Derek Seward's List: Airplane research

• Prior to da Vinci's work, no scientist had conducted a detailed examination into the mechanics of flight, nor had anyone approached the notion of powered flight. Da Vinci was the first man to do both
• He drew out his ideas of flight, including designs for multiple manned ornithopters, planes with flapping wings for a human to operate.

• Despite the reliance on human-powered flapping, da Vinci's designs for planes are very similar to those for modern lightweight aircraft. 

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• In 1874, Felix de Temple, built a monoplane that flew just a short hop down a hill with the help of a coal fired steam engine.
• Otto Daimler in the late 1800's, invented the first gasoline engine.
• The early steam engines were powered by heated coal and were generally much too heavy for flight.
• In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew, "The Flyer", with a 12 horse power gas powered engine.
• From 1903, the year of the Wright Brothers first flight, to the late 1930s the gas powered reciprocating internal-combustion engine with a propeller was the sole means used to propel aircraft.
• It was Frank Whittle, a British pilot, who designed the first turbo jet engine in 1930. The first Whittle engine successfully flew in April, 1937. This engine featured a multistage compressor, and a combustion chamber, a single stage turbine and a nozzle.
• • The first jet airplane to successfully use this type of engine was the German Heinkel He 178 invented by Hans Von Ohain. It was the world's first turbojet powered flight. 

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• The first airplane that was flown was a glider. A glider is a  non-motorized flying machine (and very hard to control.) Early gliders  were launched from high places like cliffs and floated on the wind to  the ground.
• After  experimenting for a while on unmanned gliders, they made a glider where  the pilot would control the airplane in the air.
• In 1903 the Wright Brothers  made their first powered airplane that they named the "flyer."  It was a biplane (two winged plane) that had a 12 horse power engine  that they had built themselves.
• In 1890 Cl`ement Ader took off on the first steam powered plane (a  plane with an engine, unlike the glider)
• Jet engines have replaced propellers and speeds are  greater than 600 miles per hour.

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• first aircraft: a small, biplane glider flown as a kite to test their solution  for controlling the craft by wing warping. Wing warping is a method of arching  the wingtips slightly to control the aircraft's rolling motion and balance
• Birds change the shape of their wings to turn and maneuver. They believed that  they could use this technique to obtain roll control by warping, or changing the  shape, of a portion of the wing.
• They recognized that control of the flying aircraft would be the most crucial  and hardest problem to solve.
• However, many problems occurred: the wings did not have enough lifting power;  forward elevator was not effective in controlling the pitch; and the  wing-warping mechanism occasionally caused the airplane to spin out of control.
• They decided to build a wind tunnel to test a variety of wing shapes and their  effect on lift
• Their studies showed that a movable tail would help balance the craft and the  Wright Brothers connected a movable tail to the wing-warping wires to coordinate  turns.
• After months of studying  how propellers work the Wright Brothers designed a motor and a new aircraft  sturdy enough to accommodate the motor's weight and vibrations. The craft  weighed 700 pounds and came to be known as the Flyer.
• After two attempts to fly this machine, one of which resulted in a minor crash,  Orville Wright took the Flyer for a 12-second, sustained flight on December 17,  1903. This was the first successful, powered, piloted flight in history.
• The Wright Brothers had been allowing passengers to fly with them since May 14,  1908.
• In 1911, the Wrights' Vin  Fiz was the first airplane to cross the United States. The flight took 84 days,  stopping 70 times.
• In 1912, a Wright Brothers  plane, the first airplane armed with a machine gun was flown at an airport in  College Park, Maryland.

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• Since multi-engine airplanes are designed to fly with one engine inoperative and flight crews are trained to fly with one engine inoperative, the in-flight shutdown of an engine typically does not constitute a safety of flight issue.
• A compressor surge is a disruption of the airflow through a gas turbine engine that can be caused by engine deterioration, a crosswind over the engine’s inlet, ingestion of foreign material, or an internal component failure such as a broken blade. While this situation can be alarming, the condition is momentary and not dangerous.
• Other events such as a fuel control fault can result in excess fuel in the engine’s combustor. This additional fuel can result in flames extending from the engine’s exhaust pipe. As alarming as this would appear, at no time is the engine itself actually on fire.
• Also, the failure of certain components in the engine may result in a release of oil that can cause an odor or oily mist in the cabin. Despite these observations, such occurrences do not necessarily indicate an unsafe condition that must be investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board.
• Two terms are helpful in describing the nature of engine failures. A “contained” engine failure is one in which components might separate inside the engine but either remain within the engine’s cases or exit the engine through the tail pipe. This is a design feature of all engines and generally should not pose an immediate flight risk.
• An “uncontained” engine failure can be more serious because pieces from the engine exit the engine at high speeds in other directions, posing potential danger to the aircraft structure and persons within the plane.

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• The risk is highest with engines  mounted directly on the fuselage.
• "Therefore, they are very close to both passengers and to  critical components such as control cables and fuel lines,"  Mac McClellan, editor of Flying magazine, said.
• Engines undergo rigorous testing to make sure they won't come  apart if an object strikes them or a blade breaks off. But if the disk holding the blades fails, experts say it is  impossible to build a casing strong enough to contain them.

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• Presently, aircraft jet engines, like other engines using oil as a lubricant, only have one detector for sensing oil pressure problems whether low or high. As a result, it is not possible to locate the area where the problem is occurring.
• Thus in the past, if a problem was detected, the whole engine is removed for repair and each particular area was inspected to determine the source of the problem.
• This process is very time consuming in that the whole engine had to be removed from the aircraft and then taken down section by section for inspection.
  
• The reading obtained therefrom is then compared to a predetermined standard for that particular section to determine if there is a problem therein. If the problem is detected then corrective action is taken to eliminated the problem. This procedure is applied to as many ports as necessary to find the oil pressure problem.

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