Slashdot Mirror
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.
I spent some time looking at various web sites about this yesterday - seems the original Flyer would Dutch roll from take-off to landing, and was very unfriendly in ground-effect. This made landing - interesting - until they finally cracked it up. Good thing it went so slowly that it didn't hurt so much when they hit.
By today's standards, the thing's unflyable - horrible control authority, CG all wrong, underpowered... Orville and Wilbur had to be talented in the first place to fly it. Of course, this is the basic device that we started from to derive "today's standards". I hope none of the replica teams crack up... there's enough aviation hysteria these days, without a "reenactment" generating more bad press.
Must be fun, inventing a whole science, and a set of industries.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
The part about discouraging workshop photographs in order to not leak info to the competition is weird. What modern high tech processes are there to protect, if you're trying to do something the same way it was done 100 years ago? I'd have thought most of the interest in a project like this was in being as open and historically accurate as possible.
Don't fly!!!!! You'll get too close to the sun and your wings will melt. (This from another early flight pioneer.)
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
There are two approaches that can be taken when restoring/rebuilding things
a) Make it exactly as it was
b) Make it better
Usually I'd say that you should always make it exactly as it was, but in this case lives would be at stake if you followed that approach - So there's an argument for at least *some* improvement.
The question is - how far should they go in their improvements...
Remember kids! Guns don't kill people - Americans kill people.
I had the mental image of a rope winding it's way around a pole. to an ending fit for a cartoon.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
They're trying to build a version to fly at Kitty Hawk for the centennial celebration of the original flight, December 17th 1903.
Not to belabour the point - but why?
Sure, it was an important achievement, but what's the point? And why have more than one team? Bragging rights are all that seems to be on the line here. So, in the race to build the first, best replica, a number of teams are devoting a lot of time and resources to a project that will add nothing to the body of human knowledge and experience - regardless of the outcome.
So I will ask the obvious question again. Why? There is nothing wrong with marking the occasion, but this is way OTT.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
wasn't it the first POWERED flight?
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Give Me A Break. Richard Pearse says in his own letter that he never achieved true flight and that he did not beat the Wright brothers.
Err...surely it did it in twelve seconds?
Cheers,
Ian
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"
What's interesting is that the hotbed of aviation in the 1906-1912 period was NOT the USA. It was France, who made up for lost time very quickly by building a lot of very innovative designs, designs that served as the basis for today's airplanes in terms of aerodynamic and structural design.
In that period, French pioneers like Alberto Santos-Dumont, Louis Blériot and the Duperdussin company were building monoplanes that used modern aerodynamic design. Indeed, the Duperdussin racer of 1912 had extremely sleek aerodynamics for its day thanks to the use of monocoque structural design.
In short, while the Wright brothers built the first successful heavier-than-air airplane, it was the French pioneers that laid the groundwork for designing the modern airplane.
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.
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.
As an aside, bear in mind that Scrapheap Challenge (the original UK name and format for Junkyard Wars) has already seen teams build and fly:
Yes, that's right. If you haven't seen it, some poor mad fool got in a canard nosed "glider" that had been bodged up in day, and reached about 20mph and 15 feet before releasing the tow line. The "glider" went in a direction that could charitably be described as "not quite a plummet". He walked away. Then did it again, only faster. And again, reaching about 30mph. This is pretty much comparable with the speeds and energies in the Wright brother's creation.
The remote plane was an interesting one. It actually flew, in a very nearly controlled fashion. OK, it was built with modern scrap, but it was scrap, and it was built in a day.
I'm kind of wondering why the people building the replica airplanes feel the need to have human pilots in them. Remote control or even an expert system might do nicely if safety is a concern.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
From http://www.maria-brazil.org/sdumont.htm:
...
Santos-Dumont continued to work on dirigibles, but finally achieved his dream of flying in a heavier-than-air craft in October of 1906, when his 14 Bis flew a distance of 60 meters at a height of 2 to 3 meters. As far as the world knew, it was the first airplane flight ever and Santos-Dumont became a hero to the world press. The stories about the Wright brothers flights at Kitty Hawk and later near Dayton, Ohio, were not believed even in the US at the time.
Eventually, after much controversy, the Americans and the world - even though it remains a sore spot for Brazilians, to whom Santos-Dumont is known as the Father of Aviation - accepted that they had indeed flown a heavier-than-air craft before Santos-Dumont. Where he beat them, though, was in his idea of adding the first ailerons to the extremities of the wings. Think of it: aileron is the French diminutive for aile, or wing. And, of course, he never used any contraption or catapult or wooden tracks to push the aircraft or to aid in taking off. So, maybe the Brazilians are right...
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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!
The reason the Wright brothers are given the credit for the first real heavier than air aircraft is because their design principles turned out to be scalable - they were able to take the Flyer and turn it into an airplane capable of sustained, controllable flight. None of the other designs were capable of being turned into something that was really usable for more than a flight of a few seconds.