Every Jetliner Ever Made: British Aerospace and Comac

Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made, in alphabetical order, with Airbus and Boeing at the end, otherwise this series of articles would be incredibly top-heavy, just like internet glamour legend Diamond Jackson, but with aeroplanes. This week we're going to look at British Aerospace, from the United Kingdom, and Comac, from China.

Or is it COMAC? I think it's COMAC. This is going to be short, because British Aerospace only made one airliner, and COMAC's history is not yet written. I could have padded it out by putting Convair at the end, but then it would have been too long. I begin.

A Convair 880, which appears in the next post.

BRITISH AEROSPACE / BAe (Great Britain)

The component parts of British Aerospace developed several jetliners, and British Aerospace's predecessor, BAC, developed several more, but there was only one jetliner with British Aerospace branding, and it was the 146 regional jet of the 1980s.

Throughout the 20th Century all of Britain's big manufacturing industries faced more or less the same basic problem. Whether it was the car industry, the film industry, steel, aeroplanes, nuclear power, space rockets, music, canned meat, beer, comics, music etc. Britain is an awkward size. The country is big enough and rich enough to make things, but not big or rich enough to sustain a large domestic market, and not rich or powerful enough to force the rest of the world to bend to its will. There was a time when politicians in foreign lands begged us not to put tariffs on their goods. By the 1980s no-one cared.

HMS Warspite, blowing things up

British used to be powerful enough to bend the rest of the world to its will. But a combination of the rise of Japan as a naval force, the enormous debts accrued by two massive wars, the subsequent rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as global superpowers, and the fact that post-war colonialism was not a good look, none of those things helped. Now we can merely ask that the world bends to our will, in exchange for the chance to sit next to David Beckham at Wimbledon or perhaps a knighthood. We can't use force any more, at least not without asking the United States if we could borrow some of their transport aircraft, at which point the United States would probably say "knock it off".

In the post-war years it became apparent that the costs involved in developing jet engines, guided missiles, computerised flight control systems, nuclear weapon systems, space rockets etc was an order of magnitude higher than the costs involved in developing fabric-and-metal monoplanes, and so the UK government asked Vickers, Bristol, Avro, and Hunting to merge with each other so that Britain's aviation industry would be big and strong. This entity became the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC).

The BAC 1-11 jetliner was a modest hit, the BAC/Vickers VC-10 and the BAC Concorde less so, although they were fantastic aircraft. Meanwhile Hawker Siddeley, who had resisted being merged into BAC, had its own successes and failures with the Hawker 748 regional turboprop and the Trident jetliner. In 1977 the UK government merged Hawker and BAC to form British Aerospace, presumably in the hope that this new entity would be even bigger and stronger than BAC and Hawker separately, although there was also an element of political dogmatism about the merger.

British Aerospace existed from 1977 until 1999, at which point it bought Marconi and became BAE Systems, which still exists today and is in rude health, but during its 22-year life British Aerospace only produced one airliner, the BAe 146. Development began in the early 1970s, in fits and starts, under Hawker Siddeley, but the prototype didn't make its first flight until 1981.

In the early 1970s the idea of a jet-powered regional airliner was cutting-edge, although Hawker-Siddeley called it a "feederliner" rather than a regional jet. The short-range market was at the time dominated by turboprops, and a few holdovers from the piston age, but passengers consistently preferred jets, which were faster and could fly higher.

The HS 146, as it was originally called, had more or less the same specification as later regional jets from Bombardier and Embraer - a passenger capacity of around eighty people, with a range of around two thousand miles - but with high-mounted wings and a T-tail, all chosen to enable the 146 to use poor-quality runways. And unusually it had four engines rather than two, which was a consequence of its genesis in the early 1970s. The design emerged just as Lycoming of the United States was putting the finishing touches on the ALF 502, an innovative turbofan engine fitted with a gearbox that kept the fan spinning at subsonic speeds, which greatly reduced engine noise. Hawker decided to build the 146 around Lycoming's new engine.

The 502 had about a third more power than the nearest competitor, the Garrett TFE731, but it still only had around 7000lb of thrust, which was two-thirds to a half that of the engines that powered small, full-sized jetliners. As a consequence Hawker needed to fit the 146 with four engines to ensure a safe margin in case of engine failure.

The choice of four engines was controversial, but it gave the 146 good acceleration, a power reserve in case of engine failure, quiet operation, and a short takeoff run. With a run of around 3,000 feet the 146 needed less than half the runway length of a Boeing 737. By coincidence this made it an ideal fit for London City Airport, which opened in 1988, a few years after the 146 entered service, and it quickly became a common sight at that airport.

Nonetheless the aircraft ended up as a niche product, selling in small quantities to a variety of operators rather than having large orders. With four engines its fuel consumption was on a par with a small, twin-engined jetliner, and the introduction of the short-field Airbus A318 in the early 1990s eliminated some of its raison d'etre. The A318 could also take off from London City Airport, and had a larger cabin and a longer range.

Throughout its life sales were modest, but steady, with the 146 winning orders from regional airlines in Australia, Europe, and the United States. It was also selected by the Royal Air Force as a freighter, where its performance later proved useful in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, and as a VIP transport, where it was used as part of the Queen's flight. Quite infamously Prince Charles - as he was then - overran the runway while landing in the Inner Hebrides in 1994, apparently after asking the Captain if he could have a turn at the controls. No-one was seriously injured but it was a major source of embarrassment for all concerned. In 2017 a late-model 146 flew from Cape Town in South Africa to St Helena in the Atlantic Ocean to pick up a bunch of passengers who had been stranded when their ship broke down, in the process becoming the first commercial jet flight from Africa to the island.

British Aerospace stretched the 146 twice, with the 146-200 and -300 increasing passenger load to roughly one hundred and one hundred and ten passengers respectively, with range dropping from two thousand miles to around eighteen hundred. Depending on the route the aircraft was often flown with a reduced passenger load or less fuel, or both. Initial production of the BAe 146 wound down in the 1990s, at which point it was then sold, in modified form, as the Avro RJ. The RJ75, RJ85, and RJ100 were similar to the 146-100, 146-200, and 146-300, but with more fuel-efficient engines and improved interiors. Despite the completely new name they were essentially the same aircraft, and that particular version of Avro was really just a subsidiary of BAe based in Manchester. The general internet consensus is that it was an attempt to fool buyers in the United States that the 146 was an American aircraft, or at least Canadian.

Ultimately BAe and its Avro subsidiary sold almost four hundred 146s, making it the most popular British jetliner of all time. As of 2024 the 146 is slowly leaving passenger service, although it remains a popular cargo aircraft and fire-bomber on account of its short take-off run and unusually high engine power.

COMAC (China)

The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China was founded in 2008 as part of a government initiative to kickstart the domestic airline industry. In the 1970s the Chinese civil aviation authority developed a clone of the Boeing 707, the Shanghai Y-10, but although the resulting aircraft made a series of publicity flights it never entered series production, because the underlying design was twenty years old. China's state airline instead bought a mixture of Russian, British, and eventually US and European designs, and as of this writing Air China has a mixed fleet of Boeing and Airbus airliners.

A COMAC ARJ21, original by N509FZ

But the Chinese government decided that long-term reliance on foreign suppliers was a bad idea, and so COMAC was formed in the early 2000s. Its first product was the ARJ21, which was launched in 2008 and is still in production. It has the classic configuration of a regional jet, with twin rear-mounted engines - US-designed General Electric CF34 turbofans - and a T-tail. The configuration is very similar to the Douglas DC-9, and indeed COMAC had in the past signed a deal to licence-produce DC-9s, but the ARJ21 has wings developed by Antonov of Ukraine and a new nosecone.

It carries a passenger load of 80-100 people, with a range of 1,400 miles. Since 2008 COMAC has only managed to sell just over 100 units, all within China, not helped by a general decline in the regional jet market.

Does it sound as though I'm rushing? There are only around a hundred ARJ21s, and they only fly within China, and I have to admit that I've never seen one or been in one. The general industry trend has been away from smaller jetliners to larger, more flexible designs - but not too large, as Airbus discovered with the A380 - so in the early 2010s COMAC expanded their range with the C919.

A COMAC C919, original by N509FZ

The C919 is conceptually similar to Russia's Sukhoi MC-21, in the sense that it's an attempt to make a domestic analogue of the hugely popular Boeing 737 or Airbus A320. The C919 is however smaller than those two airliners, with a passenger load of 150-190 and a much shorter range of only 2,500 miles, although an extended-range, 3,500 mile model has been mooted. Tibet Airlines has ordered a special variant with a shortened fuselage and reinforced landing gear, optimised for high-altitude runways.

As of 2024 ten airframes are in operation with airlines in China, although there are apparently over a thousand orders on the books. General internet consensus has it that the design lags behind modern versions of the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737, but only by a single generation. There is an implication that the C919's successor will be directly competitive with Western designs, and it will be interesting to see how it does on the international market.

And that's British Aerospace and COMAC. Next, Convair and Dassault. Or Concorde. Or Concorde and Convair. I don't know yet.

Alesis Micro Enhancer

Let's have a look at the Alesis Micro Enhancer. What is it? It's a building, with sick people, but that's not important right now. Hahaha! It's a building...

No, that doesn't make sense. I messed up the joke. I'm sorry. The Micro Enhancer is a digital effects box that adds a bit of high-frequency sizzle to an incoming signal, although the effect is very subtle. It's one of Alesis' mid-80s Micro effects, along with the Microverb, the Micro Gate, the Micro Limiter and a couple of others. They came in a standard metal case with fins along the side, the idea being that you could slot them together and screw them into a 19" cradle in order to fit them into a standard 19" rack.

Micro penis enhancer! Hahaha! It's handy if you have a micro penis. Oh God, I'm so good at this. Micro penis enhancer.

I realise now that they're handed, e.g. there are a limited number of ways to slot them together. Of all the micro effects my impression is that the Microverb was the most popular - it was the only one to have a sequel - and secondly the Micro Limiter compressor, with the others a distant third. Sound on Sound reviewed the series back in 1988. Their reviewer was impressed with the Micro Limiter and Micro Gate noise gate but baffled by the Micro Enhancer.

Over the years I've collected some of them. The MicroVerb II only has preset reverbs, and some of them have a boxy, metallic sound, but the smaller presets fill out the sound nicely, and the cavern-sized LARGE 4 is genuinely epic. The sound quality is surprisingly good, less hissy than I expected. The Micro Gate is fun - it was originally intended to gate out microphone hiss and cable buzzes, but it also has a trigger input that can gate the entire signal, so you can feed chords or an entire mix into it and use a drum machine or trigger signal to make stuttering rhythms.

On to the Micro Enhancer. It's stereo-only. If you plug something into the left input the sound only comes out of the left output. My hunch is that Alesis intended for it to go at the end of the effects chain, just before the speakers.

It has a limited range of controls, and although the manual talks up its utility I found that it only had an effect with MIX and BANDWIDTH all the way up and THRESHOLD from 50% onwards.

Incidentally, what does an enhancer do? They're also called exciters. They add some high-frequency fizz to a signal without increasing the amount of global background noise, which would otherwise happen if you just turned up the treble. The fine details are sketchy - the most popular exciter is made by a company called Aphex, who are vague about its workings - but they all seem to involve cutting off the bass frequencies, distorting the remaining high frequency sounds, and mixing the result in with the original signal.

In the following video I try out the Micro Enhancer first. It doesn't do anything for bass frequencies, only treble, and the results are subtle, although distinguishable. It adds a bit of high-frequency sparkle without adding too much background hiss. I'm feeding a synthesiser into it, and in theory I could just open the filter up, but what if I was using an instrument that doesn't have a filter, such as a guitar, or a bango, or a kazoo, or a person?

As a bonus the second half features a Joe Meek VC3, which also has an exciter. Does the exciter in the Joe Meek VC3 do the same thing as the enhancer in the Micro Enhancer? I have no idea. It's not subtle at all, but the results are much more flexible, especially if you don't mind a bit of grit.

Ultimately the Micro Enhancer is hard to rate. It does what it sets out to do. It adds a bit of high-frequency sparkle without adding too much extra noise. Given the fact it has stereo inputs and outputs I suspect Alesis intended or at least expected that you would use it on a complete mix, in order to give the music a radio-friendly sheen, and I imagine it would be inoffensive when used as a mix sweetener. And perhaps if you were recording to a tape machine and doing a lot of overdubs, you might have used the Enhancer to stop the sound getting too muddy. But Logic, for example, already has a built-in exciter, and with digital recording in a modern studio it strikes me that the Micro Enhancer is a relic of the days of analogue tape.

The VC3, on the other hand, is still great fun because it sounds awful at higher settings, but awful in a good way.

Every Jetliner Ever Made: Bombardier

Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. In alphabetical order, but with Airbus and Boeing at the end otherwise it would be boring. This week, Bombardier Aviation of Canada. Bomb-bar-deer, or Bomb-bar-dee-yay?

Apparently the latter. It was founded by Joseph-Armand Bomb-bar-dee-yay of Quebec, which explains why the company has such a warlike name. In the 1930s, initially specialising in snowmobiles, but it went on to be one of those classic 1960s conglomerates that made everything, at various times selling snowmobiles, business jets, buses, trains, and, yes, jetliners.

During its time as a jetliner company Bombardier only produced two basic designs, but one of them was very popular, nay era-defining.

A Bombardier snowmobile, photographed by Jim Peaco of the US National Parks Service

BOMBARDIER (Canada)

Bombardier's speciality was regional jets. Regional jets were so hot in the 1990s and early 2000s. Aviation fuel was cheap and people wanted to go on holiday. What is a regional jet?

There's a fundamental difference between the commercial aviation market in the United States and Britain. If I want to fly to Athens from the UK I can take the train to Heathrow and then fly directly to Athens. But what if I lived in Cleveland? I don't, but imagine if I did. I would be a completely different person, but humour me. I would be hard and mean. Imagine if I lived in Cleveland and I wanted to go to Athens. To get away from Cleveland.

Cleveland doesn't have flights to Athens. It doesn't. I've looked. It does however have flights to New York. If I could just get to New York first, I would be able to go to Athens.

But how to get to New York? In theory I could drive, but it would take ten hours. And the United States doesn't do trains. So I fly. And I would not be alone, because Cleveland and its surrounding area has a population of over three million people, and Cleveland is just one city.

Enough of Cleveland. Suffice it to say that in the United States the thought of flying from one city to another to catch a second flight somewhere else is not unusual.

Cleveland, 1986. Invented by Moses Cleaveland, who left after spending three months there and never returned.

It's called the hub-and-spoke model. The smaller airports are spokes, the larger airports are hubs. As a consequence the US has a substantial market for super-small jetliners that can cover short distances without using too much fuel. They're called regional jets, sometimes feederliners, and that's where Bombardier comes in.

And Fokker, and De Havilland Canada, and Embraer. All of those companies specialise or specialised in small regional aircraft that could fly between cities in the United States. The hub-and-spoke model also operates in South America and Asia, but I have the impression that Asian carriers prefer larger, full-sized airlines.

Up until the 1990s regional routes were usually covered by turboprops, such as the De Havilland Canada Dash 8 pictured above, but turboprops have some disadvantages. Limited cruising altitude, slow speed, and noisy engines among them. Furthermore there was a perception in the 1990s that turboprops were old-fashioned. When questioned, passengers frequently expressed a preference for jets, and in 1993 Comair, a subsidiary of Delta Airlines, took the bold step of ordering a batch of regional jets from Bombardier, which opened the floodgates for other airlines to do the same thing.

Sub-100-seat regional jets went on to become a huge and hyper-competitive market in the 1990s, largely killing off turboprops. Dornier struggled to introduced a regional jet, and although Fokker had a head start with the F28 Fellowship, which had pioneered the concept, the development cost of their own modern regional jet left them heavily in debt.

A Fokker 100 regional jet. The regional jet market was hyper-competitive, which unfortunately resulted in Fokker going bankrupt in 1996.

Britain is too small for the hub-and-spoke model to make any sense, and continental Europe has a high-speed rail network that's generally cheaper than an airline ticket, but a few European airlines do use regional jets. Scandinavian, for example, has a fleet of Bombardier CRJs, as does Lufthansa. Regional jets make a certain amount of sense on the edges of Europe, especially the Nordic area, where the population is widely spread out.

After the failure of Dornier and Fokker, and the withdrawal of Saab and BAE Systems from the regional market, the two remaining players in the immediate pre-COVID period were Bombardier of Canada and Embraer of Brazil. Following behind them were the Franco-Italian ATR and De Havilland Canada, but they make turboprops so for the purposes of this document I'm going to pretend they don't exist. I'll cover Embraer in a separate document, but suffice it to say that they were Bombardier's arch-rivals during the 1990s and 2000s.

A Bombardier Challenger business jet, in service with the Royal Canadian Air Force

Bombardier's regional jet programme grew from its experience with business jets. The company's first regional jet, the CRJ100, was launched in 1991. The company had gambled that the current batch of turboprop airliners were getting long in the tooth, and as mentioned earlier in the article the CRJ was given a huge boost by an order from Comair, who became one of the launch customers. Comair went on to order 110 CRJ100, becoming the type's main operator.

The CRJ100 had the same configuration as the Bombardier Challenger business jet, with two rear-mounted engines and a T-tail. A classic configuration for smaller airliners that had the benefit of keeping the engines away from runway debris while allowing for shorter landing gear. The biggest Bombardier business jet, the Challenger 650, could seat around twenty passengers, but the CRJ100 was much larger, with a passenger capacity of fifty people in a 2x2 arrangement, and a range of around 1,500-2,000 miles depending on the model.

It was conceptually similar to the Douglas DC-9 or BAC 1-11, but with a much smaller passenger load. Why CRJ? The programme was originally the Canadair Regional Jet, but Canadair was bought up by Bombardier in 1986. In fact De Havilland Canada was also bought up by Bombardier, but it was then sold again because Bombardier didn't want to make turboprops.

A Bombardier CRJ 200, courtesy contri of Japan (CC-SA 2.0)

Production of the CRJ100 was modest, amounting to only a couple of hundred sales, including 110 to Comair and 35 to Lufthansa of Germany. However in 1996 Bombardier launched the CRJ200, which had more efficient engines but was otherwise much the same. It sold like hot cakes, and of the 1,000 or so CRJs ever made the production ratio was about 7:3 CRJ200s to CRJ100s. They were mostly bought by airlines in the US, predominantly Northwest Airlines and Skywest. Production continued until 2006.

I'm unfamiliar with the regional jet market, but the late 1990s was apparently its heyday. I have the impression that the twenty-first century as seen from 1999 consisted of regional jets ferrying passengers to New York and Los Angeles forever.

A CRJ 701, with an obviously stretched fuselage.

By the late 1990s the CRJ100/200 was pushed aside by the CRJ700, which was launched in the late 1990s. It had a shorter range than the CRJ200 but carried around 50% more passengers, around 70-80 or so, with the same two-engines-at-the-back configuration. The launch customer was Brit Air of France, who began operations in February 2001. During the 2000s Bombardier also released a pair of stretched versions of the CRJ700, the CRJ900 (2003) and CRJ1000 (2007), which carried around 90 and 100 passengers respectively. The three of them also sold around 1,000 units, the bulk of production being CRJ900s and CRJ700s.

There was also a pair of oddities, the CRJ550 and 705, which were essentially CRJ700s and 900s with fewer seats. There was no real technical reason for this; they existed because some airlines in the United States were contractually forbidden from operating regional jets that carried more than a certain amount of passengers. 50 and 76, apparently. I have no idea why.

A CRJ 900. Notice the extra exit door.

The 100-seat CRJ1000 was the top of the range, but it wasn't particularly popular. For legal reasons regional operators in the United States were prohibited from using it, but conversely it was too small for most customers in Europe, who were gravitating towards uniform fleets of Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s. Development problems delayed its first paying flights until 2011, and production only continued until 2020. A year later the CRJ line was sold off to Mitsubishi of Japan, who continue to provide parts and support for CRJs, although the company has no plans to restart production.

Nonetheless the CRJ1000 had lit a fire within Bombardier. There was a general trend in the industry for regional jets to grow and grown in size, so Bombardier decided to jump up a tier and release a full-sized airliner. A miniature full-sized airliner.

This was launched in 2013 as the CS100. It had two engines mounted under the wings and a conventional tail, just like a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320.

A Bombardier CS300.

It had a passenger load of around 120 people, with a range of 3,500 miles, considerably more than the CRJ. It was joined in 2016 by the CS300, which carried around 150 people.

The CS100/300 was controversial. Until that point Bombardier - and Embraer, and all the other regional aircraft manufacturers - had avoided directly competing with Airbus and Boeing. And, technically, the CS100 did not step on the toes of those two manufacturers, although that didn't stop Boeing from taking legal action against Bombardier for selling CS100s to Delta Airlines at a keen price.

The Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 loom large in the world of aviation. They were both originally developed as small airliners that could carry a useful passenger load across the United States or Europe, but over time they have been stretched and re-engined to a point where they can almost cover transatlantic routes. They have greater range and more capacity than the four-engined jetliners of the early 1960s, and in fact Norwegian Airlines briefly flew 737s across the Atlantic from Ireland to the US east coast in the pre-COVID years. But conversely they can, at a pinch, still fly the shorter routes for which they were originally designed.

Bombardier reasoned that the 737 had grown too large for some carriers, so the CS100 was intended to slot in underneath it. Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, regional airlines in the United States ignored it, and sales have mostly been to European and African carriers, so in 2017 loss-making Bombardier sold the design to Airbus, who now make it as the Airbus A220-100 and A220-300. Boeing was like "frumple".

As of this writing the A220 is still a going concern, although its reception has been muted. The advent of COVID in 2020 did nothing to help. It has sold around three hundred units, with firm orders for five hundred more. That's nowhere near the amount of orders won by the Boeing 737 or Airbus 320 over the same period, but it's not bad. Perhaps in a world of uncertainty over infectious diseases and climate change there's room for a smaller, more flexible alternative.

A Bombardier Global Express business jet - the company essentially went around in a big circle, starting and ending with business jets.

And that's Bombardier. As mentioned earlier, the original CRJ range was sold off to Mitsubishi, and the CS100 was sold to Airbus, so the company no longer makes jetliners. It does however still make business jets. The largest, the Global 7500, has a passenger capacity of around 19, too small for this document, but notable for an extraordinary range of almost 8,000 miles, which competes favourably with most full-sized jetliners. From 1990 until 2021 Bombardier also made the famous Learjet, which is also not an airliner but looks fantastic, viz:

Using AI to Generate Content: Yay or Nay?

Over the last few years there has been a lot of noise about artificial intelligence. What is it? What does it do? Can it be used to make money?

The majority of AI solutions are language learning models. They digest a mass of human-generated written media, and in doing so they learn how to generate responses that mimic human intelligence. On the surface the end result feels like a cheat, an imitation, but the fact is that human intelligence itself is an imitation of human intelligence. We are all just clever mimics.

I mean, have you ever tried to have a conversation with a child, or anybody under the age of about fifteen? They don't understand anything. Nothing sticks. There's nothing inside them. The words just go into their stupid faces and straight out again. The fact is that young people are clever mimics of humanity, without the depth of thought that comes with experience. They can be trained to carry a rifle, but they are empty, empty vessels.

AI is a lot like that. AI is an empty vessel, a precocious child, somewhat akin to the population of Reddit. AI is horrifying, in a way, because the notion that we are just a mass of programmed responses to external stimuli implies that we are not divine at all. I'm digressing here.

The key thing is to train the model on a huge, diverse pool of good-quality written content that also contains genuine specialist information, so for the purposes of this blog post and potentially the entire future of this blog I decided to use UFOPaedia, a website that covers the long-running XCOM series of tactical wargames. It has been around for many years and contains a mass of fascinating information. I could have used Wikipedia, but I don't want to make a blog that just lists Pokemon.

My goal was to see if I could use AI to write an informative article about internet content generation for a general audience. If this works, I might be able to go on holiday for once. I can hit "go" and let the AI generate the rest of this blog while I go on holiday. At last, I will be able to go on holiday. Not just writing. Also holiday. Let's see how it goes. I begin, although at the back of my mind I worry that I might have chosen too small a dataset.

1. USING AI TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE

It's pointless having the wittiest, most informative content on the internet if no-one ever finds out about it. You need to drive traffic to your website, and the best way to do this is to MANUFACTURE LASER CANNON.

A laser cannon

Of all the potential solutions, laser cannon are by far the best. Unlike almost every other piece of technology that exists in this world, a laser cannon does not require raw materials, only money. Laser cannon have a flat cost of $182,000 and a sale price of $211,000, making a paper profit of $29,000 per cannon, although in practice this doesn't include the maintenance cost of a workshop and the wages of the engineers required to build the cannon.

Nonetheless, with production running 24/7, each cannon generates a profit of $18,000 - and a single fully-staffed workshop can produce just over 107 of them a month, for a monthly profit of over $1.9m. That's a lot of money.

2. USING AI TO DRIVE READER RETENTION

Suppose your readers get bored, and decide to leave? You could in theory sate their lust for mental stimulation by giving them more content, but a more effective way of retaining readers is to MANUFACTURE LASER CANNON.

An XCOM engineer manufacturing a laser cannon

As mentioned previously laser cannon have no special material requirements. There is a minor setup cost involved in researching laser pistols, laser rifles, and heavy lasers, but each cannon only requires money and engineer hours.

The next-most-profitable technology is the FUSION BALL LAUNCHER, but each launcher requires one unit of alien alloys, which could otherwise be sold for a profit. When the sale price of the alien alloy is taken into account, laser cannon are more profitable than fusion ball launchers. Furthermore alien alloys do not exist. They are alien. They do not exist.

3. USING AI TO GENERATE NEW CONTENT

There is an upper limit to the amount of content a human being can generate, and technically I suppose the same is true of AI, but in practice the upper limit is much higher. After less than eighteen hours of non-stop writing a human writer begins to suffer mental anguish and fatigue, and beyond a certain point her writing turned into unreadable drivel interspersed with tearful cries for help.

In contrast AI never gets tired and does not require help or a working heater. It can produce fresh, inventive content forever. The most effective way to do this, of course, is to MANUFACTURE LASER CANNON.

XCOM operatives engaging a UFO scout ship with portable laser weapons (colourised)

In addition to the positives mentioned above, laser cannon also have another thing going for them. In the unfortunate event that one of XCOM's interceptors is shot down, the cannon are immediately useful. A pair of them can be immediately installed into a fresh Interceptor. In contrast, fusion ball launchers are useless without a payload of fusion balls, which are ruinously expensive.

As a weapon the laser cannon is inferior in every way save profitability to the plasma cannon, but a dual-laser Interceptor is still capable of downing all but the toughest of enemy UFOs, without the ammunition storage requirements of the Avalanche missile system.

4. USING AI TO EXPAND YOUR PORTFOLIO

Suppose you decide that a blog isn't enough. Perhaps you want to be a YouTube personality, or perhaps you aspire to appearing in print, or on television. The most effective way to do this is to MANUFACTURE LASER CANNON.

XCOM operatives celebrate after successfully downing a small scout with laser weapons (colourised)

Laser cannon have a third benefit. Once researched, they allow XCOM to research and manufacture laser-equipped tanks. The Tank/Laser has some limitations - its main weapon is less accurate than the standard Tank/Cannon, and by the time XCOM is able to field the Tank/Laser it will be facing aliens armed with heavy plasma rifles, which can destroy the tank in one shot - but on the positive side the Tank/Laser is the second-most-effective tank against Sectopods, on account of that creatures' vulnerability to laser fire.

Furthermore the tank's laser weapon has a roughly 5% chance of penetrating the inner walls of a downed UFO, less than half the chance of a heavy plasma round, but the tank has a battery capable of firing 255 shots versus the plasma rifle's 35, so each shot is essentially free.

~

So, in summary, AI is a powerful tool in the hands of the right author, such as myself. In the next instalment I shall see if I can come up with photography tips by pointing it at the Biker Banter section of Pistonheads.com. The most effective lens? Bacon sandwiches.

Every Jetliner Ever Made: Antonov and BAC

Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. In alphabetical order. In this instalment I'm going to cover Antonov and BAC.

It would have been so easy to skip over the Soviet-era aircraft manufacturers. Antonov, Ilyushin, Tupolev and so on. How can I judge whether their designs were any good? What were they like? Were they competitive with Western designs?

Kyiv, 1938

And perhaps the biggest question, what did they mean? An airliner isn't just a collection of statistics, it also has meaning. The Boeing 747 means something. It's the Queen of the Skies, the star of Airport 1975, full-on 1970s golden age luxury top deck Pan Am disco-era cocaine-guzzling naff glamour. Concorde also means something. It's the airliner of mid-80s yuppies and captains of British industry. It's the airliner of Sam Fox wearing a swimsuit backwards so that you can see her chest. Even the anonymous Airbus A320 means something, because it's the aeroplane Daniella Westbrook uses to fly to Spain or wherever it is she goes. Airliners are like cars. They have meaning beyond their functionality.

But what does the Ilyushin Il-86 mean? If you're a keen aviation fan the Il-86 is a physical representation of the Soviet Union's stagnation during the Brezhnev era. It was launched in 1981, but it had the fuselage of a 1970s widebody and engines from the 1960s. It was out of date, behind the times. For you and I, however, the Il-86 is just a number and some letters. It would have been easy to skip the Soviet airliners. Easy, and weak. Margaret Thatcher would not have approved, and I will not fail her.

An Antonov AN-2 biplane, which remained in production from 1947 to 2001

ANTONOV (Ukraine)

Antonov was founded in the late 1940s as a vehicle for the designs of Oleg Antonov, who cut his teeth during the Great Patriotic War designing aircraft for the Yakovlev bureau. Technically Antonov's company was called OKB-153, and as per standard Soviet practice it was more a design bureau than a fully-integrated design-and-manufacture organisation, but let's call it Antonov. The company's first product... the organisation's first design was the AN-2 biplane, pictured above, an incredibly useful utility plane that remained in production right up until the early 2000s.

The AN-2 was followed by a series of turboprop transport aircraft that were constructed in great numbers for various Warsaw Pact air forces, all of which are no doubt fascinating but are outside the scope of this series.

Nowadays the company is famous in the west for the An-124 Ruslan and An-225 Mirya cargo aircraft, which were produced in tiny numbers, just two in the case of the An-225. In theory they could be configured as passenger airliners - the An-124 even had a dedicated passenger deck, much like the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy - but in practice they never were. Instead the An-124's passenger deck was designed to carry ancillary staff, such as load handlers or engineers.

The smaller An-72 short-take-off cargo transport could also be configured as a passenger aircraft, but I can't find any evidence that it was ever used as such, at least not for very long. The An-72 (and its stretched variant, the An-74) did however lead to Antonov's one and only jetliner.

Antonov AN-72

The An-72 had a peculiar configuration, with two engines mounted above the wing. This had the benefit of keeping the engines away from runway debris, and it also meant that the flow of engine exhaust passing over the wing generated extra lift. In the 1990s Antonov decided to turn the An-72 into a passenger airliner, aimed at the regional market. The result was eventually launched in 2004 as the Antonov An-148, although it was initially called the An-74TK300. Why An-148? Because it was twice as good as the An-74, probably.

Antonov An-148

The chief modifications were the wing and engines. For the An-148 Antonov streamlined the wing so that it performed better during the cruise portion of flight, and mounted the engines in conventional under-wing pods, where they were a lot easier to service. The resulting aircraft had the classic configuration of a regional jet, with a stubby fuselage, a T-tail, and a vaguely hunchbacked appearance. Not a million miles from the BAe 146, but with two engines. Passenger load varied from around 60-80 people, depending on configuration, with a range of anything from 1,300 - 2,700 miles depending on model. A stretched version, the An-158, had seating for almost 100 passengers. On the whole the An-148 / 158 was larger and longer-legged than most regional jets, but not large enough to compete with something like a Boeing 737.

Commercial operations began with airlines in Ukraine and Russia in 2009. There were at one time over 150 orders, but in practice total production amounted to only 47 aircraft, including six An-158s, which were all used by the Cuban state airline Cubana. The remainder were bought by various airlines and government ministries in Russia and Ukraine, with two going to North Korea's state airline Air Koryo. Sales were not helped by Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and were dealt a death blow by the subsequent general invasion, with several operators citing the difficulty of sourcing spare parts.

I'm not qualified to talk about the economic issues affecting the Eastern European aviation industry in the post-Soviet era, but I have the impression that the An-148 suffered from entering production at a time when regional jets were starting to fall out of fashion, and also for its odd configuration, which was twice as large as most other regional jets but not large enough to replace a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320. The contemporary Bombardier CRJ-1000 had roughly the same problem. If it had been launched twenty years earlier it might have captured the same market as the BAe 146, which it closely resembled in terms of size and range if not engine count, but by the mid-2000s the market was instead shifting to full-sized airliners that could be used on a wider range of routes.

As of this writing the aircraft theoretically remains in production, but the last airframes were delivered in 2018.

BAC (Great Britain)

The British Aircraft Corporation was formed in 1960 from the government-led merger of English Electric, Vickers, Bristol, and Hunting, all of which are much easier to spell than Hawker-Siddeley. Before the merger Hunting had designed a small jet airliner that could target the same market as the classic piston-engined Douglas DC-3, with thirty seats and a modest range. After the merger BAC decided to expand the specification, which in retrospect was a smart idea, because this series of articles is full of jet airliners that were too small to make economic sense.

BAC 1-11 in service with American Airlines

The resulting airliner was the BAC 1-11, usually referred to as the One-Eleven, which was an internal product code and should not be confused with the Lockheed L-1011, a completely different aircraft.

The 1-11 had two engines mounted either side of the rear fuselage, a wing mounted towards the rear of the aircraft, and a T-tail, with a high-mounted tailplane. The configuration was unusual at the time, shared only with the Sud Aviation Caravelle, but within a few years it became much more popular, albeit not because of the BAC 1-11.

The 1-11 was powered by a pair of Rolls-Royce Spey engines, which were powerful, but also noisy and very thirsty, something that increasingly became problematic as fuel prices rose and noise regulations tightened in the 1970s. The configuration kept the engines away from the passenger compartment and above the wake of the wings, and by mounting them above the ground the hope was that they wouldn't suck up debris from the runway.

The 1-11's configuration had been pioneered by the Sud Aviation Caravelle, pictured here, which was one of the very first jetliners, entering service in 1959

The engine location necessitated a high-mounted tailplane, which indirectly led to the crash of the 1-11's prototype in 1963. Although the tailplane was out of the wash of turbulent air from the wings in level flight, it was caught in the wake of the wings during high angles of attack, such as when the aircraft was coming in to land. Without control authority from the tail there was no way to push the nose of the 1-11 back down, which resulted in the prototype belly-flopping into the ground with the loss of all on board. This problem became known as a "deep stall", and it was a major problem with T-tail warplanes, notably the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. Ultimately the problem was solved with a mixture of aerodynamic tweaks and a simple fly-by-wire system that used hydraulic power to push the nose of the aircraft down.

The 1-11 entered passenger service in 1965, initially with British United Airways, but in something of a coup it also entered service with Braniff of the United States, who had ordered a clutch of 1-11s in 1961, when the aircraft was still in development.

The initial model carried 89 passengers over a range of 750 miles; later models increased the load to 119 passengers and over twice the range. The post-war British aviation industry produced a number of designs that were compromised in one way or the other by technical peculiarities or odd configurations, but the 1-11 was by all accounts a simple, well-designed airliner with no quirks. About the only technical issue it faced was its awkward size, slightly too large for the regional market but not large enough to be a coast-to-coast people carrier.

At the time the US aviation industry had nothing comparable. As mentioned elsewhere the US lagged behind Europe in the post-war years. Europe was forced to rebuild its aviation industry from scratch, so Britain, France, and Germany jumped directly from piston airliners to turboprops and jet engines, while Douglas and Lockheed in the United States continued with piston designs, because why not? Jets were uncharted territory and piston airliners were a proven technology. In this environment the BAC 1-11 purchase by Braniff was a shock in US aviation circles at the time. To make things worse American Airlines went on to place an order for thirteen 1-11s in 1963.

Unfortunately the 1-11 was both blessed and cursed by its timing. On the positive side, and unlike the Avro Jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, and to a lesser extent the Sud-Aviation Caravelle, it was released at a time when airlines had got over their initial skepticism of jet engines. And beyond the crash of its prototype the 1-11 had none of the design problems that affected first-generation jetliners, although two fatal crashes in 1966 (due to turbulence) and 1967 (a faulty auxiliary power unit pump) must have given airlines pause.

But on the negative side the crash of the prototype delayed the 1-11's entry to service until 1965, by which time Boeing had began test flights of its three-engined Boeing 727, while Douglas had announced that it was working on a new jetliner, the DC-9. The 727 ended up appealing to a slightly different market - it was larger - but the DC-9 competed directly with the 1-11. It had more powerful engines and greater range than the 1-11, and on announcement in 1963 it immediately began winning orders. Those orders might have led nowhere, but Douglas really committed itself to jet power, and the DC-9 entered service on schedule in late 1965, only a few months after the 1-11.

A Douglas DC-9 in US military service

BAC eventually sold almost 250 1-11s, including nine that were licence-built in Romania during the 1980s. This made it one of the most popular British jetliners, but once Douglas and Boeing entered the jetliner market the orders tailed off. At the time of its launch the One-Eleven's only real US competitor was the four-engined Boeing 720, which was much larger, but as mentioned it struggled to compete with the DC-9. Two years later Boeing launched the 737, which also had more power and range, and at that point sales of the 1-11 dried up. There was a general feeling that the DC-9 and 737 could be stretched to meet future demand, while the 1-11 was at the end of its development cycle.

The 1-11's prospects were not helped by the conceptually similar but slightly smaller Fokker F28 Fellowship, which was launched a few years later and attracted almost as many orders. UK production continued at a very low rate until as late as 1984. BAC proposed a number of enlarged successors, including the 2-11 and 3-11, but the two programmes were abandoned so as not to compete with what would eventually become the Airbus A300.

In the UK the 1-11 was particularly valued by low-cost package tour airlines, such as Dan-Air and the nascent Ryanair, who found them perfect for Spanish package holidays. Dan-Air infamously fitted their 1-11s with seat-back catering, whereby packed lunches were locked into a pair of compartments in the back of each seat. The idea was that passengers outbound to Spain would be given a key for the top compartment, and those coming back on the return flight would be given a key for the bottom compartment, which by that time was probably pretty whiffy.

The 1-11 slowly left service in the 1990s, largely because its Spey engines were too noisy for modern regulations and guzzled too much fuel. BAC eventually merged with Hawker to form British Aerospace, which continues today as BAE Systems. In 2010 the 1-11's type certificate was revoked in the EU on account of its excessive noise, and as of 2024 none remain in the air.

And that's Antonov and BAC. Next, Bombardier. And then Convair, who released two airliners that were absolutely superb at transforming aviation fuel into smoke and noise. And Dassault, whose only airliner was a heck of a thing.

MRE Menu 22: Sloppy Joe

Let's have a look at another MRE. This one is Menu 22: Sloppy Joe, which was part of the 2011 batch of MREs (PDF). It was only available for that one year, although earlier batches included Menu 17: Sloppy Joe Filling, which was very similar.

In fact Menu 22's meal packet appears to be recycled from Menu 17, so I wonder if the US Army found a warehouse full of unissued MRE meals and thought "frumple".

Today I learned that silicon dioxide is a food ingredient. It's used to prevent caking. Well I never.

What is Sloppy Joe? If it hadn't've been for Sloppy Joe, I'd've been married a long time ago. Where did you come from? Where did you go? I'll stop that. Stop. Sloppy joe is ground-up tomatoey oniony minced beef filling that goes well in a burger bun. Here in the UK it's really obscure. Imagine minced beef but with a pasta-style sauce.

The date code is 1333, which means that my MRE was packaged in the 333th day of the first year of that decade, e.g. 29 November 2011. That's thirteen years ago.

The last time I ate a really old MRE it was Menu 17: Country Captain Chicken, from 2002. Most of the food was ruined, but the main meal, the country captain chicken, was well-preserved and actually tasted really nice. I was surprised nay astonished.

I don't want to spoil the surprise, but Menu 22: Sloppy Joe is much the same. Most of the food was borderline-edible, but the actual main meal was, yes, perfectly well preserved and surprisingly tasty. Country Captain Chicken and Sloppy Joe are both mildly spicy, so I wonder if the spices kept them fresh? Who knows.

Why am I writing about MREs? A couple of reasons. I'm old enough to remember the first Gulf War, when MREs were widely fielded for the first time. The first generation of MREs had a reputation for poor quality - "meals rejected by everyone" was one of the most polite descriptions - and I've always wondered what they were like. The answer is that Gulf War-era MREs were apparently foul, but the modern-day variety is okay, although very sugary and salty.

Secondly they're a little glimpse into a different culture, because all the sweets and coffee etc are made for the US market in industrial estates on the far side of the world. It's odd to think of the United States as a different culture, but it is. The coffee in this MRE was packaged by the Maximus Coffee Group of Planet Houston:

Eventually Maximus became Atlantic Coffee Solutions, and in 2018 they shut down. British military meals are packaged on industrial estates in Slough and Staines by companies that never appear in the news, and the same is true of US MREs.

Why else do I write about MREs? I went hiking in Greenland a couple of years ago, and I was curious to see if MREs made sense as hiking food. To which the answer is no, as illustrated by the following picture:

For a couple of days a bag of MREs makes sense as hiking food, albeit more as a morale booster than sustenance. Each MRE has lots of different things, and the best meals can be mixed and matched in different ways. But for more than a couple of days MREs are too bulky, and even if you strip off the packaging you're left with pouches of wet food. Freeze-dried food would make more sense. The US does actually have a range of freeze-dried MREs - they're designed for cold weather operations - and the very first MREs had freeze-dried elements, but cold weather MREs are expensive and rare.

Still, let's get down to business. Menu 22: Sloppy Joe has a lot going for it. The meal includes the main course; a thick slice of snack bread; a cinnamon bun; peanut butter; apple jelly; plus accroutrements. Accouterments. Accroutements. Acoutrements. Accouterments. Accoutrements. Accoutrements! I did it!

I finally did it! A-cout-rah-ments. A-coo-tre-ments. I finally did it. I forced myself to spell it correctly. Just like millennium and accommodate. Accoutrements. One day I'll master how to spell diahorreah. Then I'll be able to spell four words correctly.

Accoutrements. I'm so proud of myself. Sloppy Joe has a lot going for it. You can mop up the meal with the snack bread, or have a peanut butter sandwich, or have a jam sandwich, or add the jam to the cinnamon bun etc. I opted to start off with a peanut butter sandwich:

Alas, the snack bread smelled slightly odd. I've had MRE snack bread before. It's basically cake, not bread. It's very sugary. I took a nibble, and didn't die, but I'm not a lunatic so I scraped off the peanut butter and ate that instead. The peanut butter was perfectly fine. If there's one thing I've learned from watching Steve1989 on YouTube it's that peanut butter, cigarettes, coffee, and boiled sweets tend to last, I assume because they don't have much moisture NB I am not a scientist.

Let's try out the cinnamon bun as a second appetiser:

That not jelly. It's jam. Sadly the cinnamon bun also smelled slightly odd, but again I've had an MRE cinnamon bun before so I haven't missed anything. They're okay but very dry. The jam actually smelled okay, but as mentioned passim I am not a lunatic, and I already have plenty of jam, so I prodded it with a knife and thought "what I am doing with my life" to which the answer is that I am violently upsetting the flow of an otherwise ordered universe.

Let's wash away the disappointment with some coffee. What is Diario? Is it Italian? Diary? I've never heard of it. This is the range of accoutrements that accompanies Menu 22:

The coffee was okay. It tasted very bland, but it was palatable. As with all MRE coffee it's hard rather than smooth, if that makes sense. Imagine you are on a training course, with an early morning start. It tastes like that.

The creamer is probably lethally poisonous by now. The gum was edible but didn't taste of anything, I have to assume the Splenda artificial sweetener is preserved, and salt is salt. What about the tabasco sauce? Read on, dear reader, read on.

The MRE also included a powdered orange drink. The powder smelled of pee. I've had MRE powdered drink before, and even when new it smells of pee. The resulting drink is a very bland orange squash, and I had no desire to dice with death just for the sake of bland orange squash so I threw it away.

Let's try to main meal. MREs come with a water-activated flameless ration heater, but to make doubly sure I boiled the sloppy joe in water for ten minutes:

After it cooled down I snipped off the corner of the packet and gave it a sniff. It smelled vaguely spicy, not obviously rancid, so I dipped my finger in it, and it tasted okay. I decanted it onto a plate and added the tabasco sauce, which had also stood the test of time.

This illustrates one of the problems with MREs. They're mostly just stew. An actual meal would have chips, or rice, or a potato or something. Eating a stew by itself feels odd.

But, nonetheless, the sloppy joe was surprisingly tasty. Legitimately good. It even had a decent mouth-feel. It's essentially a form of chilli, but tomatoey rather than harsh. Given that the food is thirteen years old I was amazed that it had lasted. Whatever Natick Labs did, it worked. If only they would team up with the people who make Lithuanian and Polish MREs, and borrow some of their rock-hard rusks. It would give the meal some roughage.

And that's... oh no, there's one more thing. Choclettos.

What are they? Imagine Opal Fruits, or Starburst if you're modern, but chocolate. I was torn. They smelled bad, but in a way that suggested they actually did smell like that naturally. But the concept of a chocolate-flavoured Opal Fruit felt wrong, so I threw them away. I learn from the internet that they were discontinued in 2018 and date back to at least the Second World War, so perhaps I should have sold them on eBay. It's too late now.

And that's Menu 22: Sloppy Joe. After thirteen years on the shelf most of it was ruined - not massively, but enough to put me off. However the main meal was preserved just fine, and tasted great, and a few days later I haven't noticed any untoward effects. When it was new it would have been a pretty good MRE, with a flexible range of mix-and-match components, although as mentioned passim it would have benefited from one more snack bread, or an extra packet of MRE crackers.