With a proven track record and improved technology, and even with a prototype to show, Sikorsky's first effort in the USA, the Sikorsky S-29-A, failed to find service as a passenger plane. It—only one was ever made—was eventually sold and had a varied career, ending it's life in the movie Hell's Angels. Because of the lack of interest, Sikorsky then had to switch to smaller aircraft and wait for the market to catch up. His first American passenger plane that was actually put into service in that capacity, the S-38, first flew in 1928, nine years after Sikorsky arrived in the USA. Sikorsky first learned of the Wright Brothers flight in 1906 and didn't switch to fixed-wing aircraft till 1910 and the Ilya Muromets carried its first passengers in December of 1913.
What does all this have to do with the 1632 world? In 1632 there is a tremendous concentration of technology but very little in the way of infrastructure outside the Ring of Fire. Yes, they are building railroads. But by 1634 the main rail line out of Grantville has not yet reached Magdeburg. "What railroads?" is an even more valid answer to the question of how a plane will compete with railroads than it was in Russia in our time line. And it will continue to be—in the USE for years, and the rest of the world for decades. This gives aircraft of all sorts a tremendous advantages, because they don't need infrastructure.
Yes, I know someone has to build the planes. Someone has to drill the oil and refine the fuel. But the difference in investment in infrastructure is so great that the cost of airports gets lost in the noise of the cost of a rail line. The oil will need to be drilled and refined anyway. There are too many other products that need it. Aircraft don't need rails, tons of iron per mile. They don't need roads or canals. They need approximately what ocean-going ships need: places to build them and places to dock. Well, a bit less than the ships. The ships, after all, need open water, an ocean—or at least a river—between their ports.
That means that aircraft aren't going to compete with railroads or, for the most part, even the improved roads of the USE. They really won't be competing with barge traffic on rivers or canals, either. If someone builds a railroad or a canal along your route, you smile, thank them for making it easier and cheaper to get your fuel. Then move your route, or one end of your route, to somewhere where the competition doesn't go. Ships can compete with you between ports. They are slower but cost a great deal less per ton mile. But you will still get much of the luxury trade and virtually all of the trade in perishables. For most of the things that an aircraft will carry, the primary competing transport is going to be mule trains. That is, horses or mules traveling over roads that are not much better than paths through the woods.
So, let's take a look at mule trains. According to "Hither and Yon," Grantville Gazette, Volume 11, a mule train can do "15-30mpd easy terrain, 5-15 mpd in mountains.(See note 2)." Split the difference between terrain types and call it 15 miles per day. To carry a ton of goods, you need about ten mules and two packers leading them. So, ten animals and two men. The cost is figured in ton miles and comes to 10d or around $17.50 in New US or USE dollars. That's for every mile traveled. For three hundred miles, that comes to $5,250. Why is it so expensive? Because you have to pay the packers, you have to pay to feed and care for the mules and the packers for days or weeks.
For an airplane to break even charging the same rate per ton mile, you need one or more aircraft that can carry one ton of cargo for three hundred miles at the same rate. The aircraft must be built, but the cost of building it is amortized over the projected life of the aircraft. Be conservative and call it five years of flights. Assume two flights a week and fifty weeks a year (everyone needs a vacation and even though they are only spending a couple of days a week flying and the rest of the time being maintained, it's still wise to do a full takedown twice a year.) Three hundred miles a flight makes six hundred miles a week. Fifty weeks a year gives thirty thousand flight miles a year, times five years gives an amortized aircraft cost of X/150,000 with X equaling the cost of building the airplane. So, if your aircraft cost $150,000, your aircraft cost per mile is $1.00. If the plane cost $450,000.00, then the ton mile cost is $3.00.
Of course, money costs money, and half a million dollars (more or less), costs quite a bit. The cost of money in the mid 1630s is a tricky issue. A safe portfolio or a mutual fund might reasonably be expected to have a return of as much as fifteen percent a year or as little as five percent. However, much of that return is not reflected, or expected to be reflected, in immediate productivity. The money is being spent on industrial infrastructure and the investors know it. As that infrastructure gets nearer completion, the values of the stock that represents it increases. In other words, the market is anticipating, as markets tend to do. Investment in automobile manufacturing plants probably started in late 1631 with no expectation that the first car would roll off the assembly line before 1636. What the investors do expect is that when the cars start rolling off the line in 1636 or 1638 or perhaps even 1640, they are going to make whole heaps of money. So the value of the stock is expected to increase, but it's not expected to pay dividends for a while.
What does this mean in terms of financing aircraft production? In terms of military aircraft like the Gustav, not much. They will be built on military contracts, with government cash on the barrelhead. In terms of private investors, it makes it harder in some ways and easier in others. It's harder because there are a lot of places where they can invest their money and expect a significant return. So the cost of money is going to be on the high end, somewhere around ten to fifteen percent per year. On the high side, by our standards. The availability of loans from the First National Bank of Grantville and the credit union are going to push the cost of secured loans down by seventeenth-century standards. Again, not everyone agrees on this subject. How much a loan will cost will depend a lot on who is borrowing the money and on who they are borrowing it from. Whether you invest money in an aircraft is a related question. If your other option is to loan money, you will want a higher return because you're not getting ownership. It stops paying. Ownership has more risk, but at least the potential to pay you back and leave you with stock that will continue paying you for much longer.
There are two ways of calculating the cost of money—how much will you have to pay back over a given period of time and how much would the money make you over a given period of time. Generally, how much it would make you is a bit less than how much it would cost you. My best guess about the cost of money over a five year period is that $450,000.00 will represent a cost of $600,000.00 to $650,000.00 over the course of five years. Which brings us to the plus side. The car factory won't even start paying off for years, neither will a lot of other investments. But the aircraft will start paying for itself as soon as it's delivered. Thus, hope makes it a more attractive investment Assuming $650,000.00 paid over five years that's $4.33 per ton mile. If the plane is still in good shape after that time, your profits go up. And the plane probably will be in good shape.
The planes are only one part of the cost. There is also fuel, maintenance, flight crew, and interest. Also airport or station fees. Still, flight mile gives us one major component of the cost.
So, how much is fuel going to cost on a per ton mile basis? The best I can do is make a WAG (Wild Ass Guess) It's probably going to be a methanol-gasoline mixture, perhaps 90% alcohol and 10% gasoline because alcohol improves octane. The engines will, of course, have to be modified to run on this mixture. How much per ton mile is impossible to say across a range of aircraft. You can work it out partly for a single airplane, but even there it's a constantly changing number. As the plane flies, it uses up fuel and gets lighter, reducing induced drag. So every mile it travels, it needs a little bit less fuel for the next. Obviously, the degree to which it is loaded affects the amount of fuel used. The airspeed and so on also affect fuel use. Still, it can be worked out with reasonable accuracy for a single plane.
The plane I'm going to use is the Jupiter from and my and Paula Goodlett's story, "The Monster," which is based o
n the Ilya Muromets built in 1913 by Sikorsky. We did make some reasonable improvements focused on reducing drag and improving laminar flow. And we added air cushion landing gear that was developed in the late 1960s.
Even if you knew to the inch how far a gallon of fuel would take you, there is still the question of how much a gallon of fuel costs. The best we can possibly come up with is a WAG. My WAG is about 10 dollars a gallon for standard 1634 aviation fuel. That's not the aviation fuel used in 2007, because, at least at first, people in the 1632 universe won't be using the sort of aviation engines used in 2007. What they will be using is converted automobile engines, most of which will be heavier than a modern aviation engine, and less robust. Don't misunderstand, these engines will be better than anything the Wright brothers or Sikorsky had, even if they have steel rather than aluminum blocks. They just won't be up to modern aviation standards.
A pretty good gas mileage for a year 2000 automobile engine is around twenty-five miles to the gallon at a highway speed of fifty-five miles an hour or a bit over two gallons an hour. I assume you will lose about half that in a rigged-out aviation engine that uses about four gallons an hour. Four such engines on the Monster gives a fuel consumption of sixteen gallons per hour. Absent headwinds or tailwinds, the Monster can reasonably be expected to travel about sixty-eight miles per hour. (Bill Wathen, the aviation engineer and aircraft designer that I checked this stuff with says sixty-eight miles an hour is too slow. It will probably go faster than that.) That figure gives us four and a quarter miles per gallon for the Jupiter. On the Jupiter, that means not quite a quarter of a gallon, .23529gal, of fuel per ton mile. Or $2.35 in fuel cost per ton mile. So $4.33 aircraft cost plus $2.35 gives us $6.68 per ton mile. Please note that the Gustav single engine plane has only one engine but has a cargo capacity that is probably less than five hundred pounds. It carries an ordnance load of three hundred pounds, so while it's cheaper to build and operate, it's more expensive when measured in ton miles.
Maintenance and Crew cost:
It is likely that most of the pilots in the early days will also be aircraft mechanics just as they were in our time line. They will be able to fabricate some of the aircraft parts that may break just about anywhere they are. Other parts will have to be fabricated in Grantville, at least at first. Well, that's not entirely true. The cost of fabricating some of the more precision parts outside Grantville will be much greater. I'm tempted to say prohibitive, but the truth is, it probably won't be prohibitive for what you get. It will just take what seems like forever. In any case, it is probable that the planes will take their primary maintenance staff with them, in the form of pilots. They will also take a small stock of critical spare parts. So, maintenance costs and crew costs flow together, much as they do in a mule train. There are, however, two important differences: how long you have to pay to get the same number of ton miles, and how much you have to pay. The first works for the airplane owner, the second works against him. The Monster will cover 340 miles in five hours of flight time. So call at 300 miles a day. If it really needs to, it be can be 600 miles a day. But that means you're skipping on your maintenance, and the chance of engine failure, or some other midair disaster is increased. It's not something you want to do very often. 600 miles a day also means that you're either carrying extra fuel or have some place on route where you can stop and refuel.
So, assume that you're paying the pilot and copilot $100,000.00 a year each. That's $200,000.00 divided by 30,000 miles a year. And the Jupiter caries at least a ton of cargo or passengers that comes out to $6.67 per ton mile. Plus $6.68 gives us a total so far of $13.35 per ton mile. Remember our pilots/maintenance guys are spending about ten hours a week in the air and another ten to twenty hours a week on aircraft maintenance. When they aren't at home (about half the time), they are eating and sleeping in nice inns in mostly major cities. And to top it all off, their job is pretty glamorous. This is a cool job.
Just for reference lets look at the mule packers cost per ton mile for a year's transport. The mule train travels thirty miles a day but not 365 days a year. At a minimum they're getting at least Sundays off, giving us 313 days or 9390 miles per year. It takes two mule packers to handle ten mules carrying a ton of cargo. To get the same personnel cost per ton mile, you can only afford to pay the mule packers about $31,000 a year each. They spend about five hours a day traveling, generally on foot and another five or so hours a day taking care of the mules. For a total of about fifty hours a week. When they are away from home, most of the time, they are generally eating camp food and sleeping on the ground. All for about a third of what the fly boys are getting. Ain't that just the way it goes?
Station-keeping or airports:
For regularly scheduled flights, depending on the type of plane, you need an air field: a lake or other body of water that is long and wide enough to land on, or packed snow or ice that is long enough to land on. And at all such places you need some place you can taxi to, where you can store fuel, oil, and some spare parts. You also need it to be a place where you can pick up or drop off passengers and cargo. If it's a place where you can ship fuel cheaply so you don't have to make extra trips carrying fuel, that's all to the good. Now, in most places, you're going to be able to have the alcohol component of your fuel produced locally. That's going to save you quite a bit. Especially with a ninety/ten mix. For every one hundred gallons of aviation fuel, you only need to load ten gallons of actual gasoline. And since wood alcohol works just fine as a fuel component, the quality of the hooch that your suppliers start with is not an issue. Which, again, should save you a bit.
How much the airfield is going to cost depends primarily on the type of landing gear you have. If you have wheels, you need an airport. A flat piece of ground that has had the stones and rocks removed, any potholes filled in, and so on. Most of the time, that's not going to matter all that much. It's that one time in ten, or one time in twenty, when the wheel does catch a rock or a pothole and the plane flips over on its back, that it becomes an issue. Still, better safe than sorry, so you have to pay people to get the field ready and then to maintain it. If there are several airplanes coming into and out of the field on a regular basis, that's not that much of a chore. The cost of maintaining the field can be divided among ten or twenty or thirty aircraft that land on the field in a given month. But, at least in the early days, that's mostly not going to be the case. It's going to be one, two or five airplanes. So you're talking about as much $1,000. per plane in ground fees, besides the other fees associated with an airport.
You're a bit better off if your plane has pontoons. Water is naturally flat. There is still a danger of the occasional log floating in the pond or lake you're landing in, but it is a much lower probability danger. So you don't really have the maintenance cost, if you're using an amphibious aircraft. What you do have is drag. Whether pontoons or a hull, you have to push a weight of water equal to the weight of the aircraft out of the way for your entire taxi run and for most of your takeoff run. That requires a more powerful engine than you need to maintain flight once you're in the air. That more powerful engine will use more gas and weigh more, decreasing the amount of useful lift the aircraft has available.
Skis for use on snow or ice have a bit of the disadvantages of both wheels and pontoons. The runway still has to be maintained as with wheels. While drag is less than with pontoons, it's still more than with wheels.
Now we come to two types of landing gear that never really caught on in our time line: air cushion and hydrofoil. The first experimentation with hydrofoil landing gear was done by Alexander Graham Bell near the beginning of the twentieth century. The problem is, he never actually got it to work. I cannot say this with absolute certainty, but from what I have read and seen of his designs, the problem he failed to overcome—and, to the best of my knowledge, has never been overcome—was the boundary layer. The boundary layer is that point when much of the lift is being provided by the wings of the aircraft, and the hydrofoils are still parti
ally in the water. At that point, a little distortion on the surface of the water can throw the drag thoroughly out of balance. It wasn't that Bell's planes couldn't fly, or that they couldn't run along the water on their hydrofoil. It was switching from one to the other that was never accomplished.
On the other hand, air cushion landing gear has been built successfully in our time line. Its troubles were economics and timing. By the time the first air cushion vehicle that worked came about, airports were spotted all over the United States and much of the rest of the world. And for those places where there weren't airports or where it was impractical to put an airport, pontoons were an already proven technology, with regulations and insurance premiums already firmly established. Air cushion landing gear would have had to start from scratch in a regulatory environment that was stacked against it. However, in the 1632 universe, the regulatory environment is fairly close to nonexistent.
Pontoons would still be simpler and almost certainly cheaper to build and install. But pontoons have the disadvantage that they do not work on land. And there is the issue of drag. Air cushion landing gear has very little drag, which means smaller, lighter engines are needed for take off. All of which would seem to be the beside the point except for one thing: it affects the fixed cost of running an airline. Both directly in terms of how many places you can land and how much preparation is needed, and indirectly in terms of bargaining position. In general, the more options you have, the better your bargaining position with any of those options.