The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings

352 Pages·2008·5.45 MB·English

A I R P L A N E
T H E
HOW IDEAS
GAVE US
WINGS
JAY SPENSER
To Donald S. Lopez, 1923–2008
CONTENTS
Introduction vi
1 CONCEPTION: The Thinker and the Dreamer 1
2 BIRT H: Wilbur, Orville, and the World 16
3 CONFIGURATION: Shapes and Ideas 37
4 FUSELAGE: Of Drums and Dragonflies 56
5 WINGS, PA RT I: From Box Kites to Bridges 86
6 WINGS, PA RT II: Cloud-Cutting Cantilevers 112
7 EMPENNAGE: Whale Flukes and Arrow Feathers 136
8 FLIGHT CONTROLS: The Chariot’s Reins 142
9 FLIGHT DECK: Cockpits for Aerial Ships 173
10 AERO PROPULSION: Prometheus Is Pushing 201
11 LANDING GEAR: Shoes, Canoes, and Carriage
Wheels 238
12 PASSENGER CABIN: Voyaging Aloft 253
V CONTENTS
13 SYSTEMS INTEGRATION: Making Flying
Safer 281
14 TODAY’S STATE OF THE ART : The Boeing 787
Dreamliner 292
POSTSCRIPT TOMORROW’S WINGS: Future Air
Travel Technologies 305
Notes 311
Ackowledgments 319
Photo Credits 321
Index 323
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
THE QUEST FOR WINGS—
HUMANKIND’S OLDEST DREAM
In New Hampshire one morning when I was seven years old, I awoke
and found I could fly. Concentrating hard, I levitated off the floor,
flew downstairs, rounded a tight corner, and soared across the living
room of my grandparents’ farmhouse without ever touching down.
It was a dream, of course, but it thrilled me, and decades later the
lingering memory remains vivid. It turns out that I’m not alone; at
one time or another in our lives, most of us have fantasized about
flying.
Flying is humankind’s oldest dream. Ever since our earliest ances-
tors first gazed skyward, we human beings have envied the birds their
ability to slip gravity’s bonds. The result is a pan-cultural longing for
wings so deeply rooted in our psyche that it sings to our soul and is
perennially our favorite metaphor for freedom.
The power of flight’s siren call is difficult to overstate. Eons before a
Hellenistic sculptor crafted the Nike of Samothrace—antiquity’s great
expression of this wish—flying was already a favored theme of artists
and storytellers. From the dawn of history, it has colored our myths
and our magical thinking. In religions, the ability to fly is universally
equated with the divine.
As human technological prowess advanced, this yearning escalated
into a focused quest for wings that ultimately succeeded because of
people like you and me—dreamers all, and all mere mortals of flesh
VII INTRODUCTION
and blood. It is to their vision, ingenuity, collaboration, and sacrifice
that we owe the modern wonder of air travel.
Inventing the airplane is one of history’s greatest adventures, yet
books about flight seldom do the subject justice. Too often they fail
to evoke the underlying wonder of the subject matter. Worse still, air
travel itself is often little fun these days. Long lines at airport security
checkpoints, crowded flights, and today’s lack of in-flight service and
amenities have squeezed the glamour out of what should by all rights
be an exciting adventure.
As for the jetliners themselves, we take them for granted. Whether
we as individuals love to fly or dread it, we tend to view the airliners
we board as strictly a conveyance—glorified buses with wings—and
thus fail to see them for what they really are: an invention bequeath-
ing a degree of mobility utterly inconceivable through the vast major-
ity of human existence.
But what if we could see the jetliner with fresh eyes? Better still,
what if we could understand the great ideas in history that laid its
keel and sent it soaring high into the blue? Best of all, what if we
could stand elbow to elbow with flight’s pioneers and share vicari-
ously in those “aha” moments when they solved aviation’s technical
challenges? Then flying would be an adventure again.
In this new century marked by profound global challenges, may
this book remind us what we humans can do when we share a grand
vision and collaborate to see it achieved.
JAY SPENSER
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
MARCH 2008
1 CONCEPTION
THE THINKER AND THE DREAMER
An uninterrupted navigable ocean that comes to the threshold of
every man’s door ought not to be neglected as a source of human
gratification and advantage.
—SIR GEORGE CAYLEY (1773–1857)1
I
n Yorkshire in the northeast of England, a human being first imag-
ined the airplane. This scientifically accurate emergence happened
a hundred years before the Wright brothers invented the real thing.
At first glance, Yorkshire seems an odd place for the science of avia-
tion to begin. However, history shows that creativity flourishes where
cultures mix, and England’s largest traditional county certainly boasted
plenty of that. Celtic tribes lost to the mists of time, marching Roman
legions, Angle farmers settling from Germany, and marauding Vikings
invading from Denmark all called it home at one time or another.
The airplane’s conceptual inventor was Yorkshire baronet Sir
George Cayley. Born in December 1773 at Scarborough on the
North Sea, Cayley inherited his title, wealth, and large landholdings
upon the death of his father. But a greater inheritance had already
come his way at birth, for he possessed a brilliant mind.
2 THE AIRPLANE
Few people today know Cayley’s name
even though he single-handedly estab-
lished the science of aviation and laid a
foundation for others to build on. The
Wright brothers never would have left
the ground without his powerful ideas,
for example, but they were far from the
first to try.
That honor belongs to another Eng-
lishman, Cayley’s self-appointed disciple
William S. Henson. Thrilled by Cayley’s
visionary writings, Henson galloped off Sir George Cayley.
to design a real airplane before the mid -
dle of the nineteenth century. Although his premature attempt failed,
Henson at least showed the world what the airplane would be.
If Cayley was the thinker, Henson—four decades his junior—was
the dreamer. The two men hardly could have been more differ-
ent, yet their overlapping efforts synergistically planted the seeds of
flight.
The people of Yorkshire are known for a calm and deliberate nature.
George Cayley from an early age broke the mold. Around his tenth
birthday, this enthusiastic young aristocrat was excited in particular
by news sweeping England: human beings had flown in Europe.
On November 21, 1783, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the
marquis d’Arlandes ascended into the heavens in a new invention
called the balloon. According to the reports, these Frenchmen drifted
over the city of Paris for twenty-five minutes, covering 5½ miles (9
kilometers) before setting down safely.
At that time, the event was hailed as the first time human beings
had ever flown. Today we know this was probably not the case. While
history does not provide definitive proof of earlier manned ascents, it
is quite likely that large kites (a dangerous way to fly, given their pro-
pensity for headlong plunges) carried people aloft more than a mil-
lennium before the invention of the balloon. The Venetian Marco
Polo lends credence to accounts of earlier aerial forays. Writing in the