Delta Force
Banned
How would commercial and military aviation have evolved from the 1940s onwards without World War II?
Commercial and Military Aviation without World War II
- Thread starter Delta Force
- Start date
Later jets ...but not much later
Mass production techniques are not refined.
[Interchangability ,quality control etc]
Aerodynamics takes a hit for a while ..no swept wing for example
But WW2 only advanced things which were on the way and known to be on the way ...so maybe not as much as might be imagined
Mass production techniques are not refined.
[Interchangability ,quality control etc]
Aerodynamics takes a hit for a while ..no swept wing for example
But WW2 only advanced things which were on the way and known to be on the way ...so maybe not as much as might be imagined
BlondieBC
Banned
WW2 built a huge number of airfields, trained huge number of pilots, and created a huge number of surplus cargo planes. You will see water based planes last longer. It will be costlier to establish airlines since you will need to build fields and train for staffs that IOTL were created by the militaries of the world. Might see Zeppelins hang on a bit longer, if you get Helium to Germans. Germans do a lot better in the civilian world. And over time, this gap disappears since we avoid the vast economic destruction of a major war.
And what aircearft were dominating world commercial markets in the late 30s? German 'express planes' such as the Do-17 and the HE-111? or work horses like the JU-52?
No - The American DC-2 and DC-3 and Lockheed Electras. The Martin and Sikorsky and Boeing Clippers. And the new planes that were coming Boeing StratoCruisers, DC-4s, etc.
The British would have been very active also, especially with flying boats to support the empire
So I believe there would have been much more diversity in commercial aviation without the effect of WWII
Deleted member 1487
Lufthansa was waiting to get the Ju90 around 1939, so it would probably be in service in 1940.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_90#Civil_development
Its not the DC-3 in terms of range, but it was ideal for intra-Europe air travel and had a much larger passenger and cargo capacity.
Deleted member 1487
Military engines perhaps, but they were inefficient and thirsty, even when using rare metals to maximize engine life. I think that the civilian engines really have to wait for the late 1940s and the turbofan engine.
Also if we don't have WW2 ITTL, how? The Luftwaffe built up Germanys airfield network and created a large number of pilots and 'air-mindedness' among the public, who would be largely too poor to make this happen. Without the Nazis do you still see Tempelhof airport become what it did?
I think air travel would still be close to OTL today even without WW2, but it would lag a bit until the world economy recovered from the Great Depression and potentially Nazi rule in Germany. As it was WW2 actually probably hurt air travel to some degree by diverting resources away from civilian air needs and of course diverting money away from civilian economic development that would have allowed greater public participation due to larger salaries enabling travel. The lack of WW2 would allow far quicker economic development and greater wealth in Europe, which would have driven air travel, while the US lags to a degree without the major cash infusions from Europe or need to develop their air infrastructure due to the war. That means fewer pilots for civilian air industry post-war, along with less infrastructure overall; in most of the ways that WW2 was horrible for Europe it was beneficial for the US, so it inverts their 1940s-50s history, as Europe isn't coming from a 'year zero', nor having to deal with the Cold War and having half of it controlled by the USSR, locking out trade, while the US is stuck with an insufficiently large public spending program that does not create the middle class like WW2 did (plus the GI Bill) and or have the elimination of global economic competition for a generation. The European imperial system doesn't break down and create an enormous 3rd world market for the US, nor does Japan fall into the US orbit; in fact the US then lacks the Cold War threat to continue its mobilization of money for spending for the public good (space race/education/great society/civil rights/women's rights).
This. Read the archives of Flight magazine from the late thirties and its all Douglas, Lockheed and Boeing taking the big orders and setting the pace. Without the distraction of the luftwaffe maybe Heinkel and Junkers would have had a shot at being competetive but apart from in small aircraft everyone else in Europe was basically embarrassing themselves by building antiquated junk.
Deleted member 1487
The Ju90 with DB601 engines was better than the DC-3 and roughly comparable to the DC-4, but two years earlier. It also has upgrade potential to stay competitive and can offer upgraded variants as aeronautic research enables better versions. So the Europeans were catching up, but the question is whether there would be a Ju89 ITTL without WW2 to base the Ju90 on.
Not really, swept wings as a method of dealing with compressibility at high speeds was being already being researched in the 1930s with Dr. Adolf Busemann giving a public lecture and publishing a paper on it at the Volta Conference meeting in Rome in 1935.
Delta Force
Banned
The Munich Crisis is the PoD. Either the anti-war faction calms Hitler down, or something similar to the Oster Conspiracy removes the Nazi Party from power.
Delta Force
Banned
World War II definitely built up the number of qualified people and usable facilities. Take the career of Curtis LeMay for example. When he joined the Army Air Corps, most people only stayed to receive training and meet the service requirement, and then left for a more lucrative career in commercial aviation. LeMay could have received a $10,000 a year salary in the early 1930s as a Ford Trimotor pilot, the equivalent of a six figure salary today when adjusted for inflation. He was also one of the few qualified navigators in the Air Corps in the late 1930s, with there being only a few dozen total.
Delta Force
Banned
North America has historically been the largest market for aviation, so American producers have the advantage of access to a large market. However, Fokker was dominant in the North American market with the Fokker F.VII until one crashed in 1931, killing Notre Dame's football coach. You're right on European designs being antiquated, as Fokker was late in developing metal aircraft, and tended to build partially metal aircraft.
There might also be something of a bias in the North American market as the years pass by after the PoD. Although more influential later on due to its 1938 establishment, the Civil Aviation Board tended to favor domestic manufacturers when regulating airlines, although British and French aircraft were occasionally approved for purchase.
There was significant overlap between commercial and military aviation through to the 1950s. The Boeing B-29 Superfortress developed into the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, while the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker became the Boeing 367-80 "Dash 80", which received a wider fuselage to become the Boeing 707. The Convair B-36 was even offered as an airliner, the Convair Model 6.
The opposite is also true, with commercial aircraft becoming military aircraft. Various Convair, Douglas, and Lockheed aircraft entered military service that way in the 1940s and 1950s. The Douglas DC-3 is perhaps the most famous example of this, with massive numbers being produced for military service and sold as surplus to airlines after World War II.
There were even plans to directly use commercial and civilian aircraft in a military role. Special bomb racks were designed for carriage under the wings of commercial aircraft, and there were plans for rapidly converting national air fleets to combat roles within a few hours of the outbreak of war. This wasn't carried out in World War II because interceptor aircraft began catching up to the performance of multi-engine aircraft in the mid to late 1930s, and also because military aircraft began to diverge more from their civilian counterparts.
Yes I know ,but without the pressing need for speed their use would not be required quite so soon.
And as I mentioned many of the advances we take for granted today were known about pre WW2.
They would come about anyway
There is the argument that without WW2 air routes would become more common anyway
Yes I rebuild aircraft for a living ,been doing it for decades
And I read a lot of aeronautical history over the years.
There was a good deal of research pressure behind the Wright brothers that they were never even aware of
Once the low hanging fruit of that research had been harvested the rest were picked off one by one
And by the late twenties /early thirties those high branches were begining to pay off .....a lot.
Just look at the way records were broken for speed ,distance and height,and then broken again ,and again.
WW2 just condenced that research
Its three times the weight of the DC-3 with twice the number of engines, it damn well should be better - but it only managed 50% more passengers and less range.
Relative to the DC-4 which was the same size and engine config it could manage half the passengers, 75% of the speed and 20% of the range.
Its a certainty that the aircraft were designed and configured for different roles so they are not exactly comparable, but the big Boeing/Douglas/Lockheed offerings were a class above anything existing in Europe at the time.