Please ping me to aviation and aerospace articles. Thank you.
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Please ping me to aviation and aerospace articles. Thank you.
If you want added to or removed from this ping list, please contact EveningStar or Paleo Conservative.
I never thought they weren’t bad-ass. The climbed into that contraption HEAD FIRST and launched it!
Definitely worthy watching the video.
PING
Time to all my in on wing warping futures?
As a young man, I worked at the machine shop / foundry that cast that aluminum engine block. The only place the Wright Brothers could find with the expertise to do such a casting. Alas, Buckeye Iron & Brass was just another of the places taken down be a union. They could not survive two strikes in
a period of just 3 - 4 years.
There was a really good PBS show on them a decade or so ago. They showed the total arrogance of the French, who thought they owned aviation...and they showed the Wright Bros.
The course was simple, fly an oval. The difference was that the Wrights had perfected 3-axis control of the plane - the french were still at 2 axis (pitch and yaw, I think). The French plane skidded like mad - the Wright plane ran the course with perfectly banked turns.
The French immediately knew they had been both defeated and humiliated. It was beautiful.
I always liked the fact that a couple of bike mechanics succeeded where the hugely government funded Langley Aerodrome went nowhere, but in the Potomac. Experts!
I’ve read this book, and it is amazing.
Very Interesting
The Wright brothers, largely of their own choosing, are and always will be enigmas. Each time we learn something new about them, it will only reinforce our understanding of how little we knew about them in the first place. (And I say this as someone that owns more than twenty books about them and has probably read another 20 -25.)
If Wilbur had lived, perhaps the passage of time would have caused them to open up. But with his death, the die was cast.
America needs some more crackpots like the Wrights.
Ping. Thanks
btt
I was gifted to work at Wright Patterson Air Force Base for almost twenty years including some time near Huffman Prairie. As I was going to and from I never failed to look over at the field where the first Master pilot was born. Wilbur taught himself through trial and error. He made the first 360 degree turns here and I suspect he flew into his own prop wash as I did later in my first hour of flight training. He practiced this over and over again in this small portion of the Prairie until he had mastered it, it seems flight training was born here also.
Popular Mechanics thinks the Wright Brothers were awesome because at the dawn of the automotive age, they used their bicycle shop to produce a working flying contraption.
Over 100 years later and we still don’t have our flying cars!
Gus Whitehead flew first...