Well, I wouldn't go that far. Orville Wright had the dubious distinction of being the first pilot to lose a passenger, Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge, in a fatal airplane accident on September 17, 1908.
Posted on 10/20/2003 4:29:18 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Two authentically built replicas of the Wright Brothers' 1903 Wright Flyer will be drawing keen attention in the Antelope Valley during the next six months. One of the two replicas, each of which are crafted of wood, wire and muslin, will be prominently displayed Saturday and Sunday at the Edwards Air Force Base open house. The display will help highlight this year's Centennial of Flight celebration to observe the world's first successful powered aircraft flights by the Wright brothers, who coaxed their fragile flyer into the air four times on Dec. 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
The open house replica is not just a museum piece. It has been a test article in the development of another 1903 Wright Flyer replica being built to fly at Edwards in a venture involving NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center and the organization that has built both Wright replicas, the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
While the institute still has some hope the replica will fly Dec. 17, NASA says it could be mid-spring before the event takes place.
The two Wright Flyer replicas are products of an institute volunteer effort that began more than 20 years ago to replace an earlier reproduction lost in 1978 when fire destroyed the San Diego Aerospace Museum.
The older replica had been displayed for many years at the Los Angeles institute chapter office before it was loaned to the museum. Members decided they didn't want to replace the lost replica with "just a pretty airplane to hang up," according to Marilyn Ramsey, a project official. Their ambitious plan called for two replicas to be built in an effort to learn, for the first time, the true aerodynamics and flying qualities of the original Wright Flyer.
The institute flyer to be seen at the Edwards open house was the first Wright replica ever evaluated in a wind tunnel, where aerodynamic conditions of the original 1903 flights were closely duplicated to produce historic information.
Beginning in 1979 and working just weekends, 60 institute volunteers labored for nearly 20 years to build the 650-pound, 40-foot wide biplane from plans obtained from the Smithsonian Institution. The replica was completed in late 1998 and arrived at NASA's Ames Research Center, near San Francisco, in March 1999, for two weeks of wind-tunnel testing.
In the big 40- by 80-foot test facility, where giant fan blades normally move air at hundreds of miles an hour, it never exceeded 29 mph in the institute flyer tests. That was the highest wind speed the two pioneering brothers encountered with the original flyer a century ago.
The institute had to meet wind tunnel safety standards before the tests could begin. The gasoline-powered, air-cooled engine was replaced with a 45-horsepower electric motor to turn the two wooden pusher props 300 to 340 rpm's to duplicate 1903 flying speeds. The strength of the biplane also was tested. To make sure it would not break up at the predicted wind tunnel flight loads, 3,000 pounds of sand in small plastic bags was evenly distributed across all the flight surfaces. This successfully represented more than three times the required loads.
Instrumentation was installed in several locations to record loads and behavior in pitch, yaw and roll conditions during canard and wing warping-rudder interconnect movement. Small cloth tufts were attached to the wings and canards to visually chart the flow of air during the tests.
The Wright Flyer replica was in good shape when it emerged from the tests, but those analyses confirmed the design's suspected instability. According to an institute post-test report, the replica displayed sharp pitch movements, along with adverse yaw created by wing warping that the Wrights incorporated to initiate banked turns. The tests also showed that the anhedral droop of the wings triggered a spiral tendency, but wing-warping was able to overcome that trait. The tests indicated that the wing fabric billowed at high angles of attack and changed the shape of the airfoil, an undesirable feature.
Overall, the tunnel tests showed the Flyer design had only marginal directional stability.
"We knew the Wright Flyer was unstable, and the wind tunnel tests proved it," Ramsey said. "The tests also told us just how unstable it was - and where. Following the wind tunnel tests, the No. 1 replica was displayed in the lobby of the FAA Western Pacific Region headquarters in Hawthorne until it was packed up in September 2002 and sent out on a nine-stop national tour.
Most recently, the institute flyer was featured at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona. When it leaves Edwards, where it will be surrounded by several modern aircraft, its road trip will end with a monthlong exhibit at the Northrop Grumman Corp. in El Segundo.
In April 2001, the institute carried its Flyer study another step higher when it teamed with the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards to evaluate the wind tunnel data in a flight simulator to more closely study the design's handling qualities.
Conclusions from the simulator work agreed with those of the wind tunnel tests: the Wright Flyer was difficult to fly and land. Information produced by the simulator project is being used to refine piloting procedures and prepare for the planned Edwards flights.
At the test pilot school, three pilot/flight engineer teams used a variable stability Learjet to study the Flyer's pitch and roll characteristics, effectiveness of the wing warp-rudder interconnect and landing characteristics. Each team made six flights in the simulator aircraft and logged 9.1 hours in the evaluation. A ground simulator was also used in the study.
The in-flight simulator was programmed, at the institute's request, with augmentation in all three modes (pitch, roll and WRI) and each of the three test teams "flew" the replica with augmentation on and off in all three modes and in on-off combinations. With augmentation off in all modes, the simulator confirmed that the Flyer was very difficult to fly, wandered in yaw and tended to pitch sharply with only slight pilot input, especially during landing attempts. A post-project Air Force report called the craft's handing qualities without augmentation in all three flight modes "unsatisfactory for level, non-maneuvering flight and landings."
With augmentation assist, flying qualities improved in all three modes, although "undesirable" motions in pitch and yaw were "easily induced." The report also noted that workload became very high when the simulator pilot was attempting to control both pitch and roll axes at the same time.
The majority of the successful simulator landings were far past the planned aim point. The Flyer often porpoised sharply as the angle of attack increased just before touchdown, with the test pilots remarking that landings were unnatural, uncomfortable and often ended up hard or firm.
Work on the replica that the institute hopes to fly at Edwards is more than 80% complete. Major steps remaining at the El Segundo assembly site are installation of the small air-cooled engine, chain drive and props and completion of fabric sewing. The reproduction has several slight unnoticeable changes that take advantage of what has been learned in the wind tunnel and simulator tests. The institute, however, has not revealed if changes include an augmentation system to tame the replica in roll, yaw and banking movements for the Edwards flights.
"The goal is to keep the look of the airplane balanced against safety for those who will fly it," Ramsey said. "It will be a little more aerodynamically friendly."
1. Violating Environmental Regulations
2. Non-compliance of Affirmative Action Hiring Laws
3. Operating Heavy Machinery without a License
. . . . and no pilots license.
Only at NASA would there be problems with 100 year-old technology. Hey! Got the metric system straight yet?
Well, I wouldn't go that far. Orville Wright had the dubious distinction of being the first pilot to lose a passenger, Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge, in a fatal airplane accident on September 17, 1908.
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