On a (Delta) Wing and a Prayer

A swift visit to the Farnborough Airshow yesterday, for some business meetings. Towards the end of the afternoon, I was able to fulfill a personal ambition and view the last remaining airworthy Vulcan bomber, a British warplane that was retired after a long career, in the early 1980s.

The restoration of the Vulcan – by a group of volunteers raising money against all the odds – is a wonderful tale all of itself, and I warmly recommend you visit the Vulcan to the Skies website to learn the full story www.vulcantothesky.org.

Anyway the Vulcan is a huge attraction wherever it goes, and inspires people with a similar affection to Concorde. And seeing it roar off down the runway and perform some gentle circuits of Farnborough, I was struck by two things.

Firstly, the strange contradiction of how something so elegant and beautiful existed only to deliver weapons capable of destroying all civilization. And second, how extraordinary were the advances in aviation during the 20th century that less than 50 years after the Wright Brother’s first flew, the first Vulcan was displayed at Farnborough. (There’s famous footage on youtube of a Vulcan being barrel-rolled in 1955.) That’s a rickety biplane to a beautiful and deadly Delta-winged inter-continental machine in two generations.

Of course, the Vulcan represents the past, whereas the most interesting aircraft on view this week represent the future – most notably the 787, which Graham talked about in his blog. Unfortunately it left the day before I arrived (I’m told that its schedule is so tight they treated the Farnborough trip as part of the testing cycle) so I didn’t get to see it myself. But I was assured that it is a stunningly quiet plane and of course, considerably more fuel-efficient than its predecessor.

Interestingly, to make the next leap in fuel efficiency, the designs of future aircraft look not dissimilar to the Vulcan’s delta-wing (Green Flight Times, pdf 2MB). So, in a final irony, the design of the most beautiful bomber of them all may yet herald the establishment of a truly sustainable airplane. I certainly hope so.