Every Jetliner Ever Made: Avro Canada

Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. I won't cover turboprops, because I'd like to finish this before I die of old age. I won't cover business jets. It has to be a civilian commercial passenger transport with a capacity of at least thirty passengers, and I won't cover purely military jets. If you want to read about the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, you'll have to go somewhere else.

A Lockheed C-5 Galaxy in formation with a C-141 Starlifter. The C-5 Galaxy is not a jetliner. It will not be featured in this series of posts.

The C-5 is a fascinating aircraft, though. In the early 1960s the United States Army issued a requirement for a large, long-range strategic transport. Douglas, Boeing, and Lockheed submitted designs, with Lockheed winning out because their proposal was cheapest. The resulting aircraft was enormous, with a cargo bay that could carry two main battle tanks or half a dozen attack helicopters, plus eighty passengers in a deck that ran along the aircraft's spine. It had a door in the nose, necessitating a high-mounted cockpit, plus a second door in the tail.

Unfortunately Lockheed was overwhelmed by the development effort, with costs overrunning by more than a billion dollars. The C-5 sounded great on paper, but the resulting aircraft compared poorly with contemporary freighter versions of the Boeing 747. In its favour the C-5 could use poor-quality airfields - it had twenty-eight low-pressure tyres, and a high-mounted wing that kept the engines away from ground debris - but in practice that capability was used only once in a blue moon. The C-5 was too large and precious to ferry tanks directly to the battlefield.

A C-5 Galaxy landing at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, in 1990, a rare example of rough field operations.

The C-5 was also designed to take off from relatively short runways, which meant that the engines and airframe were optimised for high thrust rather than long range. On the positive side the C-5 could carry slightly more cargo than a contemporary 747-200, but it could only cross the Atlantic with a full load if it was refuelled in mid-air, while the 747 could fly from the United States to Europe fully-loaded. Lockheed came up with a proposal for a civilian variant, the L-500, which attracted no interest from airlines on account of its poor fuel economy. Lockheed also submitted the C-5 to NASA as a potential Space Shuttle carrier aircraft, but NASA opted for a modified Boeing 747 instead.

A high-profile crash during the tail end of the Vietnam War, caused by a malfunction of the rear loading door, led to a restriction on C-5 operations for several months, and to make things worst Lockheed had miscalculated the fatigue loading of the wings, which required an expensive wing replacement programme in the early 1980s. All of this explains why, despite its huge size and capability, the C-5 was never adopted by military forces outside the United States and never had a second life as a civilian cargo aircraft.

Despite its poor reputation the C-5 filled a niche, and in the 1980s Lockheed was even commissioned to make a run of brand-new C-5B models, with improved engines and simpler landing gear. In the years that followed the remaining aircraft were upgraded with glass cockpits and more fuel-efficient powerplants, and as of 2024 around fifty C-5s remain in service, all with the United States. It's a popular draw at airshows on account of its huge size, and it's a good example of the kind of aircraft I will not be writing about.

I'm going to do this in alphabetical order, grouping each manufacturer's planes together, with Airbus and Boeing at the end, because you'd get bored otherwise. I won't write about prototypes that never entered service, with one exception.

Why am I doing this? My blog is ostensibly about photography, but by far the most popular post is this run-down of ultra-long-haul airliners from the immediate pre-COVID era, so why the heck not. Sources? I will be using them. And occasionally acknowledging them. Yes, I am aware of Greg Goebel's fantastic AirVectors, but I am my own man.

AVRO CANADA (Canada)

Let's start with the Avro Canada C.102 Jetliner. Why? Because it has a memorable name, and it's an interesting what-if. Avro Aircraft was founded in the United Kingdom in 1910, only seven years after the Wright Brothers first took to the air. In 1935 it became a subsidiary of the Hawker Siddeley group, which is spelled with two Ds and then E-L-E, Siddeley.

During the Second World War the British aviation industry funded a number of shadow factories across the British Commonwealth, safe from enemy action. One such, Victory Aircraft of Ontario, Canada, was bought up outright by Hawker Siddeley in the post-war years and renamed Avro Canada. At first the company was very successful. In the late 1940s it developed Canada's only home-grown jet fighter, the Avro Canada CF-100 Canuck, and went on to make almost seven hundred of them, with foreign sales to the Belgian Air Force.

Sadly Avro ran into some of the same problems that affected the British aviation industry, specifically a combination of political interference from the government plus stiff competition from the United States.

An Avro Jetliner, courtesy the National Library of Canada

In 1945 Trans-Canada Airlines released a specification for a high-speed airliner with a capacity of around fifty passengers that could serve Canadian and North American routes. Avro came up with with a sleek, compact aircraft with two Rolls-Royce Avon engines buried in the wings, in a way that vaguely resembled early models of the Boeing 737, but with more engines. The single prototype was never fitted out completely, but Avro envisaged a passenger load of around 36-40 people.

At the time the Avon was only certified for military use, so Avro redesigned the aircraft to use four Rolls-Royce Derwents instead, which had less thrust. The result was an aircraft that was crippled from the outset with a poor range of just over 1,000 miles with a full passenger load. This restricted it to routes inside Canada and the United States, not necessarily a terminal problem given the great size of the US domestic market, but this was the late 1940s, and domestic airlines were wary of jets. They were too new, too expensive, too untested, and there was a glut of piston-powered airliners left over from the war.

An English Electric Canberra, powered by a pair of Rolls-Royce Avons. Loaded with bombs it had roughly the same range and speed as the Jetliner, despite possessing only two engines. Courtesy the National Archives of Norway.

The prototype first flew in 1949, and by all accounts it was a good design that flew well. But it was a dead end. Trans-Canada Airlines had doubts about the economics of jet engines, and eventually they gave up on the project. The Canadian government had tentatively planned to buy Jetliners as transports for the Royal Canadian Air Force, but instead they opted for the much more capable De Havilland Comet instead, pulling their support for the Jetliner in late 1951. Avro managed to catch the eye of US entrepreneur Howard Hughes, who was sufficiently impressed with the design to consider making it under licence in the United States, but despite coming up with a tentative plan to have Convair build the thing nothing came of it.

The Canadian government was also worried that the Jetliner was going to draw resources away from the CF-100 Canuck - a hot political issue given the Korean War - so with no commercial prospects and indifference from the government Avro sold off the prototype in 1956 for scrap. A few years later exactly the same thing happened to Avro's next project, the C-105 Arrow interceptor, after which Avro Canada soldiered on for a decade before being absorbed into Hawker Siddeley Canada, that's two Ds and then E-L-E. Siddeley.

The general consensus among aviation buffs today is that the Jetliner was too small and short-legged to make economic sense, but it remains an interesting what-if. Avro's sales literature downplayed the Canadian aspect, highlighting the fact that the Jetliner was an American aircraft - the adverts proudly described it as "America's First Jet Transport" - and had it entered service in the mid-1950s it would have no doubt brought immense prestige to whichever airline flew it, even if only as a loss leader. It would quickly have become obsolete, but the same is true of all the other first-generation jetliners.

And that's the first episode of "Every Jetliner Ever Made In Alphabetical Order". If you've only learned one thing today, it's how to spell Siddeley. Will the next episode feature Antonov, or will the writer make an excuse to ignore Soviet jetliners and skip directly to BAC?

DJI Mini 2 SE: A Bone Crone Drone

Tempelhof Airport, Berlin

Let's have a look at the DJI Mini 2 SE, a budget-priced drone that was released in early 2023. It may or may not have been discontinued by the time you read these words. Is it any good? It's okay. It's very basic. But if you've got an itchin' to try out a drone, the Mini 2 SE is a... scratching stick, or something, but it's a drone.

I'm old enough to remember when drones were army things. They cost millions of dollars and dropped bombs. They were the size of actual aircraft, because that's exactly what they were:

Courtesy of the US Navy

But then, seemingly overnight, drones became tiny little things you could buy in a supermarket. What happened?

To touch the face of God

I have no idea, but my hunch is that at some point in the early 2010s a combination of new lightweight plastics, high-power rechargeable batteries, smartphones with high-resolution screens, tiny little engines, internet cloud services, clever little magnetic motors, fingertip-sized GPS receivers, all of those things converged to a point where consumer drones became feasible. Does that sound okay? It's good enough.

I learn from the internet that the pioneer was a French company called Parrot, whose AR.Drone attracted a lot of attention back in 2010. Reading through contemporary reviews I have the impression that neither Parrot nor the reviewers understood drones, presumably because they were so new. Parrot believed that the future of drones was indoor drone races and drone laser tag, which sounds odd nowadays.

The AR.Drone had an unstabilised 640x480 camera, and it could only fly about a hundred feet away from the controlling mobile phone. The problem is that the whole infrastructure of Google Panoramas and movie-quality Youtube video reviews of motorcycles etc didn't exist back then, so drones didn't have a convincing reason to be.

The AR.Drone was followed in 2013 by the cradle-shaped DJI Phantom, from China. Drones coincided with the rise of Alibaba and the direct-from-China business model, and within a few years the consumer market became dominated by China's DJI, along with dozens, perhaps hundreds of generically-branded Chinese drones. Parrot themselves withdrew from the consumer market in 2019.

DJI has been controversial over recent years. The US government is worried that the company is a tool of Chinese espionage, but on the other hand DJI's drones have an infrastructure, and they're really cheap, and if a man chooses to accept money or goods from the Chinese government in exchange for favourable coverage, who I am to judge that man, even if that man is myself, which I hasten to add has not been proven in a court of law.

In the United States the Federal Aviation Authority finally got around to regulating drones in 2015, which opened the floodgates. Until that point drones had existed in the same grey areas as electric scooters and vapes, but from 2015 they were legit. The general rule in the US, UK, and other parts of the world is that a drone with a weight less than 250gm is classified as a toy, with light-touch regulation, while anything larger requires some kind of certification.

Here in the UK the law is slightly muddled, in the sense that sub-250gm drones that are toys do not require registration, but there's no firm legal definition of what constitutes a toy. In the EU the DJI Mini 2 SE is a category C0 drone, which is covered by a similar rule, but again it's unclear whether the Mini 2 SE is a toy or not.

To avoid all doubt I have registered myself as an operator-flyer, which costs £11 and requires that I stick my operator number somewhere on the drone. There are two types of registration - the owner of the drone is an operator, the flyer of the drone is a flyer, and an owner who flies their drone is both an operator and a flyer. I think the rule is intended to cover people who own a lot of drones and lease them out, or people who want to buy a drone so that their child can fly it.

In the UK the law is such that the drone must keep below 120m / 400 feet from ground level, and at least 50m / 160 feet from groups of people, and you should not fly over people at any height, but with a sub-250gm drone you are allowed to fly over your friends. I live in the countryside, where I have access to open space, but on the other hand a lot of local people own shotguns - ideal anti-drone weapons - so I have tried very hard not to annoy anybody.

Can you fly under people? Can you fly inside them? The law does not say.

The world seemed to lose interest with drones in the late 2010s, because the novelty wore off, and of course COVID forced everybody to huddle indoors. But the 2022 war in Ukraine brought drones right slap-bang into the news again.

I remember seeing a clip on r/combatfootage of young Ukrainian soldiers riding into battle on the back of an armoured personnel carrier, with one of their number - he looked about sixteen - wearing a pair of VR goggles as he launched a drone. It was a cheap little toy-like drone, but it could spy on Russian positions or drone small grenades. It was like looking at the future, but it was real.

The widespread availability and use of £250 drones on the battlefield has sent shivers through the world of military strategy, which might explain why the DJI Mini 2 SE is continually out of stock.

When folded down the Mini 2 SE is a tiny thing. The remote control connects to a smartphone, either Android or iOS. It uses the screen as a live camera. There are custom mounts for tablets.

Spec-wise the Mini 2 SE has a 12mp camera with a focal length of 4.49mm, which equates to 24mm in grown-up camera terms. It isn't quite ultrawide but it's still very wide. It has manual exposure, or alternatively auto-exposure with exposure compensation. It takes images in either JPG or DNG digital negatives. Straight from the camera the JPG images are a bit flat and dull, not necessarily a bad thing because they can be post-processed:

JPG images have a lot of sharpening, and the JPG engine corrects some hefty barrel distortion. The DNGs aren't as sharpened. Here's an example, with a DNG at the top:

There isn't much benefit to shooting DNG. You get a bit more control over sharpening and white balance, but the files don't have much more dynamic range than the JPGs, so unless you're very careful with exposure it's easy to blow out clouds. It's not like a digital SLR, where you can generally claw back several stops of brightness by shooting RAW files. The Mini 2's small sensor has limited dynamic range, for example in the following still from a video:

The sky and clouds are correctly exposed, but the shadowy area on the left is too noisy to be lifted up very much. On the one hand it serves me right for filming in direct sunlight, and this would be a difficult exposure with any sensor, but on the other hand sometimes you have to make do with what you have.

The Mini 2 SE captures video at 1080p (2mp, 1920x1080) or 2.7k (3.6mp, 2704x1520), while the regular and now discontinued Mini 2 had the option of 4k video. Unlike helmet-mounted cameras the Mini 2 uses gimbal-based stabilisation rather than electronic stabilisation, e.g. the video head tilts and rolls and swivels in order to keep the image level. On the whole the drone does a good job of staying put in the sky. Here's a short video I took with the drone hovering at about fifty feet:

The Mini 2 SE uses GPS to sense its position and a downward-pointing sensor to land. It's smart enough to stay a couple of feet from the ground, but it's not smart enough to avoid trees or power lines. As a consequence it's a good idea, nay a legal requirement, to keep the drone under visual observation at all times.

An example of motion blur, taken while spinning the drone around in dim light

There's a surprisingly large market for third-party filters. One issue is shutter speed. The lens has a fixed f/2.8 aperture, so exposure is controlled primarily with shutter speed, which tends to be very high in bright sunlight. Not an issue with still photographs, but if you're shooting video with a fast shutter speed the results look staccato, like the combat footage in Saving Private Ryan. There's a market for tiny neutral density filters that can be used to slow the shutter speed down, which makes motion footage look smoother.

The Mini 2 SE's maximum flight time is in theory 30 minutes, but in my experience this drops alarmingly if there's any wind. The remote control has a transmission range of 4km, according to DJI's website, and a ceiling of 4000 metres / 13,000 feet. Is that a practical limit? Possibly, if you plan to take some drone footage while climbing in the Alps. The Eiger is about that height, the Matterhorn a thousand feet higher. My hunch is that if you tried to launch the Mini 2 SE from the summit of the Matterhorn the engine would quickly overheat and give up.

Here in the UK the tallest mountain is Ben Nevis, at a considerably less dramatic 4,000 feet. The Mini 2 SE has a maximum vertical speed of 5m/s, so on paper it would take just over four minutes to reach the summit of Ben Nevis from sea level, but the motors would probably not enjoy being run at full power non-stop for minutes on end.

The remote has a switch that selects between CINE, NORMAL, and SPORT modes, which limit the drone's top speed - slower for CINE, faster for SPORT.

Drones aren't just useful for birds-eye photographs of rivers etc. They can also double as general-purpose stabilised cameras, which might handy if you're selling a vintage car, or a yacht, and you want a top-down view.

The Mini 2 SE's operating software has some frustrating limits. The DJI app has a number of spirally, back-and-forth, up-down-down flight modes, but the Mini 2 can't be told to follow a series of waypoints or follow the drone operator. It can be programmed to return to the initial take-off point, but that's about it for intelligent navigation. If you plan to film yourself driving around the countryside on a motorcycle, a la FortNine, you'll need an assistant drone operator. Could you fly the drone into position, run back to the motorcycle, drive past the drone, then drive back, then land the drone? Well, you could, but it would be illegal, and a massive pain.

Curiously the DJI app, DJI Fly, isn't available on Google Play. You have to download and install it manually from DJI's website, which is unusual. The in-built map includes an overlay of restricted airspace zones, but it's up to you to ensure that you don't violate restricted airspace. When DJI Fly turns on - which takes ages - the map defaults to Beijing, which is strange because DJI is based in Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong. Do you need internet access when you fly? Not as far as I can tell, but it's a good idea to have it so that you can keep the map updated.

There is another issue. As far as I can tell the drone is completely reliant on DJI Fly. If DJI ever abandons the app, or flicks a switch that disables the Mini 2 SE, the drone will become a useless piece of junk. Something similar happened to Parrot's drones when that company left the consumer market. If you're really serious or just slightly paranoid my suggestion is that you buy a second-hand Android phone, load DJI Fly onto it, make sure it works, and then put it in a desk drawer and never connect it to the internet.

Build-quality-wise the Mini 2 feels incredibly flimsy, but that's par for the course for something designed to fly. It has to be as lightweight as possible, and I can't really criticise it for feeling like a toy. The prop blades are replaceable, and it has a removable battery, but beyond that if something goes wrong it's basically a very lightweight brick.

Why did I buy a drone? Fourteen years ago I bought a Canon 5D MkII, which was one of the first digital SLR cameras with a video mode. It was a game-changer, but after using it for a while I encountered the same problems that struck filmmakers in the early 1900s - a static camera makes for dull cinematography. Getting a digital SLR to move smoothly is difficult, and making a 1.5kg camera fly through the air in a controlled manner is a major technical challenge. In that respect drones are game-changing. Not only can they take photographs that would in the past have required a helicopter, a la Earth From the Air, they can be used as general-purpose stabilised cameras.

If nothing else they're extraordinarily useful for establishing shots. If you're making a video essay and you need a shot that says "This is Canada", "This is Rural France", "This is Iceland", a drone is fantastic. Imagine if all the actors in a film could be mounted to robotic armatures, and the cameras attached to drones. The entire production could be motion-controlled and recorded for future playback. The possibilities are endless.

Actually flying the Mini 2 SE is remarkably simple, especially if you're used to video games. DJI Fly even has an operating mode that mimics console controls, with the left stick controlling motion and the right stick controlling heading. There doesn't seem to be a way to invert the Y axis, so up is forward on the stick rather than backwards. I've managed to get used to it. Flying a drone reminds me a little bit of playing helicopter flight simulators on the PC. It's easy to move the drone too fast in one direction, then overcompensate in the other direction, but if you release the controls the drone settles into a hover.

Landing is automated. The drone refuses to descend below about two feet. At that height the rotors generate a surprising amount of wind, so if you bring along a portable landing pad - even if it's just a large piece of folded cardboard - make sure to hold it down with rocks. The first time I landed my Mini 2 SE the rotors got caught up in some grass, but there didn't appear to be any damage. There is a thriving third party market for blade guards and portable landing pads.

The Mini 2's biggest limitation is a general one that applies to all drones. After a short while it's easy to exhaust the pool of local scenic spots that look good from the air and also allow drone flights. I mentioned the Earth From the Air chap up the page. He didn't become famous just because he had access to a helicopter. He also had access to a huge variety of interesting locations all around the world at sunrise or sunset, and that took time, money, and dedication. You need those things things as well.

And that's the DJI Mini 2 SE. It's a simple take-off-and-take-photographs drone, without the complex flight modes of more expensive drones, so if you plan to emulate Revzilla or FortNine et al you'll need an assistant. If you plan to make a name for yourself it would be handy to have access to Peru, Iceland, St Helena, and an all-terrain motorcycle.

DJI sells the Mini 2 SE direct for around £249, but as mentioned earlier on it appears to be on the verge of discontinuance, so by the time you read this it might only be available on the used market. Is there a market for second-hand drones? They aren't known for their robustness, but that's the price that must be paid for being gossamer-light. The things we value... something something. Things that fade. That was how the saying went. Something something things that fade. How true that is.