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Re-Building the Wright Flyer
Isaac-Lew writes: "Several teams are trying to build a working replica of the first Wright Brothers' airplane." As the article says, "The catch is: Each team wants its plane to fly more or less as the Wrights' did." The only problem with that is that as Orville Wright put it, their plane was "exceedingly erratic," so the recreators have made some slight concessions to safety.
Thought I'd do my bit for British Tourism and point out there is a pretty fantastic replica and some other groovy stuff at the science museum - all free to get in and they've also got some groovy robot stuff and a real Cray 1 (looks like a sixties sofa, you'll see what I mean if you go there!).
You're comparing apples and oranges -- The Wright brothers made the first powered flight WITHOUT a "lighter-than-air" technology. Previously all succesful flights had been made using ballons, dirigibles, etc.
load "windows7"
In the mid-Hudson valley there's a place called "The Rhinebeck Aerodrome", where they have a combination ground museum and flight show of old aeroplanes. I took the family there, a few years ago, and saw quite a show.
I'm not enough of a student of history to remember most of the things they flew, but some of them were OLD. One of the newer things was a Sopwith Camel - as in Snoopy, the WWI flying Ace. Some of the planes took off at one end of the runway, flew the length at about 20 ft altitude, and landed at the other end. One really old plain had not conventional control surfaces - it worked by warping the wing surfaces.
The Sopwith Camel was interesting in that (apparently like other planes of its time) it had no throttle. But it did have a new innovation. The engine had nine cylinders, but four could be shut off. To get the same effect as throttling, the pilot ran on nine, five, or no cylinders. It was interesting to hear, when flying.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If you go to the Wright Brothers Museum in Kitty Hawk, NC, there is a life size replica of the exact machine that the brothers flew. I was there just last month so a bunch of the details are still fresh in my head.
There replica was fully functional (minus the ability to fly). Basically, it had all the wiring hooked up to control the pitch, roll and yaw of the plane. To adjust the pitch, you pulled a lever in from of the pilot. To adjust the roll and yaw, you push the pilot's hips in a direction. To reduce the amount of controls, they had the roll and yaw hooked up to a single control.
While there I learned some pretty neat stuff that I had never realized. In order to get off the ground they needed a really light engine, but at the time engines weighed about 500lbs. So they hired a machinest to build them an aluminum engine (the first ever built). It weighed about 150 lbs and was a perfect counter-balance to whomever was flying the plane (engine on one side, pilot on the other).
The best part of there design was the safety devices they added. All they had was a wood bar in front of the pilot that he could grab onto in case of a crash.
At least what they said. No one have a single proff of it besides their word. I'm not saying they didn't it, but scientifically speaking, it was not audited and could not be reproductible so it's not science, it's speculation. Santos Dumont flight was seen by hundreds of people, have photographs, film and so on, was reproduced lots of times and was the real base for the comercial aviation as we all know. I agree that other technologies came first (balloons, dirigibles, etc), but Santos Dumont was the real thing to be consistently called a powered flying machine. But they all add their insights to the work of one man, Leonardo da Vinci, the real genius behind lots of our inventions: Parachute, Helicopter, Delta Wing, etc.
No, they werent.
Santos Dumont was the first to accomplish a full flight. It took off alone and it landed. The wrights only got some seconds in the air, and this because they were thrown with the help of a machine
You may check that with any history teacher.
But why some people (eg. the americans) dont give him the credits is a whole other story.
"The catch is: Each team wants its plane to fly more or less as the Wrights' did." The only problem with that is that as Orville Wright put it, their plane was "exceedingly erratic," so the recreators have made some slight concessions to safety.
What Orville Wright calls erratic, is what we nowadays call "inherently unstable". You want to fly something that is inherently stable.
There are a couple of ways to make a plane stable. Put a tail on it at the back (or move it back further if you already have one), or you can bend the wings backwards.
Those are changes that people "see" from a distance, and people will say: "But that's not the plane that the Wrights flew in 1908! It's different."
Oh, and you could change the profile of the wings, but then you have to have a plane that is almost stable to begin with, because this effect is so small. If carefully designed, you can build a "wing-only" plane (which was thought impossible because most wings are inherently unstable), like the helios (which as a matter of fact has its center of gravity well below the wing, one more trick to make a plane stable!).
There are advantages to building an unstable aircraft. For the Wrights that was: "Oops never thought of that". Currently the excuse is that you can use computers to make the thing stable, and then you don't have to have the inefficient things like a "tail" on the plane...
Roger.
I helped set up the replica at the Wilbur Wright birthplace museum near Millville, Indiana USA.
We bought it from a guy in Illinois, name Buford Gross, who had built it to fly, though he chickened out and sold it to a museum, rather than risk damaging it. He built it with a synthetic fiber (dacron, i think) covering instead of cotton, because the FAA wouldn't let him fly it otherwise.
I just checked with a member of the museum board (my dad), and he informs me that Buford had added the 1905 flyer control enhancement (steerable rudder) as well. I'd just assumed that was accurate. No wonder a 1903 flyer is almost uncontrollable!
He is recognized as th father of aviation in many countries, especially France and his native Brazil. (Where we have never heard of the Wright brothers. In fact, I wouldn't learn about them until I moved to the U.S. from Brazil.)
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
No, that's what others tried to do. The Wright brothers shunned that method, instead using wires to warp the wings.