Inside a 1930s passenger plane - photo

[Altair]

Inside a 1930s passenger plane.




Previously:

Caproni Ca.60 Transaereo flying boat - photo
Saunders-Roe Princess flying boat - photos
1923 Farman F.120 sesquiplane airliner - photos
1919 Ricci R4 concept transatlantic seaplane - photos
Hughes H-4 Hercules Spruce Goose - photos

[jdurand]

Inside a 2020 plane

[TrickieDickie]

Back when flying was kind of an adventure and dressed for it. Now I find it annoying.

[Toolmaker51]

Inside a 2020 plane

I'll not be happy until all perpetrators of COVID are sued into oblivion; including billing for all the non-productive labor, bankruptcies of buffet restaurants, consumers queued over weeks of social distancing, and the myriad irregularities world-wide.
They'll claim sovereignty?
Fine, we instigate end of importations, abruptly. Who you think will holler 'Uncle' first?

[Duke_of_URL]

That picture looks to be from inside a Douglas DC-2.

When I started flying commercially smoking was still allowed in flight and the seats had ashtrays in the armrests. Later in my aviation career, an older friend related how back in the day he worked at an airline and changed cabin air filters on schedule for the Boeing 727's. The tobacco tar was literally dripping off the filters when he pulled them and it was disgusting. Unfortunately, it wasn't bad enough to get him to give up the habit, and he died way too young, not far into retirement.

[Toolmaker51]

Agreed, near certainty of a DC-2. Can't determine 12 or 14 seats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-2

Thread Hack!
My dear mother was TWA cabin cleaner, then stewardess back then, she loved hearing the radial engines power up, before & right after stint as SSgt USMC Women's Reserve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...en%27s_Reserve


[deep breath] Back to aircraft, sort of...
Regarding DC-2's and 3's alone, then factor in other aircraft, and then other feats of engineering, before dependence on digital means. All of those resulted from sheets of paper, pushbutton adding machines, slide rules and row upon row of draftsmen.
Frank Lloyd Wright? Mister's Harley & Davidson? Smith & Wesson, J.M. Browning, Edison, Westinghouse, Dr. Porsche, Tesla, Steinmetz??? Steinmetz by the way, converted the prior method of calculus to simple algebra for electrical design.
How did McMaster-Carr, Sears-Roebuck, American Hardware & Supply, or DuCommon maintain vast warehouses? IN MULTIPLE LOCATIONS??
Golden Gate Bridge? Hoover [aka Black Canyon] Dam? Empire State Building? US Interstate Highway System? Tower of London? Notre Dame? Eiffel Tower? Any sea-going hull up to mid-1980's or so? Any automobile up to same era? This spawned early consumer product quality issues, ill use of parameters; superseding judgement and established standards.
Name just one working 'engineer' today with that kind of initiative or capability. None I know can even develop a simple box drill jig or die-set.
Hell's bells, nobody seems able to manage a little 500 item toolroom anymore.
Yeah.

[mklotz]

...Steinmetz by the way, converted the prior method of calculus to simple algebra for electrical design...

My favorite, although probably apocryphal, Steinmetz anecdote...

Henry Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.

Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:

Making chalk mark on generator $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999.

Ford paid the bill.

[Toolmaker51]

Steinmetz, Ford, & the Generator; exactly the proper example to my thinly disguised rant. Apocryphal or not, there's no question he and others like him, used extraordinary perception, knowledge and intuition, uncluttered by vast amounts of unverified, errant data.

I'll apologize not mentioning Einstein, not intentional, just reminding our forum of those less celebrated. I certainly appreciate quoting of my remark.

[uv8452]

"....before dependence on digital means." Few recognise (or: are able to see?) the unefficient side effects of the so-called C'A'D/CAM. Even fewer dare to call it a costly scam.

CAD/CAM had a predecessor that showed traits of a scam: Artificial Intelligence. To persuade the US Ministry of Defence to (generously) fund their academic environment, Messrs Simon and Newell predicted/promised in 1957 that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world's chess champion, compose music, would discover(!) and prove an important mathematical theorem, etc. etc.

A clearsighted Hubert Dreyfus (not to forget his brother Stuart; both working then at MIT) wrote a paper for the RAND Corp. (1961), which after his findings he could not help title "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence". The well nourished AI academy waged war against the Dreyfus brothers and every AI critic. A quite reputed scientist (I do not get the name) commented 20 years later that it was still not advisable to be seen at lunch break with one of them. Over 30 years later the AI community struggled hard to explain the failure of Simon and Newell's prophecy. The 'Dreyfus affair'. Compiled by Pamela McCorduck in her AI history 'Machines who think'
The similarities to 'Waldsterben' and 'climate' and 'Corona' are obvious. Just the scales are different.

[mklotz]

Prediction of the technological future has always been problematic...

Remember the "flying cars" predictions of the 50s? Even as a kid I knew that wouldn't work.

Also in the 50s, "peaceful" uses of atomic bombs, like widening the Suez canal.

Lord Kelvin...
"No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful."
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

Henry Ellsworth, patent commissioner, in 1843...
"The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end."

Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM...
I think there is a world market for about five computers. (said in 1943).

H. M. Warner, founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927...
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?