The Airplane - Jay Spenser [25]
The Verville-Sperry racer is astonishing not for what it did but rather for what it was. Here, shortly after World War I, was a low-wing monoplane with a wide-spaced landing gear that retracted to enclose the wheels within the underside of the fuselage. The wing itself was fully cantilevered, meaning that it required no drag-inducing external bracings.
The Verville-Sperry R-3 racer of 1922 marked the U.S. emergence of an advanced configuration pioneered by Germany’s Hugo Junkers.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Except for its open cockpit, therefore, the R-3 racer embodied the configuration of the fighter planes that would fly and fight in the skies of World War II some two decades later. This airplane was so revolutionary, in fact, that the biplane era would run its course before designers caught up with Verville’s thinking. Whether biplanes or monoplanes, however, it was all Cayley’s basic formula.
4 FUSELAGE
OF DRUMS AND DRAGONFLIES
Balance yourself like a bird on a beam….
—“COME JOSEPHINE IN MY FLYING MACHINE,”
A POPULAR SONG OF 19101
Imagine you’re a contemporary of the Wright brothers. Like them, you’ve devoted your time, energy, and intelligence to the quest for human flight. You’ve done your conceptual thinking and experimentation. Before you now on your workshop’s plank table are sketches you’ve just made for the heavier-than-air flying machine you came up with.
You’re sure this machine will fly—well, fairly sure anyway—if you can just figure out how to build the damn thing. But how to start?
For flight’s pioneers, the logical place was the fuselage.
On the eve of the twentieth century, gasoline engines, cambered wings, a stabilizing and controlling tail, landing gear, and other foreseeable components of flight technology could all be built. The problem was that these things wouldn’t carry you aloft unless you also figured out how to connect them all together.
This appeared to be the job of the body of the airplane. The fuselage would support the wings and other components, holding them in proper alignment. This was quite a challenge because aerial maneuvers or gusts of wind would put loads on these extremities like a giant’s hand working a long lever.
Making a supporting frame do all this and still be light enough to fly was a devilish challenge, but that wasn’t the end of it. The fuselage also has to accommodate the crew and payload (in the first airplanes, the pilot was the payload), and it must be aerodynamically contoured to promote the airplane’s passage through the air.
What did all this add up to? The word fuselage itself actually gives us a clue, since it tells us what people were thinking. One of aviation’s oldest terms, it derives from the French word meaning “spindle-shaped.” Spindles, of course, are simple tools used by primitive cultures for weaving natural fibers into yarn or twine. Among humankind’s earliest technology, the spindle—or more properly the drop spindle—takes many forms. The simplest ones are fat, smoothly rounded sticks tapering at both ends. Hobbyists use them today for the sheer tactile pleasure of making yarn the old-fashioned way.
The shape of the spindle struck at least some early flight experimenters as intuitively right for the body of an airplane. If not, why else would an obscure French term make its way into aviation’s emerging lexicon? Like all linguistic hijackings, this one betrays a past mind-set.
So where did that idea come from? As always, the answer is nature. And the reason is that we human beings recognize patterns in all we see. Our brains are continuously interpreting and drawing connections.
There was a big one to draw with the drop spindle. Imagine our prehistoric ancestors fashioning and then using this tool. Its shape in their hands inevitably would have reminded them of birds or fish, the two classes of vertebrates most shaped in their evolution by the need to pass through fluid mediums with minimum resistance.
Of course, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics played no role in the design of