Fly the Friendly Skies

I saw a Concorde today. And Discovery. And Enola Gay. And a ton of Nazi planes, for some reason.

Air and Space Museum, no?

@mellbell:
The reason for that was most or all of the Nazzee planes in NASM were captured and taken back to the States for evaluation. Also a lot of Imperial Japanese aircraft for the same reason. Not many examples of either kicking around today.

NASM probably has the biggest or one of the biggest collections of Axis aircraft in the world.

ETA, they look nice, but as targets.

SFL, remember Texas International Airlines? It was the first airline I flew.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: Oh God, yes, I forgot all about them.

All I remember about Braniff is that South Park used their logo as a production-company credit in early years.

@mellbell: i’ve often wondered how fox noise would have reported WW2 and how nice they would have been to FDR. Who would they have blamed for the depression and how bad would they have imploded when FDR got re- elected 3 times after his first election? Would they treat the 2 atomic bombs like they did Obama ordering the Bin Laden hit? and of course would they have dared to call the plane that dropped the first A bomb gay?

@jwmcsame:
Never stopped a lot of GOPer friendly columnists of the day for blaming FDR for everything.

And when peace came, they were all about bombing the fuck out of the Rooshins.

In other words, not much has changed.

@jwmcsame: There was certainly an FDR Derangement Syndrome in that era. One of the sad things about reading Mencken is watching him succumb to it.

The first time I flew Braniff was on a flight chartered by my uncle to send me and some other guys on a year-long tropical vacation from San Francisco to Tan Son Nhut in May 1967. Great diet plan at that spa, too. I weighed 205 when I went and 148 when I returned.

@ManchuCandidate: Capturing and evaluating, sure, but displaying so many so prominently? It seemed odd.

@mellbell:
A lot of the Nazee stuff like the Me-262 jet fighter was a generation ahead of what the Allies flew and technologically innovative (although morally unpalatable.) It’s fortunate that the Axis were led in large part by idiots/Nazees.

I suspect that this is the museum’s way of telling visitors that without a lot of captured technology (and engineers) the US aerospace industry wouldn’t have achieved the dominance it did during the 50s-90s. The Sovs also had a bit of help from captured Nazees and technology (although they claim they didn’t need any help.)

@ManchuCandidate: Our Germans are better than your Germans.

Reminds me of a story one of my partners told me. He’s been working for Indian tribes in the legal and development front since 1972. When tribes began taking over and running federal programs themselves for the first time in the early to mid 1970s, they hired a lot of non-Indian lawyers, consultants and contractors to help get stuff done. Tribal leaders used to tell each other that “our white guys are better than your white guys.”

Back on point, I picked up an aviation magazine at the gym last week to read the story on a German guy who designed the Komet. He came to the US and had a hand in designing every delta wing plane the USAF ever has including the B-58 Hustler.

@redmanlaw:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Lippisch

I remember Braniff ads for the “Fly Me” tag line. And this…

@redmanlaw: @ManchuCandidate: Fellow aircraft geeks, there is evidence Lippisch didn’t have the influence he is usually credited with in the development of delta-wing aircraft after the war. I found this quotation in the Wiki article on the XF-92, the precursor to Convair’s Delta Dart and Delta Dagger:

“In contrast to popular myth, this aircraft and subsequent Convair delta wings owed nothing to the research of Alexander Lippisch. Convair engineers designed the delta wing before becoming aware of Lippisch’s work, using the 1944 work of Robert T. Jones on very thin delta wings. Lippisch’s thick delta wing design was tested by the NACA at Langley Research Center, where it proved completely unsuitable for transonic and supersonic flight.” This comes from a publication titled “The NACA, NASA, and the Supersonic-Hypersonic Frontier”.