Saab makes jets.

The Italians enjoyed a bit of notoriety with their early airborne bombing exploits but really, the rest of the show all the way through WWII was iffy.

Like many countries, Italy turned to it's major industrial manufacturers when it needed airplanes, because you didn't just build an airplane factory out of the blue. So, just as the Germans relied on a train factory for some of their aircraft, Italy turned to Fiat. Oddly enough, a current potential plyer in the bailout of North American automobile industry.

The Regia Aeronautica, or Royal Italian Air force was formed in 1928. By 1935 it was at war with Ethiopia. Equipped with over 1500 ill equipped, slow and virtually defenceless aircraft, they easily wupped the poor Ethiopians. The closest thing they had to airborne weapon was a spear.

When the Royal Air force got into a real fighting war in Spain in 1936, it was apparent that the weird little Fiats were hopeless. But somehow the skilled Italian pilots were among the top dozen aces of the war. Maybe being slow was an advantage.

The main aircraft was the Fiat CR 32, a biplane with just 2 machine guns and a maximum speed of just over 200 mph. At the beginning of WWII they upgraded this tiger of the skies with yet another biplane fighter, the CR 42. Finally in 1940 they scrapped the bi wing design for the C 50 monoplane. Unfortunately, it stunk and was hazardous to fly.

Mind you the Italian bombers were of an equally not quite there design too, having 3 engines. This made aiming a real challenge and impossible to see or shoot straight forward. And, once again, they were slow.

Ready the balloons.

As promised a bit of background on the Italian Air Force. They did have jet powered aircraft by the 50's, but for now lets have a look at the beginnings. The Italian Air Force was originally an offshoot of the Italian Army. In 1884, a special division, called the Aerostatic Regiment for balloon operations was created to, well, have balloons to fly. Mainly to fly over the battlefields and report back by semaphore or telegraph, the balloons, like any other suffered from one huge inescapable weakness: they went where the winds blew. But hey, they had a real cool name for the regiment.

The Italians have had quite a history with aviation, scoring it's first balloon flight in 1784. They have a page in the history of dumbass steam powered aircraft with a working steam powered model helicopter . It took to the air in 1877, but was never seriously developed further. Odd.

The Italian Air Force really came in to it's own though around 1911 when Italy and Turkey were at war. This was the first time airplanes were used in a war for bombing anything. Poor Turks.

Italy did not have an actual arm of the military called an air force until 1923 when the Italian Royal Air Force (Regia Aeronautica Italiana) was born.

Next post I look at those flying Fiats.

Crunch, crunch.

I was going to go on a tear about the early years of the Italian Air Force but decided to give you all a break, and crab about some really bad ideas for snacks.

How about Tako brand(with a k) octopus flavoured chips. I had some fish flavoured noodles not that long ago with a truly obscene name that tasted probably as bad as these sound. Actually, after a bit of snooping, the Asians seem to have this thing for mollusk flavoured chips. How about cuttlefish and squid chips? I'm serious here.

Since I am a solid defender of really good chips, I'll close out the tiny little post with a bit of chip history. The potato chip, the only real chip, mind you apple chips aren't bad, was invented in 1853 by (I'm sorry, but what are the odds?) George Crum.

That ad, to the right, ain't no joke.

There's 2 of them.

Boy of boy, was the end of WWII a real watershed for jet airplane design. Not only were the planes being developed during the insanely high stress final years of the war, but they were test flying then one week and tooling the factory the next to start production. After the war, when the first passenger jet airplanes started showing up at airports, they were usually parked far away from the terminal and metal pans placed beneath the engines in case the "self igniting" jet fuel should leak out or spill.

No doubt German engineers had it down when it came to the jet powered aircraft. C'mon, the were the first to use swept wings, molded high altitude canopies, even ejection seats. (You did have to get out of them occasionally). Sadly, many test pilots didn't. The damn things were just too fast, too powerful and had only a few things sorted out by the time they were tested. Often, the fact they had a pointy bit in the front, an engine out the back and 2 or more wings, that was enough to give them a whirl.

Case in point, the Horten Ho 229. Production models were called the Gotha Go 229 and were built by Gothaer Waggonfabrik, originally a manufacturer of train cars. Hmmm, good choice. Whilst building tram cars they also dabbled in aircraft manufacturing as the Nazi government ignored the Treaty of Versailles and armed the country to the teeth. One of their early products to actually see service was something called the Gotha Go 242, described as an "assault glider". The only assaulting thing it really did was drop off 2 dozen really angry German troops. They had, after all, to travel in the damn thing. It never actually assaulted anything.

Back to the Go or Ho 229. It was designed by Walter and Reimar Horten. The design was a flying wing type powered by twin jet engines. The Horten brothers were not university trained but had been avid glider builders for years (between the wars it was the only things with wings you could get away with building in Germany). The flying wing was something they played around with alot and knew the advantages when it came to powering the aircraft as a wing only design limits drag because there is no fuselage. Less drag means more range, larger payload and faster speeds. A wing and a couple of engines is really only half an airplane. This plane, could have however actually met the 1000, 1000, 1000 design objective dreamed about by Goring. He wanted an aircraft that could go a 1000km, carry 1000kg of bombs and go 1000km an hour.

The test version was a bizarre combination of wood (plywood actually, now that's safe) and welded steel core frame. Unpowered gliders were first tested in the spring of 1944 with unmanned powered tests that winter.

I can't hear you.

So after another couple of days of out of town stuff, I'm back again and hope to shed some light on a little known piece of jet plane history.

The British were the only other WWII participant (the first being the Germans) to have operational jet aircraft. They did not meet in combat, but the Gloster Meteor is credited with shooting down over a dozen German V-1 flying bombs.

Now things moved fast at the end of the war and many new types of jet aircraft came out of England then. An example is the deHavilland DH-100 Vampire which came out in 1946. One version of the airplane was a swept wing oddity called the Swallow. The real name was the de Havilland DH 108. It had no tail wing and resembled early German rocket powered death traps. The Swallow was no easier to fly.

The swept wing design and stubbiness of the fuselage made the plane quick in the turns but broke just about every other engineering rule it could. The first one out of the gate could barely hit 300 mph, but a second version, powered by a more powerful engine, broke apart during a high speed dive. It had anti spin parachutes attached to the wingtips, as it was near impossible, given its design and shape, to break the spin using normal techniques.

These aircraft were flirting with the sound barrier and on September 9, 1948, with John Derry at the controls, a Swallow broke the sound barrier. Although not the first ever, it was one of the first jet powered aircraft to do so.

No matter, every prototype crashed. Next, Horton hears a who.

People are passengers too.

Ok, readers, back on track. More of what we love. Explosions, flaming crashes and all done in the name of science.

No surprise at all that by the end of WWII, the military jet was moving ahead almost daily in capability, range and, dare I say it, ease of use. Fires, flame outs, explosions all dropped off as engineers and pilots got a grip on the new technology. Purpose built aircraft with real performance began to emerge and find their way into the next wars.

So too, as the years after 1945 dragged on, the technology began to leak out into the commercial sphere. The jetliner was close.

The first "jetliner" was a modified Lancastrian. So just what is a Lancastrian? They were modified Lancaster bombers used for transport and passenger service during the tail end of WWII and through the early 50's.

The airplane was used to test jet engines for use in commercial airliners. Typically the outer 2 piston engines were replaced with jet engines. They were still a little leery of equipping this rig with 4 jets. The very first flight occurred in the fall of 1945. Powered by 2 Nene turbojets and 2 Rolls Royce Merlin power plants this was the first jet powered aircraft to carry passengers.

All sorts of variants ensued but the most noteworthy was the 1947 version that used the de Havilland Ghost 50 turbojet engine, the engine slated to power the first real jetliner, the Comet 1.

At least one version had captured German rockets tied under the wings too. Now that's more like it.

get yer hammer

American folk guy ( I was going to say icon, but he wouldn't like it) Pete Seeger turned 90 yesterday. Born in New York City May 3, 1919, to a family of thinkers and doers. His dad a musical historian, his mother a violinist and teacher. Aunts, uncles and siblings were either musicians, poets or in one case, an astronomer.

Pete's first instrument was the ukulele, odd considering the number and quality of trained musicians around his home growing up. But a uke means you gotta have something else to hold the audience, and for Pete it was the grace, charm, wit and respect that flowed from the stage when he performed. He learned early on to captivate listeners with his voice and a simple instrument.

In college, his life changed musically when he heard a banjo for the first time. He was so crazy learning the banjo and messing with politics that grades began to slip. He dropped out in 1938 and looked about for something meaningful to focus his creative talents on. He was a puppeteer briefly, but it was a stint helping folk historian Alan Lomax that got him on the radio and the exposure to a wider audience.

So how good was he? Lessee, formed the Weavers, worked with the likes of Woodie Guthrie and Leadbelly. Monster good actually. At 90 he's still works for what matters with people who care.