History Intestinal

I don't know... Maybe I expect too much from the History Channel and its first cousin, Hysterical Intestinal. It's just a cable channel, and it has no more real control over content than ABC does over sitcoms. The best it can do is cancel (or stop funding) egregious failures.

But seriously, folks, something has to be done about some of the crap that appears.

Yesterday I watched part of a show called "UFO Files" or something, which purported to show that the US Air Force has been using "flying saucers" for generations. So they tap the memories of some guy identified only as a "military publisher" and trot out silly Photoshopped recreations of these alleged disk-shaped craft, and it's obvious that they're just airplanes with round wings. What's novel about that? Why didn't they show XF5U, a disk-shaped airplane that's so well documented we don't need to rely on Photoshopped evidence, so well documented it even had a nickname, the Flying Flapjack? Maybe because it was a Navy project.

Here's a good site:

http://www.daveswarbirds.com/usplanes/aircraft/flapjack.htm

But it got worse. The show started to merge the idea of an airplane with circular wings (which don't handle well, as it turns out) with flying saucers from other planets, and got right on the edge of claiming that circular wings possess some mystical New Age aerodynamic property that makes them better than Melba Toast. They had an "expert" claim that one of these disk-shaped airplanes was capable of flying at 15,500 miles per hour.

Let's explore that number just a bit. First off, he claimed that the aircraft was capable of "spaceflight", which I take to mean that it could go into orbit, which means it has to be capable of going 17,500 miles per hour - not 15,500 miles per hour. Doh! Second, the airplane is clearly seen to be uninsulated, what aeronautical engineers would call a hot structure. The X-15 was also, for most of its career, a hot structure, except for the experiments with the various spray-on ablators toward the end of the flight test program. So let's think about that. An X-15, with a powerful rocket engine and an airframe made out of an exotic high-temperature steel alloy called Inconel-X, was seriously damaged by heating and shock wave impingement at Mach 6.71. But this round airplane with conventional jet engines and an aluminum structure can do Mach 15? I am, as they say, dubious.

Here is the shape of high-speed flight, by the way, the North American Aviation X-15, which is still, as far as anyone has ever confessed, the fastest manned aircraft to have ever flown, and still, due to a technicality in the rules, holds the world altitude record for an aircraft:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-052-DFRC.html

Seriously, it doesn't matter. Do you believe that airplanes with round wings can fly 15,500 miles per hour? It won't materially alter the world in the slightest if you do - or don't. But gee whiz does it ever irritate me when the Hitler Channel and Hysterical Intestinal put nonsense like that on the air. How hard would it be to fact-check the show? How hard would it be to fix the comical "F1-17" typo in the caption? And how hard would it have been to point out to the writer that the "F1-17" is not supersonic?*

Arrrgh.

I need a beer. Perhaps two.

The "F1-17" typo appeared more than once, so I think the show was written by someone who had never actually read anything about the Nighthawk, least of all seen its actual designation of "F-117". But if you just sit at the bar and listen to some guy pontificate, I guess you could hear it was "F1-17".