S2E18 - Tubes With Wings

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Have you ever pressed your face to the window in a plane as a kid and stared at the wing thinking flying shouldn't work? Have you ever sat in seat 23B with the baby crying five rows up and perfume getting reapplied three rows over and wished for just forty minutes of respite?

Of course you have. Passenger jet aviation is one of the most transformative things humanity has ever built, and most of us experience it as a tube we sit in until we arrive somewhere else. But, it wasn't always the cattle-car experience we have today.

Marc and Renee love aviation and flying and this episode traces that tube from Frank Whittle, the British inventor who patented the jet engine in 1930, to the de Havilland Comet (which kept falling out of the sky because of square windows), to Boeing betting big on a plane nobody asked for, to the Concorde flying Mach 2 over the Atlantic for twenty-seven years while burning fuel like a small country, to the 787 quietly changing what eight hours in a metal tube feels like on your body. Along the way: Juan Trippe deciding ordinary people should be allowed to fly, the 1973 oil crisis rewriting the economics of flight, and the disappointing realisation that the shower on the first-class A380 was never going to be for you.

If you have ever waved a thanks to a flight attendant who couldn't possibly see you, paid four dollars for a small bottle of water at thirty-five thousand feet, or sat through a connection in Charlotte Douglas wondering whether there is some kind of cosmic law requiring every American flight to route through there, this one's for you.

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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The first time I flew on a plane, I was 11 years old, which pushed us squarely in 1979. My family was going to Florida because we were that kind of family. And well, I was with my grandmother and my grandfather. And I was in a window seat on a Delta 727. I remember pressing my face against the glass and staring at the wing, thinking that is is this, it's physically impossible, right? Like there's a lot of people on this plane. It is really big. This is that no, no, that that wing is way too small. This tube is way too heavy. None of the math works. I'm 11. I don't know math. And can I just tell you 21? I still didn't know math. And it was still a mystery to me. So and we started rolling, and the engines did that thing where they go from a hum to like absolute insistence, and then we're off. We're off the ground. And I genuinely thought they got away with it. They actually got away with it. We're not gonna die.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Were you like William Shatner? Like looking out the window. Something's wrong. This can't be real. So I don't remember the very first time I flew. I don't remember, you know, the first time. Because I know that I flew before the first time I remember, but I just don't, you know, I I I don't remember like where I was going or anything like that. But the first real memory I have is somewhere in the early 80s. I want to say it was like 83 or something like that. Just a kid. And I'd been up in Northern California visiting my aunt and uncle and cousins, you know, summertime and you know, all that sort of thing. My parents, they decided, well, we're gonna drive back, but they left me up there, and then you know, I was gonna stay for another week or whatever. So they my aunt puts me on a plane, you know, by myself. Oh I know, as a kid, a little kid. Yeah, I was like 10 or 11 or something like that. Sac Sacramento to Ontario on on Air Cal, which doesn't exist anymore, right? It bought got bought, and and you know, I remember the livery though. And you do you remember like back in the olden days when your ticket came into like a nice paper sleeve? You know, yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

And it was a very complicated ticket, it was like many pages. Yes, right. Yes, right.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Yeah, I remember the livery of the planes, that that dark royal purple and the orange and the red, you know, and all the complimentary colors. And you know, it looked great looked great on the plane, and that paper ticket with the carbon slip behind it. And what yeah, I remember walking down the steps, you know, onto the tarmac in Ontario, and my mom standing at the gate when I came out because back then you could walk all the way to the gate without a ticket. And I was just, you know, I was focused on the peanuts though.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

The peanuts. The peanuts. I was worried about the wing falling off, and you were like focused on the peanuts.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

I mean, come on, but like it's you know, it's a whole bag of peanuts. That's not a little bag of peanuts. I and I remember as a kid loving airplane peanuts. It's you know, it's not nothing there.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

You were flying alone across California as a child with a paper ticket. They mom's waiting at the gate on the other side, and what you remember is the snack situation. This is honestly one of the most clarifying things you've ever told me about yourself. That's like that you were fascinated by that whole tiny bag.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Well, you know, to be fair, the PDATs were doing a lot of work on that day.

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Okay, so today we're talking about one of the most genuinely transformative things humanity has ever built. And I say that with the full awareness that I say things like that on this show somewhat regularly, and I refuse. What is yours? Double entry accounting. I bought it.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

Double is your bookkeeping.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Right. And but I mean, it this really is, it really is like one of the most transformative things ever. We're talking about passenger jet aviation, the history of how human beings took everything they learned from two world wars, from a British inventor nobody would fund for nearly a decade, from a series of disasters that killed people and changed how engineers thought about failure forever, and turned it into the thing where you show up at an airport, take off your shoes for some reason still, get in a metal tube and go to sleep and wake up in another country.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

The taking off the shoes thing is maybe, you know, we talk about that in some other episode.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Yeah, okay. Fair enough, because I have feelings about that as I have about most things, right? But today, the jets. The history's wild, the engineering is extraordinary, and the wrong decisions turned out to be the most important as the right ones. So you ready? Let's go. I want to start by painting a picture of what flying actually was before jet engines arrived, because I think most people who've grown up in the jet age have completely lost track of how different the piston era was. And you need that context to understand why the jet engine changed everything. We're talking about the late 1940s into the early 1950s. World War II had ended. Aviation technology exploded during the war years because wartime will do that to a technology sector. And now the commercial airlines are inheriting this enormous base of knowledge and trying to figure out how to run a business with it.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

Yeah, the aircraft they had had to work with were, you know, pretty impressive for the era. The Lockheed constellation. Oh, I love the Connie. The Douglas DC six and the DC seven. These are sophisticated piston-engine aircraft with multiple propellers, beautiful machines.

SPEAKER_03 6:18

Technically, I love the I love that movie The Aviator. I know.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

I love that movie. Okay, so I don't build model airplanes, but I would totally build like those, you know, the Connie and stuff. I I really love those airframes.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

Beautiful, beautiful machines that were absolutely exhausting to fly in. Yes. The constellation, especially the Connie, which was one of the most gorgeous airplanes ever made from a visual standpoint. That distinctive triple tail fin, that dolphin-shaped fuselage. Howard Hughes was involved in its development, and honestly, it shows because it has the energy of something designed by a person with both genius and unresolved personal issues. Like it looks like that. But the experience of riding in it, it was not what we would appreciate as pleasant. These aircraft were loud. They flew at lower altitudes than jet aircraft, which meant they flew through weather not above it. And a rough crossing over the North Atlantic on a constellation was a genuine physical ordeal. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Yeah. The unpressurized early versions were just, you know, particularly brutal. Later versions were pressurized, which, you know, big improvement, but still at lower cabin pressure than modern aircraft. And the range limitations meant that transatlantic routes had intermediate stops.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Oh, boo. Gander, Newfoundland, the great involuntary layover of the prejet area. If you flew from New York to London in the early 1950s, you stopped in Gander, which is a place that exists primarily as a refueling stop and has been doing that job with extraordinary dedication since the war. The town of Gander, Newfoundland was literally built around the airport. The whole community exists because planes had to stop there.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Yeah. And the flight time from New York to London on a constellation was something like 15 to 18 hours, depending on the winds. Just like, okay, New York to London. We do that so fast now. 15 to 18 hours, can you imagine? That's rough.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Well, I think it takes me 12. Come on now. Although I don't have to stop in Newfoundland.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Yeah, but you're coming, you're coming from all the way to the other side.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Yeah. And we go up and over. Like we go over the top.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

We don't go wow.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Right. So 15 to 18 hours potentially with a stop in Newfoundland.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Hold on. Hold on. How do you go up and over when the earth is flat now? Come on.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Right. I'm sorry. We went we go that way. We go straight.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

We go right.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

Oh boy. 15 to 18 hours, potentially with a stop in Newfoundland is a loud, sometimes turbulent, pressurized, but not very pressurized cabin. And flying was still considered glamorous. People dressed up. You actually ate food with cutlery, like real cutlery, not the spork that I bring. And there was a whole I do travel with a spork. There's a whole culture around it. And the and part of that culture was only important people do this and only when it matters. Flying was not casual. Flying was an event.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Although, you know, sometimes sometimes I have dressed up to fly, but you know, usually because I gotta get on to a meeting like right away or something. Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

I can't do it. I wear those big petticoats, so I take up two seats when I've done my dress. Yeah. So I can't.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

That's why you gotta fly business.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Oh, good point. My dress doesn't fit.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Yeah. The the cost reflected that, you know, that event-based experience. Transatlantic fairs were prohibited for most people. Yeah, definitely. Uh flying was for executives and diplomats and the wealthy. So into this world arrives the jet engine. And it does not just improve the existing model, it blows the entire frame up and replaces it. The the speed, the altitude, the smoothness, the range. Jet engines make flying into a different thing, not just a faster version of the same thing. And the story of how the jet engine arrives in commercial aviation is not a straight line. It goes through a war and a British inventor who could not get anyone to listen to him for most of a decade, and a competition between nations that got genuinely complicated and a disaster that changed engineering forever.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

So let me tell you about Frank Whittle, because Frank Whittle deserves better than the level of name recognition he has outside of aviation circles. Whittle was a Royal Air Force officer who understood the basic theory of the jet engine in 1929, and he patented the concept in 1930. He was 22 years old, and the British government's response to this was very interesting. No thank you. Goodbye. He spent the entire 1930s trying to get anyone with money and authority to actually care. And they largely, you know, didn't. He finally got private funding in 1936 and had a working engine prototype by 1937. We could have had it by 1930 if somebody would have just given this kid money. The war changes everything, obviously. And suddenly his work gets the resources it needed. And by 1941, the first British jet-powered aircraft flies.

SPEAKER_03 11:46

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

22.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

I can't get over that. I know, that's cool. Well, and it's sad too, you know, but right?

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Because you don't listen to 22-year-olds. None of us do. Yeah, yeah, of course not.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

Well, and you you know the way you said that, uh, you know, somebody's saying very interesting. Like that's a very British way to say, you know, like go away. Yeah. That's lovely. Yeah. Goodbye. The the Germans were doing parallel development independently. Um, Hans von Chane at uh Henkel, Heinkel, had a working turbojet in 1937 as well. And the first jet-powered flight in history was actually a German aircraft, the Heinkel HE-178, in August of 1939, just before the war started.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

And this parallel development is something I find really meaningful about the jet engine story because we have this cultural habit of wanting a lone genius, one person, one idea, one founder, the cult of the founder, right? Like we really want that. The jet engine doesn't fit into that story. Whittle and on chain working independently in different countries with the different resources, arrived at the same engineering concept at essentially the same time because the physics were understood, the materials were becoming available, and the problem was ready to be solved. It happens in technology more than I think people want to admit. And it happened with the fighter jets. Like, look at a MiG and look at like an F-16. They're essentially the same, except that the MiG just cuts off at the front, right? And you think this is what it looks like when you develop two different technologies in two different closed places. Like the US was like top secret stuff, and the and Soviet Union top secret stuff. But in the end, they both build essentially the same plane. It's pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Yeah. Because my eyes are O'Hane. Yeah. Not chained. You and I probably our eyes are are bad enough that you can't read the name of it.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

I have chronic dry eyes, so my it's always blurry for me.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

I don't drive at night anymore. Yeah. Well, it's late enough at night that my eyes are tired now. So there you go. Yeah. Anyways, that's what I just keep saying. But the core uh principle is using combustion to drive a turbine, which drives a compressor, which compresses incoming air, which feeds the combustion, and it's a self-sustaining cycle once you get it started.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

The war accelerates everything and then it ends, and suddenly there's jet engines. And the question is, what do you do with this for civilian travel? Because that's what we do with everything. It was that and the peaceful use of the atom. Like there was such a thing. What do we do with this for civilian travel? And the British answer is we get there first. The Havlin Comet enters the commercial service in 1952. And this is not a prototype or a proof of concept. This is a real commercial flying aircraft with real paying passengers for BOAC, and that they're the predecessor to British Airways. And it's genuinely extraordinary. It flies at around 490 miles an hour. It cruises at 40,000 feet. The cabin's pressurized and comparatively quiet. Passengers who flew the comet describe the experience as transformative. It's nothing like anything they've seen before.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Yeah, it's a cool-looking plane, too.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

It's really Art Deco. Like that's the thing about the comet. It looks like it came out of the 1940s.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Well, a lot of the Davlind designs are like that. And um like the vampire is cool too. The design, though, it broke convention. Four two turbojet engines buried inside the wing roots rather than hanging in pods below the wings, which was unusual. The fuselage was designed around pressurization as a primary structural consideration.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

And then it just starts falling out of the sky. Three catastrophic in-flight breakups between 1953 and 1954. In one year, they had three catastrophic failures. The entire global comet fleet is grounded. And what follows is one of the most meticulous and important failure investigations in aviation history. The Royal Aircraft establishment basically reconstructs the wreckage of one of the crashed aircraft piece by piece in a water tank because water testing allows them to simulate pressurized cycle without catastrophic results. And they figure out what happened. Have you ever seen, have you ever seen that test? So they they recorded it, right? And so it's it's the plane in a tank and the wings are sticking out the side, right? So it's in this tank. And the way they tell the story is the guy who's in charge of figuring out what's wrong, they're gonna fill it, which means it's pressurized to 10,000 feet, and they're gonna drain it all. And they're so that's takeoff, cruising, landing, right? And they're gonna do this over and over and over again until they figure out what happens. And the guy's like, and they just start. They just started and they're in this facility. He's gonna go take a nap. He's like, you know, I'm gonna go back to my room, I'm gonna sleep. Oh, you know, wake me up if anything happens. He said he wasn't asleep for more than an hour and a half, and they knocked on the door and said it failed. He's like, it failed. And they're like, it was a catastrophic failure. And he was stunned. It was the same day.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

So that's crazy, right?

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Yeah. Well, and you know, the pattern that was established then, the you know, the NTSB and what is it, the N N H T S whatever. That that's when they when a crash happens, that's what they do is they literally recreate every single piece. They lay it out in a big hanger.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah, and they remember TWA Flight 800? Like they actually rebuilt that. It was hanging there in that hangar. Yeah, yeah. That's when they figured out whatever it was blew up from the inside out, not the or the outside in, not the inside out.

SPEAKER_03 17:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Yeah, crazy.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Yeah. So for the comets, you know, it was metal fatigue, specifically at the window corners. The the comet had square windows, and the geometry of a square corner creates stress concentrant concentration points. Every time the aircraft pressurizes on ascent and then depressurizes on descent, tiny cracks developed at those corners. Over hundreds of cycles, the cracks propagate, propagate until the fuselage fails catastrophically and suddenly.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Square windows. So I don't so I don't want huge square windows. These were picture windows. Like when you see them on the plane, they look unusually large. I mean, people would sit in front of them and would like eat dinner together, and you would look out like you were sitting in front of a cafe and the window is next to it. It was ridiculous, right? So I square windows. The failure mode was invisible to the naked eye. It it accumulated over time, and it took three aircraft falling out of the air to find it. And I'm not telling the story to be grim. I'm telling it because of what comes next, which is that the entire global aerospace industry absorbs those lessons immediately and permanently. The concept of fail-safe structural design, the systemic study of metal fatigue in pressurized aircraft, the oval windows that you see on every commercial aircraft in the world right now, those are all direct descendants of the comet investigation. The tragedy made everything that came after it safer, and it ultimately becomes this the safest form of travel even today.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

That's right. I learned that from Superman. The investigation also changed how aviation authorities worldwide approached certification. The idea that you have to test for failure modes that aren't obvious in normal operation, that you have to think about accumulative stress over the life of an aircraft that becomes embedded in how aircraft are designed and certified everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Meanwhile, and this is a crucial meanwhile, Boeing is watching all of this very carefully. Boeing had spent the war and the early post-war years building military aircraft, specifically the B-52 bomber, which gotta admit, it's a pretty great blade, right? The company made a decision that it's either visionary or insane, depending on how it goes. They put up their own money, not government money, their own money, to build a prototype jet transport. They called it the 367-80. Everyone calls it the dash eighty. It eventually becomes the 707.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Yeah. Yeah. The investment was approximately 16 million dollars in 1952. So yeah, 16, yeah, 16 in 52. That's a lot. And it was roughly equal to Boeing's annual profit at the time. So a whole year of well, yeah. They were spending all in. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

They just pushed all the poker chips in.

SPEAKER_01 20:38

Yeah, yeah. So they're spending a year's profit, a whole year on a speculative uh commercial project. With like, can you imagine that now? Like, there's no, like, no, nobody. Nobody does that. They don't take the entire year's profit and go, hmm, I have an unproven idea. Let's, you know, the speculative, let's just pour that in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No government contractor, airline buyer behind it, completely speculative. If it had failed, they would have exited commercial aviation entirely.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

A genuine bet the company moment. And I find it what I find interesting about it is that Boeing was not the obvious commercial aviation player at that point. Douglas had the DC series. They had the DC three. I had basically invented modern commercial aviation before the war. If you were a smart analyst in 1952, looking at who was going to define the next era of commercial flight, I can say this to you as an analyst. Um, you probably said Douglas. You know, Boeing was the one making the audacious, you know, possibly reckless bet with nothing behind them other than we we build the B fifty two and it fits six people.

unknown 21:47

Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

I'm glad that the B fifty two wasn't like, you know, the aesthetic design that they used to carry into the right with that big bubble at the bottom with the gun in it, just in case. The the 707 incorporated everything the industry had learned from the comet disasters oval windows, extensive metal fatigue uh testing, fail-safe structural design. Boeing had been watching, and they built the lessons in from the start. The aircraft also benefited from Boeing's military jet experience. The 35 degree swept wing came from the B-47 program. The decision to mount engines and pods slung below the wings rather than buried in the wing routes, like the comet, made the engines easier to maintain and allowed each engine to be sized independently of the airframe. It also meant that a catastrophic engine failure was less likely to damage the wing structure. The pod-mounted configuration becomes a standard for almost every commercial jet that follows. You still see it on every Boeing and Airbus airliner today.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

The 707 enters commercial service with Pan Am in October of 1958, and the jet age is actually properly, irreversibly underway. New York to London in eight hours. The same route had taken 15 to 18 hours on the propeller aircraft with a possible stop in Newfoundland. In eight hours, the world became physically smaller, and it happened in October of 1958.

SPEAKER_01 23:27

The ride quality was just completely different.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

And the person who understood the understood most clearly that what the 707 meant for the future of air travel was Juan Tripp at Pan Am. Tripp was one of the great visionaries of the 20th century aviation and also honestly one of the great arm twisters. He negotiated the first 707 order with Boeing, and then he used that order to leverage to get a better price, and used the better prices leveraged to argue for cutting fares, and used the lower fares to make the argument that he had been making for years, which was flying should not be a luxury activity for executives and the wealthy. Flying should be something ordinary people can afford to do. Tripp was a genuine populist about this in an era where most of the airline industry thought mass market air travel was a slightly ridiculous idea. I have to agree with that.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

I have to agree with that. I don't like I do love the way Alec Baldwin portrays Juan Trip in uh the aviator. It's just great because Alec Baldwin's good in that. But I think I think Jontrip didn't have I'm not so sure he was so populist about it. I think he just wanted to sell more tickets, but that's just me.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

Hey, you know, whatever. Like he was willing to he was willing to go down market. God bless him. Yeah, yeah, no. Hey, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Pan Am introduced economy class as a real and seriously marketed product. So, you know, it wasn't it wasn't like first class, you know, economy class. You know, this was it wasn't the same sort of all first class.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

Kind of, yeah. Everybody was in first class.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

Yeah. You know, before that, the the concept barely existed in commercial aviation. You you either flew or you didn't. And if you flew, you paid what it cost.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

And I want to, I just want to I want to pause on that for a moment because I think people have lost track of how recent this is. 1958 is not ancient history. My parents were both alive and adults in 1958. The world in which flying was something that most people simply did not do because they couldn't afford it. It it's it's within living memory. The jet engine did not just make planes faster. It changed the entire cultural meaning of air travel. It changed who got to be in the air. And that that's a bigger deal than the engineering, honestly, right? So it it like it gave world travel to anybody who was brave enough to go, right? That's pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_03 25:53

That's pretty amazing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

So, okay, here's where it gets weird. Like it wasn't weird enough. Like, here's where it gets weird. We're in the late 1960s. The 707 is a commercial success. Douglas has the DC eight, which is a competitive aircraft, and there's an actual commercial jet aviation industry now, and it's expanding. And the engineers and the airline executives are all looking at each other, asking, All right, so like what's what's next? Right. And so two completely opposite answers emo emerge almost at the exact same time. One answer is build something bigger. The other answer is build something faster. And the aircraft that came out of those two answers was the 747, which we all write on still today, which is pretty pretty amazing, right? I don't know. 747s, yeah, they're still out there.

SPEAKER_03 26:45

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

No, because BA just No, I'm not so sure about that. BA just decommissioned the last of them. So uh I'm gonna go look that up. All right. Well, I they're still they're still flying for freight, but I don't know about commercial anymore.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

I'm gonna go look it up. There might be a Concorde. The Concorde, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Those are definitely not flying.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Right. Well, they're building another one. United's building one, which is crazy. And they're both magnificent, and the only one of them turns out to be right. And the story of figuring out which one is right takes about 50 years and involves some genuinely painful plot twists.

SPEAKER_03 27:20

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

The the 747 was one trip again, right? He went back to Boeing and essentially said, I want a plane that carries twice as many people as the 707. I want to move volume and I want to lower the per seat cost. And Boeing's answer was essentially, you know, that aircraft does not exist, but we will build it. And also it may kill us financially.

unknown 27:42

Boeing.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

I think it's Boeing built an entirely new factory in Everett, Washington to assemble the 747 because the aircraft was too large to build in any existing facility. That factory is still the largest building by volume on the planet. They built the largest building in the world to make a plane. The scale of commitment involved in the 747 program is difficult to actually absorb. I, you know what? And I would say like the Dreamliner, like the Dreamliner is pretty crazy in that there's so much AI in the building of one of those. Like there's all kinds of telemetry data that comes out of the the drills, even like it, like how much torque? And did you put that screw in at the right torque? And if you didn't, it'll this you go and you hook this thing, you go, you take your drill back and you hook it up, and then it takes all the data out of it, and then it says, here's everything that wasn't done right. And then you go back and fix it, right? But it like that's how they you know how long it takes to build a dream liner? Like the biggest plane Boeing makes, like top to bottom, like like start to finish? Six weeks. Yeah. They get that done in six weeks, right? That's how technically advanced the building of the planes are. That's crazy. So anyway, they build that, the scale of commitment involved. Yeah, it's difficult to absorb for sure, especially back then.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

It's a cool building. They I've been in the I've been in up there, Everett, and uh the headquarters and factories and stuff. It's a separate story, but yeah, they had a they had a they had an issue, let's say, that took down like the the 737 production line for eight hours. That's you know yeah, and if you think about it, okay, how if if it takes six weeks to do a 787, you know, what is the turnaround time out of 737? It's yeah, I think it's shorter than that.

SPEAKER_03 29:24

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

And you know, so a day of production is a lot. But anyways, the the 747 introduced the wide-body cabin, two aisles instead of one, which is a bigger passenger experience change than it sounds. It introduced the distinctive upper deck forward section that gave the plane its iconic hump, uh, you know, the big silhouette on the front, and it introduced the high bypass turbofan engine at commercial scale, which is actually the part of the 747 story that matters the most for what aviation becomes afterward.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

Yeah, explain the turbofan because it's actually load-bearing for understanding the 747 era, and it's fundamentally different than the 707 area era, and also for understanding why the Concord story ends the way it does. So tell us about the turbofan.

SPEAKER_01 30:10

Yeah, okay. So a turbojet pulls air in, compresses it, mixes it with fuel, burns it, and blasts the hot exhaust out the back. All the thrust comes from that hot exhaust. A turbofan adds a large fan at the very front of the engine that moves a much bigger volume of air around the core of the engine itself, you know, not through it. Most of the thrust on a turbofan actually comes from, you know, that the bypass air, the air that never went through the combustion chamber at all. This makes the turbofan dramatically more fuel efficient and dramatically quieter than a pure turbojet because you are moving a lot of air at lower velocity rather than little air at high velocity.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

And quieter matters because by the early 1970s, the communities around airports are having a very reasonable and very loud conversation about jet noise, and the regulatory pressure to reduce it is building. But more importantly, fuel efficiency matters because 1973 is coming and the oil crisis is going to change the economic calculus of commercial aviation, and it's going to do it permanently.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

We're like we're on this whole transportation kick. We did we did cars and maps and uh traffic lights, now now planes, and like the 70s is like this really formative era in each one of those stories.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

We're gonna find out it was the best 10 years we ever had was the 19th. And I know it was Carter, and it was like you know, the Iran hostages, and it was you know inflation out of country. Yes, it was all but we got the the it it was incre we got environmental law, we got the EPA, we got the Department of Education, like like that all happened in the 1970s. It's like the greatest era ever.

SPEAKER_01 31:58

We got like cool mainframes, we got, you know. It was great. Uh the 747's JT9D engine was a technological achievement in itself. So Pratt and Whitney had never built a high bypass turbofan at that scale. Have you seen the 747 turbofans? They're big. They're very, they're very large. Oh, my favorite thing is to see when they put the you know the turbofans and then they have something behind them on the on the runway, and then they spin them up to you know full power and it just blasts, you know, like flips cars. Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Yeah. The the you know, there were significant development problems with the uh early engines. The the early 747s had these issues that cause real headaches for Boeing and the airlines. The fan blades alone were over eight feet in diameter, and the engine produced something like 45,000 pounds of thrust, which was unprecedented. The fan blades flexed under thermal stress in ways that you know the engineers hadn't fully predicted. Engines were ovalizing in flight. Um, which causes tip uh clearance issues and degraded performance. So the thing about tip clearance, like if you're if you're round something as round is ovalizing and squishing, you know, you're getting tip clearance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if they ever had drag, but but because the air has to flow around the fan, you know, on the kind of the outside chamber, if you if you know you don't have a gap there, then you've got a problem. So yeah, it's a big, it's a big issue. So early 7407s sat at airports with concrete bloc blocks hanging from their wings because Pan Am didn't have working engines to put on them. They they did that to stabilize the wings so they didn't flex and you know break and stuff. Boeing and Pratt Whitney had to develop the engine, the airplane, and the manufacturing process for both of those simultaneously on a tight schedule with billions of dollars on the line.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Well, I mean, as you can imagine, the whole program almost collapsed. So Boeing was burning cash. The development schedule was brutal, the engine problems were real, and there was a period in the late 1960s where Boeing's leadership was genuinely uncertain whether the company would survive it. The 747 that everyone loves and that flew for 50 years nearly didn't happen because of the development hell that it was produced in.

unknown 34:37

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

You know, it did happen, and when it did, it worked. The 747 entered service with Pan Am in January of 1970, and it changed commercial aviation uh as immediately and completely as the 707 had 12 years earlier.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

And simultaneously, while all this 747 drama is happening, the British and the French are building the Concord.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

Yeah. Yeah, the Concord project began in 1962. Okay. Okay. 1962, people. This is a long time ago. That's crazy, right? And and well, you know, when did the uh when did we say the 707 comes out, right? You know, it's it's 10 years basically, and the Concord is out. And it's a joint venture between the British and French. It was a political project as much as an engineering project. And there's, you know, this kind of European pride involved in building something that the Americans had not built.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

Ooh. And the Concord is magnificent. I just I'm gonna say that with full conviction before I explain all the ways it didn't work commercially, because it deserves its its flowers, you know, and I get a a little tired of the narrative that just calls it a failure and moves on. The Concord is one of the most beautiful machines human beings have ever built. It's slender and sharp. It looks like someone was personally offended by the concept of drag, right? Like, like it's got, it looks like a fighter jet, right? It has like the the wings are way far back, right? Because that's not the point. It's going so fast because it has such, you know, really great engines, right? So it enters commercial service in 1976. 76. At the time we're disco dancing. We're disco dancing. It carries passengers at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. And it crosses the Atlantic in three and a half hours. Heath throwed a JFK in three and a half. It's a wormhole in three and a half hours. You can genuinely have breakfast in London and be in New York at time for a second breakfast. You know what I remember? I remember World Aid. Remember that? Remember, we were like, you know, we are the world. Yeah. Okay. So like it was a big deal that what's his name? Phil Collins was gonna play in London, get on the conference. Oh, right, yeah, come to New York, and then play the New York live too. And he and he got there in three hours, right? Like that was like such a big deal at the time.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Oh, I remember that.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Can you imagine if that plane was late and people?

SPEAKER_00 37:08

All of a sudden, like Cindy Lopper's filling in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

The the engineering required to make sustained supersonic commercial flight work is just it's in it's extraordinary, right? The airframe heats up significantly at Mach 2 from aerodynamic friction, hot enough that the aircraft actually elongates by about six inches during the cruise flight from thermal expansion. The nose of the aircraft droops downward on takeoff and landing because the aircraft's angle of attack is so steep that without the droop, pilots cannot see forward of the nose.

SPEAKER_00 37:41

No, doesn't the droop cover the windows? I mean, aren't they flying like in the dark essentially? Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:48

I met a guy that did the he ended up doing some stuff for Callaway golf, but but the same like coating that was on some of the Callaway drivers was the same coating that was on the Concord.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

Oh, no way. So okay, so the the drooping nose is one of my it's actually it's my favorite details of the entire history of aviation. The solution not to being able to see past the nose is make the nose movable, right? Just rotate it down, solve the visibility problem by rearranging the aircraft. There's a certain, like we've chosen to go to the moon and do other things, energy to engineering decisions that I find like it's just deeply satisfying to me. Like, like can't see. Oh, I'll just point it down. You'll be fine.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

Don't even worry about it. We're gonna be good.

SPEAKER_01 38:33

The engines were Rolls-Royce Olympus turbojets, not turbofans. You can you can't efficiently achieve Mach II with high bypass turbofans. The bypass architecture that makes turbofans so efficient at subsonic speeds uh becomes a full liability at supersonic speeds. The Concorde needs the turbojet architecture to go where it was going.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

Which means the Concorde is burning fuel at a rate that makes the 747 engineers wince. And which also means the Concorde is loud. Not just the engines, like though the engines are extremely loud. I mean, that's like a fighter jet flying over you. Like it's the same, it's the same stuff, right? But it's the sonic boom. When you're flying faster than sound, you're continuously generating a pressure wave that propagates to the ground as a loud, as a loud boom, and that boom travels with the aircraft everywhere the Concord flew supersonically. People knew because they heard the boom. Can I tell you anytime the shuttle landed in the Mojave when Sam and I lived in Santa Monica? We lived in that apartment in Santa Monica. Anytime the shuttle landed in the Mojave desert, you'd hear boom, and then all the windows in the apartment would rattle. And then Sam would wake up because it would always be like five o'clock in the morning. He'd be like, earthquake, and like, nope, shuttle's home. Like that's all it was. I was like, nope, the shuttle's home. Like that's all it is. But yeah, I can't imagine that be on the flight path of the Concord. Could you imagine? I couldn't imagine.

SPEAKER_01 40:01

Yeah. Well, there was a big deal. I I, you know, I can't remember I was living in Ontario or or my grandmother was still living there, and they had said that they were gonna take Concord flights into Ontario. And, you know, yeah. Gasp. Yeah. And yeah, I think there's a big uproar. I don't think it did it more than once, you know, or something, but yeah. The the sonic boom problem is what forces the concrete or you know onto over ocean routes exclusively. That's it. You you can't fly supersonically overpopulated areas. The United States bans supersonic flight over the continental US entirely.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

Well, I'm I'm glad. So you've built the most advanced commercial aircraft in history, and its speed advantage is the is only relevant over the ocean, which means the routes where the Concord can actually demonstrate what it does are London to New York, Paris to New York, and like a handful of other places, and that's it. You have a Mach II aircraft and it can profitably fly two routes. The economics are always going to be challenging. And the 1973 oil crisis, which hits right in the middle of Concord's development and early service, makes it all so much worse.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

Yeah. Yeah. Airlines that had placed options to buy Concorde's canceled almost all of them after the oil crisis. The aircraft, yeah, I don't the aircraft that entered service was operated almost entirely by British Airways and Air France, the national carriers of the two countries that built it, who essentially had to operate it for reasons of national honor as much as of commercial logic. And they did. They're small too. They're small.

SPEAKER_00 41:42

Yeah, right. Like there's yeah, and they did for 27 years. And for 27 years, the people who flew on the Concorde described it as the single best travel experience they ever had. Well, yeah, it's like a private jet that goes Mach 2. Like, why wouldn't it be great? You probably paid$6,000 to be on it. And there's a Concorde passenger community, unlike any other aviation community. They are not nostalgic, they're grieving. That's and that there is a real and ongoing sorrow in that community about the retirement of the aircraft in 2003. That you know what? I find it genuinely moving because it speaks to something real about what that aircraft meant to the very rich people who could experience it. I feel bad for them. I do.

SPEAKER_01 42:23

Yeah. But yes, so more serious note, right? The the Air France crash in 2003 accelerated the retirement of the Conqueror. A burst tire caused debris to strike a fuel tank on takeoff from Paris, and 113 people died. The fleet was grounded for over a year, modifications were extensive, Kevlar liners were installed inside the fuel tanks, the tires were redesigned to fragment less catastrophically when they burst. The electric wiring was rerouted away from the fuel tanks. Concord returned to commercial service in November of 2001. November of 2001, folks. Oh, yeah. Two months after the September, you know, a month, you know, two months after the September 11th attacks devastated the business travel market that the aircraft depended on. So Air France and British Airways flew it for another two years, but the post-9-11 collapse and rising fuel costs made the economics just, you know, untenable. The aircraft was retired permanently in October of 2003.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

Oh, I don't want to call it a failure. Like Concorde flew for 27 years. It never had another fatal accident after 2000. It changed the culture of transatlantic business travel. And the engineers who built it were doing something at the absolute boundary of what's possible with technology of the 1960s. I mean, think about that. Like we couldn't microwave a potato, but we were doing this stuff, right? Like that drives me crazy. Working with the slide rules and the paper calculations, figuring out, you know, sustained Mach 2 commercial flight. you know, from first principles, calling that a failure because it didn't generate a profit is I it's just the wrong metric to something that was never it was never only about profit. And you know what else? I blame all this private jet crap on the fact that we don't have one of those now. Like you know Bieber would be on the Concorde instead of on his own stupid plane. Right? You know, you know that if like if you know Kelsey, Travis Kelsey had to get to see Tay in Japan, he'd go on the Concorde instead of taking her plane. Like, you know, they do that stuff. Like it would it's just better for the environment, I think, if we just got it back and let the Uber rich use it. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 44:36

Well I don't know. I mean less air travel is always better for the environment but yeah I don't I don't I don't know the math on the Concorde to know you know because those the private jets they do run turbofans but yeah they're they're super bad. Well and and somebody like you know Taylor Swift has two or three you know so you should see the maps that they you know that they have that you know Taylor's going this way Travis is going that way then they come together then they go apart again and then like somebody then another plane comes to pick them you know pick them up and then they go back her mom needs to go somewhere somebody comes to get her and takes her back to Nashville. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah whatever so so the knowledge generated by the Concorde program about aerodynamics materials behavior at that special paint that goes on to the the Callaway drivers um you know beh materials behavior at sustained high temperatures high altitude atmospheric science fed into airspace and engineering you know broadly for decades.

SPEAKER_00 45:35

And now while the 747 and the Concord are both in the air and everybody is figuring out what commercial aviation looks like something happens that is arguably more consequential for the everyday experience of flying than any aircraft a law the Airline deregulation act of 1978.

SPEAKER_01 45:54

Yeah yeah before deregulation the Civil Aeronautics board controlled what routes airlines could fly, which airlines could fly them and what fares they could charge. The result was the airlines competed almost entirely on service quality rather than price because price was effectively fixed by regulation.

SPEAKER_00 46:13

I want that back you got real food and coach you actually got legroom. You got a check bag included within a fair because of course you did and the experience of flying in the night in 1975 versus the experience of flying in 1995 are not comparable. Deregulation said let the market determine the routes let the market determine the fares let the competition sort it out and I have complicated feelings about what happened next. Yeah I do yeah yeah yeah fares dropped significantly air travel became accessible to a much larger portion of the population and passenger numbers increased dramatically I was able to fly as a kid because of because of this you know I flew a few years after you know uh deregulation so yeah yeah so Chip's dream comes true in a way flying stops being a luxury activity ordinary people can afford to fly with all their kids and also like I want Disney to have its own airline it could just it could save me so much grief flying in and out of Orlando Okay so oh there's a great there's a great YouTube channel called what is it the Mouse Lits I think and one of the one of the ladies that's on there is a civil engineer.

SPEAKER_01 47:26

And so it's a great she does all this stuff about the civil engineering of Disney and looked it goes back as Andrew Reports and County Records and all sorts of crazy stuff. And uh Disney had an airport still does have you know a kind of a quasi-airport down there in Orlando and that was there that was kind of they had a you know one of the a strategy around getting people to Disney and they would have had a an airline they would have had an airline. And I want them to use it.

SPEAKER_00 47:58

I want them to I want I can I I I wish I knew how to run an airline. I'd run a Disney airline if you like I would license it and run it. Okay and okay. Ordinary people can afford to fly and also the experience of doing it becomes something that I, a person who's been flying since 1979, thank you, recognize as a systemic removal of anything that made it pleasant. Oh, because I fly Frontier too, which is taking even more away that makes it even remotely pleasant. Like those seats are hard. I don't think those are cushions. Both of those things are true simultaneously and I do not think you get to pick one and ignore the other yeah and Frontier was so much better before the uh the bankruptcy buyout so yeah you know when it turned in okay but it is one of those places want to go to want to go to Columbus from Ontario, it's 49 bucks like that's the crap that make that kills you. Like how are they doing that?

SPEAKER_01 48:55

How are they doing that? I mean living in Denver that was great because you know it was an alternative to to United but yeah and southwest and that so the the hub and spoke routing model is also a consequence of deregulation airlines concentrate passengers at major hub airports and then route them through those hubs to reach destinations.

SPEAKER_00 49:16

Oh like FedEx packages rather than operating direct point-to-point service hub and spoke it's like my nemesis it's the region I spend genuinely a significant portion of my adult life in Phoenix because there's not a place I go where I can't I have to go through Phoenix or Vegas either one is it's there's 45 minutes from home. Like why did we have to stop? Like I don't understand. And I get Palm Springs International is you know lame but still anyway I I want to say clearly has it's not done anything to deserve the amount of time I spend there. It's not like Phoenix Airport isn't a a hoot and annie it's just it's Phoenix. It does have good restaurants. I'm it's funny no not good restaurants it just has some it has a Burger King. I guess it's good enough. It just sits at the geographic center of you know of the Southwest map right like like if you're gonna fly southwest you're definitely going to Phoenix and if you want to go anywhere in the southeast United States from somewhere else yeah it's waiting for you patiently yeah I yeah with a changle there's a chili's right I mean sir there Arizona it's a chili's or something.

SPEAKER_01 50:27

So there's some crappy Tex Mex place.

SPEAKER_00 50:31

There's a crappy Tex Mex place it's a sit-down restaurant. It has like a Burger King it has a a Jersey Mike's it might have like a Panda Express. I know here's the thing I fly in and out of airports based on what I can eat while I'm there right like Seattle. Like I like Seattle doesn't have a whole lot it's kind of like Denver's really good Denver is really good though.

SPEAKER_01 50:52

Denver is good. I love Denver airport. I mean it was my second home and um the the kids are funny because you know like well this summer we're gonna go back to the States and when you when you go you know it's when you go in that direction we usually end up in uh Dallas or or O'Hare before we go down to to um Arkansas and the the kids are like oh o'hare ooh you know there's no good food or no hair you know at least in the terminals that we landed right and then terminals you hang out in yeah and then because you got to go to the G terminal which is you know the little crappy you know terminal right and then and then uh Dallas they're like oh yeah we like the Dallas airport because there's a Mexican place that's really good in the Dallas airport.

SPEAKER_00 51:41

Austin has good food in its airport. Some of it might even be like like famous food.

SPEAKER_01 51:46

Austin's good Austin's good I'm with you though though man Phoenix is low rent.

SPEAKER_00 51:51

Phoenix is not you know what the just one more thing about the the Las Vegas terminal for Frontier it's off the hook. It's like brand new it's off the hook like if like if I was going to fly through anywhere and I was on Frontier like I'd be like drop me off in Vegas for three hours I'll just hang out at the terminal it's like it's that good.

SPEAKER_01 52:11

Yeah it's last time I was in Phoenix it was I don't even know what how long ago it was I try to avoid the place but it was oh I I not to offend our you know three listeners on Phoenix probably but that was about the airport right and you know man that place needed carpet bad. That place needed new carpet new flooring bad like just strip out the carpet people put in like I don't care tiles something yeah because I don't have to drag my suitcase so hard right like yeah anyways so so where does this all leave us?

SPEAKER_00 52:46

And what does the history of passenger jet technology actually mean for the world we live in now? Let's start with the most obvious thing which is what happened to the airlines themselves. The 747 flew commercially for 50 years before Boeing ended production in 2022. 50 years the aircraft that entered service in 1970 was still being manufactured in 2022.

SPEAKER_01 53:09

Think about what that says about how good the fundamental design was and how much runway the basic concept had runway the 730 uh 747 went through multiple significant variants over those 50 years the original the dash 100 then the 200 the 300 the 400 and then finally the eight each generation improved the engines upgraded the avionics increased the range with little canards the little the little the little flips on the end of the wings right you know right you know they improved you know fuel efficiency and and all of that um the 400 which was the version most people were flying in the 80s you know the 90s 2000s was something like 30 30% more fuel efficient per seat than the original 747 100.

SPEAKER_00 53:59

The aircraft that came after the 747 and the bigger is better lineage is the Airbus A380 you ever been on an A380? This is crazy. It was a crazy wait Yeah I have mixed feelings about the 380 yeah yeah yeah well I mean it's meant to fit a lot of people like a lot of people um which Airbus built on the same theory trip had been working with since the late 1960s put four put more people on one plane spread the fixed cost lower the ticket price the A380 is two full decks the entire length of the aircraft which sounds impossible until you see one and it still kind of sounds impossible. It's the largest commercial passenger aircraft ever built and it's okay genuinely like two things interesting so first of all LAX had to expand one runway to make it long enough for it to land and take off. And every Thursday so I lived I lived five minutes from LAX like no kidding like you couldn't see the runway from where I lived I was on the backside of a hill and I I would hear the the airport just as loud as I would hear the 10. So it was you know it was just wasn't that big a deal but we were you could watch the planes just line up on the horizon and come in and you really wouldn't hear them when that thing landed when the A380 landed like it shook the house and it shook it every day every Thursday at 11 o'clock I don't I think it was coming from Japan. Like that thing would shake the house it was that big and and noisy. It was crazy. Big noise but it was the other thing that was crazy about it is when it got in the air after it took off and it got to cruising altitude the wings would get bigger and then they would bow like a bird right and like you're watching it happen thinking we're all gonna die. We're gonna die. Like why is this wing moving? Why is it making that weird shape? Oh my god what is happening right and then you realize oh well it you just it's more efficient it's it's more aerodynamic right you look like you seriously look like a seagull like it's really weird.

SPEAKER_01 56:02

You know the the way the flaps and and the the control services and stuff move I mean it changes the shape of the wing. It's really cool. It's easy uh emarits which okay if you fli haven flown emirates you need to fly emirates it's a good yeah I haven't done it yet yeah yeah yeah so emarits puts a shower in uh first class on the A380 a functioning shower at 40,000 feet available to first class passengers on certain long haul routes.

SPEAKER_00 56:30

A shower on a plane you know it's funny and I completely understand the impulse behind it because the impulse is what if there was no limit like what if we could just keep asking what if the plane you know but but more like it's a plane yeah but it could be more my I'm never going to be in that shower. That shower is not for me. I mean I can't say it's not for anybody I know maybe somebody I know could use it but I mean it's for Jennifer Aniston clearly it's not for Renee Murphy. But glad someone is in the shower because it means people who built it refuse to stop asking the question like what else can we put in this thing?

SPEAKER_01 57:07

Yeah. Unfortunately though the A380 did not work commercially which is you know sort of the sort of a painful echo of the Concord story. Airbus ended production in 2019 after only about 250 aircraft were built. The economics required very high passenger loads on very high density routes and airlines found that two smaller more fuel efficient aircraft could serve the same routes with more scheduling flexibility and lower risk.

SPEAKER_00 57:35

Which brings us to the direction aviation actually went and which I think represents the most interesting design story in recent aviation history. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A350 these are smaller wide body aircraft roughly twin aisle medium to large capacity and they're built from materials that are genuinely novel in commercial aviation okay I love the 787 I do too I do I love the three liner yeah I do it's yeah it's a pretty plane it's a pretty plane it's comfortable it's oh the dream liner right aw and well you tap the windows to shade them like there's just okay except most of the time they lock you out of that functionality yes yeah it makes me mad makes me mad yeah the 787 fuselage is primarily carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite rather than aluminum about 50% of the aircraft weight is composite material.

SPEAKER_01 58:41

The changes this changes a lot of things okay so also like all right we say carbon fiber like and you know we think oh composite materials and it's lighter and it's great but the amount of work that had to go in you you're you're talking about decades of aerospace engineering that was built around aluminum aircraft frames and now all of a sudden you're talking about carbon fiber. It's it's completely different and and the amount of of time it took to get to the point you know from 1950 whatever in the 707 to you know the first iterations of the Dreamliner you know that the time the timeline from idea to delivery on the Dreamliner you're talking years not decades you know and it's just it's mind blowing. Anyways the the airframe is lighter it improves fuel efficiency carbon fiber doesn't fatigue the same way aluminum does does fatigue though which is implicit and we learned that from that from that stupid submarine. Yeah well yeah with implications for maintenance and service life right critically composite fuselage just can be built to tolerances that allow for higher cabin pressure and this is like my favorite feature of the air of the 87.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:02

Well it's one of those things it sounds boring until you realize that it's the actual explanation for why flying on a 787 built just physically different from flying on an older aircraft. The 787 maintains a cabin altitude equivalent to about 6,000 feet above sea level now usually right older aircraft maintain cabin altitude around 8 to 1000 feet right that's why you feel so beat up by the time you go somewhere you're you're 10,000 feet for that whole time. Doesn't sound like a big difference until you think about what lower altitude does to your body less fatigue less dehydration less ear pressure a less of that particular feeling of arriving somewhere and needing three days to feel like yourself again.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:44

Yeah the my favorite route is the London to Houston because it's about 10-ish hours and so it gives you just enough time to scarf something down at the beginning and then tell them to leave you alone you know for the whole flight. Right. You get your sleep in and then of course a fly business and then you know you let you know you're laying down and all of that and then you wake up and you can grab a snack for for breakfast. So the the humidity in is higher in the 787 which makes oh it's so much better. You can breathe you can actually sleep because you can breathe right older you know the older metal fuselages could support without corrosion risk. So you know the composite structure doesn't have that problem so they can run higher humidity although I did get into a 787 once and it was a little swampy I'll just say that. Oh yeah it was flying it was flying through all the southeast of of the US or something.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:42

Oh okay yeah yeah you know but that dryness issue you know helps that on the on the long flights so yeah I've flown transatlantic on both a 787 and the older 777s and the difference in how I feel when I land it's real and it's noticeable and you know what they and they're and they're paying attention to your to your your sleep cycle too your circadian rhythm because they'll eventually put the cabin through like like the sun setting and then twilight and then it's dark and then the sun's coming up it's twilight and then it's orange again and then you're awake. You're like oh my gosh like like they really I I love that it's like because I'm very I am really circadian rhythm like hook. So like oh it's so good. Anyway the best improvement to the passenger experience in recent aviation history is not the screens on the back of the seats it is cabin pressure and composite materials. It's invisible engineering that you that you can only perceive by noticing that you feel less terrible than you expected to so thank you Boeing engineers for making me feel less terrible than I expected to.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:48

Well you my brother and I, you know you've ever heard that uh saying if it's if it's if it's not Boeing I'm not going. I I ain't going, yeah. So yeah safety improvement is the other major story of the modern aviation era. And you know I think it's you know even more important than cabin pressure humidity right the fatality rate per billion passenger miles in commercial aviation has dropped by something like 95% since the early jet age. Flying commercially is now statistically one of the safest activities a human being can engage in you're substantially more likely to be hurt driving to the airport than flying in the aircraft.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:30

So I think that I think the actual statistic is you could randomly board a plane um 365 days a year and it would be 25 years before you were involved in a crash and even then the odds are you'd survive. Like that's crazy. I could randomly board a plane every single day and it would take 25 years before I was involved in anything. Like that's nuts. So if you're out there and you've been in a plane crash, let me know I want to fly with you because the odds of it happening to you twice are astronomical. So call me. I want to fly where you fly. And that's an that's an improvement and it's not magic. It's the accumulated result of every crash investigation, every regulatory change, every design improvement, every near miss that got analyzed and learned from the comet disasters taught the world about metal fatigue and failsafe design. The crash investigators of the 1970s and 80s taught the world about crew resource management, you know, which is the practice of making sure the first officer can actually push back on the captain because it turns out a lot of accidents happen because the first officer knows something is wrong, but it's too intimidated to say anything about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:38

Yeah that that's a that's a good improvement. The the development yeah the development of flight data recorders, the black box, which is actually orange or red, flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders meant that accidents could be reconstructed with a level of detail that wasn't previously possible. And that knowledge fed back into the design and training.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:58

So every time something goes wrong in aviation and things still do go wrong. I mean there's that Malaysia flight we still haven't found we still don't know where that thing is that is the culture of safety that commercial aviation built over 70 years. It is not innate it was constructed it was constructed from failures and the willingness to look at failures honestly and change things because of what you found. And you know what I swear to God if we did that in IT for 10 minutes, like really meant it like like post you know incident review and and instead of taking it personally we took it seriously like imagine how good we would be at stuff instead of still letting the AI is fixing the stuff you know yeah and then fixing it.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:44

Forever because not just adding fixing it forever. Yeah. Stupid, you know, I'm gonna go off on a tangent here for a second stupid batch files and file systems and file management basics like I was at a place not going to name names they couldn't get it Right. And it's like you do the post incident and it's like these are the problems. And it's and you go, okay, well let's fix this. And oh well that's gonna be this much time and you know, that's gonna be this, and well we can fit it in next quarter. And you're like, you know what, if this were a plane, that fleet wouldn't be flying until the issue was fixed.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:21

Like my favorite was my favorite was we had a we had a a a time clock system that um on the day payroll needed it because everybody would put it be putting in their time all at once because we're all lazy jerks. Um and so the day that they needed to run payroll would be the day it crashed. And so like I'm on I'm on you know, year two of this job, and I'm like, okay, seriously, seriously, like we we need to fix this. So like we did fix it. You just reboot it, and it's like that's not fixing it. No, it's not fixing it. Like, can we please give me Microsoft? Something's wrong. You know what was wrong? Front page extensions. Just don't install them.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:57

Well, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:59

Yeah. I mean, but like like if we actually did that in a like a core banking system, it's like no new code shows up until we fix this. You know, and it's just like Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:14

We don't live like that in the real world. We have a lot to learn from Boeing, right? That's what I'll say. They can teach us to be better engineers for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:20

Yeah. Like the the accident rate though in commercial aviation is not zero. The Boeing 737 Max crashes, okay, there you go. Software. The 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019, real serious reminder that the economic and regulatory pressures on aviation never fully disappear. So they did they built that whole thing as a regulatory thing that said, oh well, it'll be it'll fly the same and it won't require retraining. Because you know the retrain issue with pilots is huge. It's it it's massive, massive to retrain pilots.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:57

Well, I mean, if they're retraining, they're not flying. And if they're not flying, no one's making money, right? So like to everyone you train, you're just losing money on. So I guess and and they go to Boeing and they s they s like the airlines go to Boeing and say, we'll buy another plane from you, but we're not doing training. So it's up to Boeing to figure out how to build a brand new plane and not have anybody go to training. It was a real conundrum, I think, in the end.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:18

Yeah. Yeah. Those crashes and the investigation that followed raised, you know, questions about how certification process had allowed a safety critical design change to go through without adequate review and without telling the pilots about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:32

I know, right? To have the plane, I guess this is the thing. The software would think that that plane in particular would stall. And so it would pull the nose up. But the but the pilot didn't want the nose up, so they would fight to bring it back down, right? And so they couldn't figure out what was going on with it. Is it the flaps? Is it the hydraulics, like what the hell's going on? Because they didn't know that software was in there. And I think like to and I remember the they were trying to when they grounded it all. Remember they grounded them all and they were like, if everybody's trying to get their planes back to their hub. And I remember pilots being like, I'm not getting on that thing. And I remember the pilot association, the union for the pilots being like, when you have a brand new Boeing plane that a pilot doesn't want to fly, you got a problem. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:15

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

And that that was the day it became, if it's Boeing, I ain't going, right? Like that was the day it all fell apart for Boeing, which was sad. Yeah. That's sad. You know what? And that's and the story's part of the legacy too. The fact that aviation has a culture of safety does not mean that the culture isn't perfect to pressure. I mean, Boeing was getting the pressure from McDonnell Douglas, who bought them. They were the ones who said, you know, you think too much about this stuff and we're gonna move on and you're you we're leaving, we're going to Chicago. You guys all stay here and build what we tell you to build and do it in the time we tell you to do it and spend what we tell you to spend. And that's really crazy. So, you know, it has to be actively defended. The 737 Max story is not a story about aviation failing to be safe. It is a story about what happens when the institutional pressures that have always existed in commercial aviation push hard enough against the right places. The culture of safety, it's not self-maintaining, right? It requires maintenance. And I think the Boeing people wanted to do the right thing. I think the McDonnell Douglas people wanted to make money there when they said it. There you go.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:20

Well, I think that came out in the discussions, right, in Congress, the hearings. I mean, that was that was clear. And what what's what was frustrating for me is to see you some of the products that came out of Washington, like particularly like the 787, which was manufactured in Charlotte or or or you know, on the East Coast somewhere. And you know, 787 has a good safety record, but then them finding issues during production on multiple planes and you know airframes.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:49

Oh, when they f you know when they found the the the ladder in the tail.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:53

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:54

Right? Like a whole ladder was in the tail fin and had if that thing fell onto the hydraulic or any of those mechanisms back there, they would have crashed. Like it was some crazy stuff going on for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:05

So it's just really disappointing. And and I think, you know, it's good to see the kind of the corporate culture shifting again, which is which I think is good. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:14

Yeah. I mean, what a great company, and it it would be sad to think that just because people were being lazy that that happened. Okay, so my closing thought about what that 11-year-old on the 727, which is where we started. She did not know she was sitting on a machine that the product of 30 years of the most intense sustained engineering acceleration in human history. She didn't know about Frank Whittle or the Comet or Juan Tripp's genuinely radical popul uh populism or the bet the company decision that Boeing. I didn't know any of it. She knew the math didn't work and that it was happening anyway. And I've spent decades since uh learning all of it, the full history, the technical layers, the failures that have made the successes possible. And I feel the same thing when the wheels leave the ground. That it's like that disbelief, that sense that, you know, they got away with it again. They keep getting away with it. I think that's a feeling that's actually the right one. Wonder first, explanation later, wonder again after you understand the explanation. Like for me, like that's the right sequence, right? Like I see the stars. My God, I learned that they're probably dead by now. Wow. And I'm still like, wow, right? So yeah, that is the right. I like, I love wonder, but I also love knowing about things. So like that's the perfect thing for me, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:36

I think it's you know, kind of a, I don't know, just an admiration of engineering for me. So, you know, there's the Concord on display at the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum in New York, right? I've I've seen that one. That's great. The fact that it can fit onto the aircraft carrier, you know, it's got it all. You know, I stood actually, you know, some time ago last time I it was maybe was the last time I was in New York? No, maybe a couple of times. It's not, you know, it's not huge, right? It's narrow, it's sharp, and it looks like it was designed by someone with that, you know, personal uh grievance against air resistance. And I kept thinking about the engineers who designed it, you know, in the 60s with slide rules and paper calculations. I'm not gonna say they didn't have any computers, but you know, not the way that we understand them today. Right? They they were figuring out how to sustain Mach 2 commercial flight from first principles, you know, with hand calculations, and they got it right. The nose droops. Like think about the complexity of all the whole front end, you know, trip moving and stuff. Like simple like moving parts equals complexity, right? Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:46

It's just one more thing that can fail. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:49

Right. The the the fuselage elongates, you know, six inches. It's like on the SR71. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those on the ground. The thing leaks like a sieve, right? Because as as it gets up and it gets an altitude and gets the speed, it heats up and everything closes up. Oh, okay, yeah. Right? So it's designed you know on to be on the ground and leak because it if you built it so it was tight on the ground, it would blow up, you know, on in the air. Yeah. So that's crazy. Yeah. And the same thing that thing was, you know, designed in the you know, in the 50s and 60s. So you know, that that aircraft that heats to 127 degrees Celsius at the leading edges. And they predicted all of that, you know, what would happen on paper with slide rules. Uh I don't know how you build something like that without loving the problem to a degree that probably isn't healthy or sustainable, right? But that love, that you know, completely unreasonable commitment to figuring out the hardest version of the thing is just everywhere in the history of aviation. And you know, that's why any of it works at all.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:54

An unhealthy love of the hardest version of the problem. I think you accidentally described both aviation history and this podcast, honestly.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:03

I think that's you know, that's probably a common theme for us, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:07

Okay, nostalgic nurse. Thank you for spending time with us inside a glorified aluminum tool with tube with very good cabin pressure.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:17

Carbon fiber composite tube, you know, if you're on the 787.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:21

A glorified carbon fiber composite tube with very good cabin pressure and somewhere in first class a shower that neither of us will ever be in. We'll be back next week. Well, maybe Mark will. I know I won't. I mean, my gosh, I would be worried about catching something on my feet. It would be a whole thing. We'll be back next week with something new. In the meantime, stay curious, stay weird. And if you're connecting through Charlotte Douglas or Phoenix, yeah, we'll see you. We feel you, and you know, stop at the Jersey Mics. It really, they're expensive, but they're good, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:53

Yeah. Yeah. Find us wherever you get your podcast, uh review. If you loved it, leave us a review. If you hated it, Renee responds to all of them, you know, personally. She doesn't, but I just like to say that. Yeah. And uh, you know, we'll we'll uh we'll hear oh, I actually we should mention merch if you go to the website.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:11

Nostalgic drop. We had a merch drop.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:14

Yeah. Go to the website and I'll put it in the show notes, nostalgic neurons podcast.com, and up at the top banner it says shop, and you can click and you can get some, you know, you can get some merch. There you go.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:26

Right on. So go get your hoodie or your mug or your hat. We'd appreciate it. So so thanks to everyone who calls this show aggressively educational. You know who you are. Thanks everybody for listening. Tune in again. Thanks, Mark.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:41

All right, thanks. Please myself in lifting. Just be just cry. For a minute, quiet for a second, twenty three, just before. They used to be a tattoo. They used to be a tattoo. They used to be a beat.