This day Tuesday is the day before hump day in the IDS of December 2015 which means the
middle of the month! In the old days the month was divided into three parts and the IDS were the middle days of the month!
the roman empiorer was assassinated in the month of march and started they say the collapse of roman rule! so tha ancient
contotation Beware of the IDS of March refer to this assasination centuries ago!
Never the less there have been other things like Aprils fools day 1 April use to be the new year but it was changed to January
a while back keeping up with these changes and to be aware of them as noted when we look up the day of an aircraft's first
flight we find that the North American T-6 Texan first flew on 1 April 1935 and as we look toward the 2000 year and 2001 we
find the newest training airplane the T-6 Texan II was initiated about the time of (9/11) which was in 2001! The T-6 Texan
II has been written up as it has been a program which Congress has warned against as to its cost overruns!
This week Wednesday Hump day use to be the day that banks who traded on the stock exchanges closed down to catch up on the
paperwork before electronic calculating machines and computers!
Going back
to airplane construction and the cost relates many ways to the various changes in the U.S.'s and world economy since before
WW2 we decided to show what things can cost in the real world and the differences in weaponery marching through the decades!
The Ryan PT-16 and PT 22 aircraft about just over 1500 were built for the PT-22 we have it costing about $10,000 each! In
its original company the Ryan airlines modified a Ryan Mail Plane for Lindberg's trans Atlantic flight in 1927 the same year
of the Moscow spaceship exposition and copyright of a book on a nuclear spaceship design that Tinker found in the Seattle
Public Library! In those days of publication and marketing books were published that showed the idea and the science behind
aircraft designs and in the case of the book about a nuclear powered spaceship, spaceships which was on display in Moscow
in 1927!
The next aircraft we have through middle week of December is the Stearman
PT-17 which Stearman became a subsidiary of Boeing in 1934 and pilots trained in the bi-plane design at a cost of $11,000
dollars each thousands were built! 1934 is the year that Woodrow Wilson died they say of exhaustion trying to get the United
States to join the League of Nation's which it did not do and Europe was at war again in September 1939!
The next aircraft for this week is the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress of which they built 12,731 at a cost of $238,329 dollars
(1945)! It first flew on 28 July 1938 one day and one year before the Douglas B-23 Dragon first flew on 27 July 1939! 1940
was the Chinese year of the dragon and several aircraft before and during the war were called Dragon's!