Milestones of Flight

The Epic of Aviation with the National Air and Space Museum

Robert Van Der Linden

• Publisher: Zenith Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780760351512
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Experience the history of flight with the world-class aviation collection at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, which attracts millions and millions of visitors each year in Washington, D.C.

From the moment the Wright Brothers first took flight in 1903 to the modern-day reliance on stealth aircraft and drones, there have been significant advances made in aviation. Milestones of Flight celebrates each era of advancements by showcasing the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's world-class aircraft collection. Authored by Dr. Robert van der Linden, a leading expert on aviation and Chairman of the Aeronautics Department at the NASM, this book is a stunning profile of the advancements in flight from decade to decade, illustrated with beautiful, large-scale photography and enhanced with little-known facts, anecdotes, and insights from major players in the aviation industry.

Climb inside the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis that Charles Lindbergh piloted solo across the Atlantic Ocean, making history. Contrast that with a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The full-page photos of each milestone-making aircraft are accompanied by timelines to showcase related aircraft as well as sidebars with interesting and little-known facts, stories, and related research.

Milestone categories include:

- Era of Early Flight

- World War I First Fighters

- Long-Range Record-Setting Flight

- Popular Flight

- First Commercial Airliners

- World War II Aircraft

- Experimental Flight

- Cold War Military/Korean Conflict Aircraft

- Commercial Jets

- Modern Military Aircraft

What will the next milestone be?

CHAPTER 1

1903 WRIGHT FLYER

BY PETER L. JAKAB

Orville and Wilbur Wright inaugurated the aerial age on December 17, 1903, with their successful first flights of a heavier-than-air flying machine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their airplane, known as the Wright Flyer, sometimes referred to as the Kitty Hawk Flyer, was the product of a sophisticated four-year program of research and development conducted by the Wright brothers beginning in 1899. Their seminal accomplishment not only encompassed the breakthrough first flight of an airplane, but during the design and construction of their experimental aircraft, the Wrights also pioneered many of the basic tenets and techniques of modern aeronautical engineering, such as the use of a wind tunnel and flight testing as design tools.

The Wright brothers gained an interest in flight as youngsters. In 1878, their father gave them a toy flying helicopter powered by strands of twisted rubber. They played and experimented with it extensively and even built several larger copies of the device. They also had some experience with kites. But it was not until 1896, prompted by the widely publicized fatal crash of famed glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal, that the Wrights began serious study of flight. After absorbing the locally available materials related to the subject, Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution on May 30, 1899, requesting any publications on aeronautics that it could offer.

Shortly after their receipt of the Smithsonian materials, the Wrights built their first aeronautical craft, a 5-foot-wingspan biplane kite, in the summer of 1899. They chose to follow Lilienthal’s lead of using gliders as a steppingstone toward a practical powered airplane, and the 1899 kite was built as a preliminary test device to establish the viability of the control system that they planned to use in their first full-size glider. This means of control would be a central feature of the later successful powered airplane.

The “cockpit” of the Wright Flyer. The hip cradle provided lateral control while the vertical lever just to the left of the hip cradle controlled the elevator for climb and descent.

TIMELINE
1903 WRIGHT FLYER

1878	Milton Wright gives toy helicopter to sons Orville and Wilbur
1899	May 30: Wright brothers contact Smithsonian for aeronautical data to begin their research
1903	December 17: Wrights achieve first powered heavier-than-air human flight
1913	March: Flyer is damaged by flood in Dayton, Ohio
1916	Summer: Orville Wright repairs Flyer for display at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1928	Orville Wright lends Flyer to Science Museum in London over controversy with Smithsonian Institution
1938–1945	Flyer stored in Corsham, England, to protect from damage
1948	January: Orville Wright dies and bequeaths Flyer to Smithsonian December: Flyer goes on display at Smithsonian
1985	Smithsonian performs conservation work on Flyer and replaces fabric covering

Rather than controlling the craft through altering the center of gravity by shifting the pilot’s body weight, as Lilienthal had done, the Wrights intended to balance their glider aerodynamically. They reasoned that if a wing generates lift when presented to an oncoming flow of air, producing differing amounts of lift on either end of the wing would cause one side to rise more than the other, which in turn would bank the entire aircraft. A mechanical means of inducing this differential lift would provide the pilot with effective lateral control. The Wrights accomplished this by twisting, or warping, the tips of the wings in opposite directions via a series of lines attached to the outer edges of the wings and manipulated by the pilot.

Control in climb and descent—or pitch, to use the modern term—was also achieved aerodynamically. Similar to his method for lateral balance, Lilienthal had swung his legs fore and aft to balance his glider in pitch, altering the center of gravity with the weight of his legs. The Wrights achieved the same result with a moveable horizontal surface that controlled the movement of the wing’s center of lifting pressure fore and aft of a fixed center of gravity. The Wrights’ ideas for control advanced aeronautical experimentation significantly because they provided an effective method of controlling an airplane in three-dimensional space and, because they were aerodynamically based, did not limit the size of the aircraft as shifting body weight obviously did. The satisfactory performance of the brothers’ 1899 kite demonstrated the practicality of their wing-warping lateral balance and pitch control methods.

Encouraged by this success, the brothers built and flew two full-size piloted gliders in 1900 and 1901. Beyond the issue of control, the Wrights had to grapple with developing an efficient airfoil shape and solving fundamental problems of structural design. Like the kite, these gliders were biplanes. For control of climb and descent, they had forward-mounted horizontal stabilizers. Neither craft had a tail.

The Wrights’ home of Dayton, Ohio, did not offer suitable conditions for flying the gliders. An inquiry with the US Weather Bureau identified Kitty Hawk, with its sandy, wide-open spaces and strong, steady winds, as an optimal test site. In September 1900, the Wrights made their first trip to the little fishing hamlet that they would make famous.

With the 1900 glider, although the control system worked well and the craft’s structural design was sound, the lift was substantially less than the Wrights’ earlier calculations had predicted. In 1901, they returned to Kitty Hawk with a similar glider with increased wing area, hoping this would address the lift deficiency. They also changed the curvature of the wing profile. Not only was the lift even less with the 1901 glider, but problems with the control system they had seeming...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• 1. 1903 Wright Flyer
• 2. 1909 Wright Military Flyer and 1911 Wright EX Vin Fiz
• 3. Blériot XI and Curtiss D-III Headless Pusher
• 4. Caudron G.4
• 5. Douglas World Cruiser DWC-2 Chicago
• 6. Ryan NY-P Spirit of St. Louis
• 7. Lockheed Vega 5B and Lockheed Vega 5C Winnie Mae
• 8. Piper J-3 Cub
• 9. Explorer II
• 10. Douglas DC-3
• 11. Douglas SBD-6 Dauntless
• 12. North American P-51D Mustang
• 13. Bell XP-59A Airacomet
• 14. Messerschmitt Me 262A 1-a Schwalbe (Swallow)
• 15. Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay
• 16. Little Gee Bee
• 17. Bell XS-1/X-1
• 18. North American F-86A Sabre
• 19. Boeing 367-80
• 20. McDonnell F-4S-44 Phantom II
• 21. North American X-15
• 22. Arlington Sisu 1A
• 23. Bell UH-1H Iroquois “Huey” Smokey III
• 24. Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird
• 25. Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde
• 26. General Atomics MQ-1L Predator
• Image Credits
• Index
• Copyright