Posts Tagged 'Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation'
World Wide Wings
Posted in Adventure, Aviation, Flight, History, War, tagged aeronautics, aeroplanes, aircraft, airplanes, Bantam Press, Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, call-signs, Ekranoplan, F-14, Faustian quest, Felix Baumgartner, flight, flying, flying-boat gliders, Grumman F-14 Tomcat, helicopters, jet, jets, Joe Kittinger, Nick Piantanida, Otto Lilienthal, pioneers of aviation, planes, rockets, Rowland White, runway codes Patrick Mulrey, skydivers, skydiving, skyfall, The Big Book of Flight, the sky, Tomcat, Wilbur and Orville Wright, wings, Wright brothers, XB-70 Valkyrie on August 26, 2014| Leave a Comment »
The Big Book of Flight, Rowland White (Bantam Press 2013)
Aircraft are like birds: varied. And, like birds, the most beautiful are often the deadliest. Freight-carriers usually look like it, but even helicopters and flying-boats can look good. This book covers the lot, from the deadly XB-70 Valkyrie, a beautiful jet "designed to carry 25 tons of nuclear bombs at three times the speed of sound" (pg. 234), to the dumpy Ekranoplan, a huge flying-boat whose remains are "rusting away in a dry dock in the Russian Caspian sea-port of Kaspiysk" (pg. 269). Rowland White discusses every aspect of aviation: not just props, jets and gliders, but balloons, parachutes and rockets, plus call-signs, airport codes and Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. His writing is enthusiastic and intelligent and the book has a solid and fashionably old-fashioned design, like something a flight-obsessed schoolboy might have got for Christmas in the 1950s.
If he had, he would have been pleased: The Big Book of Flight mixes text, photographs, line-drawings and Patrick Mulrey's beautiful double-page oil-paintings, which capture the speed and steel of aircraft and the vastness and solitude of the sky. I like the "Project Cancelled" sections too, about interesting planes that never made it into service. Web-sites about flight aren't physical, fingerful fun like this and the heft of the book underlines the paradox of flight: how does something heavier than air get up and stay there?
A XB-70 Valkyrie
Take the "swing-wing Grumman F-14 Tomcat" shown surging aloft, jets glaring, from the deck of an aircraft-carrier on page 210. If it hit the water that stretches away to the horizon, it would sink like a stone. It's metal, after all: solid in a way birds, with their fractal feathers and hollowed bones, have never been. But it stays aloft and plays aloft, all 70,000 lb of it. This isn't magic: it's engineering. Metal jet-fighters obey the laws of physics just as birds and balloons do. And jet-fighters obey the laws of genetics too, because aircraft are as much products of genes as bones and feathers are. Evolution has taken many routes to flight, but before Homo sapiens arrived they were all direct ones: genes coded for wings, light bodies and fast metabolisms. That's how birds, bats and insects got aloft. The human route was indirect: our genes coded for higher intelligence and we invented our own wings to carry bodies that were never designed to fly.
But more than intelligence was required. The early history of flight is littered with crashes and corpses:
German engineer Otto Lilienthal published his seminal Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation in 1889 at the age of 41. He flew his first glider two years later. Over the next five years he made some 2000 flights, accumulating just five flying hours. Still, the "Glider King", as he was dubbed, had flown longer and further than anyone else in history. But on 9 August 1896, during his second flight of the day, his glider stalled. He crashed to the ground and broke his back. Two days later, like so many previous birdmen, he died from his injuries. ("Dreams of the Birdmen: Icarus and His Successors", pg. 15)
Before he died, Lilienthal told his brother that "sacrifices have to be made". His work and sacrifice were an inspiration for Wilbur and Orville Wright across the Atlantic in America. But their genes hadn't evolved in America: flight was mastered by a peculiarly north-western European combination of high intelligence and daring. This book doesn't explicitly discuss genetics, but it's there on every page, from the German Otto Lilienthal at the beginning to the Austrian Felix Baumgartner near the end. Baumgartner claimed "Joe Kittinger's record for the highest, fastest skyfall with a jump from 128,100 feet (24 miles)" in 2012 (pg. 236).
The American Nick Piantanida had preceded them in the 1960s. First he was a pilot, boxer and rock-climber, then he became a skydiver. His attempt to claim the freefall record killed him: he "suffered an explosive decompression at an altitude greater than any other reached by a human being". Like Lilienthal, he survived his crash-landing but died in hospital. Success in aviation has been won by the sacrifices of the same group that sacrificed for success in mountaineering. Flight can be seen part of the same Faustian quest.