Aviation & Avionics, Thursday September 11, Period 2

[crazypilotman.livejournal.com]

As the students were filing in, Murdock was busy writing on the blackboard.

Flight was generally looked upon as an impossibility, and scarcely anyone believed in it until he actually saw it with his own eyes.
~Orville Wright.

To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.
~Otto Lilienthal

He turned around and faced the class. "You may have heard of the first name, but probably not so much the second one. Though many people know who the Wright Brothers are, there were many who came before them, paving the way into the skies."

(ocd up! coming)

Comments

Re: Lecture! Part 2

[crazypilotman.livejournal.com]

Octave (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/crerar/exhibits/chanute5.html) Chanute (http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Prehistory/chanute/PH7.htm) provided the Wright brothers with help and advice, and helped to publicize their flying experiments. Chanute first collected all the data that he could find from flight experimenters around the world. He published this as a series of articles first published in The Railroad and Engineering Journal from 1891 to 1893, and collected together in Progress in Flying Machine in 1894. This was the first organized, written collection of aviation research.

However, he worked in partnership with younger experimenters, including Augustus (http://www.flyingmachines.org/chan.html) Herring (http://www.earlyaviators.com/eherring.htm) and William Avery. In 1896 and 1897 Chanute, Herring and Avery tested hang gliders based on designs by German aviator Otto Lilienthal, as well as hang gliders of their own design, on the shores of Lake Michigan. These experiments convinced Chanute that the best way to achieve extra lift without a prohibitive increase in weight was to stack several wings one above the other. Chanute invented the 'strut-wire' braced structure that would be used in all biplanes of the future.

Herring, who sometimes is claimed by Michigan to be the first true aviator of a motorized heavier-than-air aircraft, had by 1893 built and crashed a full sized glider. Herring built a Type 11-monoplane glider in 1894 based on Otto Lilienthal‘s 1893 German patent. He soon would take up his own aviation experiments and in 1896, Herring applied for what was possibly the earliest patent of its type in the USA, a patent for a man-supporting, heavier-than-air, motorized, controllable, 'flying machine'. Herring's glider was difficult to steer and because of his two-cylinder, three-horsepower compressed air engine, could operate for only 30 seconds at a time. He was considered having only continued the tradition of hang-gliding, and is thus not considered a candidate for the first flight.

Samuel (http://www.flyingmachines.org/lang.html) Langely (http://www.sil.si.edu/ondisplay/langley/intro.htm) attempted to make the first working piloted heavier-than-air aircraft. His models flew, but his two attempts at piloted flight were not successful. Langley (http://www.historynet.com/samuel-langley-aviation-pioneer.htm) began experimenting with rubber-band powered models and gliders in 1887. He built a rotating arm, functioning similar to a wind tunnel, and made larger flying models powered by miniature steam engines. His first success came on May 6, 1896 when his Number 5 unpiloted model flew half a mile after a catapult launch from a boat on the Potomac River. Though insufficiently controlled, a key requirement in the development of flight, aviation historians consider this to be the world's first sustained flight by a powered heavier-than-air craft.

Samuel Langley built a unmanned model of an airplane that included a steam-powered engine. In 1891, his model flew for three-fourths of a mile before running out of fuel. Samuel Langley received a $50,000 grant from the United States War Department to build a full sized aerodrome, the Aerodrome A with a gas powered engine. In 1903, it crashed immediately after being launched from a house boat over the Potomac River as it was too heavy to fly. Samuel Langley was very disappointed and he gave up trying to fly.

Re: Lecture! Part 2

[ktarian-wildman.livejournal.com]

Naomi listened carefully to the lecture and took down detailed notes.

Re: Lecture! Part 2

[death-of-hope.livejournal.com]

Anemone felt kind of sorry for poor Langley, but that didn't stop her from drawing cartoon pictures of his plane crashing into the river.