A Jog Around the Blogs

• Bobbi goes on a Prohibition-era wikiwander...


• "No longer a skull full of mush."


• Dodging the cynicism bullet, so far.

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Lycoming

Over on Facebook, John Correia was tickled by the fact that the Auburn 852 Phaeton in the previous post had a Lycoming engine, what with John being a private pilot and Lycoming being best known these days as a provider of engines for general aviation aircraft.

What I learned while digging up info on the car was pretty interesting. Lycoming's roots go back to a Nineteenth Century sewing machine manufacturer that had, by the fin de siècle, diversified into the typical array of Second Industrial Revolution manufactured mechanical goods: bicycles, typewriters, et cetera.

In 1907, in the middle of the economic contraction surrounding the Panic of 1907, the company was sold and restructured. Sewing machines not being as profitable as they had been, it stuck its corporate toe in the growing market for automobile engines. (In those early days cars were assembled from pieces by engine makers and coach builders, generally. Those "Body by Fisher" emblems on the scuff plates of your Grandma's Bonneville were a vestige of that.)

After the Great War, Lycoming had grown to become, among other things, pretty much the sole source provider of engines to the luxury trio of Auburn, Cord, & Duesenberg, enough so that E.L. Cord bought the company and brought it under his corporate umbrella. At the time, aviation was experiencing the same explosive growth that the automobile industry had been twenty years earlier, and Cord got Lycoming involved in developing engines for his new aero endeavors.

And now you know the rest of the story!

In the late '30s, Cord consolidated Lycoming and its other aviation assets under the "AVCO Lycoming" umbrella, which is still around and has been known to make a gas turbine or two.

Trial By Fire

The Su-25 "Frogfoot" is the Russian analog to the USAF's A-10*, a close support aircraft intended to operate low and slow and rely on armor and countermeasures to protect it from ground fire and SAMs.

They had a reputation for toughness from their performance in Afghanistan, but fighting against insurgents who get the occasional crate of Stingers from the CIA isn't really the same as close air support in contested airspace over the Fulda Gap if you know what I mean.

The Russo-Ukrainian war is the closest thing we've had to real peer combat with modern arms in a while, and the "low, slow armored tankbuster" concept is taking a beating.

*Actually, it's more similar to the Northrop YA-9, the Warthog's main competitor in the A-X competition.

Musical Interlude

Marzhan Kapsamat, a 23-year-old musician, is playing in Lake Köbeituz, a salt lake in Kazakhstan that turns pink every several years. pic.twitter.com/8UfEzk9VE8

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) October 29, 2022

Here's the Wikipedia article on Lake Köbeituz. She's playing a dombra.

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Mystery planes...

Scoping out the Sukhoi factory in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, I was puzzled by the small planes with broad, swept wings and what appeared to be high engines. I couldn't figure out what they were, so I googled around and found the answer: A neat little Beriev amphibian, the Be-103.

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I hate it when that happens.

I'd had a Wikipedia tab open to the entry on Fort Mandan for so long...a couple months, at least...that I'd completely forgotten what I'd planned to do with it.

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Unexpected.

Today in completely unexpected Wikipedia articles:

Fishing industry in Switzerland

Yesterday in its little "Did you know..." trivia panel, Wikipedia served up the apocryphal-sounding tidbit that the Swiss fishery boomed in the Fifties after a fisherman discovered an industrial potato peeler would make two perfect filets out of a perch. I don't know the veracity of this, but I want it to be true.

I hope the Swiss navy guards its fisheries zealously!

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An ugly bird.

The marabou stork is not the most fetching of avians.

"I heard that!"

As with most birds with largely featherless noggins, it's adapted for a lifestyle that involves a lot of time spent with its head stuck inside of corpses. Can't get your feathers all covered in clotted nastiness if you don't have any.

Most storks eat fish and frogs and the like and are far more attractive animals. Another thing I'm reminded every time I see them is how enormous marabous are. Wingspans in the 7-9 foot range are apparently the norm.

"Are you still talking about me?"

Apparently they've become common dump pests in sub-Saharan Africa:

"Increasingly, marabous have become dependent on human garbage and hundreds of the huge birds can be found around African dumps or waiting for a hand out in urban areas. Marabous eating human garbage have been seen to devour virtually anything that they can swallow, including shoes and pieces of metal. Marabous conditioned to eating from human sources have been known to lash out when refused food."

That sounds positively unnerving, because these are some big-ass birds.

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Trippy Triplane

In the course of trying to chase down info on the Supermarine Nighthawk the other day, I stumbled across this oddity:

That's the Lloyd 40.08 Luftkreuzer ("Air Cruiser"), a three-motored triplane intended as a long range strategic bomber to more effectively hit back at the Italians, whose own Caproni trimotors were bombing the Habsburg Empire almost at will. Some madman has scratchbuilt one in 1/72nd scale.

To get a feel for the nature of the Austro-Hungarian air campaign against Italy, I recommend the adventures of the fictional Otto Prohaska in The Two-Headed Eagle: In Which Otto Prohaska Takes a Break as the Habsburg Empire's Leading U-boat Ace and Does Something Even More Thanklessly Dangerous.

Basically, the Luftfahrtruppen were a hot mess, facing an uphill fight against their own military culture as well as production limitations caused by the relatively backwards nature of the empire's industrial base.

Wartime production totaled 5,180 airplanes for four years of war; by comparison, Austria-Hungary's major foe, Italy, built about 18,000 in three years.

Philly Connection

Depending on what runway is in use and the weather, you can usually get a good look at the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in Philadelphia, as well as the drydocks of Philly Shipyard, when you're on short final into PHL.

Mostly a bunch of Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates waiting to be given up to the breakers or perhaps friendly foreign navies who need a hull on the cheap.

Although the little huddle of three ship-ettes there on the right is interesting. Those are the three Cyclone-class patrol ships that are apparently going to a foreign buyer.

...and a bit of Googling tells me that this is the USNS Charlton, a Watson-class vehicle cargo ship, in the Philly Shipyard for an overhaul. 950 feet long and a 106-foot beam is a big ship, which should give you an idea of the size of that dydock. The Watson class are built right to the Panamax limits.

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Early Evolution in Aerial Warfare

While military technologies like submarines, armored vehicles, and aerial bombing had made appearances in larval form before, World War One saw their first effective mass application.

German bombing of English cities started in 1915 and immediately posed a problem, since air-to-air combat was in its infancy. There was an outcry to Do Something, but what could be done?

"Then we saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a gleaming of clouds: high up, like a bright golden finger, quite small (...) Then there was flashes near the ground – and the shaking noise. It was like Milton — then there was war in heaven. (...) I cannot get over it, that the moon is not Queen of the sky by night, and the stars the lesser lights. It seems the Zeppelin is in the zenith of the night, golden like a moon, having taken control of the sky; and the bursting shells are the lesser lights." -D.H. Lawrence

"Hey, go get shot by a Maxim gun because there's not much we can do about the bombs" isn't much of a morale boost, but in those early days it was extremely difficult to down a zeppelin. 

The German airships operated at 9,000 feet or more, and the most common British biplane in the home islands, the B.E.2a, took nearly an hour to get to that altitude. Once there, it had barely a 10mph advantage over the zeppelins, making for impossible stern chases unless it had been vectored right into the path of its target.

Further, the zeppelin was protected by defensive gun positions in its gondolas.

One solution suggested was for a plane that would patrol at altitude, like a destroyer picket looking for intruding enemy ships.

Meet the Supermarine Nighthawk...

No faster than the B.E.2a, and taking an equally interminable time to climb to altitude, it was supposed to (at least according to the design brief) have the endurance to orbit up there for nine hours or more.

In the nose was a steerable searchlight, powered by a separate gasoline genset, maybe the first airborne auxiliary power unit. Above the top wing was a gunner with a 37mm recoilless gun with which to engage targets.

It failed to live up to performance expectations and the engines were terrifically unreliable and, by the time it finally flew in 1917, there were conventional fighters like the SE.5a which had the speed and altitude to intercept zeppelins conventionally. Besides, the slow and obsolescent B.E.2's had already been successfully shooting down the dirigibles by using an upward-firing Lewis gun loaded with incendiary ammo.

It sure did look steampunk, though.

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Messy Used Plane Lot?

It's like some giant kid in Bolivia forgot to pick up his toy airplanes...

There are a bunch of areas at Jorge Wilstermann airport in Cochabamba where the planes look like they've just been shoved into a corner. There are a few clusters and singletons parked in weird places at the La Paz airport, too. This might be the aftermath of the demise of Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano.

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Virtuality

So, it all started with a beautiful photo essay in the NYT on the coconut crab trade on Makatea in French Polynesia. With the phosphate mine closed, it said the population on the atoll has dwindled from over a thousand to about eighty permanent residents. Though there's hope for tourism, a major export right now is coconut crabs.

The crab hunters have to traverse a moonscape of extraction pits, most of them seven and a half feet across and fifty to seventy-five feet deep, at night, to go check the crab traps in the best hunting grounds. You can see this wild terrain from space.

That looks like a pretty sporty walk in the woods.

Anyway, that led me to the Wikipedia article on coconut crabs, which led me to the one on Christmas Island, which led me to virtually browsing the shelves at the Christmas Island Supermarket.

They've got a pretty good selection of Pantene, Oreos, and Knob Creek, if that's your thing. America turns up in the weirdest places.

Wandering around far-flung corners of the world via Googlesat and Street View is a pretty interesting time killer, actually.

One of the more engrossing streetscapes I've found is Iquitos in Peru. It's not connected to the rest of Peru by road or rail and can only be reached by air or by freighter up the Amazon. Because of that, cars and trucks are relatively uncommon, and the city swarms with motorcycles and motorized trikes.

I remember scanning around it by satellite and Street View and chatting with Bobbi...

Me: "Man, the better parts of town I've found all have extensive bars on doors and porches and have a sort of run down look like the scruffier parts of New Orleans. I guess the war against mildew is tough when your city has the climate of a shower stall. The bad parts of town look like Mogadishu without the bullet holes. It's like there's not a nice neighborhood."

RX: "Keep looking. The mayor has to live somewhere."

Today's GoogleSat find...

I was steering the GoogleSat view around southern Germany and ran across this oddity parked out front of the Dornier museum...

I wondered what it was...and what was up with those big long wingtip nacelles.

Turns out they're full of lift! That's one of the surviving Dornier Do-31 VTOL transport prototypes.

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Satellite View

Noodling around the satellite view in Google Maps for interesting driving routes to and from the general Philadelphia area, I detoured the camera south for an aerial look at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds just across the state line.

There on the grounds of the proving grounds is Phillips Army Airfield, which has an interesting little boneyard in its southwest corner.

There are a bunch of A-7's, C-12's, U-8's, all manner of helicopters, a lonely C-123, various other stuff, and...hello...what's this?

Pretty sure that's a Mi-24, Mi-2(?), a few MiG-21's, and something pointy-nosed and single engined and about the length of an Mi-24, so maybe a MiG-23?

Pretty cool!

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The Tale of the Vanishing Air Force

Albania's story during the Cold War era is an interesting one. Occupied by Italy immediately before World War Two, it spent the war like the rest of the Balkans, a swirl of guerrilla warfare where bands of partisans, both communist and anti-communist, chased each other and the fascist occupiers up and down hill and dale.

After the war, the Albanian communists came out on top and the country was effectively a satellite of the Soviet Union. Or at least they were until after Stalin died and Hoxha gradually decided he was more communist than the Soviets. After the breakup with the USSR, Albania was cozy with the Chinese for a while until that relationship, too, boarded the last train for Splitsville in the Seventies when Mao kicked off.

Albanian J-7 (Chinese MiG-21 clone)

This left Albania, a lightly industrialized country, smaller geographically than Maryland and with fewer people than Kansas, to try and support a fleet of over a hundred jet fighters on its own. The results were sadly predictable...

Due to the collapse of relations between Albania and the Chinese, maintenance became extremely difficult and the number of deadly incidents involving Mikoyan fighters increased. Despite Albanian efforts and some initial success in repairing the engines of the MiGs, the lack of specific jet fuel forced authorities to start production locally, resulting in low-quality production (the first attempt was in 1961, when the Kuçova factory produced the special jet kerosene called TSI). The fuel shortened the lifespan of the jet engines and was often blamed as the main reason for several deadly incidents. 35 Albanian pilots lost their lives from 1955 to 2005, mainly due to MiG mechanical failures.

I discovered this when I happened to chance across the Wikipedia page for the Albanian air force and noted it currently consisted of nothing but a handful of helicopters these days. A few years ago they basically took all their remaining high performance jet fighters (the ones that hadn't made like Texas lawn darts or been left on blocks after being stripped by black marketeers during the civil war) and put them on eBay.

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I did not know that...

They're everywhere at this time of year, these bright red leafy flowers. Somehow I'd made it this far in life without noticing that they were spelled "poinsettia", since I'd always heard them pronounced "poyn-SET-uh", which is also apparently a correct pronunciation.

Another thing I didn't know was that the name isn't some derivation of their scientific binomial nomenclature or anything like that, but rather a reference to the man who introduced them to the U.S. from their native home to the south of us. That's right, the first US ambassador to the fledgling Mexican Republic was a former South Carolina Congressman and enthusiastic amateur botanist, one Joel Roberts Poinsett.

His career arc was fascinating, with visits to Moscow, a trip through the Khanate of Kuban all the way to Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea, a bit of derring-do in South America during the War of 1812, and serving as Secretary of War during the Van Buren administration.

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Sights to See

I just finished reading The Two-Headed Eagle, the third novel of the four book Otto Prohaska series. In it, our hero...an Austro-Hungarian naval officer by vocation and a u-boat commander since the start of the Great War...is spending some time seconded to the k.u.k. Luftfahrtruppen, flying against the Italians on the Isonzo front.

The book has some vivid descriptions of the Dolomites, and I've been eagerly reading Wikipedia articles and poring over Google satellite views.

Nothing there, though, can compare to the breathtaking photos at this NYT travel piece. Makes me want to get my vacation papers in order.

Busman's Holiday

What does a research librarian do while she's laid off during the Time of the 'Rona?

Well, research.

"In the past I’ve had to remind student patrons that you can’t cite Wikipedia on research papers, and if they asked why, I never had a great answer, just something along the lines of, “Um, it’s kind of lazy, don’t you think?” But now I’d advise them to visit a Talk page or two to understand what research is. It’s not just looking online for stuff; it’s a process of assessment, of re-searching through what you’ve found to determine what’s superfluous, what’s missing and what requires thought. The nakedness of this process on Talk pages makes it accessible. Professional researchers can be precious about our work, but research is a skill we can and should all acquire, given the abundance of information and misinformation mixed up at our fingertips.

Plus, it feels great. Few things are as satisfying as uncovering a hard gem of truth in the shifting sands of opinion, politics and legend. I worked my way slowly through the Sichuan pepper entry, unraveling the truth of an assertion while waiting to hear back on job applications, adding a citation while my baby slept."

Tab Clearing...

 Time for a reduction in the number of open Wikipedia tabs...

• The Fend Flitzer, an invalid carriage (a sort of advanced early mobility scooter) that was the ancestor of the Messerschmitt Kabinenroller microcar.


• Indian removals in Indiana


• German Revolution of 1918-1919. Getcher preview here of what it looks like when Commies and Freikorps duke it out in the streets!