Pioneers of Experimental Flight

The early pioneers of flight found out by trial and error what worked and what did not. In 1890 Clement Ader of France built a steam-powered airplane. It was a failure, but it showed other designers that steam engines were too heavy for use in airplanes.

Experiments sometimes cost lives. In 1899, British engineer Percy Pilcher was killed when his glider crashed shortly before he was due to test an airplane with an engine. Had he survived, Pilcher might have beaten the Wright brothers by making the first powered, controlled flight in an airplane.

In 1901, American experimenter Samuel Pierpoint Langley tested a

О This multiplane, photographed in 1911, was based on designs by Horatio Phillips and had 110 narrow wings. Although his designs appeared eccentric, Phillips’s experi­mental aircraft increased knowledge of aerodynamics and successful wing shapes.

model airplane. Encouraged by its performance, he built the full-size Aerodrome. The plane crashed into the Potomac River, not once but twice, on December 7 and 8, 1903. Nine days later the Wrights’ Flyer took to the air at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Many pioneer airplanes look strange to modern eyes. Some planes of the 1910s and 1920s were “pushers” (their propellers faced backward); others were “tractors” (the propellers faced forward). Throughout this period, there were experiments with biplanes (with two wings), triplanes (with three wings), and multiplanes (with many wings).

In the 1930s, experimenters sought higher speed with monoplanes that had single wings, sleek metal bodies, and more powerful engines. The first rocket – powered airplane flew in Germany in 1928. By 1940 the German Project X produced the DFS 194, an experimental rocket plane that led to the Me-163 rocket plane of World War II. As the war began in Europe, the first experimental jet planes roared into the skies, starting in 1939 with the German Heinkel 178.