Post by Bernard/Administrator on Oct 2, 2024 10:15:14 GMT
Once I came across of an astonishing report in "Popular Mechanics" magazine of 1934. It's dedicated to floating seadromes imaginated by an aviation engineer named Edward E. Armstrong in the 1930's.
Then more than 400,000 passengers were traveling the world by air. While many saw a great potential for rapid air transportation of mail, cargo, and passengers, the reality was that no airplane was able to fly economically beyond a 500-mile range at that time. Although Charles Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic, doing so with a load of passengers and cargo was still in the distant future.
Armstrong’s solution to the problem: a seadrome that would be a “floating landing deck” – an anchored airport and refueling station. It would ride high above the waves, moored at one end so as to trail the wind and be big enough to permit the landing and takeoff of most planes. Supported by tubular columns 70 feet or more above the surface, waves would pass through underneath, with the columns themselves terminating in ballast tanks 100 feet below the surface.
The planned seadrome looked like this:
R.E. Wyman released in 2010 an seadrome version based on a simple Afcad. Interested by this attempt and by Armstrong's crazy project as well as by partially pure fun and partially historical challenge, I tried to create basically such a fictional seadrome too and placed it in my vintage context. There are several different variants of seadromes in the web.
BTW, in 1932 the Germans produced a movie called "F.P.1 antwortet nicht mehr" (in english "F.P.1 doesn't answer anymore"). It relates a story involving a seadrome in Mid Atlantic.
Bernard
