Predictions are hard, bucolic jet engine edition

(From "The Green Mask" volume 2, number 5, 1946.)

7 Responses to Predictions are hard, bucolic jet engine edition

  1. Gero says:

    Yes, because when you think “quiet as a bird in flight” you think “jet engine”…

  2. Bael says:

    Ah yes. The incessant clash between the idealistic utopianism of the forties and those pesky laws of physics…

  3. Dionne Jinn says:

    As someone who has lived most of her life at the earshot of an airport (serving both civilian and military planes) I know what it is like to have those damned things flying over your head…

  4. Jeff Hebert says:

    Tell me about it, Dionne Jinn, the flight path for the La Plata County Airport is literally right over our back yard. We don’t get a ton of big jets, but some, and a lot of smaller corporate jets, turbo props, and the like.

  5. Trekkie says:

    Agreed. When I lived back in Wales hardly a day would go by when you didn’t have a fighter jet swooping over your head, or sometimes an enormous transport plane that I swear always flew too low. That’s what you get for living on the flight path to an RAF base.
    Definitely not ‘soundlessly like bats on the wing’.

  6. knight1192a says:

    Boy I wonder what the guys who rode Waco CG-4As during the Sicily Invasion, the Normandy Invasion, and Market Garden thought of that line “closer than ever to the soundless flight of birds.” Says a lot about the guy doing the penciling on this one, like they never were an Airborne trooper assigned to land in a glider at any point during the war. And they’d never heard of balloon rides. Man was a lot “closer than ever to the soundless flight of birds” with balloons and gliders before the Wrights made their historic flight. Even the Wrights flew gliders as they were developing the 1903 Flyer to learn the mechanics they wanted to incorporate into their plane.

    And quite obviously this guy had never heard a jet engine or else they wouldn’t have penned this at all.

  7. TheAmazingFrank7 says:

    Seriously? Those poor fools! Silent jet propelled engines, they must have been on drugs. What was going on in the 40’s that led them to believe that jet engines would be quiet?