Transitive partial parallelisms of deficiency one (Q1864610)

A partial parallelism of deficiency one in the projective space \(\text{PG}(3,q)\) is a set of \(q^2+ q\) spreads that pairwise do not have any line in common. In his monograph `Subplane Covered Nets' (Marcel Dekker) (2000; Zbl 0954.51002), the first author constructs partial parallelisms of deficiency one which admit a transitive group (transitive on the set of spreads) in any Pappian 3-dimensional projective space, with the property that every spread is a Hall spread. In the paper under review, the authors prove that Johnson's construction yields at least \(1+[(q- 3)/2r]\) mutually non-isomorphic partial parallelisms, where \(r\) is such that \(q= p^r\), with \(p\) a prime number. A similar result is proved in the infinite case (over the ground field of real numbers). Also, the authors characterize these Johnson partial parallelisms \({\mathcal P}\) amongst other partial parallelisms by the following property: There is a spread \(\Sigma\) no line of which is contained in any spread of \({\mathcal P}\), and there is a line \(l\) of \(\Sigma\) such that \({\mathcal P}\) admits the full group of central collineations with axis \(l\), and this group acts doubly transitively on the remaining lines of \(\Sigma\). This characterization holds in both the finite and infinite case.