Category FLIGHT and M ОТІOIM

Alcock and Brown were instantly hailed as heroes. The Daily Mail held a banquet in their honor, and King George V received them at Windsor Castle and awarded both pilots a knighthood. Vickers offered Alcock and Brown jobs for the rest of their lives.

Later in 1919, Alcock flew an exper­imental seaplane for Vickers across the English Channel to France. Thick fog caused his aircraft to crash, and the impact killed him.

Brown lived nearly thirty more years after Alcock’s death. He worked for

RE-CREATED FLIGHTS

In 2005 two fliers repeated Alcock and Brown’s legendary flight. Pilot Steve Fossett and copilot and navi­gator Mark Rebholz flew a Vimy that was a reconstruction of the original plane. Fossett and Rebholz took off from Newfoundland on July 3. They tried to follow faithfully the original flight path. Fossett flew the plane at low speeds of 75 miles per hour (121 kilometers per hour). Rebholz used only the type of navigational equipment that Brown had used on his flight. On July 4, 18 hours after takeoff, the airplane landed on a golf course in Ireland. The same replica aircraft was then used to repeat two other historic flights that had taken place in a Vimy: the first England-to-Australia flight of 1919 and the first England-to-South Africa flight of 1920.

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Vickers and then for an engineering company until World War II began. In 1939 Brown rejoined the military to train pilots in the British Royal Air Force. He died in 1948.

SEE ALSO:

• Biplane • Bomber • Navigation

• Pilot • World War I

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The first astronauts wore spacesuits throughout their missions. These suits were developed from the pressure suits worn by high-altitude fliers to combat the effects of altitude. The first astronaut to test a spacesuit outside a spacecraft was Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. In 1965, he stepped outside his Voskhod 2 orbiter and spent 24 minutes of extra­vehicular activity (EVA), linked to his spacecraft by two lines.

Today, Space Shuttle astronauts and Space Station crews are either tethered by a line to their spacecraft or have their boots locked into place on a robotic arm. They can also use a jetpack system called a simplified aid for EVA rescue (SAFER). First tested in 1994, the unit

can propel astronauts back to safety in emergencies—if they became untethered, for example.

Modern spacesuits have interchange­able parts in different sizes so suits can be adjusted to fit each astronaut. The Moon suits used by the Apollo astro­nauts were more comfortable than the first spacesuits because the Moon suits introduced rubberized joints that made walking and bending easier. The modern spacesuit, designed for floating rather than walking, is made of layers of syn­thetic materials—such as Kevlar, Teflon, and Dacron—with an outer skin of Teflon-coated glass fiber. The layers shield out harmful radiation and protect against the risk of puncture by dust par­ticles flying in space.

Temperatures in space are extreme: 250°F (121°C) in sun, and a freezing -250°F (-157°C) in shadow. An internal cooling system circulates water through tubes inside the spacesuit, while the suit’s heating elements prevent the astronaut from freezing when working in shadow. A gold-coated sun visor in the helmet shields the astronaut’s eyes from the sun’s glare, and flashlights on the helmet can be switched on to give extra light when working outside the spacecraft.

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NOTABLE ASTRONAUTS

John H. Glenn was the first American in orbit (1962) and, at age seventy-seven, the oldest person to go into space (1998).

Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin were the first people to set foot on the Moon (1969).

John W. Young and Robert L.

Crippen made the first Space Shuttle flight (1981).

Guion S. Bluford was the first African American astronaut (1983).

Sally Ride was the first female U. S. astronaut (1983).

Svetlana Savitskaya was the first woman to make an EVA (1984).

Jake Garn, U. S. senator, was the first politician in space (1985).

Valeriy Poliyarkov stayed in space a record 437 days (1986-1987).

Mae Jemison was the first female African American astronaut (1992).

Bill Shepherd was the first U. S. astronaut to crew the International Space Station (2000).

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SEE ALSO:

• Apollo Program • Armstrong,

Neil • Challenger and Columbia

• Gagarin, Yuri • Glenn, John

• International Space Station

• Ride, Sally • Spaceflight

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When World War II ended in 1945, it had created a legacy of new aviation technology. Aircraft designers wondered how to use recently developed rocket engines and jet engines in civilian fly­ing. These developments had opened the door to supersonic flight, or flying faster than the speed of sound.

The speed of sound, in air at sea level, is about 761 miles per hour (1,225 kilometers per hour), but it is lower at higher altitudes. The speed of sound is also known as Mach 1. Twice the speed of sound is Mach 2, and three times the speed of sound is Mach 3.

TECH**TALK

Length: 31 feet (9.5 meters).

Wingspan: 28 feet (8.5 meters).

Weight: 12,250 pounds (5,562 kilograms).

Engine: Reaction Motors XLR-11- RM-3 four-chamber rocket engine.

Fuel: Alcohol and liquid oxygen.

Thrust: 6,000 pounds (2,722 kilo­grams or 26,689 newtons).

The Bell X-1 was shaped like a bullet for maximum streamlining. Its wings and tailplane were conventional in design. (In the 1940s, other experi­mental high-speed aircraft had strange shapes.) The stubby-winged X-1, however, had hidden secrets. Its wings were thin but very strong. A stabilizer, which the pilot could move up and down, improved stability and control. Later supersonic planes were also fitted with stabilizers.

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Although propeller aircraft had reached supersonic speed during dives, very little was known about how a plane behaved at such speeds. Nor did scien­tists know much about the effect of high-speed flying on pilots. Designers worried that pilots might lose conscious­ness or that the plane would become uncontrollable. Heat friction and pres­sure waves as the airplane reached supersonic speeds might shatter the air­craft into pieces.

U. S. scientists built the Experimental Sonic 1, or X-1 for short, to explore these problems. The X-1 was developed jointly by the U. S. Air Force, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and the Bell Company. Bell is now best known for making helicop­ters, but in 1942 it built the P-59 Airacomet, the first jet plane with a U. S.-built engine.

Like airplanes, some birds fly in forma­tion. Many people have admired the V-formation of a group of geese in flight. Formation flying offers an aero­dynamic benefit: each bird gets extra lift from the slipstream (the air pushed back) of the bird in front. The formation also keeps the birds together on long flights.

Some birds make incredibly long journeys during migration, crossing oceans and continents. Small migratory birds usually fly at night, stopping dur­ing the day to rest and feed. Larger birds often fly by day, resting at night.

How birds navigate is not clearly understood. They rely on instinct in some mysterious way. The European cuckoo lays its eggs in the nest of anoth­er breed of bird and flies away, leaving the chick to be raised by host parents.

The young cuckoo, without ever having had contact with its real parents, will then fly south to Africa in winter as those parents did. Birds follow visual landmarks such as rivers and mountains, and it is thought they also navigate by the stars and by Earth’s magnetic field. Many birds return to the same nesting site year after year.

ape Canaveral is a sandy headland on Florida’s Atlantic Ocean coast. (Cape Canaveral was officially renamed Cape Kennedy in 1963, but the name reverted to Cape Canaveral ten years later.) Cape Canaveral is home to two of the world’s most famous U. S. space launch sites, one of which is Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The station, operated by the U. S. Air Force, is the East Coast spaceport for the Department of Defense. The other space­port located on Cape Canaveral is the Kennedy Space Center.

Cape Canaveral was chosen as the leading U. S. launch site for three reasons. First, it is close to the equator. During a launch, rockets get an extra push from Earth’s rotation, and this effect is great­est nearest the equator. Second, there is
a vast expanse of ocean to the east of Cape Canaveral. Rockets that fail are likely to fall into the ocean, not onto land. Third, the area has good trans­portation links with the rest of the United States. These connections are important for the delivery of rockets, spacecraft, and supplies.

The first satellite, Sputnik 1, carried a radio transmitter. In 1957 the only way to tell if the satellite really had made it into space and was orbiting Earth was to listen for the bleeps that its radio trans­mitted as it passed overhead.

The frequencies of radio signals used to communicate with spacecraft have to be chosen carefully because some radio signals will not travel through Earth’s atmosphere into space. Radio signals used for space communications today are mainly in the super high frequency (SHF) band. Radio signals in this band have frequencies from 3 gigahertz to 30 gigahertz. (A gigahertz is equal to 1 bil­lion hertz, or waves per second.)

In the early days of spaceflight, a ground station could communicate with a spacecraft only while it was above the horizon. When it passed over the ground station and disappeared below the hori­zon again, contact was lost. Ground sta­tions had to be set up all around the world to stay in contact with early manned spacecraft.

Various types of drone are in service. Some, such as the Dragon Eye, operate

at low altitude. Others, such as the EQ-4 Global Hawk, can fly at high altitudes, staying in the air for 24 hours. The Global Hawk is capable of very long flights: in 2001, a Global Hawk craft flew 7,500 miles (12,068 kilometers) nonstop across the Pacific from the United States to Australia. The Global Hawk is as big as a small airplane, 44 feet (13.4 meters) long with a wingspan of 116 feet (35.4 meters). It can cruise at

around 400 miles per hour (644 kilometers per hour) at a height of

65,0 feet (19,812 meters). Using its radar, cameras, and other sen­sors, the Global Hawk can scan an area the size of the state of Illinois in a period of 24 hours.

The smaller MQ-1 Predator is used by the U. S. Joint Forces Command. The M stands for multi-role missions; Q means it is unmanned. Predator is normally flown at medium alti­tude on long-endurance missions. The aircraft and its control system are portable-they can be loaded into a freight plane, such as a C-130 Hercules, and airlifted anywhere in the world. The Predator drone does, however, need a runway to take off and land.

Drones can be made very small. The Israelis have some aircraft that can fly in through an open window and out again on spying missions. Known as Birdy, the smallest Israeli spy drone weighs only about 3 pounds

(1.4 kilograms). Israel uses this minia­ture airplane and other slightly larger drones (all of which look like model air­planes) to take photographs of sensitive areas. The aircraft are small enough to be carried by a soldier and can be oper­ated from a laptop computer.

In 2006 the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department announced that it was using drones. Its SkySeer is a small robot pro­peller airplane that weighs 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms) and is battery driven. An officer can carry the kit in a backpack and can assemble the drone in as little as 5 minutes. At the touch of a button, the engine whirrs, and the plane takes off. The drone carries a video camera and can fly over a crime scene (such as a burglary) to scan the rooftops of surrounding buildings. It also can help locate people lost in inaccessible terrain—a ravine or forest, for example—
using low-light or infrared cameras to detect the heat given off by a body.

One advantage of drones over manned helicopters is their cheapness—a SkySeer kit costs around $30,000. Another asset is the speed with which the “eye in the sky” can be deployed when the need arises. Their size, in addi­tion, gives them access to places where larger aircraft cannot go.

SEE ALSO:

• Aircraft, Military • Control

System • Radar • World War II

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The ramjet is a jet engine for very high­speed aircraft. It has no fan or compres­sor. The engine has to be moving at about 600 miles per hour (965 kilome­ters per hour) before it starts working. At that speed, air rams into the engine so fast that a compressor is not needed to compress it. The shape of the engine enables this to happen. With no fan or compressor, there is no need for a tur­bine. Ramjets work best in aircraft flying at more than twice the speed of sound.

SEE ALSO:

• Aircraft Design • Fighter Plane

• Jet and Jet Power • Propeller

• Rocket • Thrust

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TECH^TALK

EXTRA THRUST

Some aircraft are able to swivel their engine exhaust nozzles to point in different directions. This action is called thrust vectoring. It was invent­ed for aircraft such as the Harrier Jump Jet, which takes off straight up in the air by pointing its engine nozzles downward; it then swings the engine nozzles backward to fly normally. Some fighter planes use thrust vectoring to help them maneuver fast in air battles. The engine nozzles of the F-22 Raptor, for example, swivel in this way.

A fighter plane also sometimes needs a sudden burst of power or speed to take off or to escape trou­ble in an air battle. Fighters do this by using an afterburner, which sprays fuel into the jet engine’s exhaust nozzle. The fiery, hot jet of gas leaves the engine, and the fuel instantly burns and gives the plane an extra push. Afterburners are normally used only for short periods because they use up fuel very quick­ly. The F-22 Raptor was designed to fly at supersonic speeds for long periods without using afterburners.

This ability, called supercruise, gives the fighter plane an advantage over an enemy plane that may run out of fuel in mid-combat.

fuel is a substance used to pro­duce heat or power. Fuels con­tain energy that is usually obtained by burning the fuel. Aircraft and spacecraft use fuel to produce power. When fuel is burned inside an engine, it produces a lot of gas. The heat makes the gas expand rapidly, and this provides the power to propel the air­craft through the air. A variety of different fuels are used in aviation and spaceflight.

Aviation Fuels

There are many aviation fuels, each one a different mixture of chemicals. Extra chemicals called additives are included in the mixture to make it burn smoothly instead of exploding and to stop it from freezing solid or growing bacteria.

Early aircraft used the same sort of gasoline fuel as automobiles. When new types of engines were developed, new fuels were produced specially for them. Today, aircraft with piston engines (like automobile engines) use a type of gaso­line called Avgas. The first jet engines built in Germany used gasoline, too. Modern jet engines burn a different fuel, called kerosene.

The first fuel produced especially for jet engines was called Jet Propellant 1, or JP-1. When fuels were created for new military aircraft, each new fuel was given a JP number: JP-2, JP-3, etc. The U. S. Navy, for example, wanted to develop an aircraft fuel that would not

FUEL TANKS

Planes usually store fuel in tanks inside their wings. The Boeing 747­400 jumbo jet’s giant wings hold an enormous amount of fuel. There are three fuel tanks in each wing, anoth­er tank in the space where the wings join the fuselage, and another tank inside the horizontal stabilizer, or tailplane. When the tanks are all full, they hold more than 57,000 gallons (about 216,000 liters). This huge amount of fuel enables the 747-400 to fly a distance of more than 8,000 miles (12,872 kilometers) before it has to land and refuel.

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catch fire as easily as JP-1, so that it could be stored more safely on board ships. This new fuel was named JP-5.

Fuels for nonmilitary jets have differ­ent names. The most widely used fuels for commercial jets are Jet A-1 (most common worldwide) and Jet A (most used in the United States). A different jet fuel, Jet B, is sometimes used in the coldest parts of the world, including Canada and Alaska. Jet B is a mixture of gasoline and kerosene-the gasoline helps the fuel burn in very cold air.

When superfast spy planes were built in the 1960s, they were unable to use the same fuel as other jet planes. They flew at more than three times the speed of sound. At such a high speed, air rubbing
against a plane’s body heats it up. The wings of the new spy planes became so hot that fuel stored inside them could explode.

Chemists created a new fuel, JP-7, that could be heated to very high tem­peratures without exploding. It is said that a burning match dropped into JP-7 will actually go out.

Glenn became the space hero that NASA officials and the American people so wanted. He was invited to speak to a joint session of Congress and was hon­ored with parades across the country. Four million people turned out for Glenn’s parade in New York City. A smaller but even more appreciative crowd turned out in his hometown of New Concord, Ohio.

After his return to NASA, Glenn was assigned to work on Project Apollo, the space program aimed at sending American astronauts to the Moon. He left NASA in 1964, however, and began working in business. Ten years later, Glenn won election to the U. S. Senate, where he served for the next twenty-four years. He won

О Seated between President John F. Kennedy (left) and General Leighton Davis (right), John Glenn (center) rides in a celebratory parade in Florida after his historic spaceflight in 1962.

reelection three times. Glenn tried to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1984, but his campaign never got off the ground. In 1997, he announced that he would retire from the Senate.