FIRST TRANSATLANTIC FLIGHT
On May 16-17, 1919, two U.S. Navy officers—Lieutenant Commander Albert C. Read and Lieutenant Walter Hinton—took off from Long Island, New York, in a Curtiss NC-4, landing in the Azores.
By the early evening he was reported over St. John’s, Newfoundland, headed out over the black, cold Atlantic. With no radio equipment on board, he would not be seen or heard from again for fifteen more hours. That night, the soul, the hopes, and the prayers of the nation were with Lindbergh the same way a later generation would remember the landing on the Moon. He later recounted that he was so tired along the way that he almost fell asleep and came within feet of crashing into the ocean.
Then, on May 21, Lindbergh spotted a fishing boat off the coast of Ireland and literally yelled out his window to ask where he was and which way he should travel. Miraculously, he was only three miles off course. By the time he landed in Paris, 100,000 people had gathered to greet him. He had won the race, the money, and the world’s attention.
An Ordinary Extraordinary Man
However, Lindbergh did not—as the saying goes—live happily ever after. Initially, he was the perfect hero. Showered with unprecedented tributes, including a massive ticker-tape parade in New York City, he seemed unphased by fame.
Convinced that a new era of aviation had arrived, he flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the United States, promoting the idea that anyone could fly. He then turned south and traveled throughout Mexico and South America, planning air routes and encouraging air travel. On one of these trips, Lindbergh met Anne Morrow, the daughter of the ambassador to Mexico. After a story-book marriage, the two flew together all over the world.
HIGHEST UNPOWERED FLIGHT
U.S. Air Force captain Joseph Kittinger rose in a balloon to 102,800 feet (19.4 miles) over New Mexico on August 16,1960. Wearing a pressure suit, he parachuted out in what still stands as the longest free-fall in history, during which he also attained the fastest speed by any human without an engine. (He was traveling at 614 mph straight down, just under the speed of sound.)
But the press had an insatiable hunger for Lindbergh; they stalked him and began to make his life a waking nightmare. Worse, in 1932, the couple’s infant son was kidnapped and later killed, which Lindbergh blamed on the invasive media attention by the press. Gradually, an icon who had appeared unassailable and perfect became flawed, and a much more complex and disconcerting individual emerged—a study in contradictions.
For instance, in the mid-1930s, the U.S. Army Air Corp sent Lindbergh to tour Germany and report back on the details of the Luftwaffe’s growing strength. Ironically, he was so impressed by the Nazis that he essentially supported them until the United States entered World War II. In fact, Lindbergh expressed approval of German society in general, spoke of racial purity, and made anti-Semitic statements. Yet he was a friend of the wealthy, influential, and Jewish Guggenheim family.
FIRST AMERICAN PRESIDENT TO FLY WHILE IN OFFICE
Franklin Delano Roosevelt flew to Casablanca in a Boeing 314 “Clipper” on January 11, 1943.
FIRST WOMAN TO SOLO IN AN AIRPLANE
Bessica Medlar Raiche on September 16, 1910. (Blanche Scott actually flew two weeks earlier, though some believe her seconds-long flight may have been accidentally caused by a gust of wind.)
Similarly, before the United States entered the war, Lindbergh was the chief spokesperson for the highly isolationist America First organization. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he immediately volunteered to fly and fight for his country. However, President Franklin Roosevelt, who mistrusted Lindbergh, denounced him and refused to let him serve. So Lindbergh became a civilian aviation adviser in the South Pacific, where he talked his way into flying combat missions in P-38 fighters, and showed the younger, less experienced pilots how to increase their flying range by 50 percent.
FIRST AIRPLANE TO BREAK THE SOUND BARRIER
U.S. Air Force captain Charles “Chuck” Yeager flew at Mach 1.06 (about 700 mph or 1,125 km/h) over Muroc Dry Lake, California, on October 14, 1947.
FIRST TRANSPACIFIC SCHEDULED AIRLINE
Pan American Airways began regular service between San Francisco Bay and the Philippines, on November 12, 1935, in a Martin M-130 “China Clipper.”
FIRST NONSTOP FLIGHT AROUND GLOBE
Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager (no relation to Captain Chuck Yeager) took nine days in 1986 to fly 25,000 miles around the world in aircraft designer Burt Rutan’s Voyager. The aircraft was made out of lightweight composite and averaged thirty-six miles to the gallon.
One of Anne Morrow’s teachers once described Lindbergh as “really no more than a mechanic…. Hadit not been for the lone eagle flight, he would now be in charge of a gasoline station on the outskirts of St. Louis.” Nevertheless, for all the controversy and contradiction surrounding him, it was Charles Lindbergh who ultimately convinced the public that air travel was more than frivolous daredevil’s play. He saw that air travel was the future of commercial transportation.
In the 1950s Lindbergh won the Pulitzer Prize for his book about his famous flight, also called The Spirit of St. Louis. And then, in later years, disturbed by threats to the environment, he became a spokesperson for the World Wildlife Fund. “If I had to choose,” Lindbergh said, “I would rather have birds than airplanes.”
Rutan’s super-efficient VOYAGER. (Photograph by Jim Sugar)
Amelia Earhart circa 1920.
Amelia Earhart (1897–1937), undeniably the most famous female aviator in history, initially achieved celebrity as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, a year after Lindbergh’s historic flight. Interestingly, she was only a passenger on the flight, which was flown by two other experienced pilots and set up as a publicity stunt by George Putnam (whom she eventually married). However, four years later she proved herself an able pilot by flying solo, nonstop, across the Atlantic. No other pilot since Lindbergh had accomplished this feat, and President Hoover presented her with an award from the National Geographic Society. Then, in 1935, Earhart became the first person to fly solo, nonstop, from Hawaii to California.
Dubbed “Lady Lindy” (perhaps in part because she bore a somewhat uncanny resemblance to Charles Lindbergh), Earhart was hired by Transcontinental Air Transport (later called TWA) to help convince more women to fly as passengers. In 1937, she set off with experienced navigator Fred Noonan in a Lockheed Electra aircraft to become the first woman to fly around the world, and a member of the first team to fly an equatorial route (the longest path around the globe). After twenty-eight stops and 19,000 miles of the 24,500-mile journey, Earhart and Noonan took off from New Guinea toward Hawaii, with a scheduled stop on Howland Island. They never arrived, and the Electra was never found.
While it’s likely that the aircraft flew off course and ran out of fuel over the ocean, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever know for sure what befell them. Today, more people know Earhart for her mysterious disappearance than for her spectacular records of the 1930s.
Other Flying Machines
There are all sorts of ways to fly through the air, from blimps to helicopters to hang gliders. Some people insist that skydiving and skysurfing are closer to true flight than any other method (though enthusiasts of these two sports tend to fly toward the ground more frequently than other fliers). The next two chapters look at airships and helicopters, as well as a somewhat fanciful idea that hasn’t quite “taken off” yet: the aircar.
Airships and Helicopters
If you think about it, the strangest thing about airplanes is that their wings don’t move. After all, every early aviation pioneer looked to birds to uncover the secrets of flight. However, one by one they failed at imitating the birds’ techniques and finally settled on a design that relies on thrusting a fixed wing through the air fast enough to generate lift.
Nevertheless, even though fixed-wing aircraft come in all sorts of shapes and sizes—from hang gliders to improbable behemoths that carry cargo and look li
ke they’ll never get off the ground—they aren’t the only way to fly. There are many other methods to travel from place to place through the air, the most important of which are airships and helicopters.
Naval Air Station, Lakehurst, New Jersey, 1924.
Airships
An airship is basically any balloon that is filled with something lighter than air—usually helium, hydrogen, or hot air—and that uses power to navigate, like the Goodyear or Fuji blimps. Whereas a dirigible (from the Latin dirigere, “to steer”) is an airship that has a rigid or semirigid frame, a blimp doesn’t.
Built with paper by the Montgolfier brothers in France, the first hot-air balloon floated into the sky in 1783, carrying a sheep, a rooster, and a duck. Of course, hot-air and other nonpowered balloons travel wherever the wind takes them, so they’re not technically airships. It wasn’t until 1852 that a cigar-shaped balloon was fitted with a steam engine that propelled it along at about five miles per hour. In 1900, the German count Ferdinand von Zeppelin began to build rigid-framed dirigibles for the army, and his design was so successful that even today some people call airships zeppelins.
The dirigible, which began to carry passengers in 1910, was an amazingly safe form of air travel for its time, and traveling on one was typically a luxurious affair, with gourmet meals served at fancy tables by waiters. Unfortunately, after logging over 1 million miles and safely carrying tens of thousands of passengers, the passenger airships abruptly ceased operating in 1937 when the Hindenburg burst into flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey. Even though the majority of passengers survived that disaster, the film and photographs of the hydrogen-filled dirigible exploding were enough to turn any future ticket buyers away from airships and toward the increasingly safe passenger airplane industry.
When a blimp gets caught in a thunderstorm, the blimp gets washed and the pilot gets religion.
—Traditional Goodyear blimp pilot’s saying
Nevertheless, airships have certain characteristics that make them ideal for some jobs. For example, on just the amount of fuel it takes a large passenger jet to taxi from the gate to the runway, an airship can fly for fifty hours. Remember that airplanes must burn fuel to stay aloft, whereas airships only need to burn fuel to navigate. So during World War II, the U.S. military used dozens of airships to patrol large expanses of ocean over long periods of time.
Airships, which are today filled with nonflammable helium gas rather than hydrogen, are also extremely well suited for carrying heavy loads of cargo, especially when the items are physically large (like construction materials for a bridge or a modular disaster-relief hospital) and must be moved to or from places that have no railroad tracks or runways. One German company, CargoLifter, is currently building an enormous dirigible—nearly as long as three football fields—that can carry up to 160 tons (352,000 pounds or 160,000 kg).
Helicopters
Igor Sikorsky (1889-1972) was one of those early-twentieth-century aviation pioneers who was inspired by birds, but the bird he wanted to emulate was the hummingbird, which can fly in any direction at will—even backward—or hover in midair. While Sikorsky initially gained world fame in Russia in 1913 by building the first multiengine airplane, his heart was always drawn to the idea of the helicopter.
The word helicopter derives from two Greek words: heliko (spiral) and pteron(wing).
The helicopter has become the most universal vehicle ever created and used by man. It approaches closer than any other to fulfillment of mankind’s ancient dreams of the flying horse and the magic carpet.
—Igor Sikorsky, father of the modern helicopter
The helicopter has never achieved much success and…may be classed with the ornithopter as obsolete.
—Major Oliver Stewart, Royal Air Force, 1928
A normal, medium-sized helicopter with four blades must rotate these “movable wings” at around 258 revolutions per minute (RPM). However, different helicopters use different rotation speeds, depending on factors such as weight, blade width and length, and number of blades.
Though he didn’t actually invent it (there were dozens of other people working in the field), Sikorsky is known today as the father of the modern helicopter because of his innovative advances in technology, especially that of the tail rotor. To understand this achievement, you must first understand the way that helicopters fly.
Both airplanes and helicopters use engines to move a set of wings through the air. The shape of the wing and the angle at which it “attacks” the air cause air to be pushed down, which in turn causes the aircraft to move upward. In a helicopter, the wings are called blades or rotors, and they spin in a circle, pushing air down around all sides of the aircraft.
The problem with a set of enormous, rotating blades is that as they turn clockwise, something has to stop the helicopter from turning counterclockwise. Whereas some helicopters use a second set of rotors that turn in the opposite direction than the first, Sikorsky’s novel approach was to add smaller rotating blades on the helicopter’s tail—mounted sideways to the main rotors—which push the tail of the helicopter counterclockwise.
This precise balance of forces, which keeps the helicopter from spinning wildly out of control, is only one of the many incredibly delicate balances that must be maintained during flight. For instance, while an airplane pilot can cruise along with one finger on the controls (or even hands-free for a while, even without autopilot), a helicopter pilot must use both hands and both feet to fly well.
Helicopters and airships aren’t the only vehicles that can lift straight up off the ground. Some airplanes, too, fall into this category, called VTOLs (Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft). For instance, the Hawker Harrier is a jet airplane that can direct its high-thrust exhaust downward, which literally pushes the airplane straight up. Then it can direct the air forward in order to fly backward. Similarly, the Bell/Boeing Osprey looks like a helicopter at liftoff and landing, but during flight it can pivot its rotors forward to become a propeller airplane.
One hand is always on the collective, which controls both the engine speed and the vertical position of the helicopter by changing the angle of the rotors. The other hand is on the cyclic, which controls the helicopter’s direction (forward, backward, left, and right) by actually tilting the whole rotor assembly in the direction the pilot wants to travel. Helicopter pilots use their feet to control the tail rotor, which lets them pivot to the left or right.
The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.
This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooding, introspective, anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.
—Newscaster Harry Reasoner
Airplane purists tend to denigrate helicopters as clunky devices that just barely hold together, and insist that helicopters don’t fly, they just “beat the air into submission.” In fact, there’s a common joke among airplane pilots that helicopters stay in the air because they’re so ugly that the Earth repels them. However, the truth is that helicopters are extremely well-designed vehicles that can perform in ways beyond the scope of airplanes, like hovering long enough to rescue people from the ocean, the jungle, or the tops of buildings.
On the other hand, airplanes have a distinct advantage when it comes to speed. Helicopters simply can’t fly very fast because of the intense strain on the rotating blades at high speeds: As the helicopter gains speed, the forward-moving rotor approaches the speed of sound, which c
an cause dangerous vibrations.
The Aircar and Other Oddities
At first glance, it seems like a good idea: Take the two most common modes of powered transportation—the car and the airplane—and combine them into a vehicle that you can both drive and fly. After all, cars and aircraft share some key features: a steering control, an engine, fuel, wheels, and a place for passengers and their luggage. The idea isn’t a new one: The first hybrid, called the Curtis Autoplane, appeared in 1917, only nine years after Henry Ford’s Model T and fourteen years after the Wright brother’s first flight.
So why is it that flying cars are in the movies instead of on the road? The problem is that coupling a car and an airplane becomes a study in compromises. For example, wings and a propeller can be detached for driving, but where do you store them? Some inventors suggested putting them in huge airport lockers, while others built trailers so that you could haul the wings from place to place. At least one inventor has even built a set of telescoping wings that could retract when not needed, á la Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
A bigger concern, however, is that most cars are simply too heavy to be airplanes. A road-worthy car must have bumpers and mirrors, not to mention a drivetrain and catalytic converter—all just dead weight once you’re flying.
The Flying Book Page 19