The Hot – Air Balloon History

Before the Wright brothers, there were the Montgolfier brothers and they had the idea of flight a hundred years earlier. And before you had the airplane, the flight tool of choice was the hot air balloon, invented by the Parisian siblings in the 1700′s.

The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and ‘tienne, had opposing personalities. One lived on ideals and invention, while ‘tienne represented the practical and business-minded. Though their father left the family business in the hands of their elder brother Raymond, the latter passed away not before long and ‘tienne took over with much success, based on relentless technology implementation and public acclaim and recognition.

The hot air balloon was said to be Joseph’s idea, dreamt up while observing drying laundry over fire. The hot air pockets that collected under the wet cloth led him to wonder if troops carried by aircrafts founded on such an observation, could bring down the fortress of Gibraltar. Joseph’s mental tinkering did not end there, as he proceeded to build his first balloon based on a lightweight wooden box covered with taffeta. When he simulated hot air from an underlying piece of burning paper, the device rose into the ceiling. This excited Joseph so much that he prompted ‘tienne to come over with more taffeta and rope.

What resulted next was a squarish three metre balloon that saw incredibly positive results from a sophomore experiment. The balloon sped into the air on its debut test flight on December 1782 and crashed in a field two kilometres away. This eventually led to numerous public demonstrations of their invention, including one for French dignitaries in June 1783, which saw the balloon soaring to 2,000 metres. This revelation proceeded to sweep across France.

Next on the agenda were attempts to create the first manned hot air balloon. The lack of scientific knowledge of the atmosphere raised questions of its suitability for human life in its upper reaches. Criminals were suggested as test subjects, but the brothers settled on using animals.

The first flight with a live being was tested in September 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers floated a basket with a sheep, duck and rooster to over 450 metres and across 3 kilometres, before seeing it crash due to a lack of sufficient compensation for the additional weight.

Having established the rarefied atmosphere as relatively safe for human consumption, the Montgolfier brothers embarked on designs for a human manned hot air balloon. Original designs featured ground tethered balloons, but November saw the first untethered hot air balloon flight, with a doctor and army officer as its voluntary passengers. The two men manned the balloon for 25 minutes at heights of 100 metres and traveled 9 kilometres before ending the flight due to the balloon cloth starting to burn. The flight ended since they had to prevent the cloth from burning and landed in a field.

The Montgolfier brothers did face competition from inventors who attempted to use the newly discovered element of hydrogen to power balloons. It was a discovery that eventually pushed hot air balloons to the backbench as a form of flight technology.

Despite this, hot air balloons continue to exist in modern times. Its original design first met with an update by Ed Yost in 1960, when he lined the balloon with plastic and used kerosene burners. Yost even made several successful jaunts in his balloon such as that of over the English Channel. He failed in his bid to cross the Atlantic (although someone else eventually did with the same design), but Yost’s balloon continued to achieve many records for flight time and distance.

The modern day hot air balloon now feature rip-stop nylon and propane burners, which has greatly improved its safety aspect. While a far cry from its humble beginnings of taffeta and raw fire, the hot air balloons continue to astound with its longevity in the face of its more illustrious technologically advanced flight cousins.

659

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

The History of the Airplane (The Wright Brothers – First Flight)

The Wright Brothers’ first aircraft blueprint was born in 1899. This followed a formal request for flight experiment data submitted to the Smithsonian Institution.

This blueprint was based on the Wright Brothers’ theory of wing warping, where the adjustment of the wingtips could manipulate the rolling motion and balance of an aircraft. This resulted from the Wright Brothers’ careful study of the flight of birds, where they could achieve their flight patterns through constant warping of their wings. The end result was a biplane glider slight in build, and tested while flying it like a kite.

Wilbur and Orville Wright’s ideas continued to evolve over the next three years. These came in the form of different gliders, both manned and unmanned. They also constantly studied different flight researchers such as Cayley, Langley and Otto Lilienthal. Extensive discussions were conducted with Octave Chanute, as the Wright Brothers continued to search for the solution to the critical issue of flight control.

Choosing Kitty Hawk, North Carolina as their test site for a physically comparative biplane glider that weighed 50 pounds, the Wright Brothers achieved their first breakthrough result from a piloted flight of any kind in 1900. The glider was the first piloted glider in history and featured a 17-foot wingspan with the brothers’ trademark wing-warping controls. Thereafter, they proceeded to work on the development of an even larger glider, but with more sophisticated controls and landing gear.

The result was a 100 pound glider with a 22-foot wingspan and landing skids, in 1901. Unfortunately, in flight tests conducted at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, the glider encountered numerous problems such as pitch control issues, flights that spun out of control and weak lifting capability.

Demoralized, but not disheartened, by the test results, the Wright Brothers continued to analyze their work. The root of the problem was traced to inaccurate design calculations. Using a wind tunnel to experiment with various wing designs, a brand new glider was created which had a strong foundation built on accurate workings of airfoil mechanisms. It included a tail for flight stabilization and measured 32 feet in its wingspan.

Another breakthrough followed the testing of this glider in 1902. The tests gave the brothers’ fresh insights on how an adjustable tail could add turning ability and balance to a flying object. These were confirmed through further wind tunnel experiments, which eventually morphed into the Wright Brothers’ first ever aircraft that was motor-powered, aptly named – the Flyer.

Using a movable track for the Flyer to build airspeed, Orville Wright made the first ever piloted flight in history in a powered aircraft, on December 17, 1903. This flight lasted all of 12 seconds, and came on only its second attempt. The Flyer II quickly followed into the record books on November 9, 1904, when Wilbur Wright flew it for more than five minutes.

Tragedy struck in 1908 as the first recorded flight fatality resulted in the death of a passenger ‘ Signal Corps Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge. The plane was manned by Orville Wright who miraculously survived the crash on September 17.

This, however, did not discourage the U.S. Government from their first purchase of a Wright Brothers biplane on July 30, 1909. Attaining speeds greater than 40 mph, the brothers received a $5,000 bonus on top of the $25,000 sale. This preceded the first machine gun propped airplane that took off from a College Park, Maryland airport in 1912. And the brothers’ association with the government continued, when on July 18, 1914, the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps was created and filled with airplanes bearing the Wright Brothers’ inventive hands and main rival, Glenn Curtiss.

Glenn Curtiss was the unfortunate loser in a heated patent suit brought against him by the Wright Brothers in the same year. His creations were borne from his idea of ailerons, which meant ‘little wing’ in French. While decidedly different compared to the Wright Brothers’ wing-warping controls, the U.S. Court ruled that they violated the Wright Brothers’ ownership over lateral controls in flight.

Over the next four years from 1909, the Wright Brothers’ creations continued to make their mark. The plane that acquired its name from a grape soda, Vin Fiz became the first aircraft to complete a fight across the United States over 84 days, but spent more time on the ground due to numerous crash landings. This 1911 incident perhaps encapsulated in a nutshell, the fascinating brilliance and sometimes oddity, of the Wright Brothers’ in the history of the airplane.

760

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

The History of Great Airships

The history of the airship was often filled with 2 main technical issues ‘ that of the combustible nature of its buoyancy agent, hydrogen, and its fragile structure. At the same time, they were essential in ensure the airship could float, travel light and maintain reasonable speeds, yet be able to withstand wind and rain.

Engineers sought to resolve these challenges by first resorting to helium as a hydrogen alternative. However, the natural supply and prohibitive cost in the 1920s hardly justified its commercial usage, which sometimes resulted in costs of $300,000 per airship. Despite measures taken by the government to alleviate this by 1925 where prices per cubic foot dropped to a penny, helium was still a costly substitute.

In comparison, being at the mercy of the elements, the structural nature of dirigibles created more problems between 1919 and 1937. The horrifying Hindenburg disaster put it all into perspective, even though the tragedy was traced to an explosion resulting from highly inflammable paint layered on the dirigible.

With the close of World War I, six Zeppelins, including the L49, were captured by the Allied Forces. They also featured the L72 which was constructed originally to bomb New York City. The Allied nations proceeded to duplicate the Germans’ dirigible blueprint in creating several record-breaking airships. They became so brazen that advice from German pilot Ernst Lehmann to establish landing bases to avoid airship accidents were ignored and ridiculed.

What followed was an incredible number of airships which met with untimely ends. The English ZR-2 had to be taken apart, resulting in wasted resources on the new Lakehurst, New Jersey hangar. Hypocrisy was also rampant, with the British refusing permission for the Germans to cross the Atlantic in their L72, but doing the same themselves in a copycat airship, the R-34.

In the midst of some high-profile dirigible accidents, the U.S. Navy Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Admiral William A. Moffet stubbornly supported airships and attempted to qualify its program and human casualties by learning through the mistakes of the ZR-2. Yet airship pilots were often taken to task to cover up for the lack of substantial answers from airship accidents.

Moffet continued to be in denial as high profile deaths such as Richard Byrd were narrowly avoided during the ZR-2 mishap, as was on the Roma when it was driven into high voltage lines by a sudden down-draft. More disasters followed as the C-2, then the largest airship in U.S. Army history, blew up while leaving its hangar on October 1922. A French maneuvered L-72, the Dixmude, was destroyed by harsh elements flying to Africa in 1923, and ended up wrecked in the Mediterranean.

Finally heeding Lehmann’s advice, the U.S. stopped short of destroying the Lake Constance and Friedrichshafen Zeppelin factories and hangars. The Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation was soon formed in 1923, to tap into German expertise and discovery of the alloy duralumin in the creation of new airships such as the U.S. ZR-1 and ZR-3 in 1924. These 2 dirigibles turned to helium as the buoyancy agent, although the still prohibitive cost of the element saw the airships sharing its use and alternated flights.

The ZR-1 Shenandoah flew across the western states in several test landings on moorings and airfields. The Los Angeles ZR-3 was to follow up with a promotion of commercial airship travel, but once again, it encountered technical issues and the Shenandoah took its place instead, when tragedy struck.

Zachary Lansdowne, then the Shenandoah’s commander, highlighted the ship’s shortcomings in dealing with the Midwest line squalls and thunderstorms but was ignored. On September 3, 1925, a storm struck down the dirigible in Ohio, which resulted in 14 deaths, including Lansdowne.

The survivors had landed safely whilst holding on for their lives on gas supplies they had earlier been tasked to retrieve. This sad incident forced Brigadier General Billy Mitchell to criticize the Navy’s airship program, and support for airships visibly dropped with the release of the disaster’s photos which garnered widespread public disgust and sympathy for its victims.

This did not deter the Naval Court of Inquiry from pronouncing a verdict which put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Lansdowne, based partly on statements under duress by Lieutenant Rosendahl (a survivor of the accident) from Moffett, and despite testimonials from Lansdowne’s widow that highlighted his misgivings. Following the incident, Congress proceeded to give the go-ahead for three new replacements for the Shenandoah. Ironically, only one, the ZMC-2, still remained in use come World War II, as airships began to fade into history’s pages as a viable flight tool of choice.

769

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites