The Airplane - Jay Spenser [20]
Viewed in this light, the Kitty Hawk Flyer is seen for what it is: a flying test bed. It was an airplane too, of course, but first and foremost it was a winged laboratory dedicated to the holistic solution of the problem of flight. This aerial learning platform was so well optimized to the tasks set for it that contemplating the human ingenuity behind it is truly humbling. Here is science at its best.
Remember Samuel Pierpont Langley, the scientist at the helm of the Smithsonian? Following his success with models, he oversaw the construction of a scaled-up version called the Aerodrome A. Four times as large as its predecessors, it featured two sets of upward-angled wings spanning fully 50 feet (15 meters).
Impressive as it was to look at, the Langley Aerodrome A was also fatally flawed by an aerodynamically unsound tandem-wing configuration and an excessively flimsy fuselage framework. Lacking a landing gear, the Aerodrome also had a largely ineffective control system and depended on dihedral (Cayley’s idea of upward angled wings) to stay upright. The cruciform tail moved up or down for pitch control, but it functioned more as a stabilizing trim tab than an elevator. As for the rudder, Langley for some reason placed it amidships, rendering it ineffective. On the plus side, the Aerodrome A had a remarkable engine producing more than four times the power available to the Wrights in 1903.
Like Langley’s models, the man-carrying Aerodrome A—piloted by Langley’s assistant Charles Manly—was to be catapulted off the top of a modified houseboat on the Potomac River. The first attempt came on October 7, 1903, but the machine fell instead of flew. As one reporter put it, the Aerodrome plunged “like a handful of mortar” into the water.1
Disappointed, Langley blamed the launching catapult atop the houseboat, which he felt must have entangled his machine. The Aerodrome A was duly repaired and a second attempt made on December 8, 1903. Once again the machine crashed at takeoff, this time folding back on itself and breaking as it dropped into the icy river. Briefly trapped underwater in the wreckage, Manly barely succeeded in extricating himself.
Launched from a houseboat in October and again in December 1903, the Langley Aerodrome A twice plunged into the Potomac River instead of flying.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Langley had received $50,000 in U.S. government support, a sum equivalent today to about $1.4 million. His ignominious failures put an end to the nation’s public hopes of inventing the airplane. Newspapers scoffed at the idea of flight and ridiculed the waste of public funds for so frivolous a purpose.
Nine days later and some 200 miles (325 kilometers) to the south-southeast, the Wright brothers succeeded where Langley had failed. While the Wrights weren’t much for publicity, they certainly had not tried to keep their achievements a secret. Nevertheless, the skepticism of a disbelieving world—undoubtedly reinforced by Langley’s public humiliation—meant that it would be years before most Americans knew of their success. It didn’t help that the few notices of history’s first airplane flight that made it into print were wildly inaccurate.
Samuel Langley died in February 1906, at age seventy-one. His Aerodrome A survives, painstakingly restored and carefully preserved by the institution he once headed.
We have looked at two oddly configured flying machines, one successful and the other a failure. Had Langley’s Aerodrome A flown, however, it would not have met the modern definition of a true airplane.
To qualify as an airplane, a machine must be manned, powered, heavier than air, capable of taking off under its own power and flying out of ground effect (not just skimming low, buoyed by a cushion of air against the ground), and controllable around all three axes. This rigorous understanding of what constitutes an airplane was