History Of Aviation.pdf

History of Aviation

Simran Tyagi Aerospace Engineering 18101021

Introduction It was December in 1903 when Orville Wright took flight for 12 seconds in their airplane near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. After several more attempts that day, Wilbur took flight for almost one minute. This flight proved that heavier-than-air flight was possible, something nobody else had been able to achieve prior to the Wright brother's first successful flight that day. Thus, brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright became the first to build an airplane capable of flight. The Wright brothers addressed three major flight barriers: 1. powering the airplane while in the air 2. gaining enough lift from the wings 3. maintaining balance and control of the airplane while in flight

In 1908, after perfecting their design, the Wright brothers made their first public flight, changing the course of aviation forever. However, the Wright brothers weren’t the first to attempt flight. Their success can be owed to a number of previous failures. The science of aviation owes a lot to the research of those who built planes but never successfully flew. The history of aviation is full of colorful characters, many of whom developed pieces of what eventually became our modern airplanes. Such breakthroughs, of course, continued after the Wright Brother's flight of 1903 and still continue today, but those earliest flights were the most exciting.

Hero and the Aeolipile In the past half century, jet-powered flight has vastly changed the way we all live. However, the basic principle of jet propulsion is neither new nor complicated. In 100 A.D., Hero, a Greek philosopher and mathematician, demonstrated jet power in a machine called an "aeolipile."

A heated, water filled steel ball with nozzles spun as steam escaped. The steam provided the required torque while exiting the ball. When the nozzles, pointing in different directions, produce forces along different lines of action perpendicular to the axis of the bearings, the thrusts combine to result in a torque, causing the vessel to spin about its axis.

Aerodynamic drag and frictional forces in the bearings build up quickly with increasing rotational speed (rpm) and consume the accelerating torque, eventually cancelling it and achieving a steady state speed. The principle behind this phenomenon was not fully understood until 1690 A.D. when Sir Isaac Newton in England formulated the principle of Hero's jet propulsion "aeolipile" in scientific terms. His Third Law of Motion stated: "Every action produces a reaction ... equal in force and opposite in direction." The jet engine of today operates according to this same basic principle.

Jet engines contain three common components: 1. the compressor 2. the combustor 3. the turbine.

Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier- the First Hot Air Balloon In 1783, two brothers demonstrated their invention, the hot-air balloon, before a crowd of dignitaries in Annonay, France. JosephMichael and Jacques-Ètienne Montgolfier, prosperous paper manufacturers (a high-tech industry at the time). They observed that hot air flowed directed into a paper or fabric bag and made the bag rise and thus began experimenting with lighter-than-air devices. After several successful tests, they decided to make a public demonstration.

The brothers built a balloon made of silk and lined with paper that was 10 meters in diameter and launched it without anyone aboard from the marketplace in Annonay in June, 1783. The balloon rose 1,600-2,000 meters, stayed aloft for 10 minutes and traveled more than 2 kilometers. The Montgolfiers' next step was to put a person in the basket. In Oct. 1783, they launched a balloon on a tether with Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, a chemistry and physics teacher, aboard. He stayed aloft for almost four minutes.

Sir George Cayley and his gliders Sir George Cayley is one of the most important people in the history of aeronautics. Many consider him the first true scientific aerial investigator and the first person to understand the underlying principles and forces of flight.

He built his first aerial device in 1796, (a model helicopter with contra-rotating propellers). Three years later, Cayley inscribed a silver medallion which clearly depicted the forces that apply in flight. On the other side of the medallion Cayley sketched his design for a monoplane gliding machine.

In 1804 Cayley designed and built a model monoplane glider of strikingly modern appearance. The model featured an adjustable cruciform tail, a kite-shaped wing mounted at a high angle of incidence and a moveable weight to alter the center of gravity. It was probably the first gliding device to make significant flights.

By 1816 Cayley had turned his attention to lighter-than-air machines and designed a streamlined airship with a semi-rigid structure. He also suggested using separate gas bags to limit an airship's lifting gas loss due to damage. In 1837 Cayley designed a streamlined airship to be powered by a steam engine. In 1849 Cayley built a large gliding machine, along the lines of his 1799 design, and tested the device with a 10-year old boy aboard. The gliding machine carried the boy aloft on at least one short flight.

Otto Lilienthal The work with gliders in Germany by the Lilienthal brothers, Otto and Gustav, was, arguably, the most important aerial effort prior to that of the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville. Otto Lilienthal's numerous flights, over 2,000 in number, demonstrated beyond question that unpowered human flight was possible, and that total control of an aerial device while aloft was within reach.

He was able to make sustained and replicable flights for the first time in history. Photographs of Lilienthal in flight were famous worldwide. His efforts mark the beginning of the experimental period of active research on heavier-than-air flight. Lilienthal developed eighteen different models of his gliders over a span of 5 years. His efforts received worldwide publicity, and his successes lent others the courage to follow in his footsteps. Lilienthal also made two vital contributions to the invention of the airplane. 1. He showed by word and example that mastery of flight should be first accomplished in gliders. 2. He provided inspiration to the Wright brothers, both through his successes and through his failures.

Samuel P. Langley’s Aerodrome Langley began his experiments on the physics of flight while still at the Allegheny Observatory. The results of those tests were published in Experiments in Aerodynamics (1881) and provided a foundation for the design of a series of flying models. On May 6, 1896, one of these aircrafts, the Langley aerodrome No. 5, made a flight of some 900 meters over the Potomac River. It was the first time that a powered, heavier-than-air machine had achieved sustained flight.

In 1898, Langley began work on a full-scale aerodrome capable of carrying a human aloft. Completed in 1903, the machine was powered by a radial engine developing 52 horsepower. Two attempts were made to launch the machine by catapult into the air from the roof of a large houseboat in October and December 1903. On both occasions, the aerodrome fell into the water without flying. The pilot survived both crashes, but the aeronautical experiments of Langley had come to an end. In spite of later claims, there is no reason to believe that the full-scale Langley aerodrome was capable of flight.

Octave Chanute’s Progress in Flying Machines Octave Chanute's Multiple-Wing Glider was built to test the possibility of utilizing wings which pivoted fore-and-aft about a vertical axis to control the center of pressure on the wings of the glider, thus providing stability. The strange appearance of this gliding machine with its "oscillating" wings has caused many people to dismiss the concept, especially in light of the later "classic" designs with trussed and "fixed" wings. While this glider was hardly successful, in its design can be seen the germ of an idea which would later be used in numerous designs of military jet-powered machines with pivoting movable wing surfaces, notably the F-111 and B-1. Octave Chanute went on to be the main enthusiast for the Wright Brothers during their early aerial trials, encouraging them and supplying them with the latest aerial information.

By 1900 Chanute had become the center point for various aerial experimenters in Europe and the U.S. His 1894 book "Progress in Flying Machines" was a landmark volume and was the book recommended to Wilbur Wright by the Smithsonian Institution in 1899.

The Wright Flyer In December, 1903, the Wright brothers inaugurated the aerial age with their successful first flights of a heavier-than-air flying machine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. This 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 Wilbur and Orville Wright beginning in 1899. They 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.

Rather than controlling the craft by 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.

They also built a small wind tunnel in the fall of 1901 to gather a body of accurate aerodynamic data with which to design their next glider. The heart of the Wright wind tunnel was the ingeniously designed pair of test instruments that were mounted inside. The Wrights' third glider, built in 1902 based on the wind tunnel experiments, was a dramatic success. The lift problems were solved, they were able to make numerous extended controlled glides. They made between seven hundred and one thousand flights in 1902. The single best one was 191.5 m in twenty-six seconds. The brothers were now convinced that they stood at the threshold of realizing mechanical flight.

During the spring and summer of 1903 they built their first powered airplane. Essentially a larger and sturdier version of the 1902 glider, the only fundamentally new component of the 1903 aircraft was the propulsion system. With the assistance of their bicycle shop mechanic, Charles Taylor, the Wrights built a small, twelvehorsepower gasoline engine. While the engine was a significant enough achievement, the genuinely innovative feature of the propulsion system was the propellers. The brothers conceived the propellers as rotary wings, producing a horizontal thrust force aerodynamically. By turning an airfoil section on its side and spinning it to create an air flow over the surface, the Wrights reasoned that a horizontal "lift" force would be generated that would propel the airplane forward. The concept was one of the most original and creative aspects of the Wrights' aeronautical work.

Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky’s multiengine plane Sikorsky built and flew the first multimotored plane (1913) and established the world's endurance record for sustained flight in a helicopter of his own design (1941). He organized corporations to manufacture airplanes (in 1923, 1925, and 1928) and became engineering manager of the Vought-Sikorsky Aircraft Division of the United Aircraft Manufacturing Corp. He is best known for his work on the development of the helicopter. In 1968 he was awarded the National Medal of Science.

Juan de la Cierva’s autogyro From a technical perspective, the autogyro as patented by Juan de la Cierva in 1920 is a combination of a helicopter and a fixed-wing aircraft. The major difference between a gyrocopter and a helicopter is that the rotor of the gyrocopter is not coupled to the engine. The rotor only begins to rotate as a result of flying through the air – the auto-rotatory principle – which generates the uplift necessary for flight. One of the central technical components of a gyrocopter is the flapping hinge, invented and patented by Juan de la Cierva in 1922. It was first used in the Model C.4 and enables the rotor of the gyrocopter to move up and down, which is necessary to achieve stable flight.

By inventing the principle of autorotation, and successfully patenting an airworthy autogyro, the Spanish engineer, Juan de la Cierva, decisively made his mark on the history of the helicopter. Due to the constant development of the autogyro, this aviation pioneer helped to lay down the technical principles behind the later success of the helicopter. Technical innovations such as the flapping joint are still used today with almost no changes, and impressively emphasise Juan de la Cierva’s engineering abilities.

Fritz von Opel’s first rocket-engine flight On 11 June 1928, the first-ever rocket plane was revealed to the world, and early testing started right away. Unfortunately, the Ente exploded on only its second test flight–a similar fate befell the RAK 3 rocket-powered railway car–before von Opel himself had even had an opportunity to pilot it.

Undeterred, he commissioned another rocket-propelled plane from German aircraft designer Julius Hatry. And so, on 30 September 1929 in the city of Frankfurt-am-Main, von Opel flew a rocket plane for the first time in history.

World’s first turbojet aircraft The He 178 was the world’s first turbojet aircraft to fly on August 27, 1939. The aircraft was designed by Ernst Heinkel after Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain approached him with his own design and prototype centrifugal-flow engine.

Although the first flight was successful, it was not accepted by the German Ministry of Aviation after a demonstration flight on November 1, 1939. The aircraft achieved speeds to 598 km/h, but combat endurance was only 10 minutes.

First supersonic aircraft Bell X-1, also called X-1, was a U.S. rocket-powered supersonic research airplane built by Bell Aircraft Corporation. It was the first aircraft to exceed the speed of sound in level flight. On October 14, 1947, an X-1 launched from the bomb bay of a B29 bomber and piloted by U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeagerover the Mojave Desert of California broke the sound barrier of 1,066 km per hour at an altitude of 13,000 metres and attained a top speed of 1,126 km per hour, or Mach 1.06.

Designed exclusively for research, the X-1 had thin, unswept wings and a fuselage modeled after a .50-inch bullet. Its length was 9.4 meters and its wingspan 8.5 meters. It was powered by a liquidfueled rocket engine designed, built, and tested by American engineer James Hart Wyld. Experience gained in the X-1 tests led to the development of the X-15 rocket plane.