I've been busy the last few weeks, and the blog post I had planned didn't quite come together in time, so please have this extract from the tour I did at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton back in May. (I'm also still working on editing the audio recording of the tour. As I said, I've been busy.)

At the dawn of the 20th century, it looked like man was finally on the verge of fulfilling his dream of flying like the birds. The first people to disconnect themselves from Earth's surface by a means other than falling off something were Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes, who rode the Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon in 1783, but most people soon realized that this mechanism wasn't very good, and many of the greatest scientists and engineers of the age turned their attention to the problem of flight using lift instead of buoyancy. Among those interested in the problem were a pair of brothers, proprietors of a bicycle shop about six miles from where you are standing right now.

Wilbur and Orville Wright

Orville and Wilbur Wright first became interested in the problem of powered flight in 1899, reading everything available on the subject and then beginning their own experiments with gliders. Ultimately, they made two major innovations. First, unlike most other prospective airplane designers, they realized that the biggest problem would be controlling the airplane in the air, and developed a method of warping the wings to control roll. Ailerons eventually turned out to be a better option, but it was a significant breakthrough at the time. Second, after a series of experiments with full-scale gliders in 1901 in a windy town on the coast of North Carolina known as Kitty Hawk,¹ they realized that the aerodynamic data they had been using wasn’t very good, and set about gathering their own, first conducting experiments using a bicycle to generate airflow and then building their own wind tunnel to study possible airfoil shapes. Read more...

Hornet wasn't the only museum I visited during my recent trip to San Francisco. There were three others, all on the San Francisco side of the Bay, and all confused about what sort of museum they were. Despite that, two are reasonably strong recommendations, while the third was fine, though I wouldn't recommend going out of the way for it.

The best of the three was the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. It's firmly at the upper end of the medium air museum category, although it's not entirely sure if it wants to be an air museum with a major focus on children, or a children's museum with airplanes. Fortunately, it looks like they're the former for now, in addition to having probably the world's best collection of insanely dangerous rotorcraft. Read more...

The 9/11 attacks shook America to its core. Someone was responsible, and they would have to pay. The only questions were who and how. Who was surprisingly easy to figure out. A check of the passenger manifests revealed that several were known members of Al Qaeda, and intercepted communications between members of the group talked about a successful operation. But that made how extremely difficult.² Since Sudan had kicked him out under diplomatic pressure back in 1996, Osama bin Laden and most of his network had been based in Afghanistan, a country that was going to be as difficult to access for the US military as almost anywhere on the planet. Direct access from the sea was impossible, and the shortest route from US bases in the region ran through Iran, which was unlikely in the extreme to grant overflight rights. Coming in from the south would mean overflying Pakistan, the major sponsor of the Taliban, while access from the north meant going through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, all former Soviet republics that the US wasn't particularly close to.

The last time the US had gone after bin Laden, in retaliation for the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, it had used Tomahawk cruise missiles, flying through Pakistani airspace. But cruise missiles alone were clearly an inadequate response if the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, and a plan was put together under the codename Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).³ Fortunately for the US, there was an active civil war in Afghanistan, with the so-called "Northern Alliance"⁴ still holding onto a significant corner of the country. Both sides were poorly equipped, but with US air support, coordinated by CIA and special forces teams, there was a good chance the Northern Alliance could rout the Taliban with minimal American presence on the ground. Read more...

There have been a few news stories lately about General Motors producing missile casings for the PAC-3, and delivering the parts within 22 days of the contract being signed. And, obviously, there has been commentary overinterpreting this as being a sign that players outside the traditional defense industry are better and that the glorious dawn of fast weapons manufacturing is just around the corner, if we embrace new, agile companies like... General Motors.

A PAC-3 missile with a defective casing

Obviously, I think all of this is nonsense. First, let's be clear what we're talking about. These are missile casings, basically mildly specialized pieces of metal. Shaping metal is not a particularly new technology, and I find it hard to believe that casings are the main limiting factor in expanding PAC-3 production. Seekers, warheads and motors are all much more specialized and much harder to expand. The most likely reason behind all of this is that there was some hiccup on the part of whoever normally makes the casings, and Lockheed turned to GM to bail them out. I spoke to an industrial engineer who has experience in missile production, and she said that 3 weeks would be a reasonable turnaround time for this kind of thing in the civilian world if the customer supplied the tooling. GM probably did some extra work to avoid the delays you frequently get on defense projects, but it's either a short-term stopgap or the whole thing was a publicity stunt, and Lockheed is now holding onto a bunch of casings that they won't use until mid-February. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

Overhauls are Understanding Hull Symbols, Auxiliaries Part 3, ICNW Part 5, the Arleigh Burke class, Standard Part 1, Evan's review of Turner Joy, and for 2025, Exotic Hulls Parts two, three and four, as well as Fighting the Last War.

While in San Francisco for the Pokemon World Championships, I made a third attempt to visit Hornet, this time making sure there wasn't a furry convention going on. Things started off well when I decided to take the ferry from downtown San Francisco to the Alameda Seaplane Terminal, which is maybe half a mile from the ship. The trip was lovely if a bit windy, with gorgeous views of San Francisco and a nice pass by Hornet on the arrival end.

Hornet from the ferry

Website

Hornet is one of the Essex class carriers that won the Pacific War, having been named after the previous Hornet, sunk during the fighting in the Solomons. She racked up an impressive score in WWII, then was modernized to fly early jets, with steam catapults and an angled deck. However, she missed out on the second round of modernization and was reclassified as an anti-submarine carrier (CVS), flying SH-3 Sea King helicopters and S-2 Tracker ASW aircraft as a companion to the strike carriers.⁵ Just before her retirement in 1970, she was the recovery ship for the Apollo 11 and 12 missions, and the deck is marked with the spot where Neil Armstrong took his first steps after his return to Earth. Read more...

During strikes against Formosa in October 1944, two American cruisers were torpedoed, Canberra and Houston. Both suffered damage that took their engines entirely offline, and Houston lost her boilers as well, leaving her almost entirely without power, but instead of taking the crews off and scuttling the ships, the decision was made to tow them home. Two days after the original torpedoing, Houston was struck again, this time in the stern. The resulting avgas fire was quickly dealt with, but it left the hangar flooded and threatening the stability of the ship thanks to free surface as well as the structural integrity of the adjacent bulkheads.

Damage to Houston's stern after the second torpedo hit

The crew quickly swung into action, building shoring around the forward bulkhead of the hangar to make sure that the flooding didn't spread, using up the last of their materials in the process and having to scavenge whatever wood they could find elsewhere on the ship, including 14 planks usually used to support men cleaning and painting the sides. But there were other problems to deal with. The hit aft had sent shocks ripping through the ship, exacerbating the structural damage caused by the first torpedo hit, although the stress amidships was reduced by the additional weight aft. More urgently, leakage from the hit had shorted out the main emergency generator, and with only the secondary generator, there wasn't enough power to provide the crew remaining onboard with anything like adequate sanitation or food. 300 of the 550 men aboard would need to be transferred to the escorting destroyers, but the seas were too rough for them to come alongside. Read more...

It's weird visiting a doomed museum. Not one that's slowly dying, with money and volunteer enthusiasm gradually ebbing away, where you sort of know in the back of your head that if there's a catastrophe with the roof or something like that, there may not be enough money to fix it. I've been to a few of those over the years. In those cases, there's always hope. Maybe a donor can be found, or new leadership can turn things around. This wasn't that. This was a museum that is already dead, and we're just waiting to pull the plug.

A week ago, I visited the Puget Sound Coast Artillery Museum in Fort Worden, Washington, at the gateway to Puget Sound. Tomorrow, September 7th, 2026, is their last day after 50 years.⁶ And I, crazy person that I am, said "well, I'm going to be on the West Coast anyway, might as well tack on a couple days and see it before it closes." So I left Lord Nelson among the Pokemon people of San Francisco and flew up to Seattle, then drove out to see what there was. And it was a nice little museum. It's clearly a smaller operation, with laminated printouts for signage and displays that show what they have, rather than a carefully-selected subset of the collection to best tell the story they're trying to tell. But those can be lovely and charming. That was more or less how the 45th Infantry Museum felt, and I regularly miss it now that it's been replaced by something more modern and sterile. As for this museum, well, it wasn't going to set the world alight. It wasn't even the best one I visited that day. (Turner Joy down in Bremerton is one of the best-executed museum ships I've ever seen. Review coming at some point soon.) But they did a pretty good job of telling the story of coastal defenses in the early 20th century, and it's a story that is pretty hard to find elsewhere. I've tried quite often to visit coastal fortifications, and it's generally been a frustrating experience in some dimension. The concrete may be there, but the stories aren't. The Fort MacArthur museum seems to have folded at some point in the last couple years, and there wasn't anything in the area around San Francisco except for Fort Point, which is from an older generation. Here, there was not only a place to learn the stories, but also several lovely batteries to go hike around, and I'm sad that only the second half will remain for visitors after tomorrow. Read more...

I've long wanted to do an analysis of how bomb accuracy has changed over the last 80 years or so, and how this impacts the cost of destroying a target from the air. The problem has always been that all of the data I need, from bomb accuracy to the cost of flying the planes, is scattered and sparse, and so I haven't really made much progress. But a recent comment from cassander inspired me to give it a try in Command: Modern Operations, which is basically a medium-level simulation package that is sold on Steam. I've used it for other experiments, and it could give at least a fairly reasonable number for how many bombs it takes from a given platform/delivery mechanism to destroy a generic target.

The basic setup I used for all of these tests was fairly simple. I set up a grid of 10 medium buildings (130' x 80') in CMO and then on the opposite side set up a nearby airbase with 12 planes of the type under test. All were given the same loadout (usually the heaviest one for the weapon in question) and set up to attack one at a time, using only one bomb at a time on a given target to prevent overkill from messing up my numbers. I would run the scenario until either all of the targets were destroyed or all of the planes had flown their sorties. Variables included the plane, the weapon, attack altitude and environmental conditions (day/night and weather). Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

Overhauls are Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 1, Falklands Part 5, The Battleship of the Future?, Wedding Decorations, A Brief Overview of the United States Fleet, Naval Radar - More Advanced Stuff, Speed and Range in Battleships, and for 2025, SCUBA Parts one and two, The Tanker War Part 2 and Exotic Hulls Part 1.