The Bombardment / The Shadow In My Eye - Netflix Movie Trailer
What's on Netflix
We're looking over the selection on Netflix this evening and I notice the blurb on this one and I say, hey! I know that story! I mentioned it in a post about the De Havilland Mosquito. All I noticed at the time was that the Brits had made a successful attack on Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen in the last year of WW2. I didn't pay any attention to the 125 civilians killed when some of the attacking aircraft mistook a school for their target.
This movie is mostly about the people on the ground in Copenhagen and mostly about the people at the school. We got a lot of ordinary life, but there is also a handful of crazy and solid helping of horror. The story is told almost entirely with pictures. There are some bits of dialog, but I think it's just there to let you know that these are ordinary people who can speak. It's really quite an amazing film.
The unfettered barrage of airport PA announcements may be coming to an end:
Copenhagen, we turn our weary ears to you. Not long ago I was working a flight into CPH when one of our passengers left behind a laptop. A flight attendant passed the computer to a gate agent and asked if he could page the person it belonged to. No, sir. Copenhagen is a “quiet airport,” the agent explained. No public address announcements are permitted unless it’s something urgent. That Scandinavian sensibility once again. Peace and quiet. What a concept.
I’m told that San Francisco International is instituting a similar set of rules. I’ll believe it when I (don’t) hear it. - Patrick Smith on Ask The Pilot
Here I thought I was the only one who thought all those PA announcements were annoying and stupid.
A couple of weeks ago there was a story in the WSJ about snowmobiles that mentioned some of technical advances that have been made, and one of them was turbochargers. Turbochargers have been around for a while, you can buy a production car right off the showroom floor that is equipped with a turbocharger or even two. Hot rodders have been putting them on all kinds of machines, but as far as I know no one has put a turbocharger on a small, mass production engine, like those found in motorcycles or snowmobiles, until now.
Anyway this started me musing on the subject and the turbochargers from the WW2 P-38 fighter aircraft popped into my head, so I went digging, and some strange stuff surfaced.
First of all, almost all WW2 aircraft engines were supercharged, which gave them enough boost that they were able to reach altitudes of 25,000 feet (five miles high). When engines were equipped with turbochargers, the turbochargers were added to the existing supercharger arrangement so the engine now had two stage supercharging. The turbo provided the first stage. This moderately compressed air was fed to the supercharger, which compressed it to the point that is was as dense as the air you find at sea level, and fed it to the engine. This two stage compression gave the aircraft enough power to reach 40,000 feet (eight miles high), more or less.
The General Electric turbocharger (it is always referred to as the General Electric turbocharger) was a bit of a beast. It was also secret, kind of like the Norden bombsight or RADAR. Early on in the war, we sent some P-38's to Britain, but for some reason (perhaps because we didn't trust the Brits to be able to keep a secret), they weren't equipped with General Electric turbochargers, which had a sizable impact on their performance. I imagine the Brits weren't too happy about this, but beggars can't be choosers, so they took them anyway.
The P-47 was also equipped with a General Electric turbocharger. The P-47 always looked a little plump, but I figured the designers knew what they were doing, and who knows what kind of complicated stuff was buried in the fuselage. Well, now I know. It was puffed up to accommodate all the duct work needed to connect the engine in the nose with the turbocharger and intercooler in the tail.
The De Havilland Mosquito
Now I'm watching a YouTube video about the De Haviland Mosquito which seems to have been quite an aircraft. It is a British aircraft, so it was not equipped with a General Electric turbocharger, but it still managed to get to high altitudes. How did it do that without a turbocharger? It had a two-stage supercharger, that's how.
The two-stage superchargers on the Merlin engine were driven by gears. General Electric turbochargers are driven by exhaust gas from the engine. Gears are dense and compact. The duct work needed to connect the engine to the turbo is bulky, but not dense. The weight penalty is probably similar. Duct work is easy to fabricate out of sheet metal. Gears require machine tools and castings to hold them alignment, which means the drive mechanism for a supercharger is going to be more expensive than the duct work for the turbo. On the other hand, the turbo needs to be made from unobtanium in order to withstand the heat from the exhaust gas. Superchargers can be made from regular old metal like aluminum or even iron, if you don't mind the extra mass. I think it is safe to say that the General Electric turbocharger was the forerunner of the General Electric jet engine program.
de Haviland Mosquitowas an all wood airplane, and it you believe everything in the video, you might conclude that it was vastly superior to all of the big, heavy, four-engined bombers (like the Flying Fortress, the Liberator and the Lancaster) that the Allies used for the majority of their bombing raids on Europe. That superior performance was entirely the result of its high speed (fastest WW2 military aircraft), which it was able to attain because of its light weight. It was light because it didn't carry any armor, or gunners or gun turrets. Originally it did not have any guns at all, but once they found out what it could do, they mounted a bunch of guns in the nose.
Twelve O'Clock High
I suppose it was 12 O'Clock High, and my dad's role as a gunner in a B-24, that locked the heavy bomber into the leading role (in my mind) in our war against the Axis. I remember quite vividly how the Japan's Mitsubishi Zero was a light weight, high-performance aircraft whose Achilles' heel was its lack of armor. What all this illustrates is the 'design by committee' syndrome. When the enemy builds a high performance aircraft without any armor, it's because they are not concerned about their pilot's well being, but when we do it and the aircraft is hugely successful, we shove it under the rug because it doesn't fit the narrative that the military industrial complex is trying to sell us.
There are advantages to this approach. The story is vital in order to garner popular support, which you really need in order to win. And building big, heavy airplanes means you need a big, heavy, industrial machine to produce them. And if push comes to shove, you can drop a lot of weight by getting rid of the armor, which is going to make your aircraft perform better, which is what you really need in combat. It's kind of like sandbagging. You carry a bunch of extra weight around with you which makes you look slow and cumbersome, but it makes you stronger, and when it comes to crunch time, you can drop those sandbags and really drop the hammer on your enemies.
My own experience is that Muslims don’t understand our Western way of trying to handle conflicts through dialogue. They are raised in a culture with very clear outer authorities and consequences. Western tradition using compromise and inner reflection as primary means of handling outer and inner conflicts is seen as weak in the Muslim culture. To a great extent they simply don’t understand this softer and more humanistic way of handling social affairs. . . . we see that especially anger is much more accepted in the Muslim culture. One example: in Western culture and also in other non-Muslim cultures, like in Asia, you see aggression and a sudden explosion of anger as something you’ll regret afterwards, something you are ashamed of. It is completely opposite in the Muslim culture. If somebody steps on your honor – what I as a psychologist would call self confidence – you are simply expected to show aggression and often also verbal or physical revenge. So, aggression gives you a low status in our cultures, but a high status in the Muslim culture. There is however another and much deeper reason for the wide spread anti-social behavior in Muslim communities and their strong aversion against integration – namely, the very strong identification that Muslims have with belonging to the Muslim culture. . . . A strong and proud culture unfortunately also makes the culture’s members almost unable to adapt to other values. . . . but especially disturbing is the fact that there are no differences of opinion on this topic among Muslims who are born and raised in Muslim countries and the opinion of their children who are born and raised in Danish society. When it comes to identity among Muslims, nationality does not count at all in comparison with culture and religion. The consequence is a powerful and growing opposition to Western culture and values in Muslim ghettoes throughout Copenhagen and other major European cities. . . . My experience is that the very low focus on supporting one’s children in school and on one’s own education and the lack of motivation for creating a professional career is a crucial factor for the poverty, which many Muslims experience in both our societies and in Muslim countries.
Supposedly Nicholai has a best seller out: Among criminal Muslims. A psychologist’s experience from Copenhagen. Couldn't find it on the net.
The headline on the story on the Huffington Post reads 99 Per Cent Of Sweden's Garbage Is Now Recycled, which sounds really great until you find out that they are recycling it by using it for fuel, which sounds a whole lot like the incinerators everyone used to use until we got fed up with choking on smog. Now incinerators were a bit primitive, their only purpose in life was to turn trash to ash. Any heat they generated was just another waste by-product to be disposed of as cheaply as possible, which meant sending it up the smoke stack with all the smoke. So we are making a little progress here in that we are trying to recover some of that energy and use it for something useful LIKE NOT BUYING OIL FROM SAUDI ARABIA*, which as you may know is the biggest source of problems on our planet. Supposedly we have developed some techniques for burning trash without generating as many nasty chemicals. CO2 is not one. You can bet that these plants are generating plenty of CO2.
I went looking for some pictures of these super-efficient Swedish trash burners, but I didn't find much and what I found was pretty generic, industrial type installations. But other places in Europe are also getting into the act and some of their projects have a bit of, shall we say, flair, like the one shown above. Denmark in particular seems to be jumping in with both feet with these props that have escaped from a science fiction movie:
*whether Saudi Arabia is a problem or not depends, I suppose, on whether you think slicing up your neighbors with swords is an acceptable pasttime. I mean it's kind of hard to argue with history. Killing your neighbors has been the world's most popular sport for zillions of years. Widespread peace and cooperation is kind of an anomaly.
