I love looking into the wacky ideas that engineers come up with to solve specific problems. Some of these solutions don’t make a lick of sense, and yet, they manage to get the attention of large organizations, right until they fall apart. One of those is the flying flatbed truck, because do you really want exposed bulldozers and tanks flying at over 500 mph, some 30,000 feet in the sky?
I wrote about how Lockheed and NASA looked into what was more or less a flying pickup truck. Grey alien in a beige sedan:
I can only imagine what the headlines would have looked like the first time this was flown and some massive piece of equipment broke free of its tethers at 25,000 feet.
Can only imagine the sheer amount of tiktoks all with the caption “Bro, this is why you ALWAYS secure your load”.
Zerosignal:
As long as they tug on the strap and say “that’s not going anywhere” they’ll totally be fine.
James Mason:
Who among us hasn’t experienced a large hunk of gravel falling off the track of an excavator and hitting our windshield at 500mph?
I drive a boring SUV:
So Rollo invented the Rollon Rolloff aircraft.
Matt wrote about how the Volvo EX60 has a panini press-style charging door. 06 Z33:
Doesn’t a good panini press have a free-swinging top so that as you shut it, the top can lay perfectly flat on the top of the sandwich rather than squishing it at an angle? This looks like a normal fuel/charger door that just opens vertically instead of horizontally.
Carbon Fiber Sasquatch asking the tough questions:
Why can I buy a panini press at Tractor Supply?
Matt also wrote about his quest to find every Fisker Ocean in New York. Goblin:
What sort of hunter doesn’t know to track big game at the watering hole?!?
Queens Bl Fill N’ Wash, 36-20 Queens Blvd, Long Island City, NY 11101.
It’s the car wash where they all go.Major entrance from Manhattan into Queens via the Queensboro bridge, major cab destination. Just sit there with one eye on the car wash and the other on the boulevard, and count them.
Have a great evening, everyone!
Top graphic image: Lockheed
“some massive piece of equipment broke free of its tethers at 25,000 feet.”
Around 10K, depending on configuration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbzBGpSgurU
Yo Dawg! We heard you like pickup truck beds so we put a pickup truck bed on a plane that you can drive your pickup truck onto!
Ooh! I’m internet famous again for a day!
The pickup truck plane article is great and there were excellent comments both funny and informative. However, I didn’t see any mention or discussion about the most important aspect of any pickup: can it roll coal?
Imagine the crowd you would draw when you landed that bitch at Home Depot to load up a few 2X4s, some bagged concrete, and a couple sheets of plywood.
Like the current brodozers, not as specified but with easy modification. The article says it was designed for CFM56 engines. No “rolling coal” effect there, but the CFM56 replaced the J57 on the KC-135 tanker, so let’s say you retrofit this older engine in your pickup truck plane. Now you need more thrust, but the J57 has you covered—it can be used with water injection on takeoff. Which is what the B-52 did when fitted with the J57. Which is exactly what you’re looking for. https://youtu.be/xfTdRF66QPo&t=188s
Can’t tell you how many times in my Air Force days we’d be in the line up behind a Buff and it would put on a smoke show on takeoff so bad we practically had to takeoff under IFR.
Certain things can be added to jet fuel to change the colour of flames from the afterburner.
Only if GM had perfected those coal-fired turbines!
https://www.theautopian.com/the-1970s-oil-crisis-was-so-bad-general-motors-made-an-oldsmobile-run-on-a-coal-burning-turbine/
The B-52 can put out a pretty big plume
Oh yes.