Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 78: Supersonic Transport

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

remember the future Victoria's Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikurubaeahina  Victoria at TheDrive: https://www.thedrive.com/author/victoria-scott TICKETS FOR THE LIVESHOW: https://www.caveat.nyc/event/well-theres-your-problem-9-3-2021 Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

So so how do you how do y'all start this do you just like blast into the yeah, we just go Should have all of the drops up Like several million drops for the love of God queue up the Soviet anthem because I'm gonna need it Oh, I have it. I that I I said to myself. What's what's the fourth drop that I will need for this episode and yes Thank you. All right. Welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters With slides I'm Justin Razzniak on the first news talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go I am Alice Coldwell Kelly. I am the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yeah, Liam

Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him and I'm not eating this time doing whatever because Little unbeknown what's to apparently a lot of our listeners. I do work a nine to five and then I have to Jam in Shoving food into my gullet before we embark upon our odyssey of knowledge Yeah, you get you get home from the dick-sucking factory where you work. I don't you have to like inhale Friends of the show, I'm a glory hole inspector

Glory hole safety administration. I'm an on-site glory hole inspector You got to put those QC stickers on each glory hole. Yeah, it's a it's a real pain in the ass To make sure the edges are smooth or beveled, you know before we introduce our guest. I have an announcement Hi, we're doing a live show. It's still now. However If you wanted to attend the live show in New York City, you cannot you can't you can't buy a live stream ticket And if you're a patron Sign up for our patreon You will get a link to a recording of the show

Yes, at some point also I should say I will not be at the live show because it is illegal for me to travel into the United States of America As I am not a US citizen, but I will be there in the form of a giant projection on a wall Yes, we will have merch. We will have merch. We will have flat Alice. We will have Then maybe we go to a bar after yeah, I don't know bring the projection of me to the bar So We have a guest we have a guest. Yes, I just wanted to get the now y'all. I'm just gonna keep talking out of Okay, hello guest. Hi

My name is Victoria Scott and my pronouns are she and her and I guess I should talk more about what else I do I'm mostly an automotive journalist I'm traveling across the United States in a little old Japanese van and I write about that on the drive and I do electric car stories for Jalopnik And I do automotive reviews for motor one and Hemmings and a bunch of other sites But I am not here to talk about that today. What are you here to talk about today? I am here to talk about the long pointy boys that go very fast. We are going to talk today about Supersonic transports the droop snoots

We will be discussing the droop snoots I'll be talking about my large son the tuple of to you one four four Pointy and fast. Hey, that's what they tell me about my penis I mean, hi everybody, my name is Liam Anderson my pronouns are you you already introduced yourself you don't All right before we talk about The fast pointy airplanes, we're gonna talk about the goddamn news Boston strong Boston fucking strong

You gotta you gotta drop you gotta go full David Ortiz for this one. Mm-hmm. Yes a green line Charlie in Boston has rear-ended another green line trolley in Boston injured 25 people apparently not seriously and a nation horrified Traumatized awaits the aphelic Damon movie that is going to make us feel better about Really this was Jesus Christ Alice I would have gone down that way I'll tell you that much

This happened because Ben Affleck agreed to stop saying the F slur. No, it was Matt Damon. God damn it Excuse me. I mixed up my Bostonians. Yes, you didn't Ben boy a slur Oh, wow, am I starting discourse three minutes into my first episode my only episode. I'm the guest All right, well people can yell at me on Twitter It's weird that you could just crash a trolley into another trolley like that This seems like you'd have adequate stopping distance. I guess not No, and just to like rear-end a trolley like this is like great news everyone. Thank you. I put a lot of effort into this

listen, I mean There's what I have to work with here is a fucking NBC Boston article Entitled MBTA green line crash and what we know about the investigation to which the answer is fuck all Like well, if you have those cute little NTSB jackets Alice, you could go on see I would love Because you're not allowed in America. No the NTSB the NTSB is investigating The MBTA is investigating Suffolk County District Attorney's Office is investigating and Seems like a bit of it

Yeah, and one of four operators on board is now on paid vacation. Oh Did he shoot an unarmed black child? Don't like the laughter Clip that the counselors listen, listen, actually no, I have one more thing which is From MBTA general manager Steve Pofdeck his line on this is incredible truly the only conclusion we can draw is Obviously at some point the trains became too close together That's a situation that should not happen Don't shave my trains

It's one of those Zeno's paradox Yes, how could this collision occur if the trolleys have to cover half the distance between them And then half the distance between them Half the distance between them. I would say I would say that collision is at a point where you are too close together Yes in this context was a Boston's unfortunate solution to the trolley problem The fuck together However, I have another we're gonna kill everyone on both tracks Someone jumped off the vessel God God

They're gonna close it. They're gonna close it Yeah, Alice laid the heaven this into existence on the last episode Alice congratulations. You killed someone Yeah, I did and I I mean look expressing enough remorse. I've noticed This should not have happened the person became the person on the ground became too close together No, I Jesus Christ I feel like this this shit with a vessel and like whatever else this is like, I don't know public art If you make it this

Antiseptic if you make it this corporate eventually real life is gonna intrude on it in you know Some form or another and in this case, it's one of the many people Immiserated by the system that produced the vessel climbing to the top of the vessel and then rapidly descending to meet the ground Yes, and I mean I feel like this is perhaps more honest an expression of the you know The public part of the public art then the actual vessel itself is and I feel like at some point We're just gonna get more honest about the whole death drive thing and we'll spend our buildings like percent for art on a Slip and slide that culminates in a bunch of spares and we can just watch people hurl themselves down it Do I call this one the palisade?

Put it in the palisade just for a yuck No, it has a large palisade at the bottom if I tell you it'll give you a pretty nasty splinter Congratulations, you have sepsis. Yeah Our new public art measure is the something awful zipline Yeah, so I guess the proposed solutions for this are I think they're just gonna close it because they don't Which would be the obvious thing to do They might close it. I don't know if they'll demolish it, which they probably should they already tried putting up barriers But it doesn't work because it's a big series of elevated platforms. It's very difficult not to

Like be able to jump off of it. Well, if you completely enclose it, it would be much harder to jump off Hmm But then also it wouldn't be it wouldn't be an art then anymore. You've just made a building which cannot be art The other thing they tried to do before was they were gonna charge ten bucks to get into The vessel because no one who wants to kill themselves is about to spend that much money I was about to say that's a chunk of money. I would go to another another suicide venue Yeah, there is genuinely something to this which is like this sort of like study of Suicides by by jumping or throwing yourself off of like tall buildings. It is a highly impulsive thing

Yes studies. Yes having been suicidal. I mean Yeah, we're just gonna kick this shit right off You know a lot of it the only reason, you know, I I ever attempted and not the only reason that sort of not being honest with myself, but a lot of it is like The means to do so were relatively available. There are numerous studies that like it was there Like the thing and I think that was was done in Montreal, but I could be wrong. Well, they put suicide screens like fences on one of two bridges And the number of suicides dropped dramatically because even though like

Theoretically if you went to that one bridge found it screened off and went well I still want to kill myself and I still want to kill myself by jumping off a bridge I can walk ten minutes to the other bridge and do it there people just kind of didn't once that like With British housewives literally sticking their heads in the oven. Yeah, once we start once we stopped having gas ovens People stopped gassing themselves. It's it sounds it sounds stupid, but like if you don't have that sort of impulsive thing there then Which is part of the reason why the vessel is a very bad public art is that it's it's only real sort of aesthetic utility is Suicide opportunity don't know why they built that in the middle of like the most dystopian place in the u.s.

And then we're surprised Hmm like that would just be the first thing I'd think of if I was designing that maybe whoever the artist is sociopath, but like You're building a giant series of balconies in the middle of a city where everybody is famously miserable What do you think is going to happen and the views from each of those balconies are going to depress everyone on them also I gotta say the views from this thing are not very good No, they're not it really is it is just not a very not not a very well positioned structure If you want like a nice scenic view because it's all surrounded by just mirrors

That makes it even worse Yeah All you can see is your own depression Don't need to look at her every day, buddy giant giant blocks of capital reflecting you alright We're so we're so we're so happy this evening to do this episode that we I would like it I would like it noted that I chose the plane for the slide Oh

I16 it's adorable. It's my favorite plane in War Thunder that I I do I do dogfights with one of my girlfriends and we we both take I 16 and it's very adorable So and it look at how cute it is you can't like even though it's got guns on it You can't be mad at it. It's it's it's shaped like a friend as they say yes a friend We have to ask a question to start What what are planes? They are the latest

The latest device for combating fascism and advancing proletarian revolution over the skies of Spain Way to defy God. Yes, so true It's sort of like a big metal bird, right? Also true. Yes. Yeah, sure. All right. Well, but what's a bird? It doesn't have to be a it doesn't have to be a metal bird. You have a canvas bird. What's a bird? Somebody answer my goddamn question. What are birds? We just don't know Yes, they're the last form of collective transport that Americans begrudgingly tolerate For the experience You just do not begrudgingly tolerate that. No, I avoid going on airplanes whenever possible

The thing is Americans Americans are willing to tolerate them because As a collective form of travel you can only experience them if you are like sort of like Brutalized by cops for a while Yes, if you if you like if we I don't know say quintupled Amtrak police's budget People might like Americans might come back around on trains As a as a united passenger. I I I understand that completely. Yes If you had to be searched to get on a train, I think more people would do it. Yeah You gotta beef up the security theater and suddenly Amtrak's rolling in dough making more expensive too

Yeah, I took an Amtrak recently and I was amazed by the fact that I didn't have to suffer through any indignities To get on board because I had never taken I hadn't taken an Amtrak since I transitioned And like air travel after transition is just living hell And Amtrak was just like, hey, do you have a train ticket? Would you like to get on the train that you paid to get on and I was just like, this is incredible Um, it's only served like three cities. I recently tried to take an Amtrak from sf to la You know two very small, you know podunk towns. You might not have heard of them But there's no direct rail route between them understandably. So

East coast superiority Yeah, there's no way I've I've been both places in the past six months. No way Americans suffering both of themselves and of others Yeah, that's what makes this country so great. Yeah, and as such Want demand a system of transport that can like extract that price a country built on the principles of s and m Um, genuinely kind of believe this mostly am Um, okay, so but there's some problems with planes As transportation. Yes, I like crash

with a yeah, well, they've chosen you've chosen to illustrate this with a photo of The opposite of problems A beautiful lockheed super constellation and you use this to illustrate problems We're gonna we're gonna talk about the problems momentarily What one of the problems with planes is You know, they go pretty fast, but for the distances involved they go pretty slow, right? You know your transatlantic flight that takes like eight hours, right? If you're going across the pacific from the united states, that might be 15 hours or more

This is even worse than the 40s and 50s. You had propeller planes like this lockheed super constellation And they were slower than modern planes because you know propellers, right? Yeah, and had to refuel more often which meant you had to stop at like shannon airport the air heart Yeah, the super constellation did not kill amelia air I'm just I'm just I'm just asking Listen to me. Listen to me. Okay. No, just just go the super constellation didn't kill amelia air heart baby, bro The deep state killed amelia air heart the debate we bro

What was that show with the evil car or the the movie pristine pristine cars? Is the super constellation One of the problems with planes taking a long time to go places, you know, it's annoying for passengers because flying sucks Everyone wants to get the flight over quickly, right? Yeah, that's like so much you can like try and drink through it at some point you wake up again Yes, speak for yourself It's also bad for airline profit margins You know, if you're if you're um, if you're an airline you only get the money when passengers buy the tickets and each plane

Each plane can handle a limited number of passengers each day Determined by the capacity of the plane, of course, you know the big planes being it bring in the big bucks Um, but it's also determined by how many flights you can get out of the plane in a given time frame, right? um You know, so with things like airport turnaround Periodic maintenance on and so forth on an eight hour flight. You might get two flights per aircraft per day Um on a longer flight you probably get one flight per day, right? Uh, but if you have a shorter duration flight, you know, you can use the aircraft multiple times a day

You can get more fannies in the seats, right? And therefore you as the airline are making more money Yeah, we've talked about uh, like long haul versus like short hop airliners before and how we inadvertently helped destroy the planet because now you can fly from Paris to Amsterdam instead of getting a train yes Yeah, and today we have low cost airlines that You know do stuff like they do every little trick in the book to reduce turnaround time In increased revenue per plane

Right. Um, I mean in the 50s that sort of stuff was unfathomable Especially when flying was still a luxury, right? Yeah, people dressed up in like uh dinner suits and cocktail dresses to go flying. You can't like weirdo reaction I was never shut the fuck up about it Okay, yeah I want to I want to own that for me though I I would love to get onto an airplane wearing my finest evening wear I know you can't do more because I know I am constantly trust me

But like airline passengers in the 50s were like people who mattered and therefore You can't sort of do to them the stuff that Ryanair or easy jet does to you today where you sort of like, uh, physically like cram you into seats, uh, and like make you pay to like, uh, You know take a shit or whatever They make you pay on spirit airlines for water and I know this because I got dehydrated and almost thought my head was going to Explode from a decompression headache. We were landing in Chicago. It was great The planes are very yellow though, which kind of made up for the experience because they look really cool I loved I love to fly and to ask politely could I get a like a small

Pillow or something and to be told? Yeah, you have to buy this pillow for $500,000 Yeah You're getting it back if if you get it back at the end of the flight I don't that's not a purchase. That's more really more of a rental agreement that we're coming to here Starship is what that is. Yeah. If I'm if I'm paying a lot of money for this pillow I'm taking this pillow. There's fucking jet blue branded pillow with me. Yes Made of made of just like paper For some reason yeah, yeah

All right flying is unpleasant and it's not good Flying is unpleasant now one one solution to increase The amount of money you get out of one aircraft is to make it go faster, right? Yeah So if if if your plane goes faster That means you get more flights out of it per day on a given route There's like there's two buttons you can push here Both of which are tremendously Alice. They're both kind of make it more rigid. You either make it bigger Which leads you down the route of like the 747 or like before that flying boats and shit or make it faster

Yes The early jet airliners were were fortunate in that they could be bigger and faster, right? Mm-hmm, you know and they they also got cheaper to operate, right? So like in the 1950s airline ship shifted to jet aircraft Incredibly quickly just because of how much cheaper they were to operate even though on maybe a Per mile basis. They were more expensive You were getting so much more use out of them that it made sense to switch over, right? And this period provides us with an endless bounty of future

Well, there's your problem episode because they crashed a lot of planes Yes due to the combination of like designing these in a hurry And like pilots and flight crews who had only ever flown propeller planes before for their careers Versus all the way through to like cost-casting measures And you know a lot of these things crashed or like got hijacked because you could still do that Yeah, yeah back when we had freedom and you could hijack planes easily And just as an aside, I will actually contribute something useful for the episode for once. Um, you know jet engines were really only

Necking yourself No, I refuse. That's that's literally my entire shtick The jet engines in for for flight really only became Feasible in the late in the mid to late world war two period with the me 262 Which was the Messerschmitt that used jet engines and it was a pile of sht Like we're talking about we the the germans through every resource they had left at this plane And they they lost most of them to operational failures despite the fact that they were like 80 miles an hour faster in air than 51

um, they were Like it was very much an unsolved science in the mid 40s. It you know, the supersonic transport murdered a bunch of american test pilots in the 50s and like just jet engines in general get to that Oh, I know, but i'm just saying like super like jet engines themselves were like It's like tesla now Where they just keep erupting in flames and everybody's like, why are you doing this? And it's because teslas are kind of in the same place like jet engines were in the 60s except instead of one tesla exploding And killing whoever was driving it without paying attention

Uh in airplane crashes, and then it kills like 200 people yes Also, I cannot stress enough. This is an improvement Well, there isn't your problem and it's a fatality log, but it's only like 15 people instead of 30 Yeah No, but this is like a renaissance for the airline industry Like this is this is incredible for them despite the fact that they kill a lot of people because they They don't kill a lot more and they make a lot of money

Yeah, jet engines kill a lot of people, but they don't kill as many people as turboprops, so Who can say whether they do help a lot of people get to work on time? So it truly is impossible to say whether they're good or not Excuse me not turboprops piston props turboprops aren't till later um So once we have jet aircraft that basically requires every airline to shift shift over to jet aircraft Pretty rapidly because they just fundamentally change the economics of airlines. Right? So this is the first time airlines got more profitable by speeding up

And some of them think we can do that again Right. Oh, you poor poor summer children Yeah Pour one out for airline dreams. Yeah so The natural evolution of this is to make planes that go even more faster or right So, um, but you have an issue which is the speed of sound So, you know, you switch from prop planes to jet engines. That's easy

You just have a bigger engine that makes the plane go more faster or but a supersonic airplane requires a whole new design philosophy and I'm I'm not I'm a civil engineer Not a mechanical one. So I don't know much about aerodynamics Let alone supersonic I put ailerons on the building Once you go fast enough

Shit gets really weird Because you're trying to force something through air that and I can hear Every sort of aerodynamic engineer in the audience Audibly grown at this point The air has to get out of the way faster. Yes. Yes. I'm with drag and resistance. The air is essentially thicker Yes. Yes. Well, I'm a writer. So you definitely didn't have me on for this It's about we're talking about compressibility, right, which is why we have Why we have to slide up air is a compressible fluid, right? Yes. Um now

When you're in subsonic flight, you're not really compressing the fluid. It's getting out of the way But when you're in supersonic flight, you are actually compressing the fluid and you're doing it in such a way that um You know, yeah, the the air can't really move out of the way quickly enough for the plane So, you know, it compresses it heats up. It does all this other crap, right? Um, it starts fucking with your control surfaces. So sometimes it just pitches a chuck. Yeah, you're guy straight into the fucking desert Yes But the other thing it does is it radically increases the amount of drag on the aircraft and then makes it harder to accelerate further, right? Um, there's there's a whole lot of uh, there's a lot of complicated aerodynamic stuff in here

That I again don't understand and then there's Something fun called the witcom area law, which we'll talk about a bit later But which is particularly important for uh transonic um Hi There's also something called the sonic boom which we'll talk about in a lot of detail later Um, but you know, basically there's a conical

A conical shock wave comes off of the front of the plane Right and um that shock wave from the compression of air Uh, doesn't dissipate very quickly. Um um But first I have to talk about chuck jagers Uh, because this is we are now into the late 40s and the 50s Uh, which means You are employing a bunch of former nazis to explain how to make plane go fast

Uh, and you're doing this essentially only for military reasons Yeah, and you want you want to make the plane go much now only for military utility. Um, first for like Yeah, because you've seen you've seen the like me 262 and you want to do better Uh, when are we doing an f104 episode? Bar to pass Yes Yes, you you kill a bunch of like west germans with these you get a lot of test pilots with these

Uh, and then once you have the the fighters people start thinking. Okay. What else can we do? Maybe we can do a supersonic bomber aircraft, uh, which is what this is. This is a b58 hustler um, and the idea is that this like Flies into soviet airspace nukes, you know, irkutsk or mermansk or whatever And then you know possibly flies back home again afterwards Before anyone knows anything about it. They've never really cared about that No, I don't think that they really worried about anybody getting back

It was just fast enough that it could penetrate airspace and then drop bombs and then get shot down And they were like well pilots are an expendable resource because it was post war two and they didn't care Yes, and and like air launched nuclear weapons, uh in the us at least despite the long long persistence of the b52 and then the adoption of the b1 lancer like still they were always kind of like a poor relation and like, uh, You know you ended up ended up going more into like rocket tree and icbms and nuclear submarines In the soviet union not so soviet supersonic bomber design persisted a lot longer. That's going to be important later Um, but you can see on this b58

Uh, some of the sort of like design features that we'd come to associate with supersonic aircraft You have a delta wing and you know shaped like a triangle Um, the wing's very thin. It's very angular looks very sleek Um, this is not how you would design a plane if you were designing a plane with the knowledge of like The 1930s or 1940s. It doesn't make sense in that context Yes, this is very very bad at subsonic speeds all of the aerodynamics here until you break that sound barrier This is all working against you Yeah, and the other thing too is because of the tailless design that all delta wings have they don't have

maneuverability below Sonic uh greater than the speed of sound they are they fly like shit As you said, but just like those control surfaces are not controllable until you are going Whatever 800 miles an hour. Yeah, whereas if you have like a Standard if you like set up of control surfaces those then become sort of uncontrollable At like at supersonic speed and then you know, you end up with a lot of like oscillation and generation which is like Severe enough to the point that you get test pilots getting like knocked unconscious against their own canopy um

Which is obviously not ideal. Just don't do that Be built simply simply do not build these Incredibly striking often very beautiful big fan of the like the v bombers like the avro volcan It's very beautiful designs that could quite plausibly have ended all life on earth Uh, but did not in our museum piece We love a planet does that So another thing you have is uh, you have a lot of engines per uh aircraft You have very big engines. They consume a lot of fuel in order to create a lot of thrust

Right and uh, you know, they consume a whole lot of fuel at subsonic speeds for the speed And then at supersonic speeds they continue to consume a whole lot of fuel Um Yeah, it's not like a rocket where once you're like the further up you get the less fuel you need it actually gets worse It actually gets worse. Yeah, the economic justification for a supersonic transport is that These were going to go places, but really fast Offset their thirst for fuel by being able to make these long

High-revenue flights multiple times per day Meaning the airlines are going to need fewer aircraft and fewer crews to transport more people Right, you know, you can have a supersonic transport. It'll make Two three maybe four round trip transcontinental flights a day where all a 707 is doing one at best right Yeah, and people people are more likely to use them you think because they they have This promise of spending less time on the plane, which everyone hates And and and even some people thought it would make the tickets cheaper

Yeah Poor sweet babies cute So, you know despite a lot of benefits to the airlines which you know seemed obvious in the in the 50s No one manufacturer wanted to take on the task of designing a supersonic transport on its own So, you know, there was heavy government involvement in subsidizing sst developments, right? Several countries wound up building or attempting to build an sst Only france and britain, of course were successful But the story has three

Let me just let me just trace that Is Excuse me. I'm going to literally drive to philadelphia and beat the shit out of you if you don't stop I will do it my van is back this week and I will do it What you want have van will do it admittedly The tuple of did carry revenue passengers You know, there's sort of three parallel stories going on in sst development

Which were in the uss of ussr in the usa and in britain and france, right? But as we start with britain and france hope and charity and the greatest of these is the anglo-french alliance Yes, this was sort of a hallmark of something which very nearly came to pass in In international relations, which was britain and france going, okay, well, we're on the way out if we don't do something Can we weld ourselves into one single like great power? And like be sort of the new axis of europe This did not happen, but there were very serious proposals for Seriously just becoming one country at one point. What's the english word for enchilus?

All right, so so one of these planes, of course became the concord right and this sort of starts in britain in the 1950s Had an aerospace industry my god By 1956 it was starting to look practical enough for the government to start funding an sst Under the under the direction of what was called the ministry of supply Yeah, one of these like weird wartime hangovers the ministry of supply funded a lot of weird shit in a lot of different directions Um, and it's a fascinating example of how sort of like post-war laborism was like, okay We can just turn this sort of wartime emergency measure thing into socialism. We hope yes

You know, I mean, it's a good thing when people read state and revolution. That's all i'm gonna say They read their theory and we got a plane out of it. That's right so Wait, does that does that mean that the concord has better leninist credentials than the tuple left us? Yes, excuse me Welcome to welcome to three communists Well one anarchist Leans in and goes, you know what's fucked up about this is states. It's true. It is true I

See, I guess I would have had to support the whatever English re-conquering of the The fronds or french re-conquering of england Uh, the norman reconquista if you will just because that's one less state Yeah, I'm I'm an anarchist who opposes Scottish independence because i'm trying to keep the number of states going down rather than up Listen, my political beliefs in their entirety is that government bad bureaucracy good

Yeah, the people will will organize ourselves into small communes of dmv's Yes, that but not ironically Yeah um, all right, so There was uh, there were there was a proposal to fund development of um Two planes there was going to be this small plane for sort of regional flights that would go mach 1.2

Mach is the local speed of sound, right? Um, and there'd be a larger plane that did mach 2 for trant Atlantic flights The task of developing this aircraft was given to bristol aero craft company, right? Yeah, they had made bombers during the war like the bristol bow fighter Yes sick And they came up with something called the bristol 223 No, bristol is interesting because like like all post war aviation at this point, uh, like you have a bunch of companies whose only thing has been making warplanes

Suddenly try and like find their niche knowing that like the inevitable decline in aircraft demand is just going to kill most of them Like the obvious one that we've talked about before is de Havilland, uh, which went heavily into the comet But even just stuff like short short sandal and making flying boats and still trying to make those last And bristol's bet was supersonic aircraft Yeah, and um What happened was there was a similar government funded effort in france By a company called suede aviation

Um, and they were making these super caravell right Um, both of these were supposed to compete with the supersonic transports that they both assumed the americans were developing Once again making the mistake of believing you to be a functional country. Yes, it's fine So well, don't ask us about our eviction moratorium well Well, bristol bristol aeroplanes was searching for a partner to help develop their plane They tried they tried talking to the americans. The americans weren't interested

Um, but they found out that only uh, suede aviation Uh Really seemed interested in doing a partnership, right? So two teams decided, you know, it'd be a good idea to combine our efforts They also found out the planes were remarkably similar It only came out later that that was because some of the technical documents had been leaked Uh a while back Industrial espionage for fun and profit. Yes, whatever the fuck this is gonna be This this required some approval from uh, both governments the uk government

The parliament in particular was extremely suspicious Of the low cost estimates in it. Yeah But also the low cost estimates and the economic viability of this This this plane, right? Which looks like a paper plane by the way, you see the design behind a big transparent charles de golder And it looks like you have folded up a sheet of paper Oh, yeah, I mean there was uh, there's a big, um And there's a big design process here, which I never I don't fully understand

They came up with a special delta wing. They called uh, og curve wing Mm-hmm. They came up with the droop snoot eventually wasn't on the first model, but uh the um The nose of the aircraft tilts and descends Yeah, they did a whole bunch of stuff on this one, right A lot of this stuff appeared fairly early on. Um now the uk parliament was suspicious But they also really wanted into the just new thing called the european common market, right? How times change? Yes

So The a great anglo-french project seemed like a politically expedient way to get in right So the business partnership went ahead. It was organized as a national treaty rather than a business partnership um And the british insisted on really steep penalties if either party decided to uh to drop out, right? Oh, yeah, the british the british press like routinely talked about this in terms of a marriage It wasn't so much a marriage as a suicide pact All marriages is betting someone half your shit. You'll love them forever

So, um, they either finished the project or they both were gonna go broke trying Um, so this treaty went through the great anglo-french project was going ahead But despite the concord, uh, treaty Uh, charles de gall still vetoed britain's entry into the european economic community on the grounds that they were americans Which is true He's also the reason why uh, why schaeff had to move to belgium because he uh kicked nato out of france dead Shall we remove our boys from your cemeteries? Yes, we all know

So this this project got off to a little bit of I mean it got off to a rocky start. It was rocky the whole way That's crazy The short range the short range concord was dropped because they couldn't sell it to anyone The long range version had pretty lethargic sales but enough to justify the project going ahead Hmm. Also my favorite detail about this month's long argument about the spelling the british side Absolutely insisted concord It can't have an e on it. That's a french word. We have to use the english word concord Shut the fuck up. Yeah, de gall kind of got his way on that one too

Uh, it's concord with an e in both languages because of him Big, uh, french chad right here They used to call him the the biggest sparrigus when he was at office at school That's where you say the big chad and I was just gonna lose my mind So, okay, this concord's under development they get orders from certain airlines um And one of the launch customers on june 3rd 1963 was pan am

Right pan american airlines. I ordered six concords. I'm about to go full internet fascist Just like this is what we could have had with pan am delivery to the concord seriously. That is just that is Such a good concept. Good lord Right here is a united. This is a different plane. We're gonna talk about this could have been the plane that did 9 11 Um Jesus christ, alice I'm just saying if we follow that timeline to its logical conclusion My pronouns are she and her

Listen to trash future. That's right. Yes That was actually pretty good. Uh, that's like, yeah, that's that's what I've that's what I've listened to the podcast for That's what I listen to the podcast for I can make two voices. The other one is imitating ross and my dad So pan am was the one of the big launch customers other launch customers were uh continental they ordered three american airlines ordered four twa ordered four Eastern airlines ordered two united ordered six Right all these american airlines off of these airlines. Yeah, exactly, right? It's a real Defector, remember some guys

My grandmother, uh worked for twa as a travel agent That's another thing to job and an airline that no longer exists. Yeah So you say both of those are about as around today So the result of this at american aircraft manufacturers is panic Just oh shit, we're we're gonna get left behind here concord is gonna become the the dominant airplane Right, and if they don't catch up They're american aircraft manufacturers are gonna be left in the dust, right?

Hmm Someone in the usa someone in the usa needed to take the lead and they needed a big fat government contract to do it Yeah, you can't you can't like assume risk yourself Yes The government's problem We have to socialize our potential losses guys And president john f kennedy was happy to um, uh accommodate this Right in the form of the national supersonic transport program, which was announced literally the day after pan and ordered the concords, right?

Nice This is a good reason to believe that the deep states or whoever didn't have jfk killed because pretty clearly like if Business interests wanted shit from john f kennedy. They could get on the phone and get at the next day No, it was charles diggall himself. He's basically hey you idiots. Hey you idiots. Hey you idiots The charles diggall killed it john f kennedy because he was going to threaten the supremacy of the concord I mean there we go. We solved it We can end the episode now. We figured out the this destination. You'll respect the french From the fifth floor by the way

It was actually So the goal of the national supersonic transport program was to create an ssg a national supersonic transport But it had to far exceed the technology of concord, right? And they wanted to render concord obsolete and a curiosity of history Uh, I remember when americans still dreamed like that You think from pentagon wars Yeah, I know I guess that's kind of antithetical to me. I am too excited for the tuple of slide god. Yeah

Oh Keep going. We have the good planes later Yeah, this program wanted proposals from various us aircraft manufacturers Which would be evaluated for further funding to finally create the american sst The good sst the one that had freedom and that would subdue the evils of gay communist europe, right? In my dreams And our our our freedom capitalist government would subsidize 75 of the costs of developing the aircraft that won Yeah, that's capitalism. That's freedom. Yes, and supervising the program was of course none other than lindon baines johnson

Who I would hear no criticism of America's greatest president lbj uh was being advised by robert mack macna mera never mind both shaped like bastards my god Oh, I'm sorry. I I remember you starting the war on pauvered. Oh, that's right I didn't know they had poverty in vietnam No, they do shut up And we brought them freedom And it adds is vietnam prospering today. Yes, it is

So now i'm not touching that No This was also under some kind of joint leadership The thing is liam liam has the brain of like a marine corps guy Who was invalidated out of vietnam with a serious head injury and whose attitude is we were lea We were winning when I left and everyone is too terrified to tell him otherwise Yeah, I probably saw apocalypse that went too many times also one of my favorite podcast bits is uh Is that people think I mean this shit seriously?

And then they're just like why is liam and his big counter revolutionary trash on this podcast? These are jokes. It's a comedy engineering Wait, you of course you of course support the struggle of the people's army of vietnam because vietnamese reunification Decreased the number of states Yes that but also like one thing people don't know is that the state department basically wanted us to support ho chi men Right up until dnb and fume fell he was a huge fan of america Yeah, that that was a real fucking position people in the state department had my dad always likes to point that one out And it wasn't like a crazy position to have just like at the time

Uh in the early 1960s people didn't think abolishing the cia was a crazy position to have and somehow we've just gone fucking backwards Uh, all right. Is that enough serious liam chat? Can I go back to play peggel now? Okay Are you seriously playing peggel while we're fucking recording these? I love playing peggel. I just love peggel Plains we're here to talk about planes. Oh, I heard peggel so I just really like peggel. I just I rediscovered it the other week and it's it's better than getting my ass kicked at warzone The faa director

Who was a man named najib? halabi Right lobby probably a lobby. He um, he wanted You know, he wanted an sst. That was like practical that could be produced. It should still be very technologically advanced But you know, it should be doable, right? Um, meanwhile, robert McNamara Wanted the program to uh, just sort of go away. No, this is what robert McNamara's greatest crime Yeah, this is it Just like just just ignoring the milie mask so we get on the rug

He gets to st. Peter and he's like you killed the supersonic american airplanes Going down Nothing else. He doesn't review any To turn the page This is blank Yeah, it was redacted There were three manufacturers who submitted the serious proposals the american supersonic transport When you when you say that I understand what you mean is proposals that like the faa considered serious

But I do like the idea of an aircraft manufacturer being like, okay, let's do a silly one Let's do a silly one. Yeah lasers for headlights So that was our north american aircraft lockheed and bowing, right? So pictured right here is the north american, uh, nace, uh, nac 60 Um, this is the one that was rejected earliest Hmm. It was Based on the b70 bomber, which was the supersonic replacement for the b52, which was also cancelled

Um, yeah, they're like we're finally going to stop using the b52 in the year of our lord in 1963 Um Checking my watch and I'm still wasting It was the smallest of the three proposals if you have 187 passengers It was the slowest of the pre-repo three proposals if we go mach 2.65 about 1766 knots Had these you know worth noting at this point. Sorry, uh, the the concord only went like 2.1 Yes, which is supposed to be again versus 2.41 2.65

Yeah As the slowest so I mean sure This was probably the most practical one because north american had the most experience building large supersonic aircraft at this point Also, it looks the dopest In including the xb70 which they had already built that was the prototype Falkrey. Yeah, I think it's incredible looking airplane. Oh, yeah Uh Sorry, did you say more b40 uh more b52?

Did you say b52 airframe in use for a hundred years alice? I don't know why they always went with v's but the valkyrie really occupies the same niche for me in american air power is like the vulcan and british ones, uh, which is like it's Beautiful. Yeah, it's a gorgeous plan gorgeous plane. This is probably You know, this manufacturer had the most experience and I think probably put out the most practical design That's why it was rejected early on Lockheed All right

I think the second most practical design got the l2000 It's kind of melted a bit in the front. It's the problem. It looks tight as fuck. It looks really cool. It looks really really cool I I like this What? This is kind of like it's pretty it's pretty they have they have answered the problem for any super sonic airliner Which is how do you see out of the front of it with you don't which I appreciate a lot So you can just pop the sunroof and just enjoy yourself You like hold the flight engineers belt loops and you get them to climb out of the sun

Lockheed was already developing their own sst independently called the cl a2 3 But it was you know develop them to sort of moribund. They weren't doing anything with it They also had some experience building supersonic military aircraft Um and with uh, what's fellow funding they made the they did the planning for the dinosaur Which we talked about previously for instance The x20 the uh the the early early space plane Um with federal funding on the table though They restarted development and significantly increased the size of the plane

Resulting in the l2000 you see a mock-up of it here full-scale mock-up This is a narrow-body plane 170 passengers in a mixed-class configuration as these very very large delta wings Which are supposed to allow for conventional landing and takeoff speeds Which was a problem in the concord and especially the tuple of um It has this droop nose which has extremely cool windows um Yeah, it looks futuristic as shit like even even amongst supersonic planes

Oh, yeah, uh the engines were prad and whitney j 58s Uh the same ones used on the a12 and later the sr 71 blackbird uh But they were going to make them into turbo fans, right nice Yeah, so it'd be more efficient at lower speeds and quieter, right? um And they designed this specifically for a flight profile that minimized sonic booms, right? You weren't actually going to go supersonic until you get 42 000 feet

And then your cruise altitude was 76 500 feet. Jesus imagine the views Yeah, yeah um Your top speed was mac 3 That's about 2000 knots With a range of 4000 nautical miles All right, now you've got me doing the fucking return shit Yeah

Even even even with a fucking window the size of a pencil eraser. I wouldn't be on this plane I'd be I'd be in one like an hour. I'd feel so great. I would be I'd feel horrible, but No, I don't have my eye pressed up to that window like one of the glory holes you inspect at work Believe the windows on this one were six inches square. Um, that's not that bad Actually, my face fits in that. I wouldn't absolutely get on the board that airplane one. I pressed just pressed right up against it Uh, the oldest the oldest, uh, uh joke in the book Why why don't they make the whole plane out of the black box material? I don't know that joke actually is that old if it requires

Planes Gonna be a minimum nine like 1911 right old is the black box That's a great question. Good question. I mean if you meet the whole plane of the black box material They would land intact and then you have a plane full of mush, right? Well, I think that my favorite sarcastic answer is because the highways aren't wide enough for it to drive on No, so this whole plane was going to be made out of the black box material the whole thing was titanium nice How yes, oh my god. I really like the tail livery tail Like it looks like a run wide that looks so fucking sick. Yeah, look at the fucking like stripes down it

I know You know, they add five horsepower. Yeah, that's true. They had they just had add raw fare pin striping the whole model When you have like, I don't know 400,000 horsepower on there that extra five really helps They want to make the whole thing out of a titanium alloy because aluminum couldn't withstand mach three heat Oh so Later refinements this design allowed for higher altitudes for going supersonic More power than 76,500 feet. No, they were going to go supersonic at 45,000 feet as opposed to

At 41,000 feet the original design I believe you could only go supersonic at 41,000 feet if it was a nice day The higher you go supersonic the less supersonic boom you produce at the ground level, right? So ideally you do it as high as possible This was designed with the idea that we'd still be able to fly domestic routes Supersonic which we'll get to why we can't do that momentarily um But you know, I was built sort of with the intention in the beginning that we were going to try and minimize sonic boom with this plane, right?

um But they redesigned it before the mock-up stage with more power better quieter engines more capacity and range And they built this mock-up for f a a approval in 1966, but the f a a had other ideas Which leads us to the Boeing two seven oh seven um All right, this is a sort of a child's conception of an aircraft um They're like we're gonna build the biggest plane

It's gonna be the best plane the fastest plane with all the cool stuff and then really really Wedded to not doing a delta wing. Yeah No, it is a delta wing, but it's yellow. Is it a fucking swing wing? Yes, it has variable I like that it's the spirit airlines supersonic transport Turbo banana You know what this looks like to me and I I know why but like this looks like a land speed record car The black nose and the yellow. It looks fucking sick

So, okay to my knowledge Boeing has not built a supersonic aircraft to this day I maybe wrong about that. Does the x-37 count? I sure you can have it alice They certainly had not done a supersonic aircraft in the 1960s No, that's a real american shit. Oh, yeah, we'll enter this design competition. Fuck it So one of the ways to combat the issues a supersonic airplane has at low speeds Is to make an aircraft that changes shape, right? Yeah, it works great on the the f-14 you can do Top gun shit. Yeah so

You have swept wings that take off and landing like here And then delta wings in supersonic flight, right? This is called a variable geometry wing been implemented successfully on a few military aircraft like the b1 lancer Right, it's a really heavy and complex mechanism, but it allows for improved performance at low speeds, right? It's a really neat party trick and also it means that you can have the wings back Which means it takes up less space when it's landed, which is why the navy likes them I don't think the f-18 can do this too Yeah, also, it means you don't have to land at 190 miles an hour

Yes, which is kind of a challenge on an aircraft carrier Oh, no, again good lord invented arrestor cables out Yeah, the aircraft is arrested. You are thrown forward through your canopy. Good luck They just catch y'all with a big ass phishing that I don't think you're in any position like I don't think there's you're at a consistency that isn't going to slip through a phishing that at that point Supposedly the l2000 could land at conventional speeds But you know, I wasn't developed further so we'll never know um

So anyway variable geometry wings, uh, we're still a relatively new concept as was everything else In the 1960s and the Boeing 2707 was going to have the largest variable geometry wings ever built um furthermore the Boeing 2707 was going to be the first wide body aircraft with a two three two Seating arrangement carrying 300 passengers Also cannot stress enough how weird it is that it's not like not the first wide body supersonic aircraft the first wide body aircraft period yes

Boeing 2707 would be the first plane with a glass cockpit The Boeing 2707 was going to be powered by four huge afterburning turbofan engines Some of the first of their kind the general electric ge4 The Boeing 2707 had an nba team named after it This is the seattle supersonics. Yeah Boeing 2707 was going to be made entirely out of titanium The Boeing 2707 would cruise at mach 2.7 And the Boeing 2707 was going to have on board color television

Incredible luxury. Yes The faa took one look at this thing that was clearly going to be a horrible nightmare to construct and said yep, that's our boy I like how the airplane in the image that you use is sitting on jack stands. I feel like that's the most appropriate way If you get underneath this thing it will kill you Here's the fun fact since the engines were mounted so far back you can see there's an extra set of landing gear in the back here Um, because the plane was so back heavy. Well land land really drag wheel. Yeah Landing gear is famously something that you want to have more of because they don't ever fail So you want to put as many of them on the plane as possible undercarriage out of the landing gear. Yeah

So this plane could be an episode undo itself. Um, it was It's going to be slower than the l2000 but would have better subsonic performance Um, some folks at the faa thought that ssts were only going to be useful for the domestic market because uh Uh, what was now at this point British aerospace was so far ahead of them So this is the one that got the funding and in the meantime the faa started doing some studies on sonic booms I love to talk about this shit because it's it's it's a great example of Like it's one of the least horrible But one of the therefore one of the best documented examples of the 1960s american government

Just deciding we are going to do some shit to the american people We're gonna call it something faintly or welly and sounding like project doom shrike We're gonna just start doing it. We're not gonna tell them And we're gonna we're gonna see what happens and this runs the gamut from like Like shirt and shirt and tie cia motherfuckers breaking open light bulbs full of anthrax on the new york subway All the way down to this Yeah, so we gotta talk about sonic booms. Here's a picture of a very successful supersonic transport the M-track f40 ph

Now you can see the Okay, so the shock wave from the leading edge of this plane This picture was taken on my ho scale model layout Where I turned the controller to 100 and watch it go So the the shock wave from the leading edge of the pilot down here really from the coupler, I guess Sort of propagates in a cone shaped fashion in this case the uh aircraft has a very blunt front end So I would imagine around from the horn. It's propagating this way Um at supersonic speeds

This this cone takes a while to dissipate and it's perceived down to the ground as a very large boom You know sort of on the scale of thunder, right? Have have you guys experienced sonic booms before? Yes, my question No, but it's on my list for the road trip I had I had my windows rattled by an raf euro fighter typhoon Uh when they tried to they had to like intercept an airliner that they had lost radio communication with And so they just they just like vexed a couple of these directly over central glasco at Very high speed, uh and just broke a bunch of windows which ruled that's pretty fucking alarming

So, uh, I already on the trip. I've already broken one of my windows in the van and replaced it with a wooden board that my friends have signed Um, so I'm figuring if I can go park the van somewhere where a supersonic aircraft goes over Then I think they can break the rest of the windows and I'll have more signature space So that's what I'm really shooting for here Every once in a while a uh former vmi cadet will uh buzz the academy in lexington Yes, I've I've been in I've I've been at my grandmother's house when that happened and it was very loud And and this is a problem because the coming supersonic transport paradigm shift was sort of predicated on Almost all flights becoming supersonic, right? Yes

Yeah, so I live under a flight path right now, which means I get to hear like Jets reasonably like reasonably often like a couple of times a day right sometimes more um I think if I had to hear sonic booms twice a day and I wasn't expecting them Uh, I would develop more of an anxiety disorder than I currently have Yeah, so you want to fly a washington seattle? That'd be supersonic. You want to fly new york to dallas? supersonic london and malon

That's going to be supersonic. You want to fly from altuna to roanoke? That's going to be supersonic Yeah, you doing a ferry move from national airport to dallas That's going to be supersonic And this this requires the public to have a very high tolerance for sonic booms And it was not known to what extent people were going to tolerate that So the f a a did a test in 1964 called operation bongo 2 Oh my god, this is this is classic 60s federal government like offer

Operation you look this shit up and it's like here operation bongo one was like smearing lsd on the door handle of black churches Operation bongo 2 is this Yeah So in support of the national supersonic transport program Uh, and in order to judge public opinion gather data for insurance purposes, right and the test protocol was very simple They would um Create eight sonic booms each day over oklahoma city and see how people react

Fuck yeah, they'll just do this with like literally boomer sooner Yes, yeah, and they would do this with military aircraft because well Oh during the cold war that's yeah, yeah, you just have you just have the us air force just sort of like Essentially do donuts in your parking lot, but it's the sky. I'm sure this this horrified and scared no one. Thank god Well The way that people reacted was poorly Oh Interesting. Yes, so they shattered a bunch of windows including in some of the city's tallest buildings

They had a bunch of property claims property damage claims and complaints that rolled in Yeah, who do you file an insurance claim with? A lot of oklahoma city They filed with the f a a Oh, okay Yeah, the oklahoma city residents tried to take it in stride for a few weeks Because this is something the local chamber of commerce had campaigned for right um, but Oklahoma city a place to fly over

Yes Really fast you want to spend as little time over oklahoma city as possible The the f a a rejected 94 of property damage claims To the to the anger of those residents who filed them and eventually they filed a class action lawsuit against the government Which the government lost The system works. Yeah So three percent of people complained And a lot of sources i saw said well only three percent of people complained

Three percent is a lot of people right that's a pretty high proportion It's also like if you flew a supersonic plane over my house and it shattered all my windows I'd just be like well the government said it again, and I wouldn't even bother I'd just be like i'm gonna buy new windows now because my country sucks So for three percent people will be so fucking pissed off that they were like I'm gonna file an actual complaint is incredibly impressive in 1964 like at this point Complaining about the government is like tantamount to communism. Yes, you had to you had to overcome the lsd They put on your door handles to even file the complaint

That's worth that's worth noting here You you go and file the complaint and there's two Cars all full of like four fbi agents each following you. They're all irritated as shit about the sonic booms as well And you're just like this is a functional country But your complaint also doesn't make any sense because of the lsd. You're like You're playing over my house and now my my uh my kitchen table is turned into a giant lizard. What the hell? Oh This is the claims line for windows tables that turn into lizards is lane three sir

Please please do not get combatic sir Just like like the um the line of people coming out of the building meme, but it's for like various cia operations domestically domestic gladio compensation forms Yeah, this is the mk ultraline buddy. You're gonna have to Yeah, no was this were you like uh permanently uh rendered deranged by mk ultraline or mk neomy because they are different projects So they're different forms. No, I'm here to claim damages for injuries sustained in castro assassination attempts

Myself with a needle full of cyanide Have I had all my facial hair fell out? Can I get that please? Oh my god Which we need to like we need to set up every trans woman As dictator of a communist country so the cia puts thallium salts in our shoes to try and make our facial hair fall out Does that work because i'm about to go try that. Yes, but you would also get many cancers I mean, I already smoke cigarettes. It's fine

so A lot of people complained about the sonic boom some further concerns were raised by environmentalists, right? High altitude planes were going to destroy the ozone layer And water vapor from the engines was going to create A permanent cloud layer and a gloom across the planet. Yeah the cone trails Exactly these fears were partially founded The nitrous oxides from the exhaust would probably harm the ozone layer That could be

Solved by going to low sulfur fuel Um, but it was uh unlikely that the planes were going to have a significant effect on the climate beyond, you know CO2 which no one cared about in the 60s, right? No But uh, there is there is some some strong grassroots opposition to these supersonic transport planes Which is going to become relevant in a second doesn't matter doesn't matter because from the top down This is the way of the future Absolutely future The way of the future. Uh, this is like a heavily heavily advertised thing by everybody involved both in like in europe

and the u.s. And we see here a big panam Uh thing that advertises the the two buttons you can press you either make the plane bigger with the 747 or you make it faster with the supersonic transport and they uh were holding both of those buttons down at the same time and the 70s were going to be a time of Like unbridled prosperity and progress and no one was ever going to feel any malaise Huh Yeah, you're going to get you're going to get your uh, you're going to get your lockheed l2000

You're going to get across the atlantic in uh In like uh, you're going to get the london in time for the breakfast you just had Yeah Yeah I I put this I put the next slide on here too. It's just like uh, I I believe a sort of contemporary piece of uh retrofuturist art Um And it's like, you know, this was this was kind of accepted. Everybody just thought this was like the way of the future Okay, some people in oklahoma hate it but like since when do what people in oklahoma think about anything?

since when does that matter? You know, we're the people who matter the people who live in like new york or london and we Absolutely expect that the thing that has already happened Uh, not that not that far previously was jets is just going to repeat itself Because we we believe strongly in like uh incredibly fast progression of technology. We're about to go to the fucking moon You can't you're telling me that we're not going to be able to like have breakfast in london and then the same breakfast again In los angeles on the same day Well, actually now that I think about it

If you had like the really fast ssts Because because you could do two breakfasts with concord But you could leave after lunch and then have breakfast Oh now 2000. Oh, yeah Just outpace the international dateline and have never-ending breakfast around the world you can go back in time in one of those things I was just gonna say that airplane that you have posted a picture of is remarkably phallic. That was all That's that's right for a futurism. That's what it is. It's all dicks. It's all dicks all the way down You can tell that's been a few weeks of an LA in an empty house and you know, just like big chrome dong, baby

It's a big chrome dong Hontology is when you draw a big chrome dong, but it's also when you see a spooky ghost And the spooky ghost that we are seeing those are also in the house. I'm staying in It's great. What spooky ghosts nice. Oh, yeah It's it's been around since the 20s. Somebody's died in this place The spooky ghost here is a like the possibility of improvement and of like technological horizons not just remaining constant but expanding um Like I can't stress enough that he went to the moon the moon in the fucking sky

Yes, okay, there was not much up there that was interesting But like the the the moon you get open There was a there was a guy up there I put a guy up there and then that guy came home and he wasn't like weird He wasn't like a moon guy. He was just a guy from Ohio Like a guy from Ohio went to the moon in the fucking sky Stuff was getting better and cheaper all the time. This is basically what I was trying to say earlier I was just an asshole about it. See Alice's rat

I Everything everything was gonna keep getting better forever and then And then and then and then florida No, this is this is still this is still everything getting better forever Um, this is a slide that I put in about the sort of the infrastructure that was getting built to to support supersonic airliners so

basically You want to fly over water as much as possible both because that kind of like dampens the sonic booms and also because people don't Typically live on water. So you're you know, you are booming over stuff that nobody cares about Unlike stuff that stuff like Oklahoma City, which people in Oklahoma City care about at least So you end up with these plans to build huge new airports with longer runways to accommodate Landing at very high speeds and take off at very high speeds and they were going to be like over water Um, Los Angeles was going to get a second airport on an artificial island and it was going to be connected to lax by a tunnel Uh, London was going to get a new airport in the Thames estuary

An idea which has since you know kind of been attempted to be resurrected. Yep Uh, the pan am term like jfk was going to like more than double in size They were going to be entirely new Like hubs in montreal and kansas city Your rebel airport is an episode. I want to do something. Yeah Yeah, and air france built a whole new airport entirely for concourse lights At what was the village outside of paris called wassey? Because all the airport just didn't have the the ability to handle it and uh wassey became

Harris charles de gaulle airport Um, but the funniest of these and the art for this slide is miami international airport Uh, who you can see here, uh in 1968 were getting ready for tomorrow Yeah, that's cute for miami. They were getting ready for tomorrow because what tomorrow was going to be was you make miami In you know south florida a lot of water Both internally and externally so it's easier to fly over quietly You're going to make that the hub for the whole fucking hemisphere. You can see this map on the right hand side You're going to be able to fly from miami to buenos iris or to seattle

Uh, you're going to be able to get a direct flight miami to london Um in four hours Yeah And we will we will hear more of miami international airports Uh brand new jet port site later So, uh, meanwhile, they're still chugging along with the concorde, right? Um, and a lot of the retrospective narrative of the concorde has it doing really badly from the start Which isn't strictly true. You know sales were anemic, but most airlines didn't start cancelling orders until the 70s, right?

Um, you know in the meantime things were looking up for plucky, uh, british aerospace corporation Uh, they had gone from bristol aerospace corporation to british aerospace corporation But cleverly they kept the acronym BAC Don't have to change the signs. Yeah, exactly. You want to save money on that? First prototype was up in the air by 69 And two prototypes were made two prototypes were making demonstration flights by 1971 Concorde seemed to be practical safe and most importantly was in the air But um, you know in the meantime some issues had cropped up

Uh, a lot of countries who had been horrified by the results of operation bongo 2 Uh decided we're just going to ban supersonic flights in our airspace, right? So some of the potential markets for concorde dwindled, right? Eventually down to almost exclusively transatlantic flights Um, because uh flying too far inland Was impractical because when you slowed down you had very high fuel consumption, right? Uh, so airlines started dropping orders starting really in 1973 And uh by 1975 other than oil crisis

Yeah, but he's worried about the price of fuel even more. Oh, yeah. I mean the price of fuel was going up So, yeah, you can't you can't eat once once we're like well, we can't fly these planes as efficiently as we could um You know, so you mean that american airlines and pan am weren't interested in the hemicuda of the skies By 1975 other than british air and air france only uh c a a c in china and iran air wanted concord iran air is an interesting one. This is like, uh About the same time that the shah was having awesome wells narrate a history of persia Just really really into like giant sort of marianto net prestige projects, uh, which would

Become backfire god damn it would not would not enrage a lot of people Also, apparently that green line trolley from way earlier in the episode was going 30 in a 10 Oh, yeah That's bad That's my favorite thing to do in train simulators is speed Because if nobody can arrest me for it, but it feels really illegal Iran iran in the 70s is like doing procurement like this is the same reason why the The islamic republic of iran air force is still operating f-14s to this day

This captain Yeah, iran air has like a bunch of weird aircraft too like they own a bunch of like little t tiny 747s Like they're 747s, but they're short Um so in addition to this of course Operation bongo 2 had resulted in the loss of support for the sst program From one of its biggest supporters u.s senator mike, uh, bonroni

Who was a senator from oak uh, oklahoma? um You know the the the proposed ban on supersonic aircraft had a lot of popular support um Boring in the meantime was trying to press on with the 2707 Engineers there were especially enthusiastic about it and it took up the bulk of the civil aviation division's energy Right if you got assigned to a boring project like the 747 that was a demotion um

I will just say for the record i So i'm in la right now for my my trip and i went to whatever beach is at the end of the la x certain way and a 747 flew over to me and It was Completely a religious experience. I cannot fathom like Getting assigned to the 747 being like well, this sucks. Well, it sucks. I wanted to work on I wanted to work on the 2707

Yeah, I mean my god. It was just the coolest shit. I've ever seen so that's my little aside Um, they started encountering a lot of design difficulties. Um in 1968 they scrapped the variable geometry wings They scaled down the plane to a 230 cedar Sales were strong though Project looked likely to succeed Despite at this point being about two years behind schedule um and this program was supported by

uh president nixon By the republicans by people of seattle and very much supported by organized labor You know because we're in this sort of Sort of weird nixon era, you know, yeah, hot riot shit. Yes, exactly And um while the prototypes were under construction They were actually putting together airplanes in march 1971 the u.s. Senate voted to cut funding um And with the sort of simultaneous downturn in commercial aviation orders in general bowing had to lay off 60 000 employees

Jesus Jesus. Yeah That's nuts. But bowing was seattle was like a company town for bowing. Yeah, it was just bowing. Um, They didn't have amazon yet um This was uh, this is known known today in seattle as the bowing bust Um, and it wrecked seattle's economy for decades and resulted in sort of mass exodus of population People went out to try and find jobs elsewhere. Uh, this billboard was put up outside of town famously that says will the last person Leaving seattle, please turn out the lights

Yeah, could have could have turned into like aerospace detroit. You know, yeah Yeah, and I mean especially, you know with increased automation in the industry with bowing trying to set up those non-union plants now It hasn't really bounced back. There's not, you know, there's not blue collar airplane jobs in seattle quite the way they're used to be um Need to bring back like hand riveting. Yeah, exactly. So the 2707 was definitively dead by 71 F And uh, Alice, this is your slide. Yes. Yes. So the remember miami international airports knew shiny jetport

Their plan was Uh, that in order to like achieve maximum quietness, they were going to get it as as as far over water as you could by Putting a gigantic airport in the middle of the fucking Everglades Uh, this was not very popular amongst environmentalists But they got a reprieve in that they built one massive runway Uh, and then nothing else because by this point the um Like all of the infrastructure started to collapse, right? um

So most of the like brand new airports never got built you may notice that Los Angeles does not have an airport on an artificial island London does not have an airport in the Thames estuary a lot of the expansions never got built The only real like successful airport that was built for supersonic airliners Is paris charles de gall? um In miami they built this thing in essentially the middle of nowhere because the transport links were going to be trivial Once you had a a plane that was that fast Without that you just have a like a single very long runway and a swamp

Uh, which is it's it's still there. This is a picture of it now. Um, it's used for nothing I thought they used it for training sometimes Sometimes there's also been a pitch by uh by local politicians to try And do like an equivalent of the paris air show there in the middle of a swamp This has not really captured anyone's imagination. Uh, sometimes like a cesser crashed and survived, but it was then eaten by a gator Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah, so sometimes like a cessna emergency lands there It's called a dade collier transitional and training airfield now um, that's where you go if you want to be a trans pilot

And so this is this is I don't know there is a spooky ghost in this image I think yes, because this could have been the uh, the jetport This could have been your hub to travel from fucking Buenos Aires to manila, you know, um And instead it's it's a field and a swamp There is a phone number there on a road sign, which I feel like I should bring call Be like, hi, I have a concord. Can I please land here? Types of the assets Don't do that. You'll probably get arrested

That's about to say you call in you call in and you say i'm trying to land a pan am l 2000 Be like what peril universe did you fly in from a better one? Speaking of better universes, uh, we welcome to the soviet union What is this tell us about our beautiful boy, what are we looking at here? God this is this is the tuple of tu 144 and it it droops the snoots and it flutes the canards I don't really think that there's much else needs to be said, but I will say it was the first supersonic transport So fuck you France and britain

It it uh, it was faster it went mach 2.15 versus 2.04 It was longer. It was wider. It wasn't as heavy. It was more fuel efficient It seeded 20 more people and again just you know And this is alice exclusionary when I say this because you know, I love alice, but also So they were going to develop this in the 60s when the concord was being developed and They were rushing to make it both ahead of the concord and the 60th anniversary gift to communism Which I'm sure you've never covered before on this show, but when the russians tend to Rush projects for when they pick an arbitrary date

Yeah, when they pick an arbitrary date and they're like this is a gift to communism It leads to developmental flaws and the t144 they love communism too much. They try and give it too many gifts They do they really do. I have an x like that. My god communism is not going to appreciate you As much if you give her a flawed product as opposed to a good one. That's right Yeah, put in the time and the thoughts. Yes. Yeah, and that was the t144 right is like Granted the concord is a better plane um, the the flaws of this are

Uh, the soviet union as you may have noticed is mostly land It's not a place you can fly supersonic travel over an ocean And so you run into the same problems the f a did in oklahoma city where you shatter windows um Yeah, because the soviet union by this point had been captured by revisionist apparatchiks who did not take the correct line To people complaining about sonic boom shattering all of their windows, which is to have them shot by the kgb Yes, exactly So, you know, that was a problem off the bat. Uh, it also

Was so loud inside that you couldn't talk to other passengers but both because it It had the afro burners on for the whole flight so the concord Uh used afro burners to get in the air and then turn them off once you were kind of At supersonic speed the the the tuple of did not require that it required supersonic For for supersonic flight It needed afro burners on the whole time. So you were passing notes to people in the same Over the sound of the engine noise The soviet plane make engine bigger

I made a joke in one of my car reviews about a car being louder than the economy rose with this airplane Because it was it was like literally deafening you had to bring airplugs or you might go deaf And uh There was no commercial luxury air travel in the ussr at the time because I mean theoretically like You didn't have classes. There wasn't somebody who was going to be like, I'm a rich fancy person. I'm going to take a Supersonic plane instead of a normal subsonic aircraft and you already have jets at this time. So what point does this serve really? Um

And the other thing too is that it kind of sucked So it had 181 flight hours total before it was retired over 103 flights And it had 226 operational issues of that during that period I think somewhere around 70 of those would have destroyed the airplane um They discovered a decent number of them on the ground, but uh It wasn't great No, you don't want to you don't want to be experiencing a brand new mechanical issue and a brand new type of aircraft

Going very very fast. There was actually a flight where a few seconds for you to experience it There was actually a flight where a pilot recounted There were a bunch of journalists from the west on board and 22 out of 24 something like that Like warning lights came on basically like land the plane now. You're gonna die The airborne sirens came on on board And they just were like screaming to my flight engineer Vitaly, what is check engine light and he can't hear me

I'm screaming. I'm screaming. He is screaming Yeah, so so they ended up landing that flight after 75 minutes with a pillow stuffed into the air horn on board the plane I'm not joking. That is legitimately what happened. Um, yeah, and you have to pay for the pillow under capitalism So who's to say whether it's worse? Good point. Yeah So, I mean it wasn't exactly great, uh The the other thing too is so like is made of hair of bear Diving too is like that it it flew regular service So, I mean it does count as the first supersonic transport. It beat the Concorde by a few months

um But it only flew like once a week over a two hour route with never a full plane it flew with an average of 53 passengers because They were terrified that this plane was going to Disintegrate in mid-air basically they were just like 53 passengers all of whom have like either lost bets or badly pissed off their boss Chernobyl liquidators when you you you enter the plane I serve the Soviet Union Yeah, you you get off this plane alive and somebody gives you a collected works of Lenin box

Yeah, it was very much a a uh It was really cool. I mean, I love this airplane Like I I should I should note while I'm talking about this that like I adore this aircraft because I love soviet engineering Because a lot of it is so shitty and it's so close to being so good and the tuple of 2u144 Is exactly that example it is It is

So close to being such an incredibly good airplane if they had spent six more months on this thing They would have made it Absolutely phenomenal, but they didn't because they were the the inherent problems with the command and control economy uh That the Soviet Union had was just Get this plane done Another problem they had with it was it had uh What was considered advanced for the time it had very large segments of airframe

So normal aircraft, you know when they fly to 60 000 feet And then land again you're going to develop some cracking and that's normal To an extent and you repair those as needed, but uh It's something that you kind of develop your aircraft structure to mitigate So that you don't need to get like a six inch crack and then ground your entire aircraft fleet for six months They didn't do that with this so it had nine foot slabs of airframe That would crack and because there were no splits in the airframe structure It would just split all the way down the side

I'm stuffing more pillows into the air horn Trying to like scream at my co-pilot, and I'm I'm seeing daylight through the floor I got like the highway repair tar truck just spewing You know and the thing is like I love ladders. I love uh the Vovigas 2410 You know, they're great cars for the economy that they were developed under this plane Was those except it went supersonic and flew at 60 000 feet. Listen, it's it gives you different anxieties, right? It's it's loud. It's communist and it doesn't work well. I identify with it a lot. Exactly. Well, we're getting to the bureau on so hang on Um, so it it everybody thought that they stole it the soviet stole it from the french and they did

Still call it russian concord to this day. I know Concord ski is the most common term for it and really like There is some there are Some historians believe that they saw the plans for the concord, but like it's a fucking supersonic transporter that carries passengers It's going to have a delta wing design. It's going to have a droop snoot It's going to be all of the things the concord was it wasn't all that similar in development They might have seen the plans in the like delta wings are cool and that's about as far as it went. Um The russian the soviet military thought about using them as a bomber until they realized they sucked shit

Um, and then they retired the plane Yeah, the soviet air force used a lot more, uh, like I mentioned this earlier used a lot more supersonic bombers People have made a couple of different ones for them. Uh, also also We only had what we have the b1 the b2 b5 2 is subsonic We know that you always had the b58 before that. Um, yeah, yeah Uh, off the top of my head. It's just the tu 160 and the tu 22. Okay. Yeah, I think that's right Um, russian federation still uses a bomber that's very similar looking to this if I recall correctly

Oh, yeah, and they don't they also still use the best they still use like uh turboprop bombers. Good for that, man I don't think it's based in this so because it was it was genuinely a flawed design, right? Like I mean you can't have a super I mean you can't have a supersonic plane that you can't talk to your other passengers in um, again, the other thing too is like Even the air conditioning was so loud that you couldn't talk to each other when that was on because the Stresses on the airframe required really strong air conditioning and the soviets were like Well, just make it blow louder And that was their solution to the whole problem

Um, so it wasn't it wasn't ideal. Uh, it was retired in 83 after it had two crashes One was with six people on board. I believe um Who all flight crew it it just it had a fuel problem it leaked They ditched it the the nose folded up into the cockpit and they all died And the other one was during the uh, Paris air show of 80 God, I should have written this down 73 yeah, sorry my apologies. Um, that was the french's fault. That was wait Yeah, no that that was the french's fault. So there was

The the t144 was flying at the the Paris air show to show off that the soviet model was going to develop incredible airplanes And a french mirage jet that went to take pictures of the t144 flew too close to it It startled the pilots. They stalled it out and they crashed it. I blame the french entirely. That was not the soviet's problem um That was right after the first round of cancellations for um, the uh What's it the the airlines ordering the concord too. Yeah, the kind of the soviet airplane flew for 10 more years state Leta deep

That was a very high profile crash because it was an air show, but like We'll also trigger the second round of cancellations for the concord It did it did but realistically like there's a lot of speculation over what caused it I mean, it might have just been that the the tuple of pilots trying to show off and they stalled Um, but I I truly think that the french are the problem for this because I think the french are the problem for a lot of things And I think that blaming them for this Fits my moral world worldview in a way that makes me feel better. So um

And then after this after 83 They decided they would use it as a test vehicle for uh, the soviet biran energija astronauts And then after that it served another 10 years or so in the 90s as a supersonic laboratory for nasa and ross cosmos In the 20 minute period where both of those agencies liked each other I am once again seeing a spooky ghost. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it is it is a spooky ghost period But they were seeing a tupleev in a nasa livery is like a religious experience um, there's a couple of museums and stuff now and I it is like a In the same way that you alice probably want to go to

Saudi Arabia I feel like I need to make a pilgrimage to a a Tuplev 3144 and I hope that's not rude to say Yeah, it's it's it's like It's like looking at a world where the right side won the cold war And yeah, I mean, that's the whole reason why I like the biran There's a bunch of people on twitter that followed me because I bought that nine foot tall soviet biran model And it's like you see this future where if things had just sucked a little less if there had been a little bit less

Fevered competition if people had just spent, you know 20 minutes more on developing things You could have seen a next slide for the ultimate punch line to this. Oh god, please don't I know what the then follow up to this is It killed the soviet union and it killed the tupleev also. It's pepsi. It's pepsi. Look alive. You're in the pepsi generation I want to get off mr. Pepsi's wild ride. That's too damn bad This is a concord not a fukulev Yes, um, yeah That's because it's so fucking capitalist The actual service history of the concord, right?

And your initial service was uh, not great not great, right? Um, it's sort of from the start limited to routes which went to countries where they'd allow it to fly All right off to a privacy start. Yes. So Paris to Rio by way of dacker, right? Interesting That's a heck of a route. Yeah, and then london to Bahrain Okay, that's crazy. I guess. Yeah, um Transatlantic market was pretty much off limits because the united states had banned SSTs from landing at airports, right? This ban wasn't not lifted until 1977 when the london to delis flight started

Uh, because new york city immediately locally banned the concord Now the the the reason for the ban was over noise concerns, right now The the thing about the concord on takeoff. It wasn't really noticeably noisier on takeoff than a lot of contemporary airliners and it was actually quieter than air force one at a time Still doesn't matter. I will point out that uh, the only time they tried to fly a concord later on to To san francisco. They made it land across the bay in oakland They nimby to fucking Literally all nimby shit. It's it's 100% nimby shit, right? Yes. Yeah

Um, so they didn't manage to get uh after I think a supreme court overturned the supreme court overturned the new york city local ban So scheduled service from london and paris to jfk didn't begin until late 1977 Yeah, it was because neither of those air airports were ever expanded. I've seen a photo of the check-in For a concord at Heathrow. Alice isn't doing the live show because she doesn't want to go to new york city That's right. That's right. Hey, the booking agent reached out to us Okay They had this they had this beautiful sort of like futuristic idea of what like the experience of getting onto this plane was going to be like And uh, it was not true on like either the airport that you left or the airport that you got to

Yes Well, maybe a dull us dull us was still pretty new then Um, but yeah, that jfk was not I mean one of the things I guess that really doomed these uh jet ports Is that concord could land on conventional runways? Right? Yeah, they thought ssts We're gonna get bigger faster like jets did and it didn't happen didn't happen Yeah, I will mention though that the concord had to land at about 170 miles an hour. So yeah, it was a Better had they done that normal planes land at I just don't know uh normal of the quotes Thank you

We'll end it out the typing. Yeah Thanks, um, they're landing speeds take place at approximately 150 miles an hour. So you're going a lot faster Yeah, that's what a quarter more you said 190, right? Yeah, I said 190 and the the tuple of actually was rated for landing by the faa at 204 miles an hour, which meant that it goes slower Yeah, she's always going a lot Every every time is like a flame and a you're just coming in at a 90 degree angle to the sound of I'm just gonna know to slow down I'm just gonna note really quickly that the the theme of

Superstionic transport landing extremely fast with really pumped up kicks. Is it something we'll have to explore later I'm not gonna say any more than that, but they land Fucking fast. I mean, yeah faster than normal air traffic does Which is also part of the reason why people didn't like them is like the actual like passenger experience Stu, okay, you know what? Do you know how excited I'd be if two concords flew over my house a day? Listen, we're You and I you and I are victorious. God are not normal, right? No, I'm incredibly weird

Normal that's the whole reason I'm on this podcast Did not like the experience of flying on the concord because the overall experience like okay It's not as it's not like incomprehensibly loud, but apart from anything else. It's a small cabin Right My dream someday is to fly on the tuple of to you 144 Still kind of surprised it didn't succeed just because you think you're like You're willing to make those trade-offs like you already know like it was it was so expensive, right? You would pay like

And and and rich people when they pay thousands Expect X level of like yeah, they want to be able to like stretch out Bounty of the sea and like have a machine that jerks them off. I get that I will say like concord tickets cost like eight grand Like they were not cheap. Yeah, we're definitely like it. It's like fancy It's like one one one row either side Very very small very cramped like to the point of claustrophobia small windows low ceilings

And like overall that experience is like you take off very very fast and very loud You're you're wedged into a pretty small seat in a pretty small airframe and then you land very fast That's an experience that's designed for transgender women and strategic air command men Who are about to try and like bomb air kutsk? It's not designed for like salarymen flying from london money bags, right? Yeah, exactly I'm just built different and that's all I'll say about it. I I just want to Be be the contrarian here concord, um, you know as it was originally designed and as they originally tried to market it

Um, it it failed at its original mission, which was going to make two transatlantic flights a day. Maybe more, right? Because it wasn't quite fast enough is about three hours and 30 minutes for a transatlantic flight They needed to get that a little bit farther down. It's still so good though It's really good, but it's not good enough to actually get the plane to the sort of capacity utilization Where it becomes cheaper to operate. That's why it became sort of a It originally tickets were expensive What pretty shareways realized later on was that people thought the tickets were much more expensive than they were So they raised the price commensurately, right?

All of the sudden they started making a shitload of money off of it Yeah, because it was a luxury goods. It was a luxury thing. Yeah, and people pay a whole bunch of money for the concord experience, right? so by Honestly concord started turning the profit, you know Relatively early on and I mean was sort of commensurate with like british airways privatization um, yeah, I'll also point out that british airways like Lent very heavily on patriotism to try and sell tickets to this it wasn't just a luxury experience

But it was a uniquely british. We shelved the french part pretty quickly a uniquely british This sort of like luxury experience that's the the ba slogan at this point was literally like fly the flag Oh, that's gross. Yeah I I bet no american airline would ever do such a thing Because we killed our flag carrier. Fuck off. Listen, it's going to be it's it's it's going to be like two or three years Um before they have the first, uh thin blue line american airlines. Oh, it's coming. Yeah, it's for sure coming But they'll have a blm plane with it. Oh my god, maybe it'll be each side of the plane You're leaving some shit right now

This whole sst program is sort of you know designed by the economics That airlines were initially using the idea was this was going to reduce costs and increase profits And instead it increased costs but also increased profits, but it no it became like a niche thing instead of the new Uh standard instead of the new standard. Yeah um

And then It got worse Can I do this one? Yes, I wrote it all. Okay this is concord air france flight 45 90 and It hit parts on takeoff from a previously departed dc 10 So the problem is dc 10's love just dropping shit on the runway. Oh god. Yeah, buddy. That's way

They are the Oldsmobile cutlass of the skies Hey, look, okay. I love Oldsmobile cutlasses, but this is they were it's true for both counts Yeah, um, so The the shrapnel from the from the previously departed dc 10 Got picked up by the landing gear of the concord flew up into the landing gear and severed part of the

landing gear electronic controls and also ruptured the fuel tank and The leaking fuel tank then exploded because the uh electricity was just flowing outwards instead of through the wires as it's supposed to So the sparks ignited the fuel tank So you had a wing on fire you had engines one and two completely out and You barely could control this thing and the thing that's important to remember with ssts is they are not meant to fly At subsonic speeds, right? Like the concord was stable above supersonic speeds

It it doesn't have the flaps doesn't have the it doesn't have the ability to control itself below supersonic flight, so You're riding a big lawn dart at this point Yeah, basically you're you this is not intended to land in this kind of scenario So the gear won't come up And you're you've got two engines out and your plane is on fire So what do you do and the answer is crash into a hotel? um

I wouldn't that i'm built different Yeah, I mean It it killed everyone on board and four people in the hotel. So that means that the dc 10 Actually killed people not on the plane, but also people on the ground who had never even thought about flying into dc 10 Like the like the surgery with the 300 mortality rates. Yeah, it very much. Um it just There was no way to recover from this kind of scenario and this was in 2000, I think Yeah, July 2000. Yeah, and they ended up scrapping the plane three years later

because 9 11 happened as alice would gladly point out and uh You don't want to do 9 11 in a supersonic plane You don't want to have to like contend with the risk of of hijacking in a plane that is fast enough that the air force has to Worry about their ability to catch it Yeah, um jet fuel at that speed melts steel beams. So they They uh ended up scrapping the program three years later because also like

Airbus wouldn't Maintain them anymore. They were just like we're done with the service life of the concord and also like Because tickets were $8,000 And because only rich people took the concord you can't crash an airplane meant specifically for rich people No, you know the concord was up until this point considered the safest form of air travel. It was considered Basically uncrashable and so then you show that this airplane you drawing some class parallels to another disaster that we might talk about I'm not drawing any class parallels to anything

I'm just saying that you can't kill rich people because they'll get mad John jacob aster breaks his own window on the concord and says well, I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous So The plane crashed into a hotel and everybody died And you can't do that That's really what it boils down to is just like if you pay $8,000 for a ticket you better arrive at your destination alive Yeah, and it's it's like an airframe and a form of airframe that relies on Everything until the point where you go supersonic working perfectly

The surprising thing is we could kind of do that. We did that for a pretty long time Like the pilots it was a joy to fly. Yeah. Yeah, and this isn't like Something where we like we we weathered a lot of small incidents It like mostly ran incident-free and then the incident that ended that streak is it kills Fucking everyone I will say also like there are other aircraft where And this is mostly notable with Boeing planes because they suck They can do what it's called a dead sick landing. They didn't use to suck. I know they used to be really good, but um

It used to be able to like with most other aircraft They have like a 15 to 17 to 1 glide ratio So your aircraft is coming in all your engines are dead And you'll drop 1,000 feet for every 15 to 17,000 feet of glide Which is landable Yeah, like the Gimli glider the Gimli glider Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751 Where they had a md-81 that had ice sucked into both engines and they just couldn't

land it They they land it in a forest and everybody lived like you can do that with subsonic aircraft You cannot do that with the concord because it is not designed to fly below supersonic speeds So you just end up with like you said ellis a long dart Yeah, and so you That kind of killed a lot of the romanticism of supersonic air travel I feel like because You had this you had this rich

Insulated way to fly where you couldn't die Which was up until the very recent modern era not something you could count on And all of a sudden you were just as mortal as everybody else And that just murdered the the romanticism of the flight because you you couldn't just get on board this claustrophobic thin tube but be completely insulated from the realities of air travel You were just the same as everybody else Yeah, and I feel like it could have as a as a program supersonic transports could have survived the Inevitable crashes because like one of these was going to happen eventually just by the nature of like human factors and whatever

If they had been the staple if they had been the sort of like the thing that had replaced like subsonic jets then Fine, whatever, but like By positioning it as this sort of like elite thing as you say that's that's absolutely fatal to right You know if you had the thunderbirds around With the specialized equipment to save the supersonic jet You know It's just like air france was losing a ton of money on these like they had no incentive to keep it going aside from patriotism

British Airways theoretically made profit, but that's not proven and So you end up with the same kind of proven Yeah, you end up with the same kind of capitalist realities that like ruins everything, which is that If they're not making a ton of money on it, they're not going to do it and air france was like It was super easy, you know three for them to say as they're hemorrhaging money And 9-11 is making no one want to take an airplane again to cancel these so that just ended it right there And now they're in museums In museums. Yes. Yep. You can go and see them. I've been on one. That's cool

You can go see the future look at the thing You can you can stick ahead in the cockpit and see the like gigantic panel of like uh flight engineer gauges and just be like man that's cool I very much want to go to the uh Technic museum sceneheim in germany, which is like a bucket list item for me But they have they're the only museum on earth that has both a tupolev to you 144 and a concord And they'll let you go in them and I really want to I can't drive my van there. That's a problem

They don't believe uh, I believe one of the I forget which museum there half of the Boeing two seven oh seven mock-up is preserved somewhere I will note on this road trip. I visited no fewer than two or three different aircraft museums because I love them good choice Yeah Shout out to the air force museum in Dayton, Ohio Which is not a place you should ever go But uh Unless you're going to the air force museum there that it's cool

Support your local s air and space museum But also we never like stopped pitching SSTs oh Being the key God Every single one of these sucks Ass they're all they're all really bad. I mean there's a lot of proposals for new ssts

Um, no one's no one's no one wants to take it seriously I mean the only person the only group that could Get an sst going now would be the government and the government would have to take it seriously Neither of which things are going to happen, right? No Yeah, although I do appreciate the thing that I've put on screen here is uh one one group Has pitched the us air force on why don't you make air force one a supersonic plane? This will never happen There are too many vulnerabilities for this to ever be seriously considered unless we have a fucking land

Yeah Welcome to joe biden sky palace Stop this or the air They mocked up the thing that will kill joe biden and the entire white house press pool at 500 miles an hour when it plunges vertically into terrain Fucking sick It's just like I don't know it's it's like a Sort of half remembered retrofuturist thing and it's a it's a compelling easy way to like

crib from ideas that have already been done better by smarter people To make yourself sound smart and then you don't actually have to do anything because I love that stupid idea Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't seem like I mean over the past Long time there's there's been no really serious ideas. I mean there was the Boeing sonic cruiser for a while And that wasn't that was barely super sonic. I mean it was it was trans sonic at best um, and then there's There's been nothing there's been no no ideas about speeding up planes

None whatsoever. No one wants to like give give some serious r&d into this. I guess because Well, I have a thought about why which is on the next slide uh Which is that I think there is some interesting stuff happening in in the realm of like hypersonic flight capability That is when you greatly exceed the the speed of sound like sort of mark five ish um This is something that like comes up within the context of like missiles. Putin actually sort of mentioned

Off-handedly the idea of like a hypersonic missile and got a little press in the west where it was like, oh, this guy's ridiculous. He's joking Um, isn't an ICBM already hypersonic? Yeah. Yeah, also Like in the realm of drones and I have written here in brackets. Ask me what I think about the us navy ufo videos um, but like that's at a point where it's sort of so Militarily useful that it does not behoove anyone to talk about airliners is the thing um

I mean, it's it's it's also entirely possible that covet might just kill the airline industry stone dead before any of this masses God, please Yeah, so I I think it's like, uh, yeah, we're having like this huge narrowing of horizons Uh, the world is getting bigger again Travel is getting harder again But it's happening in like a less predictable more chaotic more stupid way than any of us could have predicted I'm pretty sure technology is going backwards overall This is why this is why I don't like the uh, I don't like the uh technological singularity people because it seems fairly obvious to me

That actually there's less technology now Um, you know, everything is just use a computer to coordinate a man and a warehouse better from Ohio on the moon Yeah, and that was that was in 1969 that was 52 years ago Uh, and I don't know what do you think we're gonna be doing in 52 years? Well, we're not gonna be here, which is Why are you getting the van trip now? You wouldn't choose to do a cross-continental country country trip, uh, just like

Escue all forms of home and self At the age of 26 unless you didn't think the world was gonna be there when you're 50 And that's like See the redwoods while they're still there. Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to figure out a way to write that that isn't just Super bleak because I love to make my writing have a hopeful note to it But just like that's really the underlying purpose of why I take a road trip now It's like I don't think this is gonna be here. I think sable like sable has already caught on fire twice

since I don't know 2000 like Of course, I want to go see it before it completely burns down. There's nothing there to see It's objectively bleak So and we're back to the vessel again, aren't we? Yeah, there's not going to be any kind of optimistic future for us So that's why cling to the tuple of t144 is it was a promise of a better future that we didn't get That's why I have a nine-foot tall beer on model in my living room. That's currently a

Another issue with uh, you know Uh supersonic planes and planes in general. It's very hard to square the circle with you know planes and climate change You know, we wanted to go back on going on ships for like six months. Right. Well, even I would it's it would be very Yes Try not to murder anybody and then like start off a murder mystery unless you're putting nuclear reactors and cargo ships Um, it'd be very difficult to build an electric boat Or a sailboat that scales up to the kind of capacity that supports the modern economy There is some some cruelty

Is that like how how hard is the two-day shipping pad or his box going to be? Sort of put back in and I don't I don't know if it's even possible Because there's a real My consumer behavior doesn't Yeah, doesn't really matter like the you know Whatever the 100 companies 71 carbon emissions or whatever it is. Yeah, it's very difficult as a consumer to like You know feel like you matter and material goods and buying stuff feels good and like You know, there's all the like raw as you've said like a sustainable world doesn't have two-day shipping and that's true

But like it's really hard to sort of square that circle What there's so little to look forward to and everything feels so fucking dreadful there's also there's this cruelty right in having Like grown up and lived in a world which had had shrunk so dramatically Uh, like the the closest things like a big technological advancement on the scale of like the moon landing or whatever was the internet, right? Which we we we grew up having um And it has enabled us to sort of to make these connections like I I work with you guys across the atlantic

um And you know like I I know people I have friends all across the world that it's like It's one of the reasons why I think lockdown is like why quarantine has hit people so hard Is the realization that oh you can just have a great deal of this stuff just like yanked back away from you very easily Yes, I think the other thing too is like that's why I'm so fucking pissed that I can't be at the live show, right? It's like I don't know man. I feel I don't want to be on the end of a webcam forever There's a there's a book called blue highways that was written I forget by who but it was written in like the 70s or 80s

And it was about the same kind of road trip that I'm taking today where I try to avoid highways. I try to eschew normal locations in favor of just the off the beaten path and But the idea of doing that without The internet the idea of doing that without google maps to bail me out when I'm stuck um, it's fucking terrifying but also so cool like the just the amount of wonder

And the wilderness you must have faced In in a world where you had a paper map and pay phones Is so cool. We can't go back to that There's no there's no putting that back in the box like I have a cell phone And I have an internet connection pretty much anywhere I go and I can Figure out where my next national park is going to be them a sleep at or whatever um But there's a romanticism to that and right

SSD is like that like we know now that it's more efficient It's more economical to make you suffer for 12 hours on a transcontinental flight but There was an era where that wasn't the solution. There was an era where It was better to give you a plane that promised to literally break the bounds of gravity and physics And you can feel this you can feel this way about being trans too as I do for instance because I have often joked That things were less overtly transphobic in the 1950s because then you could simply be a newspaper headline Where it was like, uh, local like xgi now stacked and they put like two pictures

Christine jorgensen Is exactly that example. She was Absolutely like a trendsetter in that regard and it wasn't like accessible to everyone or even like most people But no it was like there was a distinct kind of ignorance where it was like wow isn't science amazing Making men into dames incredible It was really like it was mccartney that ruined everything I mean the lavender scare is really what set us all back and then the AIDS pandemic Welcome to well, there's your problem a podcast where three communists and anarchists try to work out where we're taking the time machine with a

Glock to fucking set us back on his office. I'm like certainly Joe mccartney's office Joe mccartney's office and like enough hitler They're my two y'all are saying y'all said mccartney when it's mccarthy. No, we're gonna kill mccartney. We're gonna kill Paul mccartney I'm talking about Yeah, fuck you wings Goddamn if one hadn't been released we would all be living in peace I don't know. It's probably like I don't know do the like bus of life here. It's probably something as obscure as that, you know

Christ, uh, well, I I mean Okay, we've done a podcast where we've made uh, all of the listeners cry. Um, I'm sorry. Remember the future Oh, wait, was that my goal remember the future? I think that was our goal, but we can still be sorry I'm still sorry. I always try to be uplifting. Like that's the thing is like having your We'll definitely get you back on for a more uplifting episode of our disaster podcast Like you knew you knew the job was dangerous when you took it I know I know I just I always try to end my stories and uplifting now and like There is no uplifting out here

Everything sucks. There there is a solution There isn't a lifting on this transit Transatlantic tunnel. Yes We gotta build the transatlantic tunnel. This is the only way you can have high speed Supersonic electric transportation You gotta just build the goddamn vac trains and I don't mean the Elon Musk bullshit I mean proper fucking vac trains. You mean you don't want to get model x to las vegas It should be

We should build the transatlantic tunnel and it should be like 25 minutes from new york to london. All right This this is this is how the future is going to be. This is this is why yeah, this is the future. We were promised It's why it makes sense for you to be able to have like eight girlfriends in different countries on twitter As you can see them by like going on a train for 25 minutes exactly Build the fucking vac train build the vac train We put a guy in the moon. You can build like a train in a tunnel that sucks. That's easy. You can do that Exactly. It's all pretty well. It takes a concerted political Effort and will to make the world a better and more livable place. Oh, we're all fucked only requires two countries

The united states and great britain. Fuck Shit Maybe we can do it. Maybe we can do like canada and ireland. I don't know I don't know I hate this place. Oh my god. All right Well, we're gonna do a segment on this podcast that we have On safety third Shake hands for danger

All right handwritten notes Today today is a printed notes printed notes Today is a um theater themed Safety third. Oh no theater people terrify me because like all of the like Non-acting theater personnel. We've talked about this before like Terrifying terrifying people who have like because like this is collect knife guys. Yes They're like, yeah, I I actually need this

Absolutely menacing looking folding machete, which I'm gonna unfold in front of you for my job dropping You know 200 pound sandbags on top of people all day. Oh, I all have the most insane knives, but they're like harmless people Yeah, yeah, my girlfriends is at theater tech. So yeah, that's why I like about her Go to horny gel and you get a sandbag dumped on you I No comment some of some elaborate Some kind of elaborate finish physically punishing but very comedic

series of rope mishaps um Been that speaking of which that's today's safety third Hello to the wtyp crew. I have a story myself Be nice to the people who submit safety thirds. Well, we depressed him is the thing. Yeah I have a story about how I narrowly escaped to death I don't think I've come closer since I am well out of this career now and for good reason My bachelor's degree is in theater with a concentration in lighting design

As an undergrad I did some lighting technician over hire at high school theaters and local professional theaters I would be part of an over hire crew that would go into a space and with the help of the permanent staff Change over the theatrical lighting to the designer's specs for the next show Fuck that. I don't want to do it. I'm not climbing out on a gantry I'm not gonna do that either. Yeah, someone's gotta do it. I'm not gonna do that In my freshman year one such job was at a private high school in canada kid The crew was myself my classmate a couple of high school students And the on staff technical director the td

This was one of my first gigs and having only done here theater in a high school capacity Mostly run by teachers in the english department. I had little conception of what good safety practices look like in the workplace I did not know which practices to avoid My classmate being in a same a similar year Was in a similar position And a theater was pretty nice it had about 400 500 seats It had a counterweight system over the stage for flying scenic elements Lighting and so on please see attached diagram the illustrated. I do see attached diagram

The illustrated perspective is from the stage view looking out into the audience Right, so the seats are so that stage right. Yeah, the seats are back here with all the happy people, right? There they are there's only three people. This is an unpopular show How it my one woman show has been called stupid and annoying How it works you attach stuff like lights and scenery to the baton That's that's this the pipe. You see where the leader goes. I'm just redrawing the existing leader Um, this is attached to the counterweight arbor um

Down here down here. Hold them right. Oh counterweight arbor down here. Okay Through a series of cables and pulleys or blocks, right? Uh pig iron bricks are stacked into the arbor which runs along lubricated tracks attached to the side wall Um, so I guess yeah Like an elevator Yeah, like an elevator. It was a pulley, right? But You can pull on the operating rope To make the baton go up and down probably 70 feet total either from the floor or operating galley

There's a lever lock, but those locks however have uh worn Break pads for a lack of a better term, right? In this case, I guess Now there's about 30 sets of this in this theater. Uh, the baton that we started with that day had lights on, right? We had replaced them all with a new set The td instructs my classmate to go to the operating galley to dog bone that operating line. Excuse me. Well, if you insist There's an parentheses here back to that. I can't say the joke that I want to say because it would be libeling a british twitter guy, but uh I recently started progesterone and we shouldn't be using this terminology

The Technical director unlocks the rope rock and shots on in on 18 mid denoting the baton number and rough location on stage Uh, the students were up near the back wall sorting through the lights we needed. I'm A little bit confused here. So there's a whole bunch of these I'm Okay, oh, oh, so there's a bunch of them. Oh, I see. Okay. I see this picture here So the td pulls in the baton at a steady pace the arbor pops out

And the baton is about shoulder height He locks the rope right At this point the procedure should have been Number one clear the area unload all weight bricks from that arbor from the loading gallery The system is baton heavy, but it can't go anywhere Number two remove the lights from the baton attach new lights Number three clear the area and add the weight needed weight back to the arbor

The process of adding a removing weight is a normal occurrence But it grinds all work on stage to a halt as everyone has to leave So if you don't really care about safety, you can get away with doing one weight change Enter dog bone Enter dog bone The term dog bone like many things in theater comes from the maritime field This modified practice involves taking a short length of iron pipe Sticking it between the two halves of the operating loop

And twisting to make a tension braid Ultimately wedging the pipe against the arbor track Just jam a fucking like pry bar in there and twist it around Uh-huh and twist it around. It's the most dangerous shit I've ever had If you're thinking ballista Yes, my poor ignorant classmate under the direction of an idiot had created one half of one siege weapon Oh my god, it was a siege warfare episode that reminded me of this whole thing. Oh, yeah that time I got shot at with a ballista I

We have such fucking weird listeners, man. We think we're weird We do an episode about siege weaponry and somebody is like, oh, yeah, I got shot out with one of those I I was um, I was thinking earlier. You mentioned, uh asparagus In reference to charles de gall someone just sent in a safety third about asparagus so Thank you fans I had seen this practice before so I thought nothing of it. There are definitely safer strategies to deal with

Um out of balance systems, but this one is quick and also very bad Hmm Like come loose drop the drop the baton full of lights on you But also it can shoot an iron bar rounds across the stage like chain shot Sitter than our battlefields My classmate comes down remove half the lights from the baton the system is probably 200 pounds out of balance at this point uh Some time passes and we hear a metal thunk of the dog bone slipping

The baton springs up like one of those slingshot rides Which is followed by the intense rushing sound of the arbor dropping at top speed The baton hits the loft blocks up at the top Uh, no grid structure here is depicted in the diagram and the arbor bottom bottoms out against the supporting structure of the system Followed lastly by a shower of glass shards from the remaining lights nice Everyone but my classmate was away from the action, but he had the good sense to leap away quickly

Nobody was injured, but definitely shaken a fair deal The force of the arbor bent the bottom supporting structure downward a good couple inches And there were horizontal wooden bumper rails that the arbor sits on in the lowest position They were thoroughly crushed and splintered upwards Um the top half of the arbor sagged forward slightly bent nice The day should have ended right there, but we hadn't had enough fun yet remember kids

hit the bricks My memory is very fuzzy at this point The next thing I remember is seeing the technical director absolutely tear into the arbor base with a hand grinder In attempt to free it from the mangled metal of the bottom structure, but but when you free it, it's gonna It's gonna come Alice don't think about it. Right. So I'm I'm a little bit confused here is the so so the Okay, so the batten is up and the arbor is back down, right? Yes. Okay Right he all it's wedged in there on the bottom. He's trying to cut it free

If he does cut it free uh My concern here is that it is going to like fly up and this man is going to get hit in the face With a a thing full of like pig iron bricks Good point. Yeah Well, he alternated between taking weight off the arbor and grinding. Oh So if it wasn't heavier before or wasn't lighter before it is slowly becoming lighter Yes, the rest of us were sticking to the back wall

I left to go to the bathroom and came back Uh, the door was out by the left side wall and roughly in the same plane as the batten There was about six feet of space between the left side wall of the stage and the end of the batten's So you can walk along the walls and be safe I relieved myself and came back through the door I was aware to stick to the wall, but at the moment I stepped through the threshold the arbor came free The td had taken weight off so the system was now batten heavy Q another rush of arbor travel as the batten flew downwards at such speed that the landing curtains couldn't prevent it from bottoming out

When it did it came within four to five feet of my skull before bouncing slightly and coming to a definite rest More glass shattered and came loose from the lights I was frozen in place and the technical director was enraged Again, miraculously no one was injured Everyone walked away unscathed that day Sorry, but this this this reader this uh, this viewer did survive a sort of hitman assassination opportunity here I was about have you wronged this technical director in some way that you're aware of You either causing a comical sort of loony tunes theater death. Yeah

Getting an entire light rig dropped directly on your head After having it almost murder you on the way up it almost murders you on the way down. Yeah The theater director became excuse me technical director became preoccupied with trying to clean up his own mess at this point Probably panicking about getting fired over the potentially criminal levels of negligency displayed My classmate and I told the students they should leave immediately We then do the same and we never went back A few hours after writing this story my dad called me and told me that according to the state treasury department I was I am owed roughly 200

250 dollars to back pay for this very gig Probably because I was too shook to go back and pick up my check I'm still pretty spooked about that phone call, but I assure you I will be collecting my fucking pay Chairs no name provided labor is entitled to all it creates And possibly destroys Don't work in the theater. It's dangerous. Don't work in the theater. It's dangerous This makes me feel really great about my girlfriend that works in the theater. Thanks

Which is probably a more more more dangerous to others than she is to herself It's like sharks, you know, they're more scared of you than you are of them Yeah So, um, our next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? We have a live show you can you can pay money to get into the the live stream for it Yeah, you can't get into the show because we are sold out But that's right. Probably would have been a wise decision to announce the show After the episode we're coordinating that we would have we would have sold out even faster. Um, yes

Also, I have a podcast called trash. Ucha. I have a podcast called kill james bond Tori, where can the people find you? Where can they read your work? They can find me on twitter at mikudu bayahina Which is hell. Yeah, terrible twitter name But uh, they can find me there. They can find me at the drive.com. I'm writing a story called the fans cotton. It'll express And that's my series about traveling across the u.s in a right hand drive toiota van Um, which is why I'm currently broadcasting from a backyard in la. It's my van broke because I drove up a mountain and then broke it um

I'm also at jalopnik hemmings motor one I have an article going live at automotive map my personal website is trustthemachine.com There's a lot of places you can find me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, it was my pleasure. Oh my god Send me all those links so I can put them in the description Legitimately like I so on this red trip. I mostly listen to music Oh Well, I'm driving to the american west because I don't have a lot of cell signal. I mean like this is mostly a solitary trip Take them without you know

Modern conveniences that's the whole goal um, but I do listen to this podcast a lot So it was really truly an honor to be on I Early enjoyed it Thank you for coming. Oh, yeah. Thank you for coming on. It was good. It was fun My pleasure I yeah, I I'm I'm a little bit reticent about having to listen to this episode because I have to hear my own voice

It's all I feel all the time, buddy. Don't worry. It doesn't get any better No, I know that's a trans woman thing though. It's like I have to hear my voice and it's like I've been training this shit for Six months and it is not anymore Like passable You sound great cut her mic cut her mic You know, you know what you know, I got I got another depressing note to end on Oh, good the last

remnant of the sst era was the seattle supersonics You ironically became the oklahoma city thunder in 2008. Yes, man. That really is ironic They outlasted the concord And in the city with the the sonic booms, they became the oklahoma city thunder. That's like a fucking John Boyce level of like

tying it back together One of the few authors that I truly like has inspired me on this trip. John Boyce. I imagine planning I'm planning to go to seattle to go to the uh, the old marliners Mariners Yeah, that wherever they got the The uh metal baseball player at a lo's Where they've bent back the bat That's where I'm planning to go. I already did my homage to um, hunter s. Thompson when I

Blew out my alternator on top of the mountain had to drive home with no headlights 11. Yeah Yeah, so I figured this when I get to uh, I get to see out allowed me a jamboy uh homage We'll see if I can do it John Boyce as in w e b I don't know how to pronounce his name. We'd love to get him If he's ever on the show invite me again just so I can say hi and then just cut my feed

Alice and ross we have serious business after we uh cut so well in that case No, fuck. No, it's not that serious. Uh, Liam's leaving the show. We're replacing him with Joe Cossabian Jokes on you motherfucker. I am Joe Cossabian. I'm Joe Cossabian Right. I've I've become Joe Joe Cossabianified. All right I've grown two inches and I'm covered in tattoos by my book All right. It's a little more. Yeah by Joe Cossabian's book actually. All right. All right. Bye everybody We have done Thanks for man