The wright flyer question

[davparlr]

davparlr - The Wright Flyer storage shed and workshop were located to the left of this photo. Is it your conclusion that as these structures do not appear in the photo, there was no storage shed and workshop?

I said nothing about structures, I only said there was no catapult when the flyer first flew. Of course they had supporting structures.

There are some things we can conclude about early aviation history:

There is no reason to doubt that man powered flight occured prior to the Wright effort. There were many gliders, and adding a power plant to one of these was would not be a leap of technology. What the Wrights did was to make an aircraft system, aerodynamics, power, and effective control systems, features every aircraft today utilizes.

Most major complex inventions utilize work done previously. This does not degrade the genius of the invention. The Wrights did use other peoples work and, by scientific method, used/modified/corrected it to generate something that worked.

The Wright brothers were exceptional scientist.

The Wright brothers were exceptional engineers.

The Wright brothers were exceptional pilots.

 

[Evil_Merlin]

Hi A4K,

Roger that. Germany has two contenders: Weißkopf, who apparently built a credible flying machine that as a modern replica demonstrated some degree of flightworthiness (despite the absence of a vertical tail - I'm still wondering about that), and Karl Jatho, who without any doubt lifted off for powered flight before the Wrights did.

But there is very little doubt that the Wright brothers were the first to have a recorded controlled, powered, sustained heavier than air flight.

The problem with Jatho's flight (and just about everyone else before the Wright Bros) was it was totally uncontroled. It was more of a powered glide.

Both Richard Pearse of NZ and Gustave Whitehead of the US had some type of powered flights before Jatho did, with Whitehead a full 18 months before Jatho.

Jan Wnek from Poland had a controllable glider (using warping of the wings TE) supposedly around 1887.

Alexander Feodorovich Mozhaiski from Russia supposedly built and manned a steampowered something that apparently flew for almost a 100 feet in 1884. However it was shown his "wings" did not create the lift required and the "plane" itself would never have flown.

From 1850ish to 1903 the world was full of the attempts to fly and nearly every major country had some part in the attempts.

 

[Velius]

I do know that Lilienthal had plans to put some kind of powerplant to one of his gliders, but he died in a routine gliding accident before he could. I wonder if he would have been the first?

 

[HoHun]

Hi Arsenal,

>Point being, the main arguement of the Santos Dumont supporters is that while the Wright Flyer's takeoff was assisted with the use of either, and/or high winds, guide rail, catapult, the 14-bis used none. Technical semantics really.

Just for the sake of completeness, it should be pointed out out that Santos-Dumont's supporters' "headwind" argument is a red herring entirely.

The headwind was completely irrelevant with regard to the airworthiness of the Flyer - all it did was to shorten the ground run.

"Guide rail" doesn't seem to be the right technical term here, either - unlike the guide rails in rocket launchers, the rail used by the Wrights did not fulfill any stabilizing function but merely served as a runway.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

 

[HoHun]

Hi Merlin,

>The problem with Jatho's flight (and just about everyone else before the Wright Bros) was it was totally uncontroled.

Absolutely! I was just quoting Jatho's flight as example for an attempt at flight that - though the machine actually left the ground - did not represent an actual advance in aviation.

Jatho's example might be one of the best of this kind since the date and the result of his attempt at flight appear to have been recorded reliably and without any trace of doubt. Still, his machine was not a practical aircraft like the Wright Flyer ...

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

 

[Marcel]

davparlr - The Wright Flyer storage shed and workshop were located to the left of this photo. Is it your conclusion that as these structures do not appear in the photo, there was no storage shed and workshop?

The catapult was used at Huffman Prairie near Dayton Ohio, since the 20 mph wind they experienced by the sea wasn't there in the Midwest. Point being, the main arguement of the Santos Dumont supporters is that while the Wright Flyer's takeoff was assisted with the use of either, and/or high winds, guide rail, catapult, the 14-bis used none. Technical semantics really.

davparl is correct, the Wright brothers didn't use a catapult on their 1903 Flyer I. They took off from a trolley on rails, which stayed on the ground while the a/c went into the air. The catapult was introduced with the Flyer II on May 1904. You are also correct that the French only saw the latter system.

For the question, I took the liberty to do some research and read in a book called "The men who changed the world" that the skids were used to shorten landing place, as the friction would slow down the a/c very quickly. It would enable them to fly without having to reserve a long piece of flat ground for landing

 

[Elvis]

PS: it was the first powered heavier than air aircraft with effective aircraft control (the other aircraft that flew before then could only fly in a straight line and had no or very limited control). And even that is still under debate today with Alberto Santos-Dumont who was claimed to have flown first, mostly because the Wright Brothers were very protective of their trade secrets and of course most people of that age had no want to put any aircraft in a war/military role, but thats exactly how the Wright Brothers envisioned it.

Because it was being flown off of sand?

...and lest we forget about the guy in Canada who claimed to have flown in 1901!

I'm with the weight theory as to the question of why skids over wheels.

...either that, or they just didn't know any better.



Elvis