Category FLIGHT and M ОТІOIM

Airplanes fly along set routes, called air­ways, in the same way that cars travel

Farsighted military experts, including Colonel Billy Mitchell of the U. S. Army, predicted that the bomber plane would hold the key to victory in any future war. This forecast proved to be deadly accurate. At the beginning of World War II (1939-1945), the German Luftwaffe (air force) blasted its way across Europe in blitzkriegs (meaning “lightning wars”) that overran Poland, Holland, Belgium, and France.

The major air battle of World War II was the Battle of Britain (1940), in which British Spitfires and Hurricanes went into combat against Germany’s Messerschmitts. Superiority in the air helped the Allies win invasion battles in North Africa, Sicily, and France. Allied bombers, meanwhile, pounded German factories and cities.

In 1941, Japan used carrier-based airplanes to bomb the U. S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II. Later sea battles in the Pacific were won by U. S. naval air­planes rather than by the navy’s ships. Key U. S. warplanes included fighters such as the P-51 and bombers such as the B-24, of which 18,000 were built (more than any other World War II bomber). The surrender of Japan in 1945 came after U. S. bombers dropped two atomic bombs that devastated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

World War II also saw the first use of important new aviation technology, including radar, long-range rockets, cruise missiles, and jet planes. The first

TEC

AIRCRAFT DESIGNATION

Aircraft types are designated by a system of letters and numbers. The first letter indicates the aircraft’s type or role. F indicates a fighter plane, while H stands for helicopter.

The number after the first letter indi­cates an aircraft’s place in develop­ment history. After the F-7 Tigercat, for example, came the F-8 Bearcat and then the F-9 Panther. A second letter indicates a later, usually improved model. The F-14 Tomcat began life as the F-14A (1972); later models were the F-14B and F-14D. Some of the military aircraft desig­nations are:

A attack

B bomber

C transportation

E electronic warfare

F fighter

H helicopter

O observation

T trainer

U utility

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jet in combat was Germany’s Me-262. With a speed of almost 550 miles per hour (885 kilometers per hour), it was much faster than a propeller-driven fighter. The first American jet fighter to enter service was the XP-80 Shooting Star, first flown in January 1944.

Airports may be ranked in terms of number of flights or number of passen­gers. Most U. S. airports handle more domestic flights than international flights. The busiest airport in the world is Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, Georgia, which handles more than 84 million passengers each year. Atlanta is closely followed by O’Hare International in Chicago, with 76 million passengers. The world’s busiest airport for interna­tional travel is Heathrow in London, England, with about 60 million interna­tional arrivals and departures each year. The airport that handles the most inter­national passengers in the United States

THE WORLD’S BUSIEST AIRPORTS

is John F. Kennedy International in New York City. New York has two interna­tional airports-Kennedy, or JFK, and Newark. Tokyo, Japan, also has two international airports operating from its capital city-Haneda and Narita. Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports offer passengers international flights from London, England.

The busiest cargo airport in the United States is Memphis International in Tennessee. It handles over 2.87 mil­lion tons (2.6 million metric tons) of freight a year. Most airfreight going through Memphis is transported by FedEx, the international courier service.

Even before President Kennedy made his challenge, NASA had launched Project Mercury. The project took the first American, Alan Shepard, into space on May 5, 1961, but he did not orbit Earth. After a second suborbital flight in 1961 by U. S. astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom, the first orbital flight by a U. S. astronaut was made by John Glenn on February 20, 1962. Three more Mercury flights followed, testing various aspects of spaceflight and increased flight time.

NASA’s next program was Project Gemini, designed to address some of the challenges faced in taking people to the Moon. NASA had chosen an option that would involve a rendezvous, or steering two spacecraft near each other. It would also require docking, which meant join­ing the two spacecraft together. None of this had been done before, and the steer­ing and navigation techniques needed to perform the tasks had never been tested.

In 1965 and 1966, ten manned Gemini missions tested several new space techniques. Gemini 3 had the first on-board computer used by astronauts. Ed White became the first American to “walk” in space when he left the safety of Gemini 4 and floated in space attached by two cords. Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 achieved the first rendezvous when they met up in December 1965. The astronauts on Gemini 7 stayed in space for two weeks, showing that it was possible for people to survive long enough to travel to the Moon and back. On March 16, 1966, Gemini 8 performed the first docking of two space vehicles in orbit. The docking was performed by Neil Armstrong, who would be the com­mander of Apollo 11. All the Gemini flights contributed vital knowledge and experience to Project Apollo.

Other industries are beginning to use avionics technology that was developed for aircraft and spacecraft. Some ships are now fitted with transponders that send out a radio signal to identify the ship, just like airliner transponders. The control center of a modern passen­ger liner or cargo ship is known as the bridge. The bridge is fitted with flat panel screens showing information col­lected by sensors all over the ship.

Many vehicles now have electronic systems to control their engines, just like a plane’s engine management system. Increasing numbers of vehicles are using the same satellite navigation system that commercial and military aircraft use.

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SEE ALSO:

• Cockpit • Communication • Control

System • Fighter Plane • Materials

and Structures • Navigation • Radar

• Space Shuttle

Venturis are used in the fuel system of some small piston engines in aircraft. Air flows into the engine through a venturi tube. The air speeds up as it squeezes through the narrowest part of the tube. According to Bernoulli’s

О This diagram shows Bernoulli’s Principle as it applies in a venturi tube (top) and to an airfoil in flight (bottom).

DANIEL BERNOULLI (1700-1782)

Daniel Bernoulli was born in Groningen, a city in the Netherlands in Europe. The Bernoulli family produced a number of outstanding mathematicians, but Daniel is the most famous. After gaining a doctorate in medicine, he became a professor of mathematics at St. Petersburg in Russia in 1725. In 1733, Bernoulli moved to Basel, Switzerland, where his family came from originally. He worked first as a professor of anatomy and botany and then of natural philosophy at the University of Basel. Bernoulli’s great work, a book called Hydrodynamica, was published in 1738.

О Daniel Bernoulli’s Hydrodynamica included a description of Bernoulli’s Principle.

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Principle, the air pressure where the tube narrows falls. The fuel pipe is connected to the venturi at this point. The low air pressure inside the venturi sucks a spray of fuel droplets into the engine along with the air. The part of the engine that does this is called the carburetor.

Bernoulli’s Principle is often used to explain how an aircraft wing produces lift. The air that flows over the curved top of the wing speeds up, and the air pressure there falls. Below the wing, the air pressure increases. Low pressure above the wing and high pressure below it are often said to create the upward force of lift.

In fact, lift is more complex than this. The difference in air pressure does not explain all the lift produced by the wing. The curved shape of a wing and its angle, or tilt, deflects air downward. According to Newton’s third law of motion, to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, deflecting air downward also produces the upward force of lift.

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SEE ALSO:

• Laws of Motion • Lift and Drag

• Newton, Isaac • Pressure • Wing

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The company builds a wide range of commercial airplanes, from the long – serving 747 airliner to the new 787 Dreamliner. Military aircraft include the C-17 Globemaster, the CH-47 Chinook twin-rotor transport helicopter, the AH – 64D Apache attack helicopter, and the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor V/STOL airplane.

The company has a huge program of fighter planes, including F/A-18 Hornet, F-15 Eagle, and F-22 Raptor fighters. In partnership with the Northrop Grumman Corporation, Boeing built the B-2 stealth

О The Boeing Company is headquartered at this building in Chicago, Illinois. Approximately 155,000 people in sixty-seven countries work for Boeing. More than half the company’s employees have college degrees.

bomber. Some of its famous vintage air­planes, such as the B-17 of World War II, are still flown at air shows, while the giant B-52 bomber remains in service with the U. S. Air Force more than fifty years after it first thundered into the skies in 1952.

Boeing’s space and missile develop­ment began with the Bomarc missile in the 1950s. Boeing built the first stage of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo program as well as the Lunar Roving Vehicle used by Apollo astronauts for exploring the Moon. The company’s current satellite activities include the Sea Launch communications satellite system. Boeing is also actively involved in both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station programs.

Video images of the vehicle climbing away from the launch pad showed a flame jetting out of the booster where the smoke had been seconds earlier. The flame was like a blowtorch on the bot­tom of the external fuel tank and on one of the metal struts connecting the tank to the solid rocket booster.

Hydrogen started leaking from the tank, feeding the flame. The strut was weakened so much by the heat that it gave way, allowing the booster rocket to swing out of position and collide with the tank. The tank was torn apart, releasing a massive amount of liquid hydrogen and then liquid oxygen.

Just a fraction of a second later, Challenger disappeared in a huge fire­ball. The booster rockets separated from the rest of the vehicle and flew away on their own. They were triggered to self-destruct by a radio signal from the ground. Challenger broke up, and wreck­age rained down into the ocean. It was obvious that the astronauts had perished and there would be no survivors. In the weeks that followed, U. S. Navy divers recovered about a third of the space­craft, half of the solid rocket boosters, and half of the external fuel tank.

A presidential commission was set up to investigate and review the causes of the Challenger accident. The remaining three Space Shuttles (Columbia, Atlantis, and Discovery) were grounded for the next 2 years. Meanwhile, a new Space Shuttle, named Endeavour, was built to replace Challenger.

Challenger’s crew of seven included Christa McAuliffe. She was not a pro­fessional pilot, engineer, or scientist like the other astronauts. McAuliffe was a schoolteacher, and she was to be the first of a series of teachers to go into space as part of the Teacher in Space program. Students all over the world were to see her teach science from orbit. The program was suspend­ed after the accident until August 2007, when teacher Barbara Morgan (who had trained with McAuliffe) went into space on STS-118.

The other crew members who died on Challenger were:

• Commander: Francis R. Scobee.

• Pilot: Michael J. Smith.

• Mission Specialist: Judith A. Resnick.

• Mission Specialist: Ellison S. Onizuka.

• Mission Specialist: Ronald E. McNair.

• Payload Specialist: Gregory B. Jarvis.

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Date of birth: May 21, 1878.

Place of birth: Hammondsport,

New York.

Died: July 23, 1930.

Major contributions: Aviation pioneer; built the world’s first seaplane.

lenn Curtiss showed a knack as a mechanic and a taste for speed at an early age. As a young child, Curtiss raced other children on bicycles in his town. He opened a bicycle repair shop at age seventeen and also began working with engines. Soon after, he built his first motorcycle. In 1902 he formed a new company to produce motorcycles in large numbers. At the same time, he began racing them, win­ning several different championships and setting speed records. People called him “the fastest man alive.”

Curtiss’s motorcycle engines were light and powerful, making them perfect for aircraft. Hearing of Curtiss’s success with motorcycles, pioneer balloonist Thomas Baldwin asked him to develop an engine for an airship he was building. Going aloft with Baldwin, Curtiss devel­oped an interest in flying.

In 1907 Alexander Graham Bell – inventor of the telephone—and others formed a new group, called the National Aerial Experiment Association, to build airplanes. They hired Curtiss. In 1908 Curtiss and his crew produced a small plane called the June Bug. With Curtiss flying it, the June Bug won a contest to become the first American airplane to travel 1 kilometer (0.6 miles)—in fact, Curtiss flew twice the required distance. The next year, Curtiss won another American race with a new airplane. In the late summer of 1909, in Reims, France, he won several competitions, enhancing his reputation.

Curtiss gained another triumph in 1910. The New York World newspaper was offering a $10,000 prize to the first pilot to fly from Albany, New York, down the Hudson River to New York City within a day. Curtiss successfully performed the feat, winning the money and even more acclaim.

Curtiss faced a different challenge in 1911: to produce a working seaplane. He placed a long float under the fuselage of an airplane as well as smaller ones under each wing. The plane had wheels so it also could be land-based. The wheels were retractable—the first time

this feature appeared on an aircraft. Curtiss built the seaplane for the U. S. Navy and demonstrated it successfully several times in 1911.

In 1912 Curtiss produced a successful flying boat. Like a regular seaplane, a flying boat can be landed on water. Instead of using floats, however, it lands on the fuselage itself.

Curtiss began building airplanes that the U. S. Army and Navy bought as trainers. Each had two cockpits and two sets of controls, so an experienced pilot could take over if a trainee encountered problems. The most well-known of these trainers was the Jenny, which became the standard military trainer during World War I. It was also popular with stunt pilots after the war.

During the 1920s Curtiss continued to build new designs. He also became interested in developing real estate in the Miami, Florida, area. He continued working until his death in 1930.

Curtiss met Orville and Wilbur Wright in the summer of 1906. At the time his only aviation work had been with air­ships. Since the Wrights did not see Curtiss as a rival, they were more open with him than usual. Later, when Curtiss was working on airplanes, the Wrights came to think that he had stolen ideas from them. They sued him, and the case stayed in the courts until World War I.

At that time, the government forced all aircraft companies to pool their patents in the interests of national security. As a result, the case no longer mattered. Years later, the Curtiss and Wright com­panies merged and became one.

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SEE ALSO:

• Airship • Flying Boat and Seaplane

• Landing Gear • Wright, Orville and Wilbur

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Date of birth: March 14, 1879.

Place of birth: Wurttemberg, Germany. Died: April 18, 1955.

Major contribution: Developed general and special theories of relativity, explaining the motion of bodies in space and time.

Awards: Nobel Prize in Physics; Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London, United Kingdom; Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, United Kingdom; Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia; Max-Planck Medal of the German Physical Society; honors from many universities and other institutions.

lbert Einstein became interested in science and mathematics as a child. Although brilliant, Einstein was not a good student. He had little patience for learning by memoriza­tion, which was the common method of education at the time. At sixteen, he dropped out of school for a while. Later, at university in Switzerland, he angered his professors by skipping classes so he could focus on his own ideas.

Einstein earned a teacher’s diploma in 1901, but he could not find a teach­ing job. His situation continued to wors­en for two years, until a family friend found Einstein employment in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland. The job gave Einstein an income. Because it was not demanding, it also gave him time to think about theoretical problems.

In 1905, Einstein published several scientific papers. One set forth his Special Theory of Relativity. Another offered his famous equation E=mc2 (that is, energy is equal to the mass of an object times the speed of light squared). Einstein said that an object cannot move as fast as the speed of light, although it can near that speed. The closer it gets to that speed, the slower time passes for that object from the perspective of someone who is standing still.

In 1915 Einstein published another paper explaining his General Theory of Relativity. In this, he stated that time joins the three dimensions of space (height, width, and depth) as a dimen­sion of matter. Matter, Einstein said, exists in “space-time,” and gravitation is a bending of space-time that pulls objects toward each other. He proposed that the curvature of space-time would cause light to be bent around the Sun.

Einstein’s ideas were not widely accepted at first. In 1919, however, sci­entists found that the light from stars did bend around the Sun, as Einstein had suggested. Immediately, he was hailed as a genius.

Einstein became one of the most famous scientists of his age. He gave lectures and speeches around the world. By the early 1930s, however, Germany— where Einstein then lived—was no longer safe. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party were growing in power and began persecuting Jews. Einstein, who was a Jew, left Germany in 1932. He settled in Princeton, New Jersey.

As the 1930s progressed,

Hitler gained more power in Germany and began to rebuild the nation’s armed forces. Meanwhile, scien­tists there and in other countries began using the theories of Einstein and other physicists to develop a powerful new weapon: the atomic bomb. In 1939 Einstein wrote a letter to the U. S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning him that the Germans were making progress in this work. He urged Roosevelt to undertake a crash program to develop such a weapon.

As a result, the Manhattan Project was launched. The huge U. S. project produced the world’s first atomic weapons, which were used in 1945 on two Japanese cities in a devasting-and suc­cessful-attempt to persuade Japan to surrender. The bombings brought an end to World War II.

Einstein spent the rest of his years in pursuit of two causes. One was peace. Although he had supported the fight against Hitler during World War II, Einstein was generally a pacifist. The other was an attempt to develop a unified field theory in physics-that is, Einstein hoped to explain how the major theories in physics could all be united in one single idea. He was unable to
achieve this goal before his death. Even today, physicists still wrestle with the problem.

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SEE ALSO:

• Energy • Force • Gravity

• Newton, Isaac • Relativity,

Theory of