Introduction of our job in this blog

Introduction of our job in this blog

Fokker F32 Western Air Express

This blog will Included in the early airliners, among which are those that carried the world's very first farepaying passengers, and the first small sack of air-mail letters, long before World War 1. After that great war, aircraft were not only more capable but also more reliable; but travel by air was still not far removed from science fiction, and something totally outside the lives of all ordinary people.

Those few who did buy airline tickets were advised to wear a stout leather coat, gloves and if possible goggles and a hat well tied-on.

In a space that often resembled a small box they bumped and lurched at about the same speed as an express train with hardly the slightest concession to comfort, and in noise of unbelievable intensity - until they either reached their destination, or landed to enquire the way, or landed in a precipitate and often disastrous manner because of engine failure.

Gradually new and more reliable civil engines such as the Bristol Jupiter and Wright Whirlwind put the struggling air transport industry on a slightly less shaky foundation. Though occasionally designers got carried away by their enthusiasm and made aircraft that were too large and failed to sell - examples were the Fokker F.32 and Dornier Do X - the size and capability of airliners grew in step with the traffic.

The 1930s saw a never-to-be-repeated transformation from fabric-covered biplanes to stressed-skin monoplanes, equipped with retractable landing gear, flaps, variable-pitch propellers and many other new features.

A few of the famous aircraft in that section, notably the immortal DC-3, were still important in the 1940s, which traces the introduction of pressurization, new navigation aids and many other advances, as well as a doubling in engine power from 1000 to 2000 hp and, at the end of that decade, still more powerful engines such as the 3250 to 3500-hpPratt & Whirney Wasp Major and Wright Turbo-Compound, the latter being·an established piston engine to which were added three turbines driven by the hot exhaust gas.

These ultimate piston engines were immense mechanical accomplishments, but they could not survive in the face of competition from jets and turboprops. The first commercial turboprop, and quite a crude engine at that (its compressor was a scaled-up Griffon pistonengine supercharger), was the Rolls-Royce Dart.