Category FLIGHT and M ОТІOIM

vionics is the name for an air­craft’s electronic equipment and electrical systems. Avionics have become so important in modern aviation that they can account for more than half the multimillion-dollar price of a modern aircraft.

Avionics Development

Until the 1940s, the most complicated electronic equipment carried by any air-

О Sensors constantly monitor for problems and are crucial to safety in spaceflight. These NASA astronauts and technicians are examining a sensor system installed on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 2005. The system, a long boom with camera and lasers on the end, is used to inspect the Space Shuttle’s heat shield for damage while in space.

craft was probably a radio. Then radar was developed to detect aircraft a long distance away. Radar soon became small enough and light enough to be carried by aircraft. The amount of electronic equipment in aircraft increased rapidly. The word avionics has been used to describe an aircraft’s electronic systems since the 1970s.

At first, an aircraft’s avionics were a collection of separate electrical and electronic circuits, each with its own wiring. Today, all the various circuits and systems work together, connected to an information highway called a data – bus. The databus carries information around an aircraft’s avionics systems in the same way that a computer’s databus carries information between the key­board, processor, memory, monitor, and other parts.

A lot of work goes into making sure that the different pieces of avionics equipment will work together in an aircraft without inter­fering with each other. This process is called systems integration. A big project, such as a new airliner, often has hundreds of engineers working on systems integration.

By late 1947 the X-1 was ready to show what it could do. On October 14, 1947, Major Charles “Chuck” Yeager sat in the cockpit of the orange-painted X-1 air­plane, which he had named Glamorous Glennis for his wife. He had to be helped into his seat because he had two broken ribs from a horse-riding acci­dent. A B-29 lumbered down the run­way, with the X-1 locked to its belly, and slowly climbed to 25,000 feet (7,620 meters). Then the signal came— release! For a moment, the airplane appeared to drop like a stone. Major Yeager then switched on the rocket engine to burn, and the X-1 took off.

That day, the X-1 reached a speed of 679 miles per hour (1,093 kilometers per hour). At 42,000 feet (12,802 meters), this speed is equal to Mach 1.05, or just above the speed of sound. Yeager had become the first person to fly at supersonic speed in level flight.

A few days later, the X-1 rocketed to a height of 70,119 feet (21,372 meters), setting a new world altitude record. The X-1 flew seventy-eight missions, reaching a top speed of 957 miles an hour (1,540 kilometers per hour) in March 1948.

After the X-1

Chuck Yeager went on to test the X-1’s successor, the X-1 A. Flying the new rocket plane, he set a world speed record of 1,650 miles per hour (2,655 kilometers per hour) or Mach 2.4, on December 12, 1953.

Two later and more advanced models of the X-1 (the X-1B and X1-E) were used to study specific areas of high­speed flight, including thermal (or heat) effects and different wing designs, adding to the data about supersonic per­formance. The only casualty of the test program was the X-1D. The aircraft was destroyed in 1951 after it had to be jet­tisoned from its B-50 “mother plane” following an explosion.

The Bell X-1 was followed by air­planes that flew faster and higher still, such as the Douglas Skyrocket. The Skyrocket was the first to fly at Mach 2 (1953). The Bell X-2 broke the Mach 3 barrier in 1956. The North American X – 15 was the ultimate in rocket planes. Like its predecessor the X-1, the X-15 was also launched from beneath a bomber. It broke record after record, and in 1967 flew at Mach 6.7—4,534 miles per hour (7,295 kilometers per hour), flying so high it was almost in space.

SEE ALSO:

• Air and Atmosphere • Aircraft,

Experimental • Aircraft Design

• Altitude • Engine • Jet and Jet

Power • Supersonic Flight

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Date of birth: July 1, 1872.

Place of birth: Cambrai, France.

Died: August 2, 1936.

Major contributions: First person to fly across the English Channel; first person to fly with two passengers; developer of the system for controlling direction and elevation; director of a company that produced an important fighter plane of World War I.

Awards: Member of France’s Legion d’Honneur.

hen he was a young man, Louis Bleriot made a small fortune by manufacturing headlights for automobiles. He then became fascinated by aviation.

Early Attempts

Beginning in 1900, Bleriot tried various aircraft designs, including one with bat­like wings flapped by the engine, several biplanes (with two sets of wings), a monoplane (single wing), and a design that had one wing set behind another. All of these test planes crashed.

Bleriot returned to a single-wing design and developed an airplane-the Bleriot Vl-with a modern appearance. The engine was in front, with large wheels underneath. The rudder and ele­vator were in the rear, and a smaller wheel was mounted below the tail. The plane’s body was completely covered, and there were no support wires visible on the exterior.

Bleriot flew the plane 240 feet (73 meters) before it crashed, and he decid­ed to perfect the design. As he tinkered, he developed a joystick to adjust eleva­tion and a bar under his feet to change direction. Similar systems are still used in aircraft today.

By 1909, Bleriot’s fortune was nearly gone, but he did not give up. Spurring him on was a large cash prize offered by the Daily Mail, a British newspaper, to the first person to fly across the English Channel (the stretch of water between England and France).

When the space race between the V United States and the Soviet Union began in 1957, the first U. S. rockets were launched from Cape Canaveral. Titan and Delta rockets are still launched from the same launch pads today.

In the early 1960s, the first U. S. manned spaceflights were launched from Cape Canaveral for the newly founded National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The first two manned suborbital Mercury flights were launched from Launch Complex 5 in 1961. Four manned orbital Mercury flights took off from Launch Complex 14 in 1961 and 1963. All ten manned Gemini missions began from Launch Complex 19. The Gemini missions took place in 1965 and 1966.

Manned launches switched to the nearby Kennedy Space Center when the Apollo missions began in 1967, but the Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station continue to work closely together. Unmanned launches, including those of NASA

space probes-the Mars Pathfinder, for example-take place at the Air Force Station. The station also fulfills its role as one of the two main U. S. military spaceports. (The other is Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California.)

The economies of Cape Canaveral, neighboring Merritt Island (home to the Kennedy Space Center), and the sur­rounding towns now depend on the space industry and the millions of tourists it attracts. The Cape Canaveral area has become known as Florida’s “Space Coast.”

SEE ALSO:

• Kennedy Space Center • NASA

• Rocket • Space Probe

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NASA communicates with its deep-space probes in a different way, by using the Deep Space Network. When radio signals from distant space probes arrive at Earth, they are very weak. Huge radio dishes are needed to

collect the signals. The dishes are too big to be launched into space, but a big dish on Earth cannot stay in constant contact with a space probe. For half of every day, the dish would be on the wrong side of Earth.

NASA uses three huge dishes to stay in touch with space probes all over the Solar System. The dishes, each 230 feet (70 meters) across, are spaced equally around the world. One dish is located at Goldstone, California. The second is near Madrid, Spain, and the third is near Canberra, Australia. At busy times, a 210-feet (64-meter) dish at Parkes, Australia, is also used.

The dishes must be big because the radio signals they receive are very weak.

If the signals from the farthest space probes were saved up for one billion years, there still would not be enough energy to power a light bulb. These dish­es, however, can lock onto the tiny radio signal from a space probe 10 billion miles (16 billion kilometers) from Earth!

SEE ALSO:

• Air Traffic Control • Avionics

• Satellite • Sound Wave

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Concorde

Type: Commercial transport, supersonic airliner.

Manufacturer: Aerospatiale (France) and British Aerospace.

First flight: March 2, 1969.

Primary users: Air France,

British Airways.

oncorde was a supersonic

transport (SST) that flew at Mach

2, which is twice the speed of sound. Tech­nically, it was a remark­able airplane, and its

passengers were thrilled by the experience of

speeding through the strato­sphere faster than a bullet.

Concorde began passenger services in 1976 and was retired in 2003.

In the 1950s, engineers began drawing up plans for a new generation of high-speed

О As Concorde prepares to land in 2003, the world’s only supersonic passenger service was coming to an end. When Concorde landed, the aircraft pointed upward, but its droop – snoop nose tipped downward to help the pilot’s view.

airliners. Development costs were so high that the French aerospace company Aerospatiale joined forces with British Aerospace to build a supersonic airliner. Two Concorde prototypes were built, one at Toulouse, in France, and the other at Filton, near Bristol in England. Concorde 001 first flew on March 2, 1969, in France. Concorde 002s first flight was on April 9, 1969, at Bristol.

Concorde was an instantly recogniz­able delta-wing airplane. It was powered by four Rolls-Royce/SNECMA Olympus turbojet engines, each producing 38,050 pounds (169 kilonewtons) of thrust. The plane cruised at just over Mach 2 at 51,000 feet (15,545 meters), equivalent to 1,354 miles per hour (2,179 kilometers per hour). This made it twice as fast as the first – generation jet airliners, such as the 707, that were in service when Concorde took to the skies. Concorde’s normal range was 3,870 miles (6,227 kilometers).

Much of the fuel was stored in the wings. The fuel acted as a coolant, helping to reduce the wing temperature when the aircraft was flying supersonic. When coming in to land, Concorde had a steep angle of attack, meaning that it pointed upward. To give the pilot a better view of the runway, Concorde had a “droop snoop,” a nose that could be lowered.

The passenger cabin was slimmer than the cabin of its wide-bodied trans­atlantic rival, the Boeing 747, which also flew for the first time in 1969. While the 747 could carry up to four times as many passengers, Concorde was expected to attract people willing to pay for a faster flight—New York to London in about 3 hours. Maximum seating in Concorde allowed for 144 passengers.

Air France and British Airways began scheduled passenger services simultane­ously on January 21, 1976. There were objections from U. S. environmental groups, however, which complained about Concorde’s noise and its “sonic boom.” They argued that Concorde would damage buildings, frighten livestock, and disturb sleepers at night. Environmental fears halted plans to fly Concorde supersonic across the United States, and without U. S. airline sales, Concorde’s commercial prospects were damaged. By the 1970s, air travel was a mass-market business. Airlines were eager to fill the 300 to 400 seats of jumbo jets and less eager to buy an air­plane that provided expensive, high­speed travel.

CONCORDSKI

No U. S. manufacturer ever built a supersonic transport. The Soviet Union, however, produced the Tupolev Tu-144, the first SST ever to fly (on December 31, 1968). Nicknamed ”Concordski” because of its close resemblance to Concorde with its drooping nose, the Tu-144 cruised at 1,550 miles per hour (2,500 kilome­ters per hour). Passenger services lasted only from November 1977 to June 1978, when the aircraft was withdrawn after a crash.

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On July 25, 2000, an Air France Concorde crashed after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. All 100 passengers, nine crew, and four peo­ple on the ground were killed. Accident investigators found that a tire had burst after hitting an object on the runway. The debris had fractured a fuel tank, causing a fire in one engine. In April 2003, the two airlines announced that they were retiring Concorde. In 2003, with several Concorde farewell flights, the first era of supersonic passenger transport came to an end.

SEE ALSO:

• Aircraft, Commercial • Aircraft Design • Supersonic Flight

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Charles Lindbergh made his famous solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. That feat stirred heiress Amy Phipps Guest to strive to be the first woman to make that flight. She bought an air­plane, but her family would not permit her to make the trip. Determined to see a woman achieve her goal, Guest asked publisher George Palmer Putnam to help her find someone who was willing and able to do so.

Earhart was recommended to Put­nam, who took a liking to her. (Later, the two were married.) Earhart later recalled her feelings when offered the chance to take part: “How could I refuse such a shining adventure!”

The flight took place on June 4, 1928. Earhart did none of the flying— two male pilots handled that chore. But the mere fact of her having been the first woman to cross the ocean gained her fame. She was heralded as “Lady Lindy” and treated to parades and banquets.

Earhart was determined to use her fame to promote flying for women. In 1929 she helped lead the effort to found an organization, the Ninety-Nines, which aimed to bring more women into aviation. The group’s name came from

the fact that it included ninety-nine of the 117 American women who held pilot’s licenses at the time.

The first recorded aerial combat between airplanes took place in November 1913, during a civil war in Mexico. Pilot Phillip Rader, flying on the side of General Victoriano Huerta’s forces,
exchanged pistol shots with Dean I. Lamb, a pilot serving with the army of the revolutionary leader Venustiano Carranza. Neither plane nor pilot was hit.

Fighter planes flew into combat for the first time in World War I (1914-1918). The first plane shot down by another airplane was a German air­craft, attacked in October 1914 by a French Voisin fighter.

A typical early fighter plane was the British FB5 Gunbus. This biplane had a crew of two and a top speed of only 70 miles per hour (113 kilometers per hour). The very first fighter planes had not been fitted with weapons-pilots from opposing sides, meeting in midair, exchanged pistol shots. The Gunbus, however, was more lethal; it had a single 0.303-inch machine gun, fired by

a gunner who sat in the nose of the airplane. To stop bullets from hitting the propeller, the Gunbus had a backward­facing propeller behind the pilot.

The fuels used by aircraft today are mainly made from oil. When they burn, they release gases into the atmosphere. One of these gases is carbon dioxide. Excessive carbon dioxide in Earth’s

О Photographed just before its landing in 1986, Voyager became the first aircraft to make a nonstop flight around the world without being refueled. Aircraft of the future will need to be increasingly fuel efficient.

atmosphere is one cause of the current global warming that Earth is experiencing. Scientists are working on ways to reduce carbon dioxide levels because global warming caus­es changes in the climate and weather patterns.

Burning fuels also cause pollution. The aviation industry, therefore, is beginning to think about developing new fuels for the future that will be kinder to the environment. Hydrogen is one possibility. Hydrogen is a very clean fuel, and, when it is burned, it produces heat and water.

Although hydrogen is used by rockets, there are problems with using hydrogen fuel in aircraft. It is difficult to transport and store safely because it catches fire very easily. Also, the production of hydrogen releases a lot of carbon diox­ide. When cleaner ways of making hydrogen have been developed and stor­age issues addressed, its use as an engine fuel is likely to become widespread.

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SEE ALSO:

• Energy • Engine • Rocket • Thrust ____

A glider is an airplane that flies without an engine. Sailplane is another name for a glider and it is often applied to lightweight gliders designed especially for soaring. A few glider models have a motor and a retractable propeller. Generally, gliders need the assistance of a tow airplane or a winch to get them into the air.

Gliders are flown for recreation and for sports competitions. Gliding is a very popular way to start flying because the aircraft are cheaper and simpler than powered airplanes. Gliding also offers the pilot the exhilarating experience of soaring high in the sky like a bird.

Aviation Pioneers

The earliest known airplane model is a 2,300-year-old wooden carving from ancient Egypt. Some experts think it is a model glider, while others believe it to be a carving of a bird. It is thought that gliders may have been built in China more than 2,400 years ago. Some of the earliest pioneering experiments in avia­tion were made with gliders. These devices were often little more than bird­like wings strapped to the arms of a hopeful but unsuccessful aviator.

The first person to prove that a glid­er could carry a person was British inventor Sir George Cayley (1773-1857). He built his first glider in 1809. In 1849 Cayley built a glider that carried a

TECHibTALK

THE GIANT

The largest glider ever built was the German Messerschmitt Me-321. Known as the "Giant," it first flew in 1941 during World War II. It was 92 feet (28 meters) long, had a wingspan of 180 feet (55 meters), and weighed 38 tons (34 metric tons) when fully loaded. This enormous glider was intended to carry tanks, guns, and troops for the German invasion of Great Britain—an invasion planned for 1940 that never took place.

The monstrous Giant was so heavy that towing it for launch proved difficult, and its designers eventually gave it six engines. With a top speed of only 149 miles per hour (240 kilometers per hour), the Giant proved an easy prey for Allied fighters. No more Giants were built after April 1944.

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ten-year-old boy a short distance down a hillside in Yorkshire, England. In 1853, Sir George persuaded his reluctant coachman to take a flight in another glider he had constructed.

Pioneers in the late nineteenth cen­tury experimented with kitelike gliders. The German inventor Otto Lilienthal made more than 2,000 successful glider flights before he was killed when one of his gliders crashed in 1896. The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, built their first glider in 1900. Their third glider

flew many times in August and September 1902 and was the prototype for the historic Flyer of 1903.

helicopter is an aircraft with whirling rotor blades instead of fixed wings. It gets its lift from a set of spinning blades, called a rotor, which are turned by an engine.

The helicopter is one of the most use­ful aircraft. It does not need airfields to take off and land, and its flying abilities include vertical landings and takeoffs in addition to hovering. The name helicop­ter means “spiral wing”-a helicopter seems to spiral, or twist, its way through the air as it flies.

The First Ideas

Toy helicopters are quite easy to make from a spiral twist of paper, so it is not surprising that early inventors toyed with the idea of a flying machine using this principle. As far back as the 1400s,
the brilliant Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci sketched a flying machine with a large airscrew, resem­bling a helicopter. Sadly for him, there was no engine capable of powering such a machine, and it was never built.

Inventors experimenting with model helicopters with a single spinning screw, or rotor, came up against a serious flaw. As the rotor blades turned in one direc­tion, the body of the machine turned in the opposite direction. This problem was overcome by having twin rotors turning in opposite directions. In 1843, English aviation pioneer Sir George Cayley designed a helicopter along these lines,
with two sets of rotors. Steam engines, however, were the only power unit around, and they were far too heavy for a helicopter. There was no way to turn a toy into a machine that could lift people.