The Airplane - Jay Spenser [88]
Human-factors engineering also contributes to a disciplined, highly beneficial methodology known as crew resource management that continues to make aviation safer. One example of CRM at work is the sterile cockpit rule, a regulation implemented in the early 1980s that prohibits extraneous conversation when the airplane is below 10,000 feet. Flight crews can chit-chat during high-altitude cruise, but not during the more demanding phases of flight.
Some of the technologies found in many modern flight decks were first developed for military use. In 1988, for example, Airbus audaciously introduced fly-by-wire to commercial aviation with its singleaisle A320 jetliner. Developed for military fighter jets, fly-by-wire flight control systems eliminate the physical connection between the flight crew’s controls and the control surfaces they actuate.
Fly-by-wire saves weight because the cables and pushrods that once physically deflected the airplane’s control surfaces have been replaced by electronic signals controlling actuators at those surfaces. Depending on the programming of the airplane’s flight-control computers, fly-by-wire can also significantly alter or improve an airplane’s flight characteristics.
What would Hubert Latham—seated atop his Antoinette like a fisherman in a rowboat—have made of the modern flight deck? One can only imagine.
10 AERO PROPULSION
PROMETHEUS IS PUSHING
Air surrounds me as water surrounds the submarine boat, and in it my propellers act like the screws of a steamer.
—JULES VERNE, ROBUR LE CONQUÉRANT, 1886
Two centuries ago, George Cayley predicted human beings would fly once a first mover became available that generated “more power in a given time, in proportion to its weight, than the animal system of muscles.”1 By “first mover,” he of course meant an engine.
Steam power became available early in the nineteenth century. Although many flight experimenters looked to it hopefully, the low power-to-weight ratio of steam engines rendered them generally unsuitable to aviation use. Instead, it would be the internal-combustion engine powered by gasoline that would see Cayley’s prediction realized.
Belgian-born French inventor Jean-Joseph-Étienne Lenoir created the world’s first internal-combustion engine in 1859. Running on coal dust ignited by a sparking ignition system, it utilized repurposed steam-engine technology such as cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, and a flywheel. Although prone to overheating and seizing up, Lenoir’s invention heralded a power source fundamentally lighter and more compact than steam.
In 1876, German engineer Nikolaus Otto developed the first practical four-stroke engine. Developed with the help of Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, this engine had four cycles (intake, compression, ignition, and exhaust) and promised higher power-to-weight ratios than earlier internal-combustion engines lacking a compression cycle.
This four-stroke engine of Otto’s ran on illuminating gas, the bright-burning fuel of the gaslight era. A stationary power plant, it generated just 3 hp and weighed more than 6,500 pounds (about 3,000 kilograms). Nevertheless, it is the earliest true ancestor of the twentieth-century automobile engine.
Nine years later, Otto contributed a further breakthrough in the form of a low-voltage magneto ignition system for portable engines powered by liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Concurrently, Daimler with Maybach’s help pioneered small, lightweight gasoline engines suitable for road vehicles. The stage was thus set for motorized bicycles, motorcycles, automobiles, motorboats, dirigibles, and heavier-than-air flying machines.
Karl Benz, another inventive German, tinkered together the world’s first practical automobile