Grantville Gazette, Volume XII

by Eric Flint

  "It probably would have cost Bell millions to jump through all the hoops the FAA would have wanted. For what? Maybe a thousand sales a year and liability down the line if someone blew the maintenance requirements and got themselves killed." Farrell shook his head. "I'd lay five to two that the bean-counters got hold of it and said, 'Don't bother.' Once that happened, well, they never took off because if you owned a plane you could buy pontoons but you couldn't buy this ACLG stuff."

  "That's not the real question," Magdalena interrupted. "The real question is 'can we do it'?"

  Maria pulled another file from her case. This one consisted of a report she had made after interviewing Neil O'Connor, who had turned out to be something of a creep. Neil was the proud owner of a home-built hovercraft that he had built after the Ring of Fire. After his discharge from the Army—a discharge he and his family didn't discuss—he used it to provide rapid transport down the Saale River. Because it was a hovercraft, it didn't care how shallow the water in the Saale was. It went right over sand bars without even noticing them. He could get you from Grantville to Halle in half a day. And right now the railroads were looking like they were going to put him out of business in the next year or so.

  Neil was probably going to be needing a job any time now, and building air cushion landing gear might well be his out. That hadn't kept him from hitting on Maria from the moment they had met. He was one of those up-timer guys that figured any down-timer girl would just naturally be thrilled to be his latest conquest. However, if Maria had it right, they were going to need Neil even more than he needed them. While simple in principle, air cushions weren't all that simple in practice. They weren't just skirts but a sort of a cross between skirts and leaky balloons. The design had to push the air inward.

  Neil's air cushion was a series of tubes pointing at the ground, placed in a circle around the outer edge of his craft. There were two layers of plywood above that, with a gap between them. The fan was set into the top layer of plywood. When the fan was turned on the air was spread between the two layers of plywood and escaped from there into the tubes which inflated. The tubes formed an inward curving ring around the craft and as the air was forced through them it much of it escaped into the area surrounded by the ring.

  The way Neil explained it, there were three levels of pressure. The lowest pressure was the air outside the hovercraft. The highest was the air in the tubes and between the two layers of plywood. The middle pressure was in the area below the plywood bottom and surrounded by the inflated tubes. It was the way the air had to flow that kept the skirt of the hovercraft from blowing up like Marilyn Monroe's skirt in The Seven Year Itch. Neil had leered at her when he said that part.

  The tubes were made of oiled leather, with removable thicker bits at the bottom where the worst wear was. Neil generally had to change out one or more of the extensions every trip, which was one of the reasons why his service was so expensive.

  Maria hesitated but she was a professional. "There is another option."

  Farrell looked at her and smiled encouragement, so she continued. "Hydrofoils. Herr Bell, inventor of the telephone, was working on hydrofoil landing gear from the beginning of the twentieth century. While it's clear that he got hydrofoils to work, I have not been able to see any case of a plane actually taking off using them. I have no idea why but I think they didn't work." After some discussion—and over Georg's objections—they decided to go with the air cushion landing gear. The Time article was proof that it did actually work.

  * * *

  The problem with air cushion landing gear became apparent as soon as they started to seriously look at it in terms of something designed to leave the ground. Once the ground was taken away the air escaped almost instantly, the skirt deflated and stayed deflated till the plane landed. Not till it was going to land, until it was on the ground. They worried over that a lot. It was the Time article that finally came to the rescue. "Bag down and inflated," the pilot had said. The air cushion on the plane up-time wasn't a skirt, not even a fancy skirt. It was a bag.

  Building the Monster

  January 1635

  The ACLG required several changes in the design of the aircraft. The lower wings were shortened and their width increased. They became short stubby things, barely forty feet wide. The upper wings were increased in length. The Monster began to look less like the Ilya Muromets. While all this was going on, Georg was working out the thousands of details that go into making an aircraft. Where the control runs would go, how to save weight and drag while increasing lift.

  Georg really wanted to use monocoque construction and mostly he did, but not all of it could be built that way. The materials he had to work with would actually increase the weight if he tried to make a pure monocoque plane. There were places where internal supports would be needed to save weight. But he spent weeks balancing the numbers to determine just where the internal supports had to go, where he could use the shape of the plane to provide the support. The good news turned out to be the engines. Though water-cooled, they were lighter than expected, if weaker than he wanted. He refined his estimates, did drawings, changed things around, did more drawings, refined his estimates again.

  He got in knockdown drag-out fights with Magdalena over weight versus cost, which didn't help his love life any. Lost some, won others, redesigned again. After that he got in knockdown drag-out fights with Farrell, Hans, Karl and the guys in the shop over how to build each and every component. How to make the forms, how to angle the fabric, how much of which glue and resin to use, in what mixture.

  Testing and Turnover

  "Bag motor on." The putt-putt of the small lawn tractor engine that powered the two fans and inflated the ACLG was loud in the cabin. Farrell looked over at Magdalena and grinned.

  He put the engine in gear. "Bag inflating." Farrell looked out the window and saw the large leather bag balloon out below the plane. He waited till the plane lifted on the air cushion, and he started the left inboard engine. The plane started to spin. They hadn't realized just how little drag there would be. He managed to kill the engine but not before the plane had made a full half circle and not before he had scared the heck out of himself and Magdalena. He felt a thump as Georg apparently leapt onto the plane. The door opened. "Magdalena, are you all right?"

  Neil was sitting off to the side laughing his ass off. It rapidly became apparent that after checking to make sure she was all right, Georg's next intended destination was to murder Neil. Farrell almost let him. Air cushion landing gear apparently didn't include brakes. And air, it turns out, is more slippery than any grease.

  * * *

  "We'll have to work out some sort of procedure to handle it," Magdalena said. "Start the engines with the props feathered."

  "It will take more than that, I'm betting," Farrell countered. "Each engine will be a little different. They'll idle at different speeds. What we're looking at is having to fly the plane from the moment the engines come on."

  "Kickstands." Georg snapped his fingers. "Kickstands, like on the bicycles in town. One about twenty feet out on either wing. And maybe one near the tail. They'll have to be retractable. And they won't work on the water or even on muddy ground, but even if you land on water you should be able to taxi onto solid ground."

  "But what about water and muddy ground?" Farrell pointed at the four levers that were the thrust controls for the four main engines. "We need something that will let us adjust the thrust on each engine to match the thrust on all the other engines. We'll need it in the water as well as on a runway."

  They tried several things before settling on what amounted to an anchor. Near the tail, a retractable tail skid provided drag. Since the drag point was well back from the engines, uneven thrust twisted the plane less. It wasn't a perfect solution but it was workable.

  * * *

  Another day, another test, and this time the Monster only slewed a bit back and fourth as Farrell brought up the engines. When Magdalena retracted the tail skid, off they we
nt. The surprising thing was how fast it picked up speed till the air drag matched the engine thrust. They started to bounce a bit when the air speed indicator read twenty-five mph, which was before they were supposed to. Farrell gave it a bit more power and at thirty-two indicated air speed, they were off the ground. And drifting left. Farrell adjusted the flaps and the engines again.

  It handled like a barge. Slow and steady. You turned the wheel and it took a while for the plane to turn. Banks weren't just slow, they were physically difficult. The Monster had a lot of wing and a lot of flaps and no power-steering. In fact, it took both of them to bank it to any great degree. They made a slow circuit around the field and landed.

  After that came the water landings. Any stretch of water a hundred feet wide was a landing field. Well, two hundred feet wide. Or a body of water that didn't have trees or too steep a bank.

  Fields were landing fields, too, and they didn't have to worry about rocks unless the rocks were three feet tall.

  Each flight brought them closer to the final turnover of the plane to Trans European Airlines. Each flight used more of the gasoline-methanol mix that they had adjusted the engines to take.

  Testing completed, TEA paid the final delivery payment. It was a great deal of money. Markgraf and Smith Aviation was in the passenger plane business.

  TransEuropean Airlines

  The Wietze Oil Field

  Since its creation in 1633, TEA had been an airline without any airplanes. All outgo, no income. Arrangements had been made, deals agreed to, money spent—all on the basis of Magdalena's promises and the investors hopes. Now they had a plane. They needed fuel. Well, gasoline. They had the alcohol stations. But they had been unable to contract for much gasoline until they could show a working aircraft.

  On a sunny Thursday afternoon, the oil men at Wietze looked up into a clear blue sky and saw a plane. It wasn't the first they had seen, but it was the biggest.

  The manager came out to see. As did Duke George of Calenburg, who owned the oil fields. The manager was impressed, Magdalena could tell, but not nearly as impressed as the duke.

  "There they are." Magdalena climbed down from the plane and helped an older gentleman down after her. The older gentleman was Vrijeer van Bradt. And Vrijeer van Bradt was here to buy gasoline. Lots of gasoline. He wanted it shipped to various places in and out of the use and he wanted to make arrangements for some to be carried by the Jupiter itself.

  If it wasn't carrying much of anything else the Monster could carry close to three hundred gallons of gasoline. When mixed eighty five gallons of methanol to fifteen gallons of gasoline that came out to seventeen hundred gallons of aviation fuel. Enough for fourteen three-hundred-mile trips.

  Van Bradt looked at the approaching men, then looked at all the people who had stopped working to watch. He rubbed his hands together. "Time to, how do they say? Oh, yes. Let's make a deal."

  * * *

  The first trip to Venice was just the three of them: Magdalena, the copilot, Johan, and Vrijeer van Bradt, along with a bunch of extra gasoline. As luck would have it, they arrived three days after Pope Urban. They hadn't had any intent to upstage the man, since they hadn't known that he was going to be there. The neat thing was he came out and looked at the Monster and blessed it. The official name of the plane was the Jupiter. But it's real name had come about when Colonel Jesse Wood had come by for a visit, taken one look at it and said "What a monster." From then on, no matter what Georg said, it was the Monster.

  They spent three weeks in Venice that first trip and a week in Bolzano with Claudia de' Medici. Now that a real live plane was part of the deal, they could work out the details of the agreements they'd previously made. Magdalena came away convinced that Claudia was one smart cookie. The deal they had worked out had real advantages for TEA and Claudia.

  Among other things, it just about guaranteed them full cargo loads because Claudia got half-price for standby cargo transport. If they didn't have a full load, they stopped at Bolzano and carried what she wanted, carried it at about the cost of the flight. In exchange for which Claudia provided docking facilities and didn't charge tariff on what they carried. At the end of the year if they hadn't carried at least the required amount of her stuff, or offered to, they paid her a fee.

  Three months later

  Magdalena glanced back at her passengers who were crowding the portholes on the right side of the plane and over at her co-pilot. Their navigation had been just a touch off this trip. It looked like they would pass about a mile to the east of Munich, closer than the five to ten miles on most trips. They were also a bit light this time. Their passengers were two Venetian merchants who had business in Grantville, and Claudia de' Medici, who was taking one of her free flights.

  Magdalena grinned. This was still a very new thing and it was a first flight for all of their passengers. While their ceiling was higher, they were flying at about three thousand feet to facilitate sightseeing. One of the merchants pointed out a feature of Munich that he recognized. The other apparently missed it.

  Claudia de' Medici spoke up. "Signorina de Passe, might we go around again to get a better look?"

  Magdalena looked over at Johan and shrugged. He shrugged back. They knew relations between Duke Maximilian were in the dumps, but heck. They weren't doing anything, just flying over. She started a slow right turn that would take them around Munich and if they lost a bit of altitude in the turn, that was all to the good. It made for better sightseeing.

  * * *

  On the ground, a captain of the duke's guard cursed. They were rubbing it in. The duke had been livid every time they flew near Munich. Now it seemed they wanted to rub salt into the wound, and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. At least, at first he thought there wasn't, but as they circled they got closer and lower.

  The captain started shouting, "Load with canister! All cannons! And double the charge!" That got him a questioning look from the sergeant but they did it right enough. It took a couple of minutes for the plane to make the circuit around Munich and by the time they did, they had dropped to eighteen hundred feet and were less than half a mile from the wall. By that time, His Grace had arrived and the captain had the guns aimed at a point in space he thought the plane would fly through.

  * * *

  "What are they doing there on the wall?" Claudia de' Medici asked, just as the puffs of white smoke appeared.

  It wasn't a golden bb, not even a silver one. The cannons missed entirely; no single bit of shot from those guns came within a hundred yards of the plane. They were much lower and closer to the cannons than they should have been, and the Monster was a big, slow-moving plane. Still, it wasn't close enough or slow-moving enough—or, most especially—low enough, to be hit by cannon fire. They weren't, however, far enough away to avoid being frightened by it.

  What it actually was, was a loose copper fuel line, combined with suddenly ramming the throttles to their stops. The fuel line on the right inboard engine came loose and sprayed the hot engine with fuel. Johan had already kicked the rudder over and started to reverse his bank by the time the fuel line came loose. The engine didn't catch fire; there was fuel and oxygen in plenty but in spite of the heat of the engine, there wasn't a spark.

  As the engine died, the torque of the left side engines was no longer balanced by the right side engines. The plane started a right roll and right yaw, bringing it closer to Munich and lower. Magdalena and Johan struggled with the controls. Neither of them were what an up-timer would call qualified. They had more time in the Monster than anyone else, but it was still only a few hundred hours. They had very little experience flying with one engine dead and none at all with it happening suddenly out of the blue.

  "The right inboard engine is out," Magdalena shouted. While Johan tried to remember what he was supposed to do. Some of it was obvious they were rolling right, so stick left. They were also yawing right, so left rudder.

  Johan noticed that all the engines were at their max. Ma
gdalena must have done it. Then what Magdalena had shouted penetrated and he cut the fuel to the right inboard engine. While Magdalena was holding the stick left, he throttled back on the left engines.

  "Take the stick, Johan. I've got to adjust the trim."

  * * *

  It took a few minutes and almost five hundred feet to get everything as well balanced as they could. Magdalena pulled out a pencil and started doing sums. The Monster could fly with three engines. At least, with its tanks half empty. But three engines delivered unbalanced thrust, so the right outboard engine was being run full out.

  They couldn't do that with the left side engines or they would end up going around in circles. As it was, they had the left inboard engine at about fifty-five percent power and the left out board at eighty-five percent. The rudder was almost all the way over and they were in a slight left hand bank to keep from slipping right. All of which meant that they were using about twenty percent more fuel than they should be using at this point in their trip.

  They weren't in any danger of crashing, not as long as the right outboard motor held. They would just run out of fuel before they got to Frankfurt. As long as the left outboard motor held. They were stressing the heck out of it. The engine wasn't designed to handle that sort of RPM on a constant basis.

  They had time before the fuel shortage became critical, but they needed that engine fixed. Normally, they would put down in a field or on a lake or river to fix an engine. It had happened a couple of times before and was generally no real problem. But to do it where people pulled up cannons and shot at you just for flying over seemed unwise. This was not a place where you wanted to land even for a few minutes and they didn't know how long the repair would take.