Grantville Gazette, Volume XII Read online

  Johan was not as familiar as Magdalena was with engines. Generally, when they stopped to fix something, he held the tools. They discussed the matter in whispers, in an attempt to avoid alarming the passengers.

  "I could go out on the wing and have a look." Johan didn't look happy about it but he didn't hesitate either.

  "Don't be silly, Johan. You've never met an engine that you couldn't make worse by looking at it." Magdalena looked down at the rudder pedals; the left one was almost to the floor. "Besides, you weigh one eighty, I weigh one twenty. Which of us is going to do a better job of holding the rudder hard over?" Even with the trim set all the way it was still taking muscle to keep the plane straight and level.

  He nodded. "What do we tell the passengers?"

  At that point it became apparent that their whispered consultation had not had the desired effect. "You might try the truth." Claudia de' Medici arched an eyebrow. "Just how bad is our situation?"

  "Well," Magdalena hesitated. "It would be just inconvenient if the duke wasn't a crazy man. We'd just land, fix the engine, then be on our way."

  Claudia nodded. "How far away were we when they fired at us?"

  "Around eighteen hundred feet up and a bit less than half a mile off. Why?" Johan asked.

  Claudia shook her head. "Crazy people, indeed. To have had any chance of hitting us, even to reach us at that range, he would have had to double charge his cannon. He was willing to endanger his men in order to have a very slight chance of hitting a target that was no danger to him. Just out of spite. I agree. I don't want to land in his territory. What options does that leave us? We seem to be flying well enough on the three engines remaining."

  "There are two problems facing us. One is fuel. Flying this way takes more," Magdalena said. "The other is that we are over stressing the remaining right side engine. It will last for a while, but we don't know how long. The longer we wait before fixing the inboard engine, the worse it will be."

  "How long will it take to fix the damaged engine?"

  "We don't know yet. The only way to find out is to go out and look. Normally we'd land and look but in this case . . ." Magdalena pointed back toward Munich. "What I am going to do is go out on the wing and look at the engine to see what's wrong with it."

  One of the merchants swallowed. "Go out on the wing?"

  "It's not that bad." Magdalena smiled at the man. "I've seen it done and our air speed is low." She didn't mention that the only time she had seen it done was in the movies in Grantville.

  * * *

  The Monster had one real disadvantage when it came to wing-walking. Its streamlining. Hand holds were hard to come by. Magdalena wing-crawled to the right inboard engine with one hand on the leading edge of the bottom wing. To keep the engine away from the water when making water landings, it was hung from the upper wing rather than sitting on the lower. There was a support that went from the bottom wing to the streamlined box it was in. But the bottom of the engine casement was four feet from the bottom wing and she was only five feet six.

  After she reached the support, Magdalena carefully tied herself to it and looked around. She was terrified and at the same time exhilarated. Standing in the open with just three and a half feet of wing below her, twenty feet from the body of the plane. With a forty-five mile an hour wind blowing in her face. She wanted to shout for joy. She wanted to get back inside the plane where it was safe. Her hands were shaking and that wasn't all. She wanted to jump Georg and would have if he weren't over a hundred miles away.

  Instead, she took a few minutes getting herself under control. She forced the cowling open against the wind and examined the damage. By now she wasn't sure whether she wanted to jump Georg or kill him. The cowling worked fine on the ground. But in the air, with a gale blowing in your face, and that gale trying to slam the cowling on your hand, it sucked.

  She found the problem easily and it was an easy fix. She decided that she could fix the engine right there, and there would be no need to land. She reached for the line and bumped the strut holding the cowling opened against the wind. It slipped and the forty-five mile per hour wind slammed the cowling against her back and head.

  There wasn't time for it to build up much momentum or she would have died at that moment. As it was she was knocked senseless, and left dangling from the strap she had used to tie herself to the support.

  * * *

  Inside the plane Johan, Claudia de' Medici and the two merchants watched helplessly as Magdalena dangled from the strap. Johan started looking for a place to put the plane down. Duke Maximilian be damned, and all his solders with him.

  They had come just twenty miles since they had left Munich. No rivers of any size were within another twenty miles but there in the distance was an open field. There was going to be an unhappy farmer.

  Johan cut back on the power to the remaining engines and started the bag engine. That was what they had come to call the small motor that ran the fans for the air cushion landing gear.

  * * *

  The farmer watched as the plane floated down onto his field, across his carp pond and out the other side. It stopped, still sitting on the big brown bag. He saw a woman—he thought it was woman, it was hard to tell at this distance—dangling from one wing. Then he saw the large man come out of the plane and run along the wing to the woman. He thought of going to give aid, he thought of calling the local lord, but on due consideration, he decided that he didn't want to get involved.

  He knew that the duke didn't like the people from the future. Had even been told that they weren't from the future, also that they weren't people but demons. He didn't know what he believed about them except that he didn't want either the duke or the people who flew mad at him.

  * * *

  Johan reached the still woozy girl only seconds after touch down. He used some ammonia as smelling salts and that seemed to mostly do the trick. Magdalena had been semiconscious as the Monster landed and the spray from crossing the carp pond had helped. "Let me up, damn it. Where are we?"

  "What? About twenty miles north of Munich."

  "Well, if we were going to land anyway, what the hell was I doing out on that wing?"

  Johan paused for a minute. "Got me. I'm not crazy enough to do it, that's for sure."

  That was when Claudia stepped out on the wing. "I hate to interrupt, but since I doubt that they have any airplane fuel here and since Maximilian has never impressed me with his forbearance, perhaps we should see about fixing the engine and being on our way?"

  Magdalena looked at Claudia, who was standing calmly on the lower wing of the Monster, shaded by the upper wing, and suddenly realized what "unflappable" meant. Claudia was unflappable. Magdalena got up. It hurt, but she did it.

  Looking at the engine without the wind in her face, she saw a problem. The nut had been over-tightened and the threads had slipped. "Johan, get me a the five-eighths inch wrench, would you? And the vise grips!"

  She had to bang the connection a bit to make it fit again. And she gooped it up to keep the stripped threads from leaking too much. She used the vise grips to lock it in place and taped that. All in all, it took almost fifteen minutes.

  Fifteen increasingly nervous minutes. Johan had climbed up on the upper wing, which put him almost twenty feet off the ground and gave him a good view of the surrounding territory. About twelve minutes into the repairs he shouted down, "Riders!"

  "How far?"

  "A couple of miles, perhaps a bit more."

  "I'm almost finished."

  "Well, finish later. We need to leave. We'll make a short hop, ten miles or so then you can finish."

  "Can't. If we lose the vise grips, we'll be even worse off. Just another minute. Go ahead and start getting ready for takeoff."

  "Right! Ma'am, gentlemen . . . if you'll kindly take your seats, and fasten your seat belts for takeoff."

  Claudia might have been unflappable, but Matteo dal Pozzo, one of the merchants, certainly wasn't. In a nervous voice, he asked, ""
How often does something like this happen?" I don't mean being shot at, but having to land in the middle of nowhere."

  "Not that often," Johan said. "Certainly a lot less often than it did in the early days of flight up-time. Our engines are better and better maintained. It does happen sometimes, though."

  "So our cargoes aren't really safer than if this were a mule train?"

  "Of course they are. A mule train spends the whole trip subject to being found by bandits. It can be tracked by them. We can't. For your cargo to be taken by bandits, they would have to be right where we happened to land. And be there right when we landed."

  Claudia laughed. "Matteo, we have regular flights from Venice to the USE. That is worth millions. Perhaps a bit more expansive than a mule train would be and certainly a little less per trip. Still, it is faster and much safer."

  * * *

  While Magdalena was tying down the vise grips, she felt the plane shift under her as the bag inflated and took the plane's weight from the stands. She closed the cowling, and ran.

  "The wind's from the south," Johan told her as she was strapping in. "And so are the troops coming our way."

  There was really very little choice. They had to get into the air as quickly as they could. They took off into the wind and into the faces of the approaching riders. There were no puffs of smoke from the riders as they passed overhead at only a couple of hundred feet. But Magdalena could see them trying to get their flintlocks ready. And one guy waving a sword at them.

  Magdalena couldn't resist. She stuck her thumbs in her ears, then waggled her fingers at him. She leaned back into her seat. "Let's try to keep this a unique experience, Johan. At least on this airline."

  Technical Notes:

  The Ilya Muromets is, or was, a real airplane built by Igor Sikorsky in Russia in 1913. It had flight characteristics quite similar to those described for the Monster. It was Russia's large bomber during World War One, but was initially designed as a luxury passenger plane with seating for sixteen passengers.

  Likewise, the air cushion landing gear is real as is the Time article on it. There is also a small hybrid hover/flair craft that is sold as a sports vehicle. The technology is proven but does have several drawbacks. The primary one is weight, after that comes the lack of friction. It's like taking off and landing on a slip and slide. Everyone seems to assume significant issues in terms of drag while in flight, but from the reports the drag issue is minor to nonexistent. Besides, parasitic drag is more of an issue for high-speed aircraft than for the sort of low-speed aircraft envisioned here.

  The composite materials are a bit more iffy. There are several possible routes that might be taken to achieve the desired ends. The fabric could be the fiberglass we used, or silk, or even linen. The bonding agent might be glues or Viscose, the material that is extruded into both cellophane and rayon. Viscose was originally developed to act as a coating for fabric tablecloths. It failed in that use because it made the tablecloths stiff. It apparently didn't occur to the inventor that there were circumstances under which that stiffness might be a good thing. If it had, we might well have had the composite materials revolution a century early in OTL. We can point to no instance of viscose and fiberglass being used together and the specific properties of that composite aren't known to us. It's a WAG.

  What isn't a guess is that the down-timers, being made aware of the concept of composite materials that are light and strong, will experiment with the concept using the glues and resins they have. They will, we're sure, combine those glues and resins with up-timer knowledge of chemistry to make new ones. There is, for instance, a better than even chance that they can make carbon fibers within a very few years of the Ring of Fire. Carbon fibers are produced by baking polyacrylonitrile (PAN), however, lower-quality fiber can be manufactured using pitch or rayon as the precursor instead of PAN. Further heat treating can improve the quality. Our point, however, is that while what the particular composite is may be somewhat unpredictable, that some fairly decent ones will be developed, is predictable.

  Semi-Monocoque is not quite the same thing as monocoque. What semi-monocoque means is that there are internal supports but fewer of them are needed because some of the stresses are supported by the shape of the structure. The use of corrugations, as in the skin of the Ford Trimotor, is a semi-monocoque; the corrugations in the aluminum add structural strength. Since then, quite a bit more has been learned about ways of effectively adding strength to materials through structure. And most modern aircraft, and car bodies, are of semi-monocoque or monocoque construction.

  One Step Toward the Clouds

  by Sean Massey

  Hans Richter Field

  Near Grantville

  December 1633

  Marie Moritz concentrated hard as she lined her plane up for final approach. The drone of the engines poured from the speakers next to the monitor as she fought a thirty mile-per-hour crosswind within a simulated Cessna. Although she routinely flew flights like this on her computer, she usually didn't do it while waiting to present this software to the top brass of the new USE Air Force.

  The base didn't have a conference room and Colonel Wood's office was supposedly too small, so Marie had been directed to set up her equipment in one of the unused hangars that had recently been constructed. Through an arrangement with Lieutenant Miller, she managed to have her computer delivered to the base and set up two days prior to the meeting.

  The room was cold—much too cold for Marie's comfort. The buildings on the base lacked heating. Had she known that, she would have brought gloves and worn something warmer than a skirt.

  "Come on, Marie," she told herself. Her left leg began to bounce, draining off her nervous energy. "You can do it. You just have to concentrate." She reached up and adjusted the plane's flaps for landing and began to ease back on the throttle. That's it, just ease her in. You've done this a hundred times. It's no different just because you're going to be demonstrating this software.

  Marie kept one eye on the altimeter and the artificial horizon as she descended. She didn't want to descend too quickly and end up as a smear on the ground, and she had to make sure she wasn't descending so slowly that she overshot the runway. The rest of the landing went quickly, and before she knew it, she heard the chirp of the tires on concrete as the plane touched down. As soon as she had brought the plane to a stop, she ended the simulation.

  Before she could start another flight, Colonel Jesse Wood, the chief of staff of the nascent Air Force, entered the room a good half an hour late. "Marie Moritz?"

  Marie stood up. "Colonel Wood." He had more than a few inches on her 5'3" frame and a strong grip to match.

  "And this must be the flight simulator that you plan on showing me. If I remember correctly, you're in high school. I believe you were in Greg Ferrara's Rocket Club."

  "Yes, sir," Marie responded.

  "I realize you probably have a presentation, Ms. Moritz," he said, "but I think we can dispense with that. I'm familiar with flight simulators from my days in the Air Force. I had to do simulator checks in order to qualify in the aircraft I flew. Flight simulators are very useful for training, but they're a lot different than the real thing."

  Marie began to tremble. This isn't going the way I planned. My whole proposal is ruined.

  "I need simulators, Ms. Moritz," he said. "I need a way to weed out unsuitable pilot candidates before they get behind the controls of one of our few planes. And I need a way to put potentially good pilots into dangerous or emergency situations without risking them or their planes, so they can learn to handle those situations calmly when they meet them in the air.

  "None of the simulators I have experience with came through the Ring of Fire," Colonel Wood continued. "Back up-time, I was aware of home computer based flight simulators, but I never had the time to really delve into them. I recognized how useful the software could be when I was forming up the Air Force this summer, but I didn't have the time or the resources to research it." He gave Marie a
wry grin. "I wasn't sure if anyone even had the software or if they would be willing to part with it."

  Colonel Wood gestured at the computer. "So tell me more about your flight simulator . Which one are you using? Can you create new aircraft and new terrain files? How realistic is it? And how easily can it be modified?"

  Marie took a moment organize her thoughts. Although she could answer most of his questions, her nerves had driven the answers from her head. "I think it'd just be easier for me to do my presentation, Colonel Wood. It should answer most of your questions."

  "I'm sorry, Ms. Moritz. I guess I got a little excited by the prospect of having a flight simulator. Please, continue."

  "Thank you, Colonel." With her notes in hand, Marie started her rehearsed presentation. The longer she presented, the more comfortable she became. She began by describing the two flight simulators she was familiar with, then went on to discuss how they could be used in training.

  "Honestly? I don't know how real these programs are," Marie said as she neared the end of her presentation. "The program literature and comments on the news groups by experienced pilots suggest both programs are realistic. The biggest issue with realism, though, is the aircraft model. If they aren't modeled perfectly, their flight profiles won't be realistic. And even then, it might take some tweaking to get it just right."

  Marie took a breath. "Back up-time, that was one of the biggest complaints with all flight simulators. The models would look like the real thing, but avid fans and pilots would take the time to tweak both the default planes and custom creations to ensure they would fly as realistically as possible."

  Colonel Wood nodded his understanding. "I can't elaborate too much, Marie, but we have some new plane designs. Can we use the computer to test the design?"