Extropia’s Mad-Tech

EXTROPIA’S MAD-TECH

‘The Atomic Airplane’

When you think of a submarine, what do you imagine it doing? If you are like me, you visualise it travelling underwater.

But, actually, submarines in World War II did not spend much time below the surface. This was because they ran mostly on Diesel engines and these could not work underwater. When they did dive, World War II subs had to rely on battery power, which was soon drained. Therefore, these submarines only submerged when attacking or trying to evade enemy ships.

Later submarines were nuclear powered and this gave them the ability to travel underwater for weeks at a time.

In the mid-1950s, Walt Disney believed that nuclear power could do for airplanes what it had done for the submarine. Atomic airplanes would stay aloft almost indefinitely, forever travelling through our skies. As you can see from the illustration, atomic planes were conceived as pulling gliders along with them, presumably so that passengers could return to land while the atomic plane continued on its never ending journey.

If you look closely (well, OK, you don’t have to be all that observant) you may notice a teeny tiny flaw in the design of this craft. When attached to the A-plane, the glider is being bathed in the radioactive plume!

As if anticipating that this might worry some people, Walt Disney set out to assure folks in the book ‘The Walt Disney Story Of Our Friend The Atom’. “The free space between the windows is filled with water, which absorbs any stray radiation from the reactor”.

Oh phew. Doubtlessly, those boffins at Disney also had solutions for other potential problems, such as the landing gear’s lubricating oil turning to tar because of the reactor’s radiation, or how to clean up the mess should an atomic plane crash.

Then again, seeing as how this is the 21st century and no such airplanes exist, maybe we should conclude that such problems were not resolved?

Thanks to ‘Follies Of Science’ by Eric and Jonathan Dregni for the image