“Well, I guess that means the king in the Low Countries won’t be offering us tons of money to set up shop in the Netherlands,” Farrell’s wife Mary said. “What about that Magdeburg site?”
“Magdeburg!” Georg protested. “RDA doesn’t even have Magdeburg on its flight schedule. They say there is no reason to compete with the rail line. I’ll never see Maggie in Magdeburg!”
Captain Fredric van Moris had been with His Majesty when he was still a cardinal. He had a hundred hours in the Jupiters. He had taken off five times and landed three. He had flown left seat with Magdalena van de Passe and Merton Smith. He was the most qualified pilot in the Dutch Air Force. Based on what Fredric considered to be not very good advice, His Majesty had decided that the pilots that had come over to RDA from TEA were not to be involved in the flight of the first aircraft built in the Netherlands.
The Sea Bird looked like the Jupiter 3. In fact, from a distance you would think it was a Jupiter 3 rigged for two engines instead of four. When you got closer you could see other differences. After some difficulties with the composites, they had switched doped canvas and wood. That made the body and wings lighter than a Jupiter’s, but also weaker. It had two straight six engines-made in the Netherlands at great expense-which together produced a bit over six hundred horsepower, but weighed over fifteen hundred pounds. To compensate for the weight of the engines, they had made the body of the plane as light as they thought they could get away with. However, the Sea Bird was still heavy compared to a Jupiter.
Fredric van Moris knew that the Dutch designers’ knowledge of aircraft design was imperfect but he didn’t know how significant the deficiencies were. One of the things that none of the Dutch designers realized was just how strong a shaped composite could be. It was also designed without benefit of a clear understanding of the laws of aerodynamics. Especially the cubed square law. The difficulty came from the fact that in an airplane some things scale up along a line and other things scale up along curves. Reynolds Number calculations derived from a one-twelfth scale model will work just fine for the full-scale model. Lift calculations work on the square which is nice. But weight and wing stress calculations work on the cube and that’s not nice. Not nice at all!
Captain van Moris looked at the plane with a little trepidation but mostly with pride and excitement. It looked good to him. Of course, he wasn’t an aircraft designer. He was, truth be told, barely a pilot. The Jupiters were a fairly forgiving type of aircraft. And a hundred hours was little more than twice the minimum to get a private pilot’s license up-time. He went through his preflight checks with extra care, climbed aboard and spent a few minutes checking each of his controls. Finally, he started the engines, then inflated the bag and he was off. He sped along the lake as he neared takeoff velocity. Something felt different…the wings were flexing more than they should and the aircraft felt more like it was taking off overloaded. By now, the Jupiter would be telling him that it was ready to fly. But not this bird. It was still married to the lake. When the airspeed indicator reached the indicated speed, he pulled back on the stick and it tried. He could feel it reaching for the sky and not quite grasping it. He gave it more throttle and at sixty mph indicated airspeed, the Sea Bird crawled into the sky. Captain van Moris managed to get the aircraft almost thirty feet into the air, constantly just on the edge of a stall…and that’s when the wings came off. The plane fell thirty feet onto the air cushion landing gear which compressed, taking some of the impact, then popped like a balloon.
Captain van Moris got out of the plane-barely. And swam to shore. He was very lucky. If the wings hadn’t come off when they did, he would have hit the trees on the edge of the lake.
Farrell Smith looked at the fancy embossed letter with the royal seal. Then looked at his son.
Merton nodded. “They had a blow-up, Dad. Luckily Freddy van Moris wasn’t killed. But His Majesty wasn’t happy.”
“What happened?”
“The wings came off at maybe thirty feet H over G. That’s what Freddy van Moris said. Apparently they were flapping when he left the water. I didn’t see it; the first I heard about it was when they called us in for the after-crash report. Anyway, it was a darn good thing Freddy’s a good swimmer or there’d be another name on the tower out at Grantville Airport.”
There were now forty-six names on the tower wall, each one for a person who had died in the pursuit of aviation since the Belle had flown in 1633. Thirty-seven of them had little silver wings painted beside to signify people who had died in crashes. People who had built planes that they thought would fly then tried to fly them. Apparently Freddy van Moris had come close to being number forty-seven. “Why?” Farrell asked. “Why did the wings come off?”
“Do I look like Georg or Grandpa? It was wood and canvas. I know that much. And Freddy said it looked very much like the J3. Before it came apart anyway.”
That was enough to tell Farrell Smith what had probably happened. “Wood and canvas isn’t the same as a composite. In a composite the load is spread pretty evenly. It stresses differently and needs fewer supports. Damn it, Merton, they could have asked us. We would have told them.”
Merton nodded again with a half shrug. “It’s the books. They tell you enough, enough so that you get high enough to kill you. No one is stacking eight wings on a bicycle and looking silly in a movie, like they did in our timeline. Instead they’re building delta wings powered by black powder rockets and auguring in at two hundred MPH. Stuff that makes sense and seems like it’ll work if you’ve read the books and only read the books.”
“Where did they get the engines?” Farrell asked, trying to bring the discussion back to the Dutch accident.
“They built them themselves,” Merton told him. “Big mothers. Bronze and crucible steel. I never saw them bright and shiny, just the one that they managed to fish out of the lake. That plane had to cost a fortune to build. The engines were, in essence, handmade by master craftsmen. Probably ten thousand man hours in each engine.” Merton was shaking his head over it and Farrell understood why. To hand-make an engine was more than anyone could afford to do very often. Even kings could only do it occasionally as a proof of concept or proof of wealth, but it could be done and it didn’t require the tiny industrial base that existed so far. What it did require was pot loads of money.
Farrell nodded and looked back at the letter. With the success of the Monster, orders had poured in to M amp;S Aviation. Unfortunately, planes had not poured out. The issue for M amp;S was the same as the issue for all the other aircraft manufacturers: engines or at least affordable engines. The tiny little wedge in the door that leads to the industrial revolution was producing goods, but not enough to go around. There weren’t enough factory-made engines, not for airplanes and not for anything else either.
The Gustavs under government contract had first priority, especially in terms of up-time engines. The new down-time-built radial engines were just beginning to appear and were pretty darned expensive being partly handmade themselves. M amp;S was second in line, after the government, for those because of its involvement in their development. But that didn’t mean that they got all the engines that the government didn’t want. Radials were, in theory, being built by two companies in the USE, which were in turn getting several of their parts from other companies. Swartz Aviation was where M amp;S was getting their radials. The company had produced just eight engines so far. Four of the eight had gone to the air force; the other four had put the J3 into the air. Farrell didn’t really trust them. They were prone to breakdowns, which was not a good thing in an aircraft engine. The J4 had had its design tweaked to suit the new radials after M amp;S’s experience with the J3. So, once they got another set of four engines, they had the airframe ready for them.