LITTLE AEROPLANES - PETER GARRISON
LIT TLE
AEROPL ANES Where Do Little Aeroplanes Come From? They grow in the heads of little kids AS A YOUNG BOY I LOVED AEROPLANES. It was in the late forties and early fifties, the era when jets were replacing props. Except for the Douglas Skyraider – a great homely radialengine taildragging behemoth that became a favourite of some pilots in Vietnam because it could be punctured in so many places without becoming disabled – the aeroplanes I sighed over were jets. I don’t know if it was my first plastic model, but it may well have been, because I remember the agony of impatience in which I accompanied my mother and grandmother on an interminable hike through a department store on Wilshire Boulevard while a newly-purchased kit for a P-80 Shooting Star waited beside me on the back seat of my grandfather’s ‘51 Chevrolet, the taupe fabric of whose seats felt as if it could give you rug burn. Silver paint, it turned out, was hard for a young kid to apply convincingly – not that I had done too elegant a job of gluing the parts together in the first place. But no matter. It was probably from that aeroplane, or from the similar but less graceful F-94, that I contracted the fondness for tip tanks that lurked in me undetected until I started designing my own planes years later. There they were again, for no reason other than that some fighter of the Korean War era with an excessively thirsty turbojet engine had had them.
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May 2021
In like manner, my Melmoth’s single cooling air intake, placed below a big spinner, probably reflected a similar crush, nourished unconsciously since childhood, on the F-86D. Other models of the -86 had a round air intake with a small visor-like extension on top, like the headlights of the next car my family bought, a white and turquoise ‘55 Bel Air that my mother, who was given to anthropomorphising the inanimate objects around her, christened Happy. But the F86D model had a parabolic radome on the nose and a beautifully sculpted intake beneath it; it was arresting in a way that I can’t explain to myself even now. An early sketch of a cowling design for Melmoth shows a combination of spinner and intake whose affinity to the -86D is more evident than the final version’s is; the smaller air requirements of a reciprocating engine forced me to shrink the inlet to the point that all trace of its ancestry vanished. Is that too far back to go? Not really, because for me the design of an aeroplane was a series of aesthetic choices. When I sketched a detail I was creating a personality, not recording the outcome of a rational calculation. This is not how aeroplanes are supposed to be designed. Any book on the subject will tell you how it’s really done. You begin with a specification, which is basically a description of what the aeroplane is supposed to do. From the
