The Flying Book

by David Blatner

  Airlines are required to keep every page of maintenance paperwork for their airplanes, including pilots’ logs and mechanics’ checklists—even if nothing was found wrong. That’s no small feat, as each year the average commercial aircraft gathers about twelve inches of paperwork.

  All commerical aircraft are boarded from the left. Some historians have linked this convention to the custom of mounting horses from the left side (which may have started when soldiers had swords hanging along their left legs). It would be incredibly difficult to change this arrangement because all airports are designed around this configuration.

  When you board an airplane, check the little metal registration plate above or on the side of the open door. This plate often tells you what year the airplane was built.

  Once every month or so, the aircraft gets a B Check, in which between ten and forty mechanics look over every major system (hydraulics, electrical, brakes, and so on). Then, every eighteen to twenty-four months, the maintenance crew takes the airplane out of service for ten to forty-five days for an even closer inspection. If that weren’t enough, every four years or so, the airline pulls out all the seats and many of the interior fixtures in order to check the fuselage for signs of stress or other wear and tear. And after eight or nine years, the mechanics tackle the biggest job of all: They strip the entire airplane down—literally taking apart every system in the aircraft, including the engines—check every item, and then put it all back together again.

  Plus, you might think your mechanics down at “Heinrich’s Auto” are good, but did the person who checked your brakes have to pass a federal certification exam? Did she precisely follow written procedure and then document the work in detail, including noting the serial number of every part she replaced? Airline maintenance has gotten a bad reputation in recent years, but the truth is that these mechanics are extremely well trained and are under constant peer and supervisor review.

  It’s no wonder that some estimates place maintenance costs at about $1 million per airplane per year. In fact, while most airplanes are removed from service after about twenty or thirty years, there are still aircraft from the 1930s that are providing safe and efficient commercial service in some places around the world. So next time you read a newspaper article implying that airlines are flying old aircraft, remember that the word old is relative.

  The glass windshield on a Boeing 777 is about one inch thick.

  FIRST HUMAN-CONTROLLED POWERED FLIGHT

  On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright flew 120 feet in twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Later that day, Wilbur Wright flew 850 feet in sixty-nine seconds. Over a year later, on October 5, 1905, Wilbur Wright flew twenty-four miles in thirty-eight minutes.

  FIRST SKYWRITING

  Milton J. Bryant first wrote words in the sky over Seattle on July 19, 1913, though which words exactly have been lost over time. However, the first commercial use of skywriting was in May 1922, when Captain Cyril Turner wrote “Daily Mail” over London. (Later that year he wrote “Hello USA” over New York City in an effort to drum up an advertising contract.)

  In 1911, thirty-two-year-old Calbraith Perry Rogers became the first person to fly across the American continent. He paid for the trip by naming his airplane after a popular soda: the Vin Fizz. During the forty-nine-day journey he crashed at least nineteen times (various sources define crash differently; some say he crashed as many as sixty times), and by the end of the flight, he had replaced every part on the airplane except a rudder and one wing strut. Sadly, a year later he was killed after a midair collision with a seagull.

  FIRST IN-FLIGHT MOVIE

  While there is some controversy over this record, it’s likely that the first in-flight movie was the silent film classic The Lost World (complete with animated dinosaurs), presented on Britain’s Imperial Airways in April 1925, en route from London to Paris.

  FIRST GUN FIRED FROM AIRPLANE

  Lieutenant Jacob Fickel shot at ground targets on August 20, 1910, from a Curtiss biplane over Sheepshead Bay, New York.

  Flying Through History

  To fly. It is one of humankind’s oldest dreams, talked about for millennia by scientists, philosophers, and poets. No other invention fulfilled a dream so long held or so widely considered impossible. Today, with millions of flights each year, it is easy to take flying for granted—as though the mechanics of flight were obvious. So let’s take a moment to look at the amazing journey of flight over the past two centuries, as well as three men who were largely responsible for making commercial aviation history possible: Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Charles A. Lindbergh.

  A Brief History of Flight

  For over 4,000 years, everyone who dreamed of flight made a simple and obvious assumption: Since flying animals all have flapping wings that both lift them into the air and propel them forward, a flying machine for humans should try to do this, too. The thirteenth-century Franciscan monk Roger Bacon rightly believed that air could support a craft in the same way that water supports a boat, but he wrote of ornithopters that would use birdlike wing motions to keep afloat. In the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci designed several ornithopters with flapping wings, though it’s unclear whether he ever built them. Certainly, they would never have flown if he had.

  The d’Ecquevilly multiplane, 1908.

  In fact, it wasn’t until 1809 that Englishman Sir George Cayley had a breakthrough idea. Like most breakthroughs, this one was simple: Use one device to move the aircraft forward and another to keep it in the air. The thrust would come from an airscrew which, because it propelled the vehicle forward, would later be called a propeller. The lift would come from an unmoving fixed wing, which would also be called a plane (and thus airplane). Cayley’s insight, radical for the time, changed the course of aviation forever.

  Sir George Cayley conceived the idea of the airplane fifty-six years before the invention of the bicycle in 1865. Of course, it was almost a century after Cayley that the Wright brothers actually flew an aircraft with any control.

  Gliding (1800–1900)

  There was one problem with Cayley’s idea: No one had invented a propulsion system powerful enough yet light enough to be fitted on an aircraft. So Cayley built a fixed-wing glider and enlisted a servant to fly it off a hill. The man lived, but the aircraft didn’t. (As Cayley’s granddaughter diplomatically noted, “I think it came down in rather a shorter distance than expected.”)

  Of course, some inventors continued to flap around (on the ground) in ornithopters, but for serious researchers, the rest of the ninteenth century was all about finding the best shape for a wing. A glance at a bird’s wing was enough guidance: The top of the wing should be curved so that air passing over it will be deflected downward. However, the exact shape, called an airfoil, depended on a number of factors such as the width and length of the wing.

  Yet, few inventors were patient enough to figure out the optimal airfoil, and instead simply followed their intuition. Each overexuberant inventor promised that his design would be the first to fly. In fact, two hopeful entrepreneurs named William Henson and John Stringfellow even founded the Aerial Transit Company in 1843 on such promises, though they hadn’t built (much less flown) an aircraft.

  The aeroplane will never fly.

  —Lord Haldane,

  British minister of war, 1907

  Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

  —William Thomson (Lord Kelvin),

  president, Royal Society, 1895

  Those who were patient, like the Russian Alexander Mozhaiski and the German Otto Lilienthal, made great strides forward. Mozhaiski was perhaps the first person to build an airplane capable of flight, in 1884, but it lacked any real controls and quickly crashed.

  The example of the bird does not prove that man can fly. Imagine the proud possessor of the aeroplane darting through the air at a speed of several hundred feet per second. It is the speed alone that sustains him. How is he ever going to stop?

  —Mathem
atician and astronomer Simon

  Newcomb, in THE INDEPENDENT,

  October 22, 1903

  Otto Lilienthal’s glider.

  Lilienthal understood that it was useless to lift off the ground if you couldn’t control the aircraft, so he had a giant hill built outside Berlin for gliding experiments. He took hundreds of flights in his homemade glider (which looked somewhat like a modern hang glider with a tail), slowly becoming proficient at controlling his aircraft and systematically keeping detailed records of his flights. The world learned of Lilienthal’s success after French-born Octave Chanute published in 1894 Progress in Flying Machines, the same book that inspired two American brothers to take up a new hobby: building an airplane.

  FIRST FLIGHT AT NIGHT

  Charles W. Hamilton flew over Knoxville, Tennessee, one night in June 1910.

  FIRST SUCCESSFUL HELICOPTER

  In 1936, the German Focke-Achgelis Fa61 remained airborne for over an hour and 20 minutes and flew to 8,125 feet. Three years later Igor Sikorsky flew the first single-rotor helicopter.

  Although Lilienthal understood how to glide better than anyone, he insisted that a powered aircraft would require flapping wings and even built two models that never left the ground. Then, on a routine gliding experiment in 1896, the forty-eight-year-old Lilienthal was killed when his glider, caught in a gust of air, stalled and crashed. His tombstone reads Opfer müssen gebracht werden (Sacrifices must be made).

  Controlled Flight (1900–1916)

  By the turn of the century, dozens of people were building airplanes, including Hiram Maxim (the inventor of the machine gun), and Samuel Langley, an influential scientist and the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Newspapers carried reports almost monthly of someone claiming to have flown, like the little-known Gustave Whitehead who insisted he flew his airplane in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1901—unfortunately, without reliable witnesses.

  In truth, few designs were even as successful as Langley’s 1903Aerodrome, which was catapulted off the top of a houseboat and flew directly into the Potomac River. Langley was so well-known that for several decades the Smithsonian insisted that because Langley’s airplane might have flown, he should get the credit for inventing the airplane.

  Finally, on December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright succeeded in flying a controllable, self-propelled aircraft: the Wright Flyer. Witnesses took pictures and reported the event, but because the brothers were concerned about obtaining a patent they didn’t show their aircraft publicly until August 1908, and then only in Europe. So the first public demonstration of an airplane was on October 23, 1906, in France, by Brazilian inventor Alberto Santos Dumont. The first public demonstration in the United States was performed by Glenn Curtiss a month before the Wright’s, on July 4, 1908, in his June Bug. Curtiss and the Wright brothers would be involved with patent infringement suits for years to come after this.

  Alexander Graham Bell, better known for inventing the telephone, had a keen interest in aviation and backed Glenn Curtiss in building the June Bug in 1908.

  Glen Curtiss in the JUNE BUG, July 4, 1908.

  While most people today have never heard of Glenn Curtiss, he was perhaps just as important to the success of the early aviation industry as the Wright brothers. He built the first seaplane and later the Curtiss Jenny (the JN-4D), which became one of the most popular airplanes of its time.

  The Wright brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk, Orville at the controls. THE FLYER had no wheels; rather it slid on skids along a wood rail.

  FIRST TRANSPACIFIC FLIGHT

  A three-man crew led by Charles Kingsford-Smith flew from Oakland, California, to Sydney, Australia (via Hawaii, Fiji, and Brisbane), May 31–June 10, 1928. The first nonstop transpacific flight wasn’t until October, 15, 1931, when Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr., flew 4,500 miles from Japan to Wenatchee, Washington.

  Flying exhibitions were extremely popular in these early years. Few people at that time had actually seen an airplane fly, and the general consensus was that flight was simply impossible. As one early pilot, Beck-with “Becky” Havens, noted, “They thought you were a fake, you see. There wasn’t anybody there who believed an airplane would really fly. In fact, they’d give odds. But when you flew, oh my, they’d carry you off the field.”

  Before 1914, however, airplanes were somewhat of a novelty, not particularly useful for anything. But all that changed with the outbreak of World War I.

  The Military and Commercial Explosion (1916–1926)

  If the nineteenth century was all about the wing, the twentieth century was all about the engine. The quest for the power to fly faster, longer, and with both cargo and passengers dominated the field of aviation. In 1914 Anthony Jannus piloted the very first scheduled passenger airline service, between the Florida cities of St. Petersburg and Tampa. That sounds more impressive than it was: With only a single passenger and the pilot in an open cockpit, the airplane flew about ten feet above the ground the whole way. The service lasted only three months.

  Although several European governments had recognized the military potential of airplanes early on, the United States had surprisingly little interest in aircraft until the outbreak of World War I. Suddenly, the idea of air superiority was born, and who controlled the skies could clearly influence who controlled the ground. An enormous effort went into building faster aircraft that could carry guns and bombs.

  Then, after the war ended in 1918, governments realized that these aircraft could now be used for civilian purposes. The U.S. Post Office started an experimental airmail route between New York City and Washington, D.C., which was soon expanded cross-country to San Francisco. In 1920, it took seventy-eight hours for airmail to cross the continent, in part because airplanes could not fly reliably in clouds or at night.

  This unreliability was due to the fact that no instruments had yet been developed to tell pilots where they were headed. The phrase “flying by the seat of your pants” derived literally from the fact that pilots could only figure out when they were turning, rising, or falling by the sensations they felt against their seat. Within three years, half of the original forty airmail pilots had been killed in crashes.

  FIRST FLIGHT AROUND THE WORLD

  On April 6, 1924, four Douglas DWC World Cruisers took off from Seattle. Only two completed the 26,345-mile journey. Total time actually flying: 371 hours and eleven minutes, at an average flying speed of 75 mph.

  While the United States focused on moving the mail, other countries were founding national airlines to move passengers around. By 1926, most European nations had a government-subsidized airline industry, and there were scheduled passenger flights in South America, Australia, and Africa. Of course, flying was a tedious, loud, and dangerous business back then. In fact, taking the train was generally faster and far more comfortable.

  Aviation Grows Up (1927–1940)

  Certainly, there was some passenger aviation in the United States during the early 1920s. After all, airlines couldn’t help but notice the constant stream of American passengers who were trying to accompany the airmail, even if it meant sitting on bags of letters. However, not only was passenger flight prohibitively expensive for most people, but the vast majority of Americans distrusted flying.

  Then, almost overnight, Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic changed American attitudes about flying. After his record-setting flight, Lindbergh traveled around the United States and the world preaching that airplanes were the future of transportation, and people believed him. Of course, only the wealthiest could fly in those days. On the first transcontinental flights in 1929, passengers still flew only by day (they took the train to further their journey at night), and tickets for the twenty-eight-hour trip cost $338 each way (about $7,000 for a round-trip ticket at today’s cost).

  In 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt canceled all government airmail subsidies and ordered the military to carry the mail instead. But army pilots were ill prepared
for long-distance, scheduled flight. In two weeks, ten pilots died in crashes, and Roosevelt quickly changed his mind.

  Nevertheless, these large sums of money did not buy luxury. The cabin of the ultramodern Ford Trimotor (nicknamed “the Tin Goose”) was sweltering in the summer, freezing in the winter, and so loud that passengers had to wear earplugs. Plus, using the toilet was an adventure: Below the seat was simply a hole framing the passing landscape.

  The twelve-engined, luxurious Dornier Do X, 1929.

  Fortunately, in 1933 Boeing released the 247, which many consider to be the first modern airliner. It could fly ten passengers and their luggage almost 500 miles at 155 mph, crossing the United States in only twenty hours. TWA (which was Transcontinental and Western Airlines before it became Trans World Airlines) desperately wanted to buy a Boeing 247, but the early models were all reserved for United Airlines. So TWA commissioned Douglas Aircraft to build an even better airplane; the DC-3, which in 1935 could fly twenty-one passengers across the country in greater comfort and in only sixteen hours. The DC-3 was an enormous success: By 1939, 90 percent of the world’s airline traffic traveled aboard these aircraft. The DC-3 was so stable, economical, and easy to fix that there are still a handful flying in various locations around the world.

  Four of the earliest airmail carriers—Varney Air Lines, Boeing Air Transport, National Air Transport, and Pacific Air Transport—banded together in 1934 to form a single company: United Airlines.