Welcome back to the show. We have an incredible
mission for today's deep dive. You, the listener,
sent us an excerpted Wikipedia article covering
a largely forgotten but honestly utterly massive
chapter of aviation history. Well, massive is
definitely the right word for it. Yeah. We're
talking about the reason Flugzeug today, our
planes, and... looking at the virtual backdrop
you've set up for us. Ah, you like the dusty,
sepia -toned hangar look? I love it. It's perfect.
We're just surrounded by these sprawling, incredibly
complex blueprints of early 20th century biplanes
and triplanes. It really sets the mood. Because
to grasp the sheer, just the audacity of this
era, we really need to anchor ourselves firmly
in the years between 1915 and 1919. Right. When
people think about World War I aviation, the
picture that usually comes to mind is, you know,
flimsy single -seat biplanes, the classic dogfighters
swirling over the trenches. Snoopy and the Red
Baron kind of stuff. Exactly. But operating right
alongside those tiny maneuverable aircraft, Germany
was actually building absolute behemoths. I mean,
the largest warplanes of the entire conflict.
Okay, let's unpack this. Because defining what
actually makes something a Riesenflugzeug is
crucial. Yeah, the term itself just translates
to giant aircraft in German. Right, but the German
military used it as a very strict technical classification.
It wasn't just a nickname. To actually qualify
for the R -Class, a bomber had to have at least
three aircraft engines. So they usually had four
or more. Right. And their payload capacity had
to be significantly larger than the standard
heavy bombers of the time, the Grossflugzeug.
Like the Gotha GV. Exactly. But what completely
blew my mind in the article you sent us, and
this is a staggering piece of context, the airplanes
that bombed London during the First World War
were actually larger than any of the primary
German bombers used decades later during World
War II. Which is wild when you think about the
timeline of aviation. The Luftwaffe in the Second
World War. had large planes, sure, but they were
mostly transports or maritime patrol. World War
I airplanes were true strategic bombers built
on a scale that just defied the materials of
the time. They were building outward instead
of upward with engine power. Yeah, because early
engines were weak. If you wanted to lift a heavy
bomb load, you needed immense wing surface area.
And Germany wasn't alone in this. It was an international
arms race. The source lists the Allied equivalents,
and everyone was trying to build these giants.
Yeah, the direct inspiration for the German program
was actually a Russian plane, the Sikorsky Ilya
Muromets. Right, with a wingspan of 29 .8 meters.
Exactly. That proved you could build a multi
-engine giant and keep it in the air. Then Italy
stepped in with the Caproni Sackway 4. That one
marginally beat the Russian plane with a 29 .9
meter span. Just inching past them. Totally.
And the British weren't sitting out either. They
had the Felixstowe Fury, which was this one -off
flying boat that hit 37 .5 meters. And the Panley
Page V1500 stretched all the way to 38 .41 meters.
But the absolute peak of this specific era, the
undisputed record holder, was German. The Siemens
Shuckert R8. Built in 1918. And its wingspan
was 48 .0 meters, almost 160 feet. Which is staggering.
Just an ocean of timber, bracing wire, and fabric
stretching across the sky. And here's the craziest
part about that 48 meter wingspan. It took a
full 16 years before any other nation built an
airplane with a larger wingspan. 16 years. Yeah.
It held the record until the Soviet Union built
the Tupolev Maxim Gorky in 1934. And that was
a 63 -meter wingspan, but it was a much later
monoplane design. For a wooden wire biplane from
1918 to hold that record for that long just shows
how far they were pushing the engineering. But
pushing the size was just one part of the headache.
Oh, absolutely. Because there was a specific
rule from the German military that made the R
-Class an absolute nightmare to design. What's
fascinating here is that defining mandate. It
wasn't just about having three or more engines.
The military demanded that those engines had
to be serviceable in flight. Here's where it
gets really interesting. You have to picture
the reality of 1915 engines. They were, frankly,
terrible. Very unreliable. They overheated. They
spewed oil. They ceased up. If you are flying
deep into enemy territory and an engine dies,
you can't just land in a field. Right. You become
a prisoner of war. Or worse. Exactly. So the
military said, fine, if the engines are going
to break, the plane has to be a flying workshop
so mechanics can fix them in the air. And to
solve this, the engineers split into two totally
different design camps. Right. Let's look at
design one first. This group approached the bomber
almost like it was a naval ship. An airborne
submarine, basically. Yeah. They decided. The
safest place for the engines and the mechanics
was inside the fuselage, centralized. So they
mounted these massive heavy engines in the belly
of the plane. But then how do you turn the propellers?
That was the catch. They had to invent this insane
system of gearboxes and long metal drive shafts
running from the center of the plane out through
the wooden wings to spin remote propellers. Which
is a mechanical disaster waiting to happen. The
source notes that in practice, this power transmission
method was incredibly troublesome. Troublesome
is an understatement. You've got rigid, high
-speed metal shafts spinning inside flexible,
vibrating wooden biplane wings. The harmonic
resonance alone would tear the gearboxes apart.
The friction, the twisting, it just didn't work.
The material science of the day just wasn't up
to that kind of precision. Which brings us to
design two. The pragmatists? Exactly. They scrapped
the internal engine room and the drive shafts.
They went with conventional setups. They mounted
the engines directly out on the wings in large
nacelles or on the nose, direct drive. The propeller
is attached right to the engine. But they still
had to follow the military rule. The engines
had to be serviced mid -flight. Yes. So their
solution was to build the engine nacelles out
on the wings large enough to put a person inside.
I just can't get over this detail. They actually
stationed mechanics inside these wooden pods,
out on the wings, sitting next to a roaring engine
during the entire flight. It sounds like fiction,
but it was standard practice for these planes,
and the direct drive method actually won out.
The most successful model of the entire R -Class
used this design. The Zeppelin -staken RVI. Exactly.
18 of them were built, which is a massive production
run for the R -Class. And they weren't just test
models. They actively bombed the Western Front.
18 units really is a huge success when you look
at the rest of the list in the source, because
almost all the other planes were one -offs. Just
a menagerie of monsters. Truly. I mean, imagine
you're a soldier in the trenches and you see
one of these bizarre multi -engine wooden castles
lumbering overhead. But because they were mostly
experiments, the outcomes were often incredibly
tragic. The trial and error phase was brutal.
Take the AEGRI, for example. Built in 1918. It
literally broke up in midair. The aerodynamic
forces just ripped it apart. Yeah, structural
failure. And it was so bad, they instantly abandoned
seven other airframes of the same model that
were currently being built. Just pulled the plug
completely. We see that same fatal structural
issue with the Seaman Shickert Forceman R. Ah,
the Forceman. This thing was an absolute mess.
It was used as a trainer starting in 1915. It
had this weird, unbalanced engine setup. Two
smaller engines and two massive ones. They had
to rebuild it over and over again before the
military would even let it be used just to train
pilots. And its final fate. It was scrapped because
the fuselage just snapped in two. Just broke
its own back. Broke its own back under the weight.
But instead of dialing it back, designers kept
pushing for even more absurd extremes. Look at
the Manisman giant triplane. Oh, the Manisman.
The sheer hubris of that design. If four engines
are good, why not ten? Ten engines on a triplane.
Yes. The blueprints called for a 50 -meter wingspan
to carry ten individual engines. Thankfully,
it was canceled before they could finish building
it because the war ended. The drag alone would
have made it a brick. And then there's the Link
Hoffman, Shay. This one actually flew in 1919.
It only had four engines, but it drove the largest
single propeller ever built for an aircraft.
6 .9 meters in diameter. Nearly 23 feet across.
Just one massive blade. Think about the engineering
nightmare that creates. The gyroscopic force
of a 23 -foot propeller spinning on the front
of a wooden plane. Every time the pilot tries
to turn, the physics want to rip the nose off.
Not to mention just trying to take off. You need
incredibly tall scaffolding -like landing gear
just so the propeller blade doesn't strike the
dirt. Right, which adds tons of drag and weight.
It's just solving one problem by creating three
worse ones. Exactly. But it's important to note
that this whole R -class obsession wasn't just
for land -based bombers. There was the whole
subcategory of flying boats. The Zeppelin Lindau
R series? Right, the R's all the way through
the R -6. These were designed for long -range
maritime patrols over the ocean. And there is
a great historical connection here. These giant
flying boats were developed by Claudius Dornier.
While he was still working for Zeppelin. Yes.
He used the R -series to figure out the complex
math of multi -engine seaplanes. The R -SIF actually
had a 37 -meter wingspan and was evaluated by
the military in 1917. So he took all the hard
lessons he learned from these World War I wooden
giants managing water landings, the corrosive
sea air, the structural stress, and applied that
directly to his famous interwar flying boats.
Weeding right up to the massive Dornier 2X. That's
a great through line. Now, organizing all of
this chaos, all these competing manufacturers
and experimental prototypes took a massive amount
of bureaucracy. The German military had a dedicated
department for it, the Idflieg. The Inspection
of the Air Force. They managed the funding, evaluated
the prototypes, and tried to enforce some level
of standardization on this fleet of weird machines.
And their naming convention reflects that. It
was incredibly rigid, but simple. Any plane that
met the giant multi -engine, in -flight serviceable
criteria was an R. Followed by a period and then
a Roman numeral. Right. So that Zeppelin stake,
and we talked about earlier, is the RVI because
it was the sixth accepted model from that manufacturer.
And for the seaplanes, they just added a lowercase
s. So Dornier's third flying boat became the
Ars III. Exactly. It kept the paperwork clean,
even if the planes themselves were a chaotic
mess of trial and error. So what does this all
mean? When we look back at the R plane. we're
looking at a very brief, incredibly intense window
in aviation history. Just 1915 to 1919. Right.
And driven by the desperation of a global war,
engineers tried to basically cheat the slow evolution
of technology by simply making things bigger.
They pushed wood, canvas, and wire to limits
that wouldn't be touched again for almost two
decades. They paved the way for the heavy multi
-engine strategic bombers that would define the
rest of the 20th century. But this raises an
important question, and I think it's something
we really need to sit with. What's that? The
human element. We talked about the engineering
mandate for in -flight servicing. We talked about
placing mechanics inside the engine nacelles,
the direct drive models. But imagine the raw
physical reality of being one of those mechanics.
It's almost unimaginable. You're stationed inside
a thin, unpressurized wooden box suspended out
on the wing of a biplane, thousands of feet in
the air. Over an active battlefield. Or the freezing
ocean. The air is freezing, the plane is vibrating
violently. And right next to you is a massive,
unsilenced aviation engine running at full RPM.
The noise alone would be a physical assault.
You'd go deaf instantly without modern protection.
You are surrounded by highly flammable aviation
fuel, hot oil spitting everywhere, and you're
just holding a wrench. Your only job is to keep
that temperamental engine running, because if
a valve seizes or an oil line cracks, the entire
behemoth might fall from the sky. the psychological
endurance that would require. You are crawling
around in the freezing dark, totally exposed,
knowing the lives of the whole crew depend on
you fixing an experimental engine mid -flight.
It's a terrifying, visceral human experience
hidden inside the belly of these giant machines.
It really grounds all these massive blueprints
and records into a stark reality. Thank you to
the listener, the learner, for sending this source
in and sparking this deep dive. The R -planes
are a fascinating piece of history. To everyone
listening, keep exploring the hidden margins
of history, and we will catch you on the next
deep dive.