Building an Airforce from scratch
You'd have to scour through all the design drawings you had for existing aircraft for ones you could adapt. You wouldn't try to design new ones because of the risk of failure.
No electricity means no aluminium, I presume. That might be simplistic because there's recycled aluminium out there but your casting process might not be able to produce good enough quality and you'd have less of an ability to inspect the stuff you had. At the very best I'd assume that its use would be minimal.
You'd need rooms of people doing calculations, checking and rechecking them.
A lot would depend on the materials available. Could you make fibreglass for instance? It needs plastics which an electrically and electronically operated factory might not be able to make.
Fabric over wood might be a better bit although many textiles factories are no longer in the UK or are electronically operated you still might have enough in storage to kit out an airforce. This obviously also applies to aluminium too - perhaps there is enough piping in the UK to enable one to construct ultralights.
You would most likely restart your airforce with all the aircraft that you can still find that are in a flyable condition. Perhaps this ragtag of old planes would actually be enough for the start.
While you are playing out this fantasy old aeroplane game, the rest of us would be rushing to get the infrastructure back online and unless there was a continuous problem that prevented us, we'd have the most critical parts of it back soon enough - most importantly the communications systems which are quite critical to anyone including the military. We might start with ladybird-book crystal radios using a lump of coke and a lemon battery but we'd be progressing out of that state as fast as we possibly could.
So it would be imperative to return to the electronic age and we would do it bloody quickly and as a matter of probably much more importance than an airforce. We would not be able to get to where we are now in terms of quantity but probably would be able to reach the quality level mostly.
Again this is also dependent on how many people got wiped out. The first problem would probably be food and the sudden inability to move it around because of not having electricity for trains, trains with electronics onboard, trucks with any kind of electronic engine control and so on.
If most people survived then most would be engaged in restarting the entire engine of the economy and whether you want electronics or not the rest of us would want them and would work towards getting them back.
No electricity means no aluminium, I presume. That might be simplistic because there's recycled aluminium out there but your casting process might not be able to produce good enough quality and you'd have less of an ability to inspect the stuff you had. At the very best I'd assume that its use would be minimal.
You'd need rooms of people doing calculations, checking and rechecking them.
A lot would depend on the materials available. Could you make fibreglass for instance? It needs plastics which an electrically and electronically operated factory might not be able to make.
Fabric over wood might be a better bit although many textiles factories are no longer in the UK or are electronically operated you still might have enough in storage to kit out an airforce. This obviously also applies to aluminium too - perhaps there is enough piping in the UK to enable one to construct ultralights.
You would most likely restart your airforce with all the aircraft that you can still find that are in a flyable condition. Perhaps this ragtag of old planes would actually be enough for the start.
While you are playing out this fantasy old aeroplane game, the rest of us would be rushing to get the infrastructure back online and unless there was a continuous problem that prevented us, we'd have the most critical parts of it back soon enough - most importantly the communications systems which are quite critical to anyone including the military. We might start with ladybird-book crystal radios using a lump of coke and a lemon battery but we'd be progressing out of that state as fast as we possibly could.
So it would be imperative to return to the electronic age and we would do it bloody quickly and as a matter of probably much more importance than an airforce. We would not be able to get to where we are now in terms of quantity but probably would be able to reach the quality level mostly.
Again this is also dependent on how many people got wiped out. The first problem would probably be food and the sudden inability to move it around because of not having electricity for trains, trains with electronics onboard, trucks with any kind of electronic engine control and so on.
If most people survived then most would be engaged in restarting the entire engine of the economy and whether you want electronics or not the rest of us would want them and would work towards getting them back.
