A historical development I learned about yesterday, in the course of research related to today’s upcoming piece:
The experiments of the Royal Navy and US Navy, back in the 1950s, with flexible - for which read inflatable rubber - flight decks for their aircraft carriers, in an effort to save weight on carrier-based aircraft by eliminating their need to have any landing gear at all.
It didn’t work out.
…technical reasons aside, I’m pretty sure part of the reason was that the dignity of the military would have been fatally wounded by the floating bouncy castle era.
