Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I'm just so thrilled
you're joining us today. It's great to be here.
Yeah, whether you're prepping for a huge meeting,
trying to catch up on some history, or you're
just insanely curious like we are, you are in
exactly the right place. Absolutely. Today, we
are unpacking a really fascinating era of extreme
aviation. We're specifically focusing on something
called the Riesenflugzeug. For those of you who
don't speak German, that translates to giant
aircraft. All right. colloquially, they're often
just called our planes. They are. And the mission
for our deep dive today is to explore this largely
forgotten era from the First World War. It's
such a wild time. It really is. We're going to
look at how rapid innovation, especially, you
know, when it's placed under the intense pressure
of a global conflict, leads to incredible engineering
marvels. Oh, yeah. But also some absolutely spectacular
basically logic -defying failures. So we're digging
deep into the operational histories, the wildest
design studies, and the sheer audacity of these
early leviathans of the sky. I love that we're
doing this because when we think of early aviation...
I mean we're talking 1915 to 1919 we usually
picture those tiny fragile little biplane right
the Red Baron kind of stuff exactly Yeah, the
Red Baron stuff, but these were something else
entirely. Let's set the baseline for you listening
Yeah, we are talking about Imperial German bombers
that to even qualify for this class had to have
at least three aircraft engines. Yes. Though
honestly, most of them rocked four or five or
even six. Precisely. I mean, these weren't your
short range jump over the trenches kind of tactical
aircraft. Right. These large multi -engine planes
were designed to fly for several hours at a time
deep into hostile territory. Which is wild for
1915. It is. They were built to carry significantly
larger bomb loads than the smaller class of German
bombers of the era. Those were known as the Grossflugzeug,
or the G -type bombers. OK. A good example of
the smaller G -type would be the Gotha GV. But
the R -planes, the Riesenflugzeug, they were
in a completely different weight class entirely.
OK, let's unpack this. Because there's a fact
here that absolutely blew my mind, and I know
it's going to surprise you too. Oh, I know the
one you mean. Right. When we think of massive
heavy bombing campaigns, our minds naturally
drift to World War II. You know, the Blitz, the
massive Armadas. Yeah. But the R -planes that
were actually bombing London during the First
World War were physically larger than any of
the German bombers used decades later in the
Second World War. It's just a stunning piece
of history. The sheer scale is staggering. It
really is. If you look at the entirety of the
German Luftwaffe in World War II, the only aircraft
that even approached these World War I sizes
weren't standard bombers at all. Right, they
were mostly transports, right? Exactly. You had
the Junkers Ju -390, which had a massive 50 -meter
span, but yeah, it was just a transport plane.
Okay. And the Focke -Wilfuh 200 Condor, sitting
at a 32 -meter span, was mostly from Maritime
Patrol. Wow. When it comes to dedicated purpose
-built strategic bombers, the wooden and canvas
art planes of 1918 reign supreme over the metal
machines built 25 years later. It's just wild
to think about. You have these canvas, piano
wire, and spruce wood structures completely dwarfing
the sleek metal machines of the 1940s. It sounds
impossible. It does. But to really understand
why they got so massive, we have to look at the
rules of the game. We have to look at the ultimate
engineering requirement that forced these planes
to become flying giants in the first place. Yes,
the defining characteristic of an R -plane wasn't
just about the wingspan or even the sheer number
of engines. It was a very specific, almost unbelievable
operational requirement set by the Idflug. And
that's the inspection of the Air Force, right?
Correct. The German Army Department responsible
for military aviation at the time. Okay, and
here is the rule. To earn that official R designation,
to graduate from a normal heavy bomber to a giant,
the engines had to be serviceable in flight.
Exactly. The IDCLUG recognized a hard truth about
early aviation. 1910's internal combustion engines
were notoriously dangerously unreliable. Yeah,
they were breaking down constantly. Constantly.
So if you're sending a bomber on a multi -hour
mission across the English Channel, an engine
failure isn't just a possibility. It's basically
a guarantee. It's practically guaranteed. So
their solution was to mandate that a human mechanic
must be able to physically access, troubleshoot,
and repair the engine while the aircraft is thousands
of feet in the air. I want you to just picture
that reality for a second. Think about driving
down the highway at 70 miles an hour, and your
check engine light comes on. Now imagine having
to climb out of your window, pop the hood, and
try to rebuild your car's engine while you're
still speeding down the road. It sounds like
an action movie. Right. That's essentially what
the id -flig was demanding. Except you're in
the sky, it's freezing cold, the wind is deafening,
and you might be taking anti -aircraft fire.
It's an insane requirement. It is a monumental
engineering challenge. I mean, how do you give
a mechanic access to a spinning, burning, vibrating
block of metal in midair? Exactly. It forced
the designers into two very distinct schools
of thought. Let's get into those. So the first
approach was what we might call centralized power.
The engineers decided to mount the massive engines
centrally, safely inside the main fuselage of
the airplane. Like in a little room. Exactly,
in an enclosed room where mechanics could easily
walk around them. They then used a complex system
of gearboxes, clutches, and long heavy drive
shafts to transfer the power from those inside
engines out to propellers that were mounted remotely.
Usually suspended between the wings, right? Yes,
exactly. Wait, they put massive... vibrating
oil -skewing engines inside a hollow wooden fuselage.
They did. How did that not just shake the entire
plane apart? Well, that's exactly the problem
they ran into. In theory, it sounds elegant.
Sure, on paper. Right. Keep the heavy engines
and the mechanics warm and safe in the belly
of the beast. But early 20th century metallurgy
simply couldn't produce drive shafts capable
of handling the massive torque of four engines
without violently twisting. Oh, man. You have
hundreds of horsepower generating immense rotational
force traveling through steel shafts that are
bolted to flexible wood in airframes. That sounds
like a recipe for disaster. But the vibration
was catastrophic. Gearboxes shattered, driveshafts
snapped, and the planes literally threatened
to tear themselves apart from the inside out.
Which naturally leads us to the second school
of thought, the distributed power model. Right.
In this setup, they ditched the internal engine
room and used conventional setups. The engines
were mounted out in large nacelles, those aerodynamic
pods on the wings. Yes. But because of that Eidflieg
rule, These nacelles couldn't just be tight metal
cowlings. They had to be massive. Because of
the mechanics. Exactly. They were essentially
little wooden rooms suspended in the bracing
because engineers had to be physically stationed
inside them for each group of engines. Right.
It was a completely different approach to the
same problem. Wait, hold on. You're telling me
a mechanic is locked inside a tiny wooden pod,
hanging off the wing. inches away from a deafening,
vibrating engine in sub -zero temperatures. That's
the reality of it. For hours, how is that possibly
the better option? What's fascinating here is
how practical simplicity almost always defeats
complex, elegant theories when you're operating
in the field. Even if it's terrifying. Even then,
as terrifying as it sounds for the mechanic in
that pod, it worked. Most of the operational
successful examples of the Reason Fluxa class
were of this distributed type. Wow. The prime
example was the Zeppelin Staken RVI. It was an
all direct drive aircraft. No fancy central gearboxes,
no long twisting drive shafts. That's brute force.
Exactly. Just huge engines in huge pods with
brave mechanics right there next to them, nursing
them along with oil cans and wrench mid -flight.
The Zeppelin Snake and RVI wasn't just some one
-off prototype that barely flew. They actually
built 18 of those. They did. They had a wingspan
of over 42 meters that's over 138 feet and they
successfully flew bombing missions on both the
eastern and western fronts. A huge success for
the time. It really proves that when you're pushing
the absolute limits of new technology sometimes
the brute force straightforward terrifyingly
raw method is the only one that actually makes
it off the ground. It truly was an arms race
of scale, a global competition to see who could
build the biggest flying machine. And it wasn't
just Germany, right? Not at all. To understand
the catalyst for this race, we actually have
to look outside of Germany. The original inspiration
for these behemoths, the aircraft that proved
to the world that larvescale flight wasn't just
a fantasy, was Russian. Right. It was the Sikorsky
Ilya Muramets. Ah, OK. That one had a wingspan
of two. 30 meters so about 98 feet. It was the
first successful large passenger aircraft turned
bomber. and it directly panicked the German military
into launching both their Grossflugzeug and the
Riesenflugzeug program. Exactly. The Germans
saw the Ilya Muromets and realized they were
instantly behind in a brand new theater of war.
Panic mode. Complete panic. But they weren't
the only ones trying to scale up. The Allied
forces were simultaneously building their own
giants to compete in this new heavyweight division.
Just to give you listening a sense of the sheer
scale happening globally at this time, the Allies
had some absolute monsters in the sky. The Italians
built the Caproni Cat 4, which matched the Russian
plane with a 30 -meter wingspan. The British
built a one -off Felix Doe Fury flying boat,
pushing out to 37 .5 meters. Huge. And then there
was the Hanley Page V1500, a massive Allied bomber
designed to reach Berlin with a wingspan of over
38 meters or 126 feet. Those are staggering dimensions
for a time when most people still travel by horse
-drawn carriage. Right. But the Germans, driven
by those intense id -flig requirements and their
ambitious strategic bombing goals, decided to
push the envelope even further. Here's where
it gets really interesting. We've talked about
the 42 meters up on Staken, but the absolute
largest reason Flugzeug ever built was the Siemens
-Schickert RE8, developed in 1918. A true monster.
This thing was a titan among giants. It had six
300 horsepower engines and its wingspan. 48 .0
meters. Incredible. Imagine half American football
field. Now imagine that entire length suspended
in the air held together by nothing but canvas,
spruce wood, and panel wire. 157 .5 feet of wingspan.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, the
Siemens Shukar R -8 was such a massive leap in
aeronautical engineering that it created a literal
historical plateau. What do you mean by that?
Well, it was so big that it hit the absolute
physical limits of the materials available. It
was not until 16 years later that humanity managed
to build an airplane with a larger wingspan.
Wow, 16 years. Yes. That was the Soviet Tupolev
Maxim Gorky in 1934, which finally surpassed
it with a 63 meter wingspan. 16 years. Why did
it take so long? Did we just lose the ambition?
Not at all. We just ran out of structural integrity.
Wood and fabric simply cannot scale infinitely.
The weight to strength ratio becomes impossible.
Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. It wasn't until the
1930s when material science perfected lightweight
aluminum alloys and monocoque metal construction
that engineers could finally break the 48 meter
barrier set in 1918. So they pushed the physical
limits of organic materials so far that the rest
of the world needed over a decade and a half
of metallurgy advancements to catch up. And what
I find absolutely captivating is the dreams that
didn't quite make it off the drawing board, like
the menacement giant triplane. Oh, the menacement.
That design study is the perfect example of ambition,
entirely unconstrained by immediate physical
reality. It's completely unhinged. A triplane,
meaning three stacked wings, one on top of the
other, with a planned wingspan of 50 .3 meters.
Unbelievable. That's 165 feet of stacked canvas.
And to power it, they plan to use 10 engines.
10. Which is an aerodynamic nightmare. I can
imagine. The amount of drag created by three
stacked wings of that size, combined with the
complex airflow interference between them, means
you face severe diminishing returns on lift.
Right. Adding 10 heavy engines might give you
thrust, but the sheer weight of the fuel in the
engines themselves would likely mean it could
barely lift its own shadow. Sadly, or maybe luckily
for the poor test pilots who would have had to
fly it, it was canceled while still incomplete.
Very lucky for them. but it perfectly captures
the mindset of the era. If it's not working,
just make it bigger. More engines. More wings.
That mindset of relentless, almost reckless expansion
is incredibly apparent when you dive deep into
the comprehensive list of aircraft built during
this program. When you analyze the numbers, a
very crucial pattern emerges. The vast majority
of these planes were one -offs. Yeah, looking
at the production records, it's almost exclusively
one built, one incomplete, or design study only.
Right. DFWRI, just one build. The Junkers R .I.,
one incomplete. The Siemens Shookert R .I. through
R .I. to all, just one single aircraft built
per model. What that tells us is that this wasn't
standard manufacturing. This was an era of rapid,
high -risk prototyping. Trial by fire. Exactly.
They weren't setting up massive Ford -style assembly
lines to churn out identical models, with the
notable exception of the Zeppelin -Stacon RVI
we talked about. Instead, they were building
a massive, highly experimental plane, learning
from its almost inevitable and often fatal flaws
and immediately designing the next slightly different
iteration. And because they were essentially
testing completely unproven theories at a massive
scale, The history of these planes is full of
absolute tragedies. It really is. I want to share
a few of these specific stories because they
really highlight the human cost. What it meant
for the people actually strapped into these experimental
giants. It's important context. For example,
the AEGRI. It had four 260 horsepower engines
and a 36 meter wingspan. Its first flight was
in 1916. But the records explicitly note It broke
up in flight in 1918. It's a terrifying prospect.
Think about the sheer terror of structural failure
at 10 ,000 feet. Oh, where to go? Exactly. You're
in a machine the size of a building, and suddenly
you hear the crack of a main spruce spar. There
are no parachutes for the crew. Oh, man. Once
the airframe fails, the massive weight of the
engines just drags the entire splintering wreckage
out of the sky. Then there's the DFWRI. It saw
service on the Eastern Front in 1916, but its
operational life was incredibly short. It crashed
on its second combat flight. Just gone. And maybe
the most dramatic example of this rapid prototyping
trial and error is the Siemens Shuckard Forceman
R. The Forceman is a fascinating, if grim, case
study in sheer persistence. It really is. It
first flew in 1915. It was a weird hybrid with
two 110 horsepower engines and two larger 220
horsepower engines. A very strange setup. The
records show that it was notoriously unstable.
requiring several major structural rebuilds.
It was finally accepted by the military in 1916,
but its ultimate fate. It was scrapped after
literally breaking in two. It just snapped in
half. It perfectly illustrates those limits of
the materials we discussed earlier. Wood and
canvas can only take so much cyclical stress,
especially when you're hanging thousands of pounds
of violently vibrating engines off of them. Eventually,
the structural fatigue reaches a breaking point.
Yeah. But alongside the tragedies, there is also
some truly bizarre, almost comical engineering
documented here. Oh, absolutely. My favorite
oddity of this entire era has to be the Linkhoffman
Ri from 1919. Oh, this one is crazy. This plane
had a massive 42 meter wingspan. But instead
of putting its four engines out on the wings,
they grouped them all together in the nose and
routed all that power to a single propeller.
This is absurd. A single propeller utilized the
combined force of over a thousand horsepower.
It was the largest single propeller ever built.
It was an astounding 6 .9 meters in diameter.
That is nearly 23 feet across. Think about a
two -story building spinning at hundreds of revolutions
per minute. It's hard to even picture. The gyroscopic
force alone would have made the plane incredibly
difficult to turn. I can't even imagine the noise
or the ground clearance. You'd need landing gear
like a skyscraper just to prevent the bottom
of a 23 foot propeller from striking the earth
on takeoff. It's just sheer engineering hubris.
It really is. Now, if you're building planes
this massive with landing gear that needs to
support tons of weight, eventually you literally
run out of runway. Yes. The wheels just sink
into the mud of 1910's airfields. Yeah. So where
do you go? You go to the only runway big enough.
and flat enough to handle them, the ocean. The
id -fleig had a specific designation for these
naval variations. Seaplanes were denoted by adding
a lowercase s after the r, making them r's types.
And a key figure in this naval expansion was
a man named Claudius Dornier. A name that becomes
massive in aviation history later on. Very much
so. While working for the Zeppelin company, Dornier
developed a series of huge flying boats known
as the Zeppelin Lindau R series. Flying boats?
Because they didn't have to worry about the weight
of massive wheeled landing gear, they could experiment
with immense boat hulls. It's an incredible shift
in design. The R's eye, for example, had a massive
43 .5 meter wingspan. But the attempt to merge
a boat with a giant bomber wasn't easy. No, it
wasn't. The records say it was wrecked unflown
in 1915. A gust of wind likely caught it on the
water and just flipped it before it ever took
to the sky. Nature always wins. But they kept
trying. The RC actually made it to the evaluation
stage in 1917 and the RSA was built in 1918.
They even built float plane variants for the
Imperial Navy. That persistence is a theme here.
So what does this all mean? The war finally ends
in late 1918. You have all these massive, experimental,
highly specialized, giant aircraft. What happens
to them when the fighting stops? That's a great
question. We actually have two incredible anecdotes
about the post -war afterlives of the Zeppelin
-Staken line. The transition from military to
civilian use is always a chaotic, fascinating
phase of any post -war period. And the R -planes,
despite their extreme size and expense, were
no exception. Exactly. Take the Zeppelin -Staken
RX -6. It was a beast powered by a crazy combination
of two 530 horsepower engines and two 220 horsepower
engines. Just massive power. What's incredible
is that they actually took one of these unfinished
bombers and completely repurposed it as a civilian
airliner. It's so funny to think about. Right.
Imagine being a wealthy traveler in 1919, buying
a commercial ticket and boarding a repurposed
canvas covered World War One heavy bomber for
a pleasant flight across Europe. It speaks to
the incredible lift capacity of these aircraft.
If an airframe is designed to carry tons of high
explosives, it can certainly be modified to carry
a spacious, enclosed cabin full of paying passengers.
It really was the chaotic genesis of commercial
airline travel, as we know it today. Absolutely.
But the absolute best post -war story belongs
to the Zeppelin Staken RX -AVA. It was a massive
post -war iteration sporting five Maybach engines.
And under its operational history, it simply
says, seized while smuggling. It's a remarkable,
almost cinematic historical footnote. It really
is. A multi -engine giant aircraft representing
the absolute pinnacle of Imperial strategic bombing
technology, ending its brief career being impounded
for illicit trade. Just incredible. It really
paints a picture of the desperate lawless nature
of the post -war landscape in Europe. I just
picture this 138 -foot wide bomber, engines roaring,
touching down in a dark muddy field somewhere
in the dead of night, loaded to the brim with
contraband. It's like something out of an Indiana
Jones movie. This raises an important question
as we look back at the entirety of the Reason
Fluxoid program. When you synthesize all this,
the tragedies of planes snapping in two, the
triumphs of the Zeppelin -Steakens, the bizarre
23 -foot single propellers, the massive flying
boats, what you're really looking at is a unique
fleeting moment in history. It was a brief window
where pure ambition drastically violently outpaced
standard conventions and material science. Perfectly
said. The results were incredibly profound engineering
insights alongside magnificent, sometimes literal,
failures. I think that's the core takeaway for
you listening right now. Because it's not just
about old wooden airplanes. Right. Whether you're
leading a new project to work, coding a new app,
or just learning a complex new skill, the story
of the airplanes proves something fundamental
about the human endeavor. Sometimes, rapid prototyping,
trying the absolute wildest idea, seeing if the
23 -foot propeller works, testing the absolute
limits, even when it results in your project
literally breaking in half, is the absolute only
way to discover where the true boundaries lie.
They didn't know what was physically impossible
until they built it, flew it, and watched it
fail. Exactly. That's a powerful perspective
on innovation, and it leaves us with a final
lingering thought to mull over. Let's hear it.
We saw how the engineers of the Riesenflugzeug
pushed the physical limits of their time so aggressively
that their 48 -meter wingspans weren't surpassed
by humanity for nearly two decades. Yeah, that
16 -year gap. It makes you wonder, if we look
at today's landscape of failed or abandoned extreme
tech projects, the hyperloops, the canceled space
planes, the bizarre drone delivery concepts,
how many of those are actually silent time capsules?
Oh, answer soon. How many of today's so -called
magnificent failures have already secretly solved
the engineering bottlenecks we won't even realize
we face until the year 2040. I absolutely love
that. The colossal failures of today, quietly
building the reality of tomorrow. Thank you so
much for joining us on this deep dive into the
giant airplanes. Keep exploring, keep questioning,
and we'll catch you on the next deep dive.