Delta Airlines brought its “Team USA” airplane to Oshkosh this year. Our elite athletes will travel in style to the next few Olympics. Where do the proud Americans who built this machine live? Toulouse, France. It’s an Airbus A330.
Delta even flew it during an afternoon airshow (there is an airshow every afternoon at Oshkosh, plus two evening airshows).
Separately, on the way to Oshkosh we visited the Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum and learned that no American-made car has won the Indy 500 for 40 years:
On the way back from Oshkosh, I stopped in Amana, Iowa, a center of All-American quilting. Where is the fabric made and printed for this All-American craft? Korea and Japan.
But I am sure that American lawyers and accountants are World Champions.
Guess they don’t want to deal with the noise of a Boeing. A 25 year old athlete doesn’t care if it’s a bus or a finicky autopilot with no redundant angle of attack sensors.
“American-made” car with Cosworth engine. Cosworth being the British engine manufacturer, of course…
Minor nitpick, but weren’t the 1994 Penske PC-23s that dominated that year’s Indy 500 built in the USA? Their engines came from Ilmor in the UK, but the 1982 example also had international horsepower. I can’t remember when Penske stopped building their own chassis but it would have been a few years after that.
I’ve done a bit more digging, seems they were built by US-owned Penske in Dorset, England.
At one point the USA led the world in advanced composite manufacturing – the first successful full carbon-fibre F1 chassis was made for McLaren by Hercules Aerospace in Utah.