The EAA needs an Atmosphere Dude Ranch

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The NAVY was not totally committed to advanced air and a study by a Captain Meeks came to the fore called Advanced Navy Vehicle Concepts Evaluation (ANVCE). This study tried to go across all kinds of vehicle concepts including ships, surface effect craft, ground effects machines, and -- yes aircraft for a whole plethora of missions. The ANVCE I was asked to study was a four engine turboprop. Now you might say, the 15 % Supercritical wing refocused? No, the burden was put on creating scenarios with threats and in all the potential theaters of conflict. So, my world of tools still included a Handbook of Chemistry and Physics that had an atmosphere in cgs standards. It was from winning a science fair prize in the late 1950's.

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Where did reality go? First thing I found was a Swissair brochure that presented a double-decker, commercial transport with four bypass ratio 6 engines in an artist's concept and a performance engineer's charts with other data. That showed up in the new mockup area as a wooden full-size construction of a section of fuselage. Walked down to look at it as I puzzled about the CX-HLS team that had occupied the offices in building 13 near my drafting board for A/RIA. It was becoming time to go to the moon but no one was telling me anything about that except on commercial television.

Don Brimley had briefed me on the pressurization turbo-compressors and their water separators and bootstrap compressors that were obvious in ducts in the nose of the DC-8 but more subtle in the tips of each pylon on the Boeing 707. I did not walk up a ramp into the mockup. That concept did not take hold in the market as a big dip in traffic made such ambitious concepts unreality. It was only material for a moment.

Later, in the mockup area a truly wildly torqued arching wing section over what was to be the nacelle for a DC-10 and a short section wing airfoil appeared in aluminum. It was quite thin compared to an advertising picture and description of the C-5 upper wing slab and how it was milled. I commented to my boss and he send me down to look at the mockup. While there, I looked at the perforated ducts and noise treatments. Engine acoustics was going to be beyond the bypass air and tubular noise arrestors of the JT-3D and JT-3B of the DC-8 and 707.

Now I had three atmosphere models to keep track of. The general universal global one, the onboard passenger compartment and the noise field of the engine energy.

I'd like to jump ahead here to the Engine Based Oxygen System (EBOGS) to cover the oxygen masks in the emergency aspect of the passenger compartment, but there are none coming beyond tactical air and trainers.

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One has to be careful of over projections of rules of thumb like every increase in English unit altitude of 1000 feet has a temperature decrease of 3 degrees Fahrenheit. Knowing the liquid air temperature or the individual values for Nitrogen, Oxygen and Argon misses the triple point where gas, liquid and solid coexist, and the supersaturation effects of quickness. High enough and the molecules dissociate and have longer mean paths so it seems the gas is increasing in temperature up high enough as space approaches.