beaches of the Gold Coast. It was fantastic. Definitely one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.
Decades later, I actually moved to the Gold Coast and I was pleased to see out of my window in the distance, that little Tiger Moth still doing aerobatics over the ocean, and I’d be jealous of whatever tourist was having the time of their lives.
Then one day:
https://www.goldcoastbulletin.com.au/news/gold-coast/pilots-role-in-fatal-tiger-moth-crash-on-the-gold-coast-in-2012/news-story/5cd11acd78c33ba4e758b7c52cf9b17c
That can only be the same plane I’d flown in decades before – I’ve never seen a biplane out my window since. Still not the end of the story:
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/gold-coast-plane-crash-one-dead-in-tiger-moth-crash-20151228-glvnc3.html
The same company had another accident at another location – this time the pilot survived, but another dead passenger.
As you may gather, that particular form of recreation is no longer available on the Gold Coast. The company folded (they had no choice, they were out of planes!) but you can still see their last reviews from unhappy customers who booked flights and never got a refund:
https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Attraction_Review-g2464576-d2462107-Reviews-Tiger_Moth_Joy_Rides-Pimpama_Gold_Coast_Queensland.html
So I guess the moral of my story is – Yes, if you get a chance to fly in an aircraft from the Amelia Earhart era it will be an unforgettable experience. Just, y’know… remember what happened to Amelia Earhart.
Did you ever hear the story of “The Long Way Round”? The day after Pearl Harbor, the crew of a Boeing 314 flying boat was in New Zealand when they opened the special orders they were issued in case war broke out. “You plane is now a vital war asset and must be returned to the United States immediately”. Well they were on the opposite side of the whole world. Flying across the Pacific was not an option.
So the decision was made to go the other way around. They took their flying boat up Indonesia across India and Africa. Remember this is a flying boat, it has no wheels. It took weeks and I’m leaving a lot out, but they eventually flew into New York exhausted but home. I honestly can’t believe it hasn’t been turned into a movie yet. Those 314 Clippers were damn pretty airplanes.
@18. Silentbob : Which was? ;-)
My 1st flight was in a Travel Air biplane built in the last years of the 1920s.
I was a huge airplane nerd as a kid so my parents took me to the movie Nothing By Chance, a documentary about a flying circus organized by Richard Back, he of Jonathan Livingston Seagull fame. It was a promotional film for the remnants of the Circus and it turned out that one of the planes and pilots featured would be doing flights a few weeks later out of the Olympia WA airport. This would have been sometime in the mid 1970s. Mom and Dad bought me a ticket and I flew unaccompanied. It remains the best present I ever received.
The flight was loud and cold and windy and oily as air cooled radial engines from that time period threw off a fair amount of the greasy stuff. But above all is was absolutely thrilling for that 12 year old boy. I would not be surprised if he was levitating from pure joy as he disembarked and walked across the tarmac and back to his parents.
I am an optometrist. PZ, your myopia was not the result of any behavior on your part. Nearsightedness is like eye color: determined before you were born. If anything, myopia caused you to like reading books, not the other way around.