For aircraft enthusiasts: a list of the ones who did it first.

[Blazer]

Yes, it's a given that with the development of the plane, people threw things against the wall to see what would stick. And it's a combination of all the ideas which ended up working that made the plane into the plane as we recognize today.

So let's name those things that made it as a standard feature in modern day planes and name the people who did it first and the planes that implemented those innovations.

Starting with the first wing design optimized for powered flight, which of course goes to...

This year sees the 120'Th anniversary of the Wright Brothers succeeding in the quest to getting an engine powered plane into the skies, so of course they have to be in this thread. So what gave Orville and Wilbur Wright the edge here?

Well, all their contemporaries like Samuel Langley used the designs penned up by Otto Lilienthal, who published a book about gliders and whose work was considered to be the bible of human flight. What the Wrights discovered was that Lilienthal's designs were flawed, his wings were fine for gliding, but they would never work with powered flight.

But the Wright's design wasn't perfect either, they would steer the plane by bending the wings by force, Wilbur recounting the dread he felt whenever the Flyer took off. If it were up to him, he would have burned the plane, it was that unsafe. Luckily, he never did, the groundbreaking aircraft is still around today.

Later, Glenn Curtis would take the Wright's design and started to add flaps and ailerons, creating the wings that aircraft still use today. But in a recent twist (Pun intended) those warping wings without the flaps that made the Wright flyer a health hazard, have people going "You know, that actually isn't such a bad idea." Because it allows for planes to fly more smoothly through turbulence.

Heck, a paraglider gets its manoeuvrability because it's essentially the Wright brother's original wing design.

The first plane which successfully flew with swept back wings.

Now, with this it's generally accepted that it was the Germans who in the second world war made leaps and bounds in the development of the jet fighter and the swept back wings to make the airframe cope with the increased speed. But they weren't the first.

This is the Dunne D8, which was a 1912 design of what is essentially a tail less, flying wing.

I guess, I don't need to say that this swept wing wasn't designed with supersonic speeds in mind. The angle is 32°, and it was all for the sake of stability. An earlier version named the D.5 achieved perfect aerodynamic stability in flight. The pilot actually took his hands off the controls and wrote a message on a note board in flight. A feat which was witnessed by Orville Wright himself.

The first functional helicopter.

Yeah, the philosophy is simple, and it makes so much sense; If you can use a propeller to generate thrust to lift a plane into the air by forward motion, you could do the same by directing it upwards. But as the footage shows here, it's not that straightforward as the aircraft has to deal with the torque of that rotor, and it takes a very fine balancing act to get it right.

But one man who DID get it right was Igor Sikorsky, who in 1939, came up with the winning formula, which all modern helicopters are still using today.

 

[RodeoTex]

I was just reading something a while back about someone building and flying a powered craft in Luchenbach, TX 60 years before the Wrights. I believe it was supposedly spring powered.
Do know how much is myth or fiction or fact but interesting.

 

[Peegoo]

The truly incredible thing about the Wrights was by the time they flew, they had spent about $1000 total--including travel costs to and from Kitty Hawk several times. Not only were they extremely frugal, they were extremely private because they knew the value of their innovations which included a wind tunnel they built to test wing and stabilizer designs. They used bicycle spokes as the supports and control rods for their wind tunnel models.

The engine on their Flyer I was hand built in their bicycle shop by a naturally-gifted machinist named Charles Taylor, which he cut from a block of Alcoa aluminum using only a lathe, a drill press and some basic hand tools.

They did this at the same time Samuel Langley (chief scientist of The Smithsonian Institution in DC) was trying to achieve manned powered flight with the backing of other prominent scientists at the time--including Alexander Graham Bell. He also had congressional funding behind him to the tune of more that $50K for his first few attempts. And he failed miserably in front of the press. Bell was really more interested in kites than gliders and airplanes. Kites! I would've gotten along famously with ol' Alex.

 

[Blazer]

The truly incredible thing about the Wrights was by the time they flew, they had spent about $1000 total--including travel costs to and from Kitty Hawk several times. Not only were they extremely frugal, they were extremely private because they knew the value of their innovations which included a wind tunnel they built to test wing and stabilizer designs. They used bicycle spokes as the supports and control rods for their wind tunnel models.

The engine on their Flyer I was hand built in their bicycle shop by a naturally-gifted machinist named Charles Taylor, which he cut from a block of Alcoa aluminum using only a lathe, a drill press and some basic hand tools.

They did this at the same time Samuel Langley (chief scientist of The Smithsonian Institution in DC) was trying to achieve manned powered flight with the backing of other prominent scientists at the time--including Alexander Graham Bell. He also had congressional funding behind him to the tune of more that $50K for his first few attempts. And he failed miserably in front of the press. Bell was really more interested in kites than gliders and airplanes. Kites! I would've gotten along famously with ol' Alex.

Yeah, in my thread about the worst planes ever, I actually placed Langley's plane above the infamous Christmas bullet.

For aircraft enthusiasts: a flaw in the design, the top ten worst planes ever.

Okay, let's be honest, for every successful design, there is a far larger amount of duds. The Supermarine Spitfire was a very successful plane but in the annals of Supermarine aviation it was a very notable exception because subsequent fighter planes by Supermarine such as the Spiteful, Seafang...

www.tdpri.com

Here's what I said.

Now among aircraft enthusiasts, the Christmas bullet is the worst ever plane but I argue that there is a worse one and not just because of it being a failed design but also because it was involved in a scandal and all being masterminded by somebody who should have known better.

Well, here we are, the one you've all been waiting for...
Number 1: The Langley Aerodrome A.

A very dramatic picture of Samuel Langley's attempt at achieving powered flight gone wrong. Langley was a curator for the Smithsonian museum had a bit of an ego to match, so when he learned about the Wright Brothers trying to create a motorized airplane he was dead set on beating them at the punch. He got backing from the Army and set out to work. But Langley used the wing designs of Otto Lillienthal of which the Wright brothers had discovered were flawed, they would NEVER work for powered flight. Langley's plane was never capable of flying.

But big headed as he was, Langley argued with the Wrights that his plane WAS capable of flying and thus HE should be in the Smithsonian as the first man who achieved powered flight and to prove it he brought out his prototype to another rival of the Wrights, Glenn Curtis who flew it, taking away the title from the Wrights.
But not that much later, it was revealed that Langley had Curtis rebuild the wings completely incorporating Curtis' modifications to the Wrights wing design which made it airworthy and after the flight had the old wing reattached again. In short, he cheated. It took until 1942 before a court ruled against the Smithsonian and the Wright brothers were rightfully reinstated as the pioneers they were.

So because of being a plane which never could have successfully flown and then being used in a ruse to take away the credit from the people who truly deserved it. Langley Aerodrome A. is the number one worst plane ever.

 

[PhoenixBill]

Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles (Youtube channel) has some good information proving why the Wright Brothers got powered flight down first. One of their achievements was the recognition that they needed to control the aircraft in three different axis; all other “inventors” (including the ones which a few people think came before the Wrights) did not provide for that. Without 3-axis control a plane cannot fly. They also recognized how to make a functional propellor, something other folks did not achieve. Their first plane managed to fly, but only on exact conditions of temperature and humidity and barometric pressure and wind; that’s why the replica did not fly on the 100th anniversary (but did fly on following days). Improvements in engine power and tweaking their design soon made them capable of flying under less exact conditions.

 

[trapdoor2]

As I recall, the Burgess-Dunne was the first aircraft purchased by the Canadian military. It was a floatplane version of the D-5. Dunne erred on the side of stability, they were very difficult to maneuver. That's the fine balance A/C designers have to tread: instability vs stability.

Emile Berliner (the guy who invented the flat disc record) made an early attempt at a helicopter...and his experiments with a vertical tail-rotor in 1914 helped Sikorsky...eventually. Later, he co-founded the Berliner-Joyce Aircraft Co...who built some of the ugliest fighters of the post WWI era.

The constant succession of lawsuits between the Wrights and Glenn Curtiss kept them from innovating...and the stress may have killed Wilbur.

Langley was such a power in the Smithsonian that he would not promote the Wrights above himself. He had Glenn Curtiss rebuild his plane, modified so it would actually fly...and Curtiss flew it in 1914. Langley claimed "First flight" and the Smithsonian didnt make nice with the Wrights until 1948...

 

[mycroftxxx]

You can’t talk helicopters without talking about Juan de la Cierva and his autogiros. He’s really the person who made the helicopter possible, by realizing that the blade needed the flapping and lead-lag degrees of freedom, and thereby inventing the fully articulated rotor. It is impossible to overstate how important this was to rotorcraft. Think about how important the Wright brothers’ understanding of the aircraft lateral degree of freedom and subsequent invention of wing warping as the way to control the aircraft in lateral motion was to fixed-wing flight (hint - it’s really important); de la Cierva’s invention of the fully articulated rotor was even more important to the development of a practical rotary-wing aircraft, because the rotor is pretty much everything on such vehicles.

Igor Sikorsky’s accomplishments were legendary, but Juan de la Cierva is the indispensable inventor in the helicopter story.

 

[Bob Womack]

When modern designers work with the first Wright plane they are utterly amazed that it was able to accomplish those first flights at all because of its near-fatal flaw. I watched a program where a bunch of aeronautical engineers and test pilots reproduced that plane and tried to reproduce the first flight. They found that it was completely unstable in the pitch axis, enough so that it wanted to either pitch up into a stall or dive into the ground, even while being frantically controlled.

Another irony was the impetus that lead to the modern hinged control surfaces. The silly Wright Brothers were so absorbed with profiting on their warped-wing control design that they FORCED Glen Curtis to innovate the hinged wing surface. By contrast, Curtis discerned that aircraft technology was exploding and everyone would need the ability to benefit from his basic designs so, though he copyrighted them, he freely allowed competitors to use them. Voile'! They are everywhere.

And also ironically, Curtis and Wright later merged and a division of the resultant company, Wright Aeronautical, went on to create the Wright Cyclone series of air-cooled radial engines that powered some of America's most important aircraft, and versions of the Sherman tank, during WWII. In the 1920s a group of former Wright employees and leaders broke off from Wright to form Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company who provided the majority of the rest of radials for American aircraft during the war.

So an interesting lineage!

Bob

 

[Blazer]

When modern designers work with the first Wright plane they are utterly amazed that it was able to accomplish those first flights at all because of its near-fatal flaw. I watched a program where a bunch of aeronautical engineers and test pilots reproduced that plane and tried to reproduce the first flight. They found that it was completely unstable in the pitch axis, enough so that it wanted to either pitch up into a stall or dive into the ground, even while being frantically controlled.

Another irony was the impetus that lead to the modern hinged control surfaces. The silly Wright Brothers were so absorbed with profiting on their warped-wing control design that they FORCED Glen Curtis to innovate the hinged wing surface. By contrast, Curtis discerned that aircraft technology was exploding and everyone would need the ability to benefit from his basic designs so, though he copyrighted them, he freely allowed competitors to use them. Voile'! They are everywhere.

And also ironically, Curtis and Wright later merged and a division of the resultant company, Wright Aeronautical, went on to create the Wright Cyclone series of air-cooled radial engines that powered some of America's most important aircraft, and versions of the Sherman tank, during WWII. In the 1920s a group of former Wright employees and leaders broke off from Wright to form Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company who provided the majority of the rest of radials for American aircraft during the war.

So an interesting lineage!

Bob

Yeah, I mentioned most of that in the OP and the Aeronautical insanity thread.

Curtiss-Wright will forever be known for severely flawed planes too.

The CW-21 was light and fast indeed, but it came at a price: it didn't have pilot protecting armour or self sealing tanks. Nor did it come with heavy calibre cannons, it was no match against Japanese fighters.

The "Curtiss Calamity" AKA the C-46 Commando. This quote of the official history of the Army Air Forces perfectly summarized its shortcomings,

But from first to last, the Commando remained a headache. It could be kept flying only at the cost of thousands of extra man-hours for maintenance and modification. Although Curtiss-Wright reported the accumulation by November 1943 of the astounding total of 721 required changes in production models, the plane continued to be what maintenance crews around the world aptly described as a "plumber's nightmare". Worse still, the plane was a killer. In the experienced hands of Eastern Air Lines and along a route that provided more favorable flying conditions than were confronted by military crews in Africa and on the Hump route into China, the plane did well enough. Indeed, Eastern Air Lines lost only one C-46 in more than two years of operation. But among the ATC pilots the Commando was known, with good reason, as the "flying coffin". From May 1943 to March 1945, Air Transport Command received reports of thirty-one instances in which C-46s caught fire or exploded in the air. Still others were listed merely as "missing in flight", and it is a safe assumption that many of these exploded, went down in flames, or crashed as the result of vapor lock, carburetor icing, or other defects.

Now, credit where it's due, the P-40 was a success and one of the most numerous allied fighters of the Second World war. But in the grander scheme of things, it fell flat compared to the Spitfire and BF-109 contemporaries. And while meant to be an improvement over the P-36, it barely performed better than that one.

The SB2C Helldiver.
Stability issues, the tendency to break apart during deck landings an unsustainable loss rate. The pilots, deck hands and the high command of the US Navy had little nice to say about the "Son of a B*$@# Second class" and in the long run, it led to the company's demise.

The only jet fighter Curtiss-Wright made, the XF-87 was similar in outlay to the Gloster Meteor, except for it having FOUR engines and even with that was still severely underpowered. The USAF rejected the plane and with that Curtiss-Wright as a company went under.