What is an airplane? It’s simple – it’s an aircraft heavier than air, an airplane. Today, there are many types of aircraft that are used in various areas of our lives. Do you know who contributed to the development of this industry? Let’s take a look below, because this is a laborious process that many scientists are engaged in.

First Attempts

Has anyone heard of George Cayley? A scientist who tried to create a flying machine. How did Kaylee come up with the idea to create an airplane? He loved to study birds: wingspan, flight speed, all this gave impetus to the creation of the aircraft. Who would have thought that this is how our acquaintance with aviation would begin. Want to see the details of the aircraft and familiarize yourself with them? Then get acquainted with the publications, scientific works of the researcher, everything is painted there to the smallest detail. The scientist was able to make this device capable of lifting a person above the ground. This invention was created at the end of the 18th century in Great Britain. 

Have you heard of a scientist like William Henson? Someone must have heard! The researcher made a detailed drawing of the aircraft, you can see it. The idea was in a propeller plane, he made it so that there was a propeller to launch the structure.

Aircraft of Alberto Santos-Dumont

Santos Dumont is a Brazilian scientist who can be called the creator of the airship – an airship, an aircraft. He independently invented and designed it, this idea was a success. There have been and will be disputes. The question of superiority is always open. However, one person should not be singled out, because everyone contributed to aviation, only from their own side.

Invented by the Wright Brothers

Wright brothers, you must have heard of them. The guys were engaged in the development of aircraft, and they managed to create an aircraft that could take off from the ground for a while – this is a huge step forward. At that time, it was a breakthrough, getting closer and closer to the real plane. However, can they be called the first? Absolutely yes, like any other scientist.

There are many supporters of the theory that the Wright brothers were the founders of the aircraft. The history of the creation of their invention began with a detailed study of the biplane, which was made in accordance with the Herring-Chanute project. This design was successfully tested in 1896. The brothers were able to improve the design, improve safety and control the flight from the ground. The plane was able to fly, albeit for a very short time – 12 seconds, but this is already a huge step forward, an incentive to work and develop further. The plane was miraculously able to cover a distance of 30 meters; this is a clear success. On just the third attempt, the Wright brothers managed to launch the plane, which managed to overcome an interval of more than 279 meters and was able to climb 13 meters in height.

After the creation of the aircraft, the Wright brothers signed a contract with the US Department of Defense. In 1909, they founded their own aircraft manufacturing company, which was engaged in the execution of orders in various fields: military, orders from investors, etc. They managed to work with many private companies in France and beyond. They financed the development of various areas of aviation – civil and commercial. In the fall of 1909, one of the brothers flew over downtown New York and the Statue of Liberty for half an hour. The guys did an amazing job, improving the aircraft.

Santos Dumont and His Developments

Santos Dumont is a hot air balloon maker, a wonderful invention. Would you like to fly in a hot air balloon? Or have you already flown? How do you feel about flying? I think it’s a great emotion and a very romantic thing to do. The scientist is also called the creator of the first manned aircraft. In addition, the researcher is considered the author of airships that were under the control of the engine. The researcher’s plane took off to a height of about 2.5 meters and overcame more than 60 meters. This happened in 1906.

We hope that you have learned a lot of new and interesting things for yourself!

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In January 1908, the French aviator Henri Ferman won the competition for the distance of the flight, setting a record of 1 km (the judges did not know that three years earlier Orville Wright had already flown nearly 39 km over the expanses of the prairies). At this time, the desire to get a heavier-than-air aircraft again expressed by the British military. Now the designer John William Dunn took up the task. In December 1908 his machine D5 showed a much higher stability of the flight than even that which was demonstrated by the creation of brothers. The latter, however, in an unannounced competition between the two continents in May of the same year, first took aboard a passenger, a certain Charlie Furnas.

In July 1908, Léon Delagrange, wishing to surpass their achievement, flew in Milan 200 meters with a woman on board, and on September 17, 1908 the first plane crash occurred, resulting in the loss of lives. Thomas Selfridge, who was on board, died in the crash of an airplane piloted by Orville Wright, demonstrating his qualities to the U.S. military. The world certainly froze in anticipation of some significant event that would make it clear that aviation as a new human activity had taken place.

Also in 1908, the publisher of the English Daily Mail, Lord Northcliffe, announced a £1,000 prize for the first person to fly across the English Channel in an airplane. Wright did not enter the race and returned to his business in the United States.

In July 1909, a young Frenchman, Hubert Latham, took off, but the engine of his car stalled halfway and the pilot fell into the strait. The poor guy was pulled out of the water by French sailors.

Louis Blériot’s 37-year-old flying machine took off next on July 25, 1909. At first the wind blew it to the north, and the pilot had to level the course. Eventually, after spending 37 minutes in flight and covering 23 miles, Blériot landed safely in England. After that, all doubts about the aviation’s ability to handle serious tasks disappeared.

The value of Blériot’s victory was that it was achieved in a monoplane, the favorite child of French aviators, while the British and Americans preferred a biplane. Over the following month, Blériot received a hundred orders to produce the machine, which was his 11th model. While the Wright brothers spent years perfecting their planes, the French pilot preferred to change them.

“Blériot XI” was the most famous of them all. The following year the pilot set two world speed records on it, achieving first 74 km/h and then 77 km/h. Louis Blériot triumphed in front of half a million spectators at the Rheims show, beating Glenn Curtis. A year later the speed of Blériot exceeded 100 km/h. The plane was becoming the fastest vehicle known to man.

In Russia the next after A. Mozhaisky to design an airplane was attempted by E. P. Sverchkov in 1909. Tests were unsuccessful: the device failed to get off the ground, and it did not even budge. In 1912-1913 I.I. Sikorsky created the first in the world four-engine plane “Russian Vityaz” intended for strategic reconnaissance. Even specialists did not believe in the possibility of flight of such a machine, but on July 23, 1913 the plane with four engines set in one row and rotating each of its propellers (an absolute technical innovation of that time), took off and showed excellent controllability.

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Work on the development of a controlled balloon (dirigible) (which was called an airship) continued throughout the 1800s. The first controlled apparatus equipped with a steam engine, lighter than air, flew in 1852, when the Frenchman Giffard flew 24 kilometers.

Unguided balloons were used during the American Civil War by the Union Army.

The next technological breakthrough was made in 1884, when the first fully controlled free flight on a French military airship with an electric engine La France by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs was carried out. The airship was 52 m long and had a volume of 1,900 m³, covering a distance of 8 km in 23 minutes with an 8 1/2 hp engine.

Nevertheless, these apparatuses were short-lived and extremely unstable. Regular controlled flights were not made until the advent of the internal combustion engine.

However, airships were used in both World Wars I and II, and continue in limited use today, but their development was largely stymied by the development of heavier-than-air vehicles.

The first printed publication on aviation was Emmanuel Swedenborg’s Sketches of a Machine for Flying by Air, published in 1716. This flying machine consisted of a light frame with a strong cloth stretched over it and had two large oars or wings moving on horizontal axes in such a way that they met no resistance when moving upward and created lifting force when moving downward. Swedenborg knew that this machine would not fly, but he regarded it as a starting point and was confident that the problem would be solved. He said:

it seems easier to talk about such a machine than to actually create it, since it requires more force and less weight than the human body has. The science of mechanics could perhaps suggest a way, namely the use of a strong spiral spring. If these advantages and requirements were attained, perhaps one day someone would be able to figure out how to make better use of our sketch and find a way to make additions that would achieve what we can only suggest. Still, there is ample evidence and examples in nature where such flight can be safe, yet when the time comes for the first trials, you will probably have to pay for the experience, but you cannot get by with the strength of your arms or legs.

Swedenborg showed in his work that having an engine in a flying machine is the most important condition for flight.

In the last years of the 18th century Sir George Cayley made the first serious study of the physics of flight. In 1799.

He created a diagram of a glider which, with the exception of the vertical projection, corresponded fully to modern ones, its tail being used for steering and the pilot being below the center of mass to ensure flight stabilization; this model flew in 1804. Over the next fifty years Cayley continued to work on the physics of flight, during which time he learned most of the basics of aerodynamics and introduced such terms as lift and drag. He used internal and external combustion engines that used gunpowder as fuel, but settled on Alphonse Penot’s rubbermotor, which allowed him to make engine models more easily. Cayley later used his research to build a full-scale machine which flew unmanned in 1849, and in 1853 an already manned short flight was made in Brompton, near Scarborough in Yorkshire.

In 1848, John Stringfellow made a successful test flight of a model with a steam engine, at Chard, Somerset, England. This model was unmanned.

In 1868, Jean-Marie Le Brie, a Frenchman, made the first flight in which he climbed above the starting point, in his L’Albatros artificiel glider using horse-drawn shore power. Le Brie reportedly reached an altitude of 100 meters, covering a distance of 200 meters.

In 1874, Felix du Temple in Brest, France, built a Monoplane, a large aircraft made of aluminum, with a wingspan of 13 meters and weighing 80 kg (without a pilot). Several tests were performed, the glider was launched from a springboard, the flight lasted a short time and returned safely.

Another man who contributed to the art of flight was Francis Herbert Wenham, who tried unsuccessfully to build a number of unmanned gliders. He found that the greater contribution to lift from a bird-like wing is made at its front end, from which he concluded that long and thin wings would be more efficient than the bat-like wings commonly used by his colleagues because they have a greater leading edge relative to their weight. Today, this characteristic is known as relative wing elongation. He presented his research to the newly formed Royal Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1866 and decided to get practical confirmation by building the world’s first wind tunnel in 1871. The Society members used the wind tunnel and determined that curved wings had significantly better lift than expected from Cayley’s research based on Newtonian mechanics, and the aerodynamic quality at 15 degrees was approximately 5:1. Thus the possibility of practical construction of heavier-than-air vehicles was clearly demonstrated; there remained, however, problems of propulsion and flight control.

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Simultaneously with the development of flight theory to obtain numerical values of aerodynamic characteristics, special aerodynamic laboratories are created, equipped with wind tunnels, which became the basis of experimental aerodynamics, the creators of which can be considered N.E. Zhukovsky, the French scientist J. Eiffel and the German scientist L. Prandtl. IN 1902 N. Е. Zhukovsky established the Aerodynamic Laboratory of the Moscow State University, and in 1904 the Aerodynamic Institute in Kuchin. In 1909 was created the aerodynamic laboratory by J. Eiffel in Paris, and a little later by L. Prandtl in Göttingen. On the proposal of N.E. Zhukovsky in 1918 was established Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (CAHI), which is currently one of the largest centers of aerodynamic research in the world.

Simultaneously with the development of aviation technology, scientists from different countries conducted theoretical research and experimental work in the field of aerodynamics and strength of the aircraft. Scientific works of Zhukovsky (“Dynamics of airplanes in a rough description”, “Propeller vortex theory”, etc.) had a huge impact on the development of world aviation science. Zhukovsky armed designers with the method of calculating flight data of aircrafts. His pupil V.P. Vetchinkin worked in the field of airplane and propeller theory, calculations of their strength. Chaplygin continued to develop the theory of the wing. His work “On Gas Jets” (1902) is well ahead of similar works of scientists in Western Europe and the USA. Studies of models of various aircraft schemes in wind tunnels were conducted. Work on improvement of propellers, the first parachutes, etc. was going on. As a result, during the 1-st World War I airplanes flight data became much better: fighters velocity grew from 90-120 up to 200-220 km/h, ceiling – from 2 to 7 km.

Scientific research front also expanded. On May 9, 1924, the new aerodynamic laboratory (now named after S.A. Chaplygin) was established in TsAGI. Then laboratories for testing of aviation materials and engines, a hydrochannel and an experimental plant were also built there.

To further deployment of research activities TsAGI separated from Tupolev Design Bureau (KB); Department of aircraft materials, transformed into the All-Union Institute of Aviation Materials (VIAM), and aircraft engine department, which became the Central Institute of Aviation Motors (CIAM). Several small design teams headed by V.V. Kalinin, V.B. Shavrov, D.P. Grigorovich, A.I. Putilov, A.S. Yakovlev, at Moscow and Kharkov Aviation Institutes, etc. worked in parallel with large design bureaus of Tupolev and Polikarpov.

During the 30’s, the scientists solved a number of the most important principal issues of flutter, in particular, the problem of elimination of the flutter – the wing and tail rotations with the growing amplitude in the air flow – and spinning out, which ensured rapid qualitative growth of the domestic aircraft industry. The study of flutter was conducted in the 20’s Vetchinkin and Chaplygin, and in 1931 at the TsAGI was organized by a special group. Theoretical and experimental research conducted by the group, which included M. V. Keldysh, E. P. Grossman and others, made it possible to develop recommendations for designers who permanently cured aircraft from the dangerous phenomenon of vibration. The beginning of the practical study of the release of aircraft from spin was laid (1916) by the Russian pilot K. K. Artseulov. The solution to the spin problem was outlined in the works of Soviet aerodynamic scientists V. S. Pyshnov and A. N. Zhuravchenko. Studies of spin modes were carried out in the specially built TsAGI wind tunnel.

An important role in the practical application of scientific research, their technical implementation was played by a group of specialists from TsAGI and other institutions in 1940-1941 “Guidelines for designers” which unified the methods of designing, building and testing aircraft.

In the United States, the overall management of research in the field of aerodynamics is carried out by NASA (National Aerodynamics and Space Exploration Committee), which has large laboratory centers in Moffett Field (California), Langley Field (Virginia), etc., as well as in the California and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, research institutes of the Air Force, Navy and the laboratories of major firms producing airplanes, missiles and weapons. There are large centers of research in aerodynamics in England, France, Japan and other countries.

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