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It seems many slashdotters need to take a look at the basics of airplanes.

Here's a nice picture too.

It seems many slashdotters need to take a look at the basics of airplanes.

Here's a nice picture too.

We're both a little off...

I found this, which should shed a little light on things.

which is why they have a signature, but it is a lot like a flock of birds, not an airplane.

This is liquid cooled.

My original source was either the Discovery Channel or History Channel. I'm afraid I don't remember which at the moment. However, this link actually claims that the US and Britain had been working on the technology together long before the development of the MIT radlab.

The key thing to remember about WWII, however, is that Roosevelt wanted us in that war. The public considered it primarily a European problem, so aid was almost entirely secret. The Japanese attack on Perl Habor finally gave the President the excuse he needed. "A Day that will Forever Live in Infamy" was an easy sell to the American public.

Here's a link that discusses aerial firefighting, if you're interested. There's some info on the CL-215 in it.

I can't answer your question definitively, because searchs for the "Highest Altitude Plane" on Google tends to return the X-15, which would (in my view) be a booster rocket, not a plane to piggy-back on.
Helios seems designed to max out at about 100,000 ft.(Helios Site - 3rd paragraph)
The highest balloon flight was 113,740 ft. (assuming this site is up-to-date - 3rd paragraph).
JP Project's .pdf file marketting release on the subject says 140,000 feet, but I think they've only made it to 100,00 so far, so I don't know if that's a realistic expectation.

The price of jet fuel vs. the price of helium is a good issue to raise. I'd have to do some research to compare them. It would take me a while to figure out reasonable estimates for each (which is an example why I want to read someone elses analysis rather than do the work myself ;-).
It also seems that a balloon launch with a parachute backup is a safer system than a jet airplane. Less working parts to malfunction, and easily understood principles.

No offense, but you have no idea what you're talking about.

If I were to trust anyone to build an "out of this world aircraft", it would be Burt Rutan. Burt has designed some of the most exotic, and popular, experimental homebuilts ever. (Ever hear of a VariViggen, VariEze, Quickie, Defiant, or Long-EZ?) When I went to Oshkosh a few years ago, I saw hundreds of Vari-Ezes and Long-EZs. He has built aircraft that has broken records, such as Voyager the first aircraft to fly around the world without refueling and the Boomerang a completely asymmetrical aircraft! (BTW, even though the link is to a computer generated pic, I saw the actual one closeup, firsthand at Oshkosh... talk about a COOL aircraft!)

The man is a legend in the experimental aircraft world... and probably more knowledgable about real-world flight characteristics than anyone! He has introduced dozens of successful, cutting-edge aircraft designs that are currently flown by hundreds, if not thousands, of pilots.

Your claim that "experts" should only get involved reminds me of the closing scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. "Which experts?"... "TOP experts"...

This man IS the expert!

Actually, hot air balloons were used as far back as the US civil war. (Sites include photos).

Nitpick: Jenna Yeager (Voyager) is NO relation to Chuck.

You are correct. I wasn't sure, since my source was the History Channel. Here is more (corect) info.

Yeager, who is no relation to the famous test pilot Chuck Yeager, first met Dick Rutan, and his brother Burt, at a California air show in 1980.

unless the US is planning to have many planes airborne, around the clock, which does seem somewhat wasteful.

You mean like the height of the Cold War when bombers with hydrogen bombs where kept airborne around the clock?

"Throughout the Cold War there were times when tension nearly escalated to nuclear war. The most dramatic was in June 1962 when a U-2 spy plane photographed Soviet missile bases being built on Cuba, 90 miles (145 kilometers) off the coast of Florida. For 14 tense days, the world feared nuclear war would begin. Finally, in the words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "the Soviets blinked" and removed the missiles. Khrushchev noted that the nuclear threat, especially the fact that "20 percent of all Strategic Air Command planes, carrying atomic and hydrogen bombs, were kept aloft around the clock," had been a major part of the withdrawal decision." more

In support of this, the Air Commerce Act of 1926 gave authority to regulate aviation to the Federal Government. If you know a pilot, ask him or her what they think about the Federal Aviation Administration. I suspect you will get a tirade about over-regulation, security-irrelevant Presidential TFRs, ridiculous medical requirements and so forth.

While air travel is much safer than it was in 1926, so is automobile travel, and the states still regulate that. I'd say we're a lot better off in the civil liberties department with respect to autos than we are with respect to aircraft, and it's because the states find it a lot harder to get together on restrictions.

By the way, this apparent digression is in fact on-topic--Schnier frequently writes about nutty aviation security, and mentioned it in his current issue.

She must have really been sleeping around!

I wouldn't get too down. This is the USA after all, and the race is rarely won by the "first", and usually won by the "cost efficient" (or, if you're a cynic, it's won by the "heavily marketed").

After all, today's commercial airline industry isn't flying planes built by Burgess, Curtiss, or Loening... It was Boeing who got the contracts for training planes during World War I, and commercial transport planes afterwards...

You missed a big physics fact. The orbit that the ISS sits in is totally wrong for launching anything. Originally the orbit was to be just off the equator, but in order for the Russians to help and launch from the Cosmodrome in Khazakstan, the orbit was changed to 51 degrees. That meant a change in the mission of the ISS from a "jumping off point to outer space" to an international scientific outpost. Here's a NASA quote: "NASA spokesperson Phil West says the ISS' inclination of 51 degrees was chosen as a compromise to accommodate all of the international partners who will be launching from different latitudes. For example, Russia's launch site in Kazakhstan is further north than the Florida site, making lower inclinations difficult to achieve."
ISS History article
Space Station History

Yup, it's a hoax. The Beech Starship used plain ol' Alumin(i)um:

Aluminum mesh embedded into the skin shielded the Starship's electronics by permitting electric current to flow through the body to a point where the charge exited the aircraft, with only minor cosmetic damage at the actual lightning strike point.

And Long-EZs (a composite aricraft) can be seriously damaged by lightning:

This incident is not a good example of what would occur to a Long-EZ in a lightning strike. A "full threat" stroke would likely have ripped a hole a foot or more in diameter through the composite and vaporized small diameter control cables and inter-connecting wiring. The accompanying shock waves would have caused extensive internal damage, delamination, etc.. I doubt very much whether the aircraft or pilot could have survived such a strike.

The Soviet Union did indeed want to go to the moon.

Agreed. We all must learn to walk before we can run.

It should also be pointed out that although the Redstone rocket used to launch Alan Shepard into space was not capable of putting the Mercury capsule into orbit, it set the stage for later orbital Mercury missions using the larger Atlas rocket. Even NASA in the 60's took a methodical and evolutionary approach to space flight -- although on a hastened and expensive timetable that small private enterprise cannot hope to match.

Also note that the Redstone rocket used to launch the first US satellite Explorer I was a direct descendant of the German V2 which began development some 20 years or so earlier.

I for one can't wait to see where the descendants of the X-Prize efforts will be in 20 years.

So their tinkering was a mixed blessing to say the least. The Wrights might be heroes now, but as far as aviation buffs were concerned back then, they were a cross between Darl McBride and Steve Ballmer, with Hillary Rosen thrown in the mix (ugh).

December 1986 this was done with fuel
Why can't this now be done with solar cells and high-density batteries?

I would have more faith in this project if it was being done by somebody else.

Stay aloft for weeks at a time? sure why not. Just expand on this idea

Auguste Piccard was a Swiss while J-L Picard is a Scot actor playing a French dude. I am certain the Star Trek NG writers had in the back of their mind that A. Piccard was a famous explorer, and they wanted their J-L Picard to be more the Swiss Explorer than the Captain Cook-like J.T. Kirk. If they knew about A. Piccard, they may have changed the name and nationality to make it simpler for TV viewers.

Cook definitely was the inspiration for Kirk, both as an explorer and as a shoot-from-the-hip military man, while I think that J-L Picard was meant to be more science and less militarism. Remember, STNG was kind of like a Total Quality Management, Fan Focus Group, New and Improved Star Trek, and one of the criticisms of Star Trek was putting the captain in harms way all the time. Captain Cook put himself in harms way and was killed in a skirmish in Hawaii, but some dweeb critics thought the captain of the Enterprise was too important to get into hand-to-hand combat with aliens every other episode, so Picard was supposed to be kept safe by Worf, and Riker was supposed to tangle with the aliens and get beat up. But as episodes went on, we learned from Q that Picard had an artificial heart because he was more hot-headed than he let on, and by the time he has turned into Locutus, he was fighting aliens and proved to be a scrappier fighter than Kirk (or the time he single-handedly thwarted a hijacking of the Enterprise by terrorists when the crew was gone on leave in a thin ripoff of Stephen Segal's "Under Siege" -- while Navy Seal Segal was "only a cook" because he was busted in rank, Captain Picard was "only the barber" because I suppose with his shaved head that was real funny).

• If it took off from level ground, accelerating into the wind under its own power, then its engine was already pushing into the wind enough to accelerate so leaving the ground does not affect airspeed.
• The downward slope of the rails did provide acceleration, so if the engine was not also accelerating the craft into the wind the craft would slow when the downward acceleration ended. If the craft was accelerating into the wind due to the engine, there was enough thrust to offset the wind anyway.
• The Wrights already had a glider, which they used to practice flying.
• As others mentioned, the Flyer was not launched until the winds were strong enough. Drop it off the John Hancock building to get a reliable breeze. Clearance needed from Air Traffic Control and Ground Control :-)

This design will likely have higher drag than traditional supersonic aircraft. The designers cannot get around the fact that the air cannot move out of the way as quickly as the oucoming aircraft passes through it. Its just that instead of all the air piling up into a massive shockwave, it is distributed into a more gradual shock front that will be less perceptible.

The supersonic area rule tells designers how to minimize drag by shaping the profile of cross-sections (creating the right curve to the cross-sectional area). By inference, this invention does not minimize drag because it uses a different-from-optimal profile of cross-sectional areas. High drag = high fuel consumption and that will limit it's application to non-military aircraft.

Steven's 1935 record of 72,395 feet (22,066 meters) was broken again and again in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the US Navy and Air Force with their stratolab and manhigh projects vied for the top dog slot.

While the Air Force gets top honors for parachuting back, their record setting 102,000 feet (31,090 meters) flight in 1960 was surpassed less than 8 months later by the Navy's current record holding 113,740 foot (34,668 meter) flight. (1961)

So thanks to the space program, the high altitude ballooning thing isn't the big research attraction it used to be. The Navy record has stood for over 40 years, and now it just remains to be seen if they can break it.

As I recall, Echo I, the balloon satellite launched in 1960, had its orbit significantly affected by light pressure.

An object falling through wind shear accelerates up to the speed of the air mass, like a boat in a current. How quickly it does so depends on the object's mass and drag. A bowling ball is pretty dense (hard to accelerate) and low drag (hard to accelerate), and it won't even be in the air very long. Airplanes are mostly air, thus lots of cross section, so they pretty much instantly become part of the air movement. However, they also (hopefully) have more than enough thrust to pick their own heading.

The big deal with the Norden bombsight was its oversold ability to compensate for airspeed (the inital velocity and vector of the bomb) and wind speed/direction after the bomb was released. The same would be true of the bowling ball. I'd think the meteor would have a higher terminal velocity -- some of them are basically chunks of metal.

Incidentally, the Bernoulli effect is only a percentage of a wing's lift. I figured out recently that the textbooks make this hard to understand by always depicting the airfoil at a zero angle of attack, at which few planes could stay aloft. Military jets and aerobatic planes and paper airplanes don't rely on it as much, and most planes can fly upside-down provided the gas and oil keep flowing....

Here, for example, is a collection of essays on the Wright Brothers from the U.S. Centennial of Flights Commission.

Especially good is "Things Are Looking Up", which tells how Orville proved himself to the skeptical French, and

Glenn Curtiss and the Wright Patent Battles, which detail how the Smithsonian and the AEA, a group founded by Alexader Graham Bell, tried to take the fruits of the Wrights' genius.

Actually, there are plenty other sites out there, since the first century of powered flight is coming to a close. Read them all! But don't dis the Wright brothers. Their remarkable accomplishments were just as hard-won as anyone's.

Here, for example, is a collection of essays on the Wright Brothers from the U.S. Centennial of Flights Commission.

Especially good is "Things Are Looking Up", which tells how Orville proved himself to the skeptical French, and

Glenn Curtiss and the Wright Patent Battles, which detail how the Smithsonian and the AEA, a group founded by Alexader Graham Bell, tried to take the fruits of the Wrights' genius.

Actually, there are plenty other sites out there, since the first century of powered flight is coming to a close. Read them all! But don't dis the Wright brothers. Their remarkable accomplishments were just as hard-won as anyone's.

Here, for example, is a collection of essays on the Wright Brothers from the U.S. Centennial of Flights Commission.

Especially good is "Things Are Looking Up", which tells how Orville proved himself to the skeptical French, and

Glenn Curtiss and the Wright Patent Battles, which detail how the Smithsonian and the AEA, a group founded by Alexader Graham Bell, tried to take the fruits of the Wrights' genius.

Actually, there are plenty other sites out there, since the first century of powered flight is coming to a close. Read them all! But don't dis the Wright brothers. Their remarkable accomplishments were just as hard-won as anyone's.

The truth was quite different. Various big-money groups like the Smithsonian and the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA), a group founded by Alexander Graham Bell in 1907, tried hard to screw the Wrights, shy and naive mid-western boys, out of all their accomplishments deserved. You can read about it here.

> The Wrights had flown a fully controlled glider in 1902! Nobody else had a clue how to do that until the

False. They did they work in secrecy, so necessarily all the European designs, and much of the US ones, were parallel developments.

Well, I guess we'll have to disagree. To me there seems that there is plenty of evidence that the Wrights were quite ahead of any competition. When Santos Dumont was making hops in his 14 bis, the Wrights were flying in circles in Dayton, with plenty of witnesses.

In 1904 there was not a single heavier than air, powered aircraft in Europe that could have flown at all. Meanwhile the Wrights were flying in circles and made duration flights of over 30 minutes that year at Huffman Praire near Dayton.

Here are some photographs from 1905.

When did 14 bis fly? 1906 or was it 1907?

So much worse. That means that, had they succeeded in their patents, they would have been able to forestall aviation during 17 years both in US and Europe.

Patents can be licensed. The Wrights expected to make money from their invention. Is that so bad?

You seem to oppose the idea of patents altogether. Is there an invention that you think should have been patented? Do you think the patent on public key encryption, let's say, was OK, or not? Especially since public key cryptography was already invented by a British cryptographer, in the 60s - it was just kept secret by the british goverment.

Since you have just about Slashdotted the poor little Glenn Curtiss Museum just down the road from me, let me give you some highlights about this amazing man. More information at the Glenn Curtiss Historical Site.

Glenn Curtiss was not only a true pioneer in the world of aviation, but also in motorcycles. He had the distinction of being the "Fastest Man Alive" for a good period of time after putting his V-8 motorcycle to the speed test. The motorcycle featured at the small museum in Hammondsport, NY - about 1 hour south of Rochester, NY in the heart of New York's Wine Country. The motorcycle, really just a huge engine with a very small seat, is quite an impressive little beast.

Curtiss also developed and implemented seaplanes and aircraft carriers. My wife's grandfather actually saw Glenn Curtiss piloting one of his "Flying Boats". Her grandfather was beaten by his blind father for insisting that there was a boat flying over Keuka Lake!

If you are ever in Upstate NY I highly recommend the Glenn Curtiss Museum. The last time I was there, they even had a great exhibit of classic comic book covers by Dick Ayers.