Replicas of the first airplanes.

[David MacRay]

I am a fan of the Wright brothers. There is someone that posts on AvCanada sometimes claiming the bicycle mechanics from Ohio were not the first ones to fly. If you count gliding he's right. OH goody, a pun.

Here is a link about a grade Six class that built a replica of a Wright glider from 1900, they made theirs in 2000 then donated it to NASA.

https://wright.nasa.gov/replica/replica.html

I believe Orville and Wilbur were the first humans to fly what might be better discribed as an unstable powered glider in 1903, but agree that there was more development required to fly in a machine that could climb under power. I believe they were the first to do that too.

It's certainly reasonable to discuss the fact, in the decade that followed, there were some others, particularly in France hot on their heels building some arguably better airplanes,

https://wright.nasa.gov/index.htm

On the 100th anniversary of the first powered flight a few replicas flew. I think that is pretty cool but I don't think I would try to fly one. In my twenties I would have but now I am not daring enough. Even the replicas were too squirrelly.

I might however, given some space and funding, build and fly a replica of the 1905 flier. Here's some cool links about a guy that did that just prior to the hundredth anniversary of that machine.

https://wright.nasa.gov/replica/rep1905.html

https://wright.nasa.gov/gallery/markplane/flight.AVI

It would be even better to build something slightly more practical, that does not need a catapult to launch and has wheels to taxi and land on.

Maybe a Silver Dart? I bet Slick knows what I'm talking about. Now where can we get a sponsor?

[Slick Goodlin]

The Wright’s Flyers seem just a bit too much for me, but then that’s to be expected of the first of anything (note: if you want to count Langley or Whitehead or Pearse as first I bet their airplanes suck to fly too). Sort of like how the early nuclear bomb scientists would “tickle the dragon’s tail” to determine critical mass, it’s scientifically important but in retrospect seems completely insane.

I’m still slowly moving toward that Bleriot build. The current lockdown really put a damper on that since I can’t actually go inside the specialty wood shop to hand pick material and I’m not buying a single stick without being able to. But that’s a downer and I prefer not to focus on or advertise those things, so instead here’s why I picked it: as far as I’m concerned it’s probably the earliest usable airplane. Prior to 1908 I figure there are maybe three airplanes worth building for historical reasons but you’re never going to fly any of them for more than a quarter mile in a straight line. You gotta want it bad to sink the effort of making it into getting so little of a return. That and the controls were weird on a lot of early flying machines so you have to decide if you’re sticking with historical accuracy and re-learning how to fly, or if you’re going to cheat a little. If you start cheating where do you draw the line and what do you do when some righteous a-hole calls you out on it and won’t go away?

So if it were me, I’d move the goal posts a little. I’d build a replica of a replica if I had to. In The Great Race, Professor Fate had a Curtiss headless pusher but since it was built for movie work it had a Continental engine and conventional controls. It looks the part AND you get to paint a skull and crossbones on your completely accurate replica plane. Win-win!


Another place to find replicas worth doing is in Those Magnificent Men and their Flying Machines. There’s far too much in that movie to get into it here but if you haven’t seen it, change that this weekend.

[David MacRay]

Yes! I’m with you.

I couldn’t remember his name this morning and was too lazy to look it up but... Louis Bleriot was one of Aviation’s finest innovators. His machines were fully functional, arguably far better than anything else from that timeframe and as you say, the controls are sensible to a modern pilot.

Stick, rudder and throttle. https://www.kitplanes.com/1909-bleriot-xi/ Add a radio, ads-b maybe some brakes and off we go.

I find it interesting that though the Wright brothers studied birds they got stuck making Canards instead of putting the elevator at the back.

After posting this thread I admitted to myself that I really want a more powerful plane than the Citabria I have been flying lately. This is strictly for entertainment purposes, no wagering please.

I notice someone working on that film clip you posted knew to use a soundtrack emulating a blip switch, even though the actor said, “Switch on.” instead of “Contact!” when the assistant swung the prop.

I wasn’t there so I won’t bash Mr Langley, but I don’t believe he ever managed to build anything, that I would credit with flying as well as the 1905 Wright Flier. He had money and the press on his side.

[David MacRay]

I have been watching some videos about Louis. I should probably point out the plane we love is type eleven. The first ten are not as great.



I think that was an important part of the way he made advances. He was ready to abandon a plane that was not working.

In defence of my guys Orville and Wilbur they might have been tired of changing plans from testing around 200 airfoils.

[Slick Goodlin]

Louis Bleriot was sort of the Elon Musk of his day. He had made a good bit of money manufacturing gas powered headlights (I forget if it was acetylene or carbide but whatever) for bicycles and motorcycles, which is hard to imagine being cutting edge but we’re talking about over a century ago. He took his earnings and started putting them into his passion to fly, hiring a group of fellow enthusiasts and developing aircraft through an iterative process not unlike what we see SpaceX doing today; get an idea, build the thing, try it, keep the good and replace the bad for the next one. These were also not at all incremental changes between models, they went from biplanes to monoplanes to tandem wings or canards just sort of throwing all kinds of ideas out there to see what stuck.

Both the Wright and Bleriot teams made some incredible strides forward that are so easy to take for granted now but absolutely groundbreaking then. The Wright brothers did this incredible thing where they took the sum of the world’s knowledge of airfoils... and threw it out. Can you imagine these two eccentric single guys just saying nope, all this accepted research is wrong? When their 1901 glider, built to specifications called out by Lillienthal’s table of airfoils, didn’t perform at all as expected they ruled out everything else but the data they worked from. They made a balance beam for the front of a bicycle to empirically re-develop airfoil data and when they found crosswinds interfering they made their own wind by inventing the wind tunnel. In a world where wings were developed basically by freezing a dead bird, sawing its wing off, and tracing the cut these guys came up with a scientific method to understand why a bird’s wing was shaped like that and how they could optimize it. They also understood propeller theory worlds better than their contemporaries, which I always found odd since boat propellers seemed to be very well understood by then. Perhaps the biggest and most necessary innovation from the Wrights was the notion that you had to control it in all three axes.

Silly as it sounds, Bleriot was on the bleeding edge just by putting his airplanes on wheels. Most of his contemporaries relied on launching their flying machines from tracks, often using catapult assists to reach flying speed. Bleriot could, and did, land in any flat and clear enough field then just take off again when he wanted. It blows my mind to think this was once a breakthrough. One of his first major prizes to be won was when he was able to cover something like 40km in under six hours. It seems so easy in today’s context but airplane engines at the time were fairly unreliable and may only run for 15-20 minutes at a time. If you were in a Wright that would have meant that you’d have a crew following you with a cart to assemble your track and catapult every time you had to land, then disassemble the whole affair to take it to the next (likely unscheduled) stop. A Bleriot XI could just go, and I believe he made the 40km nonstop but if there was a break needed for cooling or repair it would have been easy to do.

[David MacRay]

I believe there were some others getting close at the time too.

I suspect some what it seemed like a conspiracy or fairytale back then for some regular people. A book about the Wright brothers I have describes how often people could not believe humans flying was possible, even after it had been reported for a few years that a few separate teams were actually doing it, until they witnessed it them selves.

Also, I might have undervalued Langley’s unmanned and uncontrolled aircraft that flew before the first Wright flier. I’m going by many reports of his attempts to get a person airborne, which seemed to have never quite worked out. Though he sometimes appeared to be claiming success.

[Slick Goodlin]

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[David MacRay]

I laughed.

They had no time for women, too busy trying to build a machine they could fly with. There are plenty of stories about how they were almost always working, six days a week.

I’m going to have to look up Whitehead and Pearse.

[David MacRay]

I found a video of a flying replica of the plane Gustave Whitehead built. Looks quite like a bird.

I am sceptical of the capabilities of the designs I see built by Mr Pearse.

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/images/ ... -monoplane

[anofly]

I was in a bar once, on a boat.The question asked was who was the first to fly across the Atlantic. Of course an American won the free beer. I cried foul.... A canadian and a brit had done it 8 years or so earlier. They had done it together not alone. That is an example about how history gets changed by who has the pen in hand....