PILOT SPIN
Pilot Zone => Pilot Zone => Topic started by: PeterNSteinmetz on October 17, 2021, 11:43:41 AM
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Got started last night reading Lilienthal’s seminal book from 1896 (translated and published in 1911).
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/bga-sg-archive/Books/BIRDFLIGHT%20AS%20THE%20BASIS%20OF%20AVIATION.pdf
The first chapter is essentially a small history of the brothers Gunther and Otto’s interest in flight and their experiments. Very interesting as one can see how they evolved into this field.
Some quotes from the book -
“my brother Otto was of the opinion that these gliding experiments would develop into a sport”
“With each advent of spring, when the air is alive with innumerable happy creatures; when the storks on their arrival at their old northern resorts fold up the imposing flying apparatus which has carried them thousands of miles, lay back their heads and announce their arrival by joyously rattling their beaks ; when the swallows have made their entry and hurry through our streets and pass our windows in sailing flight; when the lark appears as a dot in the ether and manifests its joy of existence by its song; then a certain desire takes possession of man. He longs to soar upward and to glide, free as the bird, over smiling fields, leafy woods and mirror- like lakes, and so enjoy the varying landscape as fully as only a bird can do.”
“It looks as though there had been too much calculation and too little experiment, and that the outcome of all this was the kind of literature resulting when pure reasoning is not supported or refreshed by actual experiments.”
The book contains a number of the excellent photographs of them gliding.
I had not realized previously that they had decided to stop their experiments and disassemble the gliders when Otto took his last ill fated flight in August 1896. And that that day he had not fitted a “shock absorber” which had prevented injury in a previous crash.
And then the newspaper report of his death was what finally gave the impetus to the Wright brothers to really go out and try to solve this problem.
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I can’t imagine what it was like to be alive before flight. All those millions of years, our ancestors watching birds in the sky and longing to fly like them. And all the men trying and trying to find the way, dying in the process, to get us to now, where we can get in a contraption and go up in the air like the birds, the eons long dream come true at last.
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Another quote -
“We do not refer to stationary flight in calm air; this we have already dealt with in § XVIII. The stork, which we take as our example, is not capable of such flight, and we do not think that human beings will ever apply this type of flight.”
Their belief was that man would not fly in helicopters.
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All those millions of years, our ancestors watching birds in the sky and longing to fly like them. And all the men trying and trying to find the way, dying in the process, to get us to now
Once the technology became available (mostly lightweight gasoline engines, I suppose) the ideas came fast and furious. The Wright brothers' historic flight took place in 1903; by 1936 the piston-engine airplane was virtually perfected in the Spitfire.
Tim