The Airplane - Jay Spenser [37]
Boeing
Armed with the hard-won knowledge of bitter experience, de Havilland set about completely redesigning the Comet. Now fitted with oval windows and stretched to carry ninety passengers, it returned to service in October 1958. By then, though, it was too late; less than two weeks later, the Boeing 707 also entered service. Far more capable, the 707 was the plane that ushered in the commercial jet age.
Engineering is a discipline that learns from failure as well as success. The Comet’s audacious leap and subsequent fall at least helped lift the industry to a higher plateau of safety. So too did the 707, whose success rested on its maker’s world-leading philosophy of safe airplane design.
Among other things, that uncompromising Boeing philosophy prohibited single-failure modes, which in plain English means that no failure of any individual system or structural component can ever be permitted to endanger the airplane or its occupants. Consequently, designs are required to be robust and employ redundancy where needed in the form of backup systems and alternative structural load paths.
A spectrum of simple yet powerful design ideas such as this one has made air travel vastly safer over the decades. Another example is a blanket aviation industry design prohibition against uninspectable limited-life components. The idea here is that if a key structural part is located where an airline can’t get to it to check it during maintenance, then the part must be made to last the life span of the airplane. Degradation that could affect airworthiness is not permitted.
Despite a host of improvements over the decades, airliners today are built basically the same way that the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-3 were back in the 1930s. All-metal semi-monocoque construction has served the world well.
The newest jetliner at the time of this writing is the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which features an innovative plastic body that is much stronger and lighter than metal. Despite having a composite primary structure, however, the Dreamliner remains a semi-monocoque airplane and is thus the dragonfly’s conceptual progeny.
5 WINGS, PART I
FROM BOX KITES TO BRIDGES
In the early days, the chief engineer was very often also the chief test pilot. This tended to result in the elimination of poor engineering.
—IGOR SIKORSKY (1889–1972)1
Engines rattling, the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets trundled down the field at St. Petersburg, Russia, and climbed slowly into the air. Dipping its wings to one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, the enormous biplane pointed its nose southward.
It was June 21, 1914. Less than five years after Louis Blériot staggered across the English Channel in a frail 30-hp single-seater, here was a flying giant with an enclosed cockpit with dual controls, a plushly furnished passenger cabin, four engines of 148 hp each, and a wingspan of 102 feet (31 meters).
At the helm of this astonishing giant was its twenty-five-year-old designer, Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky, a figure who ranks just behind the Wright brothers themselves in the annals of early flight. Chief engineer of the Russo-Baltic Carriage Factory, a company specializing in railcar manufacture, this humble genius was also its aviation shop foreman and test pilot.
Just twenty-three years old, Igor Sikorsky sits at the controls of his Grand, the world’s first multiengine airplane, in 1913.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
A year earlier, Sikorsky had built and flown the Grand, history’s first multiengine airplane. When that behemoth was destroyed in a freak accident (the engine fell off a landing Morane airplane and plummeted through the parked Grand), this brilliant Ukrainian had built an even bigger and better machine.
Named for a mythical Russian folk hero of the tenth century, the Ilya Muromets made its first flight the previous December, a week shy of the tenth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ crowning success. In February, it had carried sixteen people aloft at once. Now on the first day of summer it was off making