Category SUPERPLANES John Gabriel Navarra

The traditional purpose of aircraft has been to provide a means of transportation for people and cargo. In this third section, you will read about helicopters, VTOLs, and the space shuttle program. Each of these machines is designed to accomplish the task of transporting people and cargo in a very special way.

Many agencies of government are beginning to find that their missions can best be accomplished by the use of air­craft. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis­tration, a branch of the United States Department of Com­merce, for example, has found that specially outfitted aircraft can provide valuable information about the atmos­phere and the ocean. In addition, specially equipped re­search aircraft are being used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to make surveys of the Earth’s surface and objects in space.

Private companies are finding that aircraft can help them in their tasks, too. The Zapata Corporation, for exam­ple, is a company that uses modern technology to good ad­vantage. They have found a very important use for a spe­cially equipped light plane.

Most helicopters flying today use simple rotating blades to get lift and control. A main rotating blade lifts the craft. The small blade at the tail helps the pilot to move the hel­icopter in different directions.

The tail blade does something else, too. It balances the twisting forces of the main blade. Without the tail blade the cabin of the helicopter would spin like a top.

Sikorsky Aircraft s ABC helicopter is shown in the photo below. The ABC does not have a tail blade. It has two main blades. One is placed above the other. These blades rotate in opposite directions. They balance each other and the cabin does not spin.

The ABC in the photo is flying over the Connecticut countryside. The tail with movable parts allows the pilot to change direction. This new tail feature gives the pilot greater control of the craft and offers improved maneu – ■ verability.

Sikorsky Aircrafts twin-turbine-powered S-76 shown above has a four-blade main rotor. No wheels can be seen in the photo. The wheels are retractable. The S-76 carries up to twelve passengers plus a crew of two. It has a maxi­mum cruise speed of 179 miles per hour and a range of 460 miles.

The instrument panel of the S-76 is shown below. IFR equipment is installed. The S-76 is equipped with com­munication and navigation aids for all-weather operation.

The Sikorsky S-58T—shown in the photos on this page—is a medium-lift helicopter. The S-58T above is heading for a drop zone on the shore in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The helicopter is carrying a load of cement from one of the ships waiting in the harbor. Helicopter unload­ing is being used because Jeddah’s dock facilities are not adequate for the amount of shipping coming into the port.

The Sikorsky S-61 can carry thirty passengers plus its crew. This helicopter has a cruise speed of 140 miles per hour and a range of about 500 miles. Okanagan Helicop­ters in Canada and New York Airways in the United States put the S-61 to good use in passenger service.

The S-61 gives good reliable service. One of these trans­port helicopters operated by the Evergreen Company is shown landing on a drilling rig in the Gulf of Alaska. High winds, heavy seas, ice, rain, and snow are constant threats to operations in these waters.

Oceans and mountains are no longer significant barriers to travel. In this age of jet aircraft the time it takes to cross such barriers is not very significant. Today it is possible to reach any location on this planet of ours in less than twenty-four hours.

The high-speed transportation of jet aircraft is available to almost everyone. Each day commercial airlines carry more than one-half million people on giant subsonic air­craft. High-performance military aircraft are streaking across the sky at twice the speed of sound. And commer­cial supersonic transports are carrying passengers from continent to continent.

Our present world-wide transportation network would not be possible without jet aircraft. The airplane is an im­portant part of our social, political, and economic life. In this book you will find information about some of the air­craft used in commercial and military aviation. In addition, you will find a section that details the use of aircraft for special purposes such as weather forecasting, astronomical observation, and surveying.

JOHN GABRIEL NAVARRA

The length of a runway limits the kinds of planes that can land at an airport. Airlines have been searching for ways to get around this problem. One answer is to use aircraft that can take off and land vertically.

The vertical takeoff and landing machines are known as VTOL airplanes. A VTOL does not need a runway. It can hover like a helicopter. And it can fly like a regular air­plane.

The X-22A is a VTOL aircraft. It has four huge ducted fans. Four jet engines provide the power to drive the seven-foot-diameter propellers. The fans can be tilted. They can be tilted vertically or horizontally.

During takeoff the fans of the X-22A are tilted ver­tically. The thrust is directed downward. The downward thrust causes the plane to be lifted straight up.

As the X-22A rises, the pilot begins tilting the fans hori­zontally. In the photograph on the opposite page, the fans are being tilted from a vertical to a horizontal position. The plane moves forward with the fans in a horizontal po­sition.

The X-22A basically is a research craft. It is 40 feet long and 20 feet high. The X-22A has two wings. A fan is fixed to the end of each wing. The long wing—located just for­ward of the vertical stabilizer—has a span of 39 feet. The shorter wing is mounted just behind the cockpit.

The Vertol 76 shown above is a VTOL that has a tilt­wing. With the wings in the position shown in the photo­graph, the propellers are used as rotary wings for takeoff. The wings and engines tilt to a horizontal position to pro­vide thrust and lift for conventional flight.

The Hawker Siddeley Harrier shown below is a British fighter used by the Royal Air Force. It has a speed of Mach 1,25 and operates above 50,000 feet. The Harrier looks like a regular jet but it is a VTOL. There is a thrust – deflection nozzle inside its engine. The nozzle is used to direct the exhaust power of its engine downward for takeoff and landing and to the rear for horizontal flight.

Today the airline industry is large and varied. If you want to fly nonstop from New York to San Francisco, you can make a reservation on any of a number of domestic com­mercial airline flights. An around-the-world tour is ar­ranged through an international commercial airline.

Much of the success of an airline stems from the careful selection of the aircraft it uses. Other things being equal, airline passengers favor the airline that gets them there first. Speed is one of the factors in attracting passengers. There is a constant race among the airlines to be the first with newer, larger, and faster planes.

The design of an airliner evolves slowly. It is usually a compromise between what several airlines want. The pres­ent realities also play an important part in the design of a commercial airliner. For example, the sudden jump in the cost of jet fuel has made a lot of the aircraft currently flying too costly. And other aircraft are too noisy to meet the new environmental rules! The airliner of the future must be quiet and it must be economical to fly.

The space-shuttle orbiter Enterprise left the ground for the first time on the morning of February 18, 1977. The craft shown below was riding piggyback atop a modified Boeing 747. This first flight lasted two and one-half hours. The 747 carried the shuttle to a height of 16,000 feet to test the stability of the vehicle.

The shuttle is a true space-transportation system. It con­sists of two stages: a booster for launch from earth, and an airplane-like manned reusable orbiter for flight into space where it will conduct its missions. The orbiter is designed to be flown back to the earth and to land at a conven­tionally sized airstrip.

The shuttle will lift off vertically as shown in the lower picture on the opposite page. Two solid-propellant booster rockets will fire in parallel with three liquid-propelled rocket engines of the orbiter. After burnout, the solid rocket will be jettisoned and parachuted to the ocean where it will be recovered.

The orbiter is equipped with a delta wing. A crew of four is responsible for the operation of the orbiter. The or – biter’s cargo compartment is 15 feet in diameter and 60 feet long. This craft will carry payloads of 65,000 pounds into space. The payload can consist of either people or cargo.

The orbiter will make space operations less complex and less costly. It will also encourage greater participation in space flight. Scientists and engineers, for example, will be able to go into orbit to check on their experiments. In the upper picture opposite, the manipulator arm of the orbiter is extended to retrieve a satellite.

When the orbiter completes a mission in space, its pilots will fire its rockets to slow it down. Then they will direct the orbiter so it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere. The or­biter will be flown through the atmosphere and landed like an airplane on a jet-sized airstrip. Each orbiter is designed to be reused up to a hundred times.

Scheduled commercial aviation began on April 6, 1926. On that historic day, the small Swallow biplane—shown in the photo below—lifted into the air at Pasco, Washington, and flew toward Elko, Nevada, 487 miles away. The cargo on board was sixty-four pounds of mail.

Interest in flying was high in the 1920s. People wanted to go along as passengers on the mail planes. The only space available for a passenger, however, was in the open cockpit along with the mail sacks!

The first airplane designed for passengers had a forward cabin. But the pilot flew in an open cockpit. Passengers are in the process of boarding the Boeing 40B-4 shown in the upper photo opposite. There was space for four passengers in the forward cabin area between the wings. The Boeing 40B-4 was in service in 1926. It soared along at 110 miles per hour.

The forerunner of the all-metal airliner was the sleek

Boeing Monomail. This single-engine plane had cabin space for passengers just forward of the open cockpit. The Monomail—shown in the lower photo on page n— had re­tractable landing gear.

By 1930, the Boeing 80A, a tri-engine plane, was the last word in comfort. It featured cushioned seats and wide windows. Twelve passengers traveled in relative comfort between San Francisco and Chicago on the flight shown in the photo above.

In the photo, the Boeing 80A is flying just north of Chicago’s Loop. The Chicago of today is quite different from the Chicago of 1930. But some familiar landmarks can be seen in the photo. In the background at the upper left you can see the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower.

The first Douglas DC-3 was flown on December 17, 0.935. The DC-3 became the workhouse of the airlines. It was the first airliner capable of earning a profit carrying only passengers. The industry put these planes into service as fast as they could be produced. More than 10,000 DC – 3s were built and about 1,000 are still in service through­out the world.

The DC-3 shown below was designed for twenty-one passengers. It has a wingspan of 95 feet and a length of almost 65 feet. A maximum speed of 230 miles per hour is developed at 9,000 feet. The DC-3’s cruising speed is 155 miles per hour. It has a range of 1,300 miles and a service ceiling of 29,000 feet.

In the Atlantic Ocean, the job of flying into the most vio­lent weather in the world is assigned to flying weathermen of the U. S. Air Force. These men are known as hurricane hunters. They fly Lockheed WC-130 Hercules aircraft.

The WC-130 shown in the photograph is on the ground at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico. The aircraft is a four-engine turboprop that can cruise at 350 miles per hour. The “W” denotes that it has been weather modified. This means that it is packed with special weather instru­ments.

Data for altitudes below the flight level are obtained by an instrument called a dropsonde, which is a collection of weather-sensing instruments in a small case. The drop­sonde being prepared in the lower photo opposite will be dropped from the WC-130 by parachute. The instrument readings are radioed back to the aircraft by a small trans­mitter in the dropsonde.

The WP-3D Orion shown above is a weather plane op­erated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis­tration. Special weather-radar units are housed in its nose, in the large black blister below the fuselage, and in the tail. The WP-3D operates effectively from sea level to

30,0 feet. It can loiter at speeds between 200 and 260 miles per hour. Top speed for the WP-3D is about 460 miles per hour.

Air transportation was revolutionized when jet aircraft re­placed piston-driven planes. The graceful French Caravelle with twin engines mounted aft made its first flight in 1955. On July 14, 1961, the speedy Caravelle—shown in the photo below—was the first two-engined jet to enter service within the United States. It was used on short-to-medium – range flights—especially the Chicago to New York run.

A return to American built tri-motor aircraft was made when Boeing introduced its 727. The three powerful fanjet

engines of the Boeing 727 are nestled at the rear of the airplane. This sleek 6oo-mile-per-hour jet can carry from 96 to 113 passengers on short-to-medium-range flights.

Three other entries in the tri-motor class can be seen

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on page 16. They are Lockheed’s L-1011 Tristar, the Hawker Siddeley Trident, and the Douglas DC-10. The Tristar—shown in the lower right photo—is capable of car­rying more than 250 passengers. The DC-10, called an airbus, is a fat-fuselage plane that is 20 feet wide. The

airbus—shown in the lower left photo—can cruise at 600 miles per hour and carry more than 300 passengers for dis­tances of 3,000 miles. The Trident—shown in the upper photo on page 16—is a large-capacity, short-range aircraft. The British Trident can carry up to 180 passengers over a range of 1,500 miles.

On long hauls, the workhorse jets of the 1960s were the Boeing 707s and the Douglas DC-8s. But fuel and other operating costs skyrocketed during the 1970s. And as a re­sult, airlines found that they needed to fill more than 60 percent of the seats on these planes just to break even. In the competitive market of today, especially on international flights, it is difficult for these older aircraft—the DC-8 shown above, for example—to make money for their oper­ators.

In order to hold costs down and increase profits, the air­lines have turned to the jumbo jets. The long-haul work­horse of today is the Boeing 747. It is an aircraft that is very efficient.

The 747 can carry up to 490 passengers. The 231-foot – long craft cruises at 625 miles per hour, and it has a range of more than 5,000 miles. The 747 can weigh up to 712,000 pounds at takeoff.

The 747 s cabin is 20 feet wide and nearly 186 feet long. It is partitioned into five sections, which gives a passenger the feeling of being seated in a small theater. Movies are shown on screens in each section.

Economy seating is nine abreast with two aisles. Each aisle is 20 inches wide, which is sufficient to permit passen­gers to move about. First-class seating is four abreast with one center aisle. There are six galleys for preparing and serving food, and there are twelve lavatories for the con­venience of the passengers.

The 747 s wingspan is 195 feet. A single wing on this giant jet weighs 28,000 pounds. And the wing area of 5,500 feet is larger than a basketball court!

A 747 carries its own weather radar system. The on­board radar allows a pilot to detect a storm up to 300 miles away. The pilot can use the radar to study the storm and plot a safe course.

The Boeing 747 is equipped with two special naviga­tional systems. The systems are self-contained and do not rely on outside radio or radar signals. This unique naviga­tional equipment makes the jet’s exact position available to the pilot at all times. When the special navigation equip­ment is connected to the autopilot, the system automat­ically steers the aircraft.

A variety of aircraft have been modified and are used by governmental agencies and private corporations to make observations of the land, ocean, and sky. A broad range of photographic and other sensing equipment is carried by these survey aircraft. The altitude at which the survey is to be made determines the kind of aircraft that is used.

U-2S and WB-57FS are used by NASA and the Air Force for high-altitude surveys. A WB-57F is shown in the photo on the opposite page. It flies survey missions at

60,0 feet and above. This high-altitude aircraft is equipped with a variety of long – and short-focal-length camera systems.

A high-altitude aerial photograph of the New York met­ropolitan region is shown on the opposite page. This photo was taken by a NASA aircraft. The river at the upper left of the photo is the Passaic River. The Passaic flows through the city of Newark, New Jersey. The Hackensack River is to the right of the Passaic River in the photo. The Passaic and the Hackensack rivers flow into Newark Bay. The cities of Bayonne and Jersey City are on the peninsula that borders Newark Bay. Manhattan Island has the Hud­son River on its left and the East River on its right. The Hudson and East rivers flow into Upper New York Bay. The island in Upper New York Bay off the tip of Manhat-

tan is Governor s Island. The bridge in the lower left of the photo is the Verrazano Bridge, which runs from Staten Island on the left to Brooklyn on the right.

The Lockheed C-130 Hercules, which is used by the Air Force in weather reconnaissance, is a very versatile plane. The C-130 shown above has been modified by NASA for use in its survey program. This plane, called Earth Survey 2, flies medium-altitude missions.

The Lockheed Starlifter shown in the upper photo on the opposite page has been modified by NASA to carry an infrared telescope. The C-141 is cruising with its telescope port open. The high-flying telescope allows astronomical observations that are not possible at the earth’s surface.

The Zapata Corporation conducts aerial fishery surveys with two Cessna Skymaster 337 aircraft. A special low – light-level camera is mounted in the pod beneath the fuse­lage. The plane in the lower photo on page 75 is flying along the Pacific Coast of Baja California. The aircraft is used to assist anchovy fishing vessels.