History of aviation

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Gliding into Kitty Hawk on October 10, 1902

The history of aviation is that part of human history that includes the development of aviation .

The pioneering stations in aviation history go back several thousand years to the kite , the first man-made aircraft , and to the mythologies of the Sumerians and Greeks , who with figures such as the shepherd Etana as well as Daidalos and Icarus gave expression to the dream of man flying .

For a chronological overview of the development see Chronology of Aviation .

Mythology and antiquity

The "ride on a bird", an element of the Etana myth from the 24th century BC. Chr. (Illustration of the clay unwinding of a cylinder seal )

From Sumerian mythology, the "ride on an eagle" is an element of the Etana myth on a cylinder seal from the 24th century BC. Depicted. The shepherd Etana wants to bring down the “herb of childbirth” for his childless wife from heaven, but when he had almost reached the goal he fell down with his eagle.

Flying was often seen as an attribute and privilege of the gods. Even where gods or supernatural beings are not represented with wings, the ability to fly is one of their characteristics. Indian mythology knows images of divine flying chariots ( Vimana ), such as those found in the epic Ramayana . The monkey god Hanuman could also fly. With the Aztecs it was Quetzalcoatl , the feathered serpent, which played an important role, and the Babylonians also depicted lions, bulls and people with wings.

From the 2nd century BC The bird of Saqqara , a wooden artefact from a tomb in Saqqara, Egypt , comes from the 4th century BC . There are claims that this is a model of an aircraft.

Around the turn of the century, the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso documented the Greek legend of Daedalus and Icarus in his work Metamorphoses, who tried to escape from Crete to Sicily with self-made wings made of bird feathers glued with wax . According to legend, the technology was actually functional; that it didn't quite work - Icarus fell - was more due to the fact that he had come too close to the sun and the realm of the gods and, as a punishment for the sacrilege, the wax of the wings melted. So Icarus fell into the sea and lost his life.

In the 2nd century AD, Aulus Gellius describes in his compilation Noctes Atticae the dove of Archytas , a flightable wooden replica of a dove that Archytas of Taranto had already in the 4th century BC. Should have built.

middle Ages

Abbas Ibn Firnas , an Andalusian scholar of Berber descent, is said to have succeeded in gliding near Córdoba in 875 . The only statement in this regard comes from a 17th century author, Al Maqqari . The Benedictine monk Eilmer of Malmesbury is attributed a gliding flight of 200 m in length for the period 1000-1010 in a tradition by the historian William of Malmesbury (approx. 1080 / 1095–1143) . Like Abbas, he is said to have sustained serious injuries.

In the Christian West, the ability to fly was mostly associated with mystical beings. The human imagination saw ghosts, fairies, demons and angels flying through the air. Witches had a reputation for flying with brooms ; According to popular belief, they needed a flying ointment for this .

Predictions for the development of flying machines can be found as early as the 13th century in the writings of the English Franciscan Roger Bacon (1219–1294).

Renaissance

Designs by Leonardo da Vinci, Codex on Birds Flight , 1505

During the Renaissance , Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) designed various aircraft, including the first "helicopter". None of the models would have been airworthy, but the creative approaches and especially the engineering methodology had pioneering value, with da Vinci being “far ahead of its time” with his thoughts on aviation. It was not until the end of the 19th century that da Vinci's designs were rediscovered, but had no groundbreaking influence on the development of the first aircraft. It is believed, however, that the Augsburg shoemaker Salomon Idler had Leonardo's plans when he built his flying machine.

From step to jump, from jump to flight

The first airworthy model helicopters

In 1784, the French Launoa and Bienvenue built an early airworthy model helicopter with a double rotor. Sir George Cayley (see below) modified the model in 1796. These were the first known airworthy model helicopters with counter-rotating coaxial rotors. They were driven with a drill bow, a control was not provided. 1816 Austrian constructed Jakob Degen , a propeller with clockwork . This world's first (unmanned) helicopter model reached a height of 160 meters in the Prater in 1816. In 1842 the Englishman WH Phillips built the first airworthy model helicopter with a blade tip drive . In 1874 Fritz and Wilhelm Achenbach designed the first single-rotor helicopter with a tail rotor for torque compensation. There is no airworthy model of it.

Jakob Degen

In 1807 the watchmaker  Jakob Degen designed  a flying machine with movable wings that was powered by muscle power. Degen realized that the lift that could be achieved in this way was insufficient and made do with a hydrogen-filled auxiliary balloon, which generated around half of the lift required for flying. On November 13, 1808, he managed the first controlled free flight over the Prater .

Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, the "Tailor of Ulm"

From 1810 to 1811 Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger , the tailor from Ulm , constructed a self-supporting glider. During a public demonstration over the Danube , however, he fell into the river under the mockery of people. Today it is assumed that his device was an airworthy and proven hang glider .

William Samuel Henson

In 1842, the English engineer William Samuel Henson (1805-1885) applied for a patent for a powered aircraft project (kite principle), but it was unable to fly.

George Cayley

Cayley Glider in Mechanics' Magazine , 1852

The English scholar Sir George Cayley (1773 to 1857) was the first to investigate and describe the problems of aerodynamic flight in a fundamental way and is therefore also known as the "father of aeronautics ". He broke away from swing flight and published 1809 to 1810 a proposal for an aircraft "with an employed surface and a propulsion mechanism". He was the first to describe the principle of the modern fixed-wing aircraft. In September 1852 he published the plans and descriptions for a single-wing glider in Mechanics' Magazine , which had been successfully tested with ballast.

Jean Marie Le Bris

Jean Marie Le Bris with his l'Albatros , Brest 1868

The French sea captain Jean Marie Le Bris (1817 to 1872) built gliders in 1857 and 1868 that were derived from the shape of the albatross. The horse-drawn gliders are said to have reached flight distances of up to 200 m when towed. His l'Albatros from 1868 is the first airplane that is documented by a photograph.

Alexander Moshaisky

The Russian naval officer Alexander Moshaiski (1825 to 1890) was granted an aircraft patent in 1881. Between 1882 and 1886 he made several flight attempts with his steam engine airplane. The aircraft was able to take off from the ground, but subsequently lost speed and sagged. Its improved version, which was equipped with more power, would have been airworthy according to the conclusion of the Russian aeronautical research institute ZAGI (carried out in 1982). However, due to the death of the designer, the flight did not take place.

Clément Ader

The Frenchman Clément Ader (1841 to 1925) built the Éole , an airplane powered by a steam engine and a 14 m wingspan, the wings of which were designed to resemble bat wings. On October 9, 1890, the Éole took off on its only flight over approximately 50 meters.

Otto Lilienthal

"From step to jump, from jump to flight."
Otto Lilienthal 1891 in Derwitz with his
Derwitz apparatus .
Lilienthal's flight in a double-decker , Fliegeberg in Berlin-Lichterfelde on October 19, 1895

The aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) carried out successful gliding flights based on the principle of “heavier than air” since 1891 . He was distinguished by the fact that, after observing the flight of birds, he differentiated between different flight conditions and recognized that lift and propulsion should be viewed independently of one another. His working hypothesis was: “Man must also be able to imitate soaring flight [birds], since he only requires skillful steering, for which man’s strength is completely sufficient.” From 1874 he developed aerodynamic shaping in extensive theoretical and practical preparatory work of hydrofoils for a man-carrying glider . To do this, he used his "rotary apparatus", which was functionally a forerunner of modern wind tunnels . From 1891 he tested and improved his glider in over 2,000 successful gliding flights himself in flight. He achieved flight distances of up to 250 meters. His normal glider was the first production aircraft and found at least nine buyers from 1894.

Octave Chanute

The Chanute - Herring double-decker glider 1896

The railway engineer Octave Chanute , who systematically collected information about the worldwide development of flight technology, published this in articles from 1891 and in 1894 in his book Progress in Flying Machines , a very comprehensive and systematic inventory of the topic of flight with machines heavier than air for the time . He engaged Augustus Herring and others for the practical experiments and carried out air camps with them in 1896. They tested and compared different slope glider variants. The tests led to the confirmation of the double-decker construction , which Francis H. Wenham had already proposed in 1866 and which Otto Lilienthal had successfully implemented in 1895. The Wright brothers took up the good double-decker experience of their predecessors and especially Chanute's double-decker construction for their gliders and developed them further.

Gustav Whitehead

The German-American aviation pioneer Gustav Weißkopf is said to have covered the first controlled motorized flights over a distance of half a mile on August 14, 1901 . There are testimonies from well-known personalities and several historical newspaper articles. There are drawings and photos that prove that Weisskopf was technically capable of developing and building an aircraft. A number of flight historians have no longer any doubts about Weisskopf's motorized flights in 1901.

Wright Brothers

The outstanding achievement of the Wright brothers was to be the first to build an aircraft with which a successful, continuous, controlled powered flight was possible, and to have carried out this powered flight on December 17, 1903. In addition, they documented their flights very precisely and proved the suitability of their aircraft in further flights within a short time. Of outstanding importance is that Orville Wright was able to fly a full circle with the Wright Flyer as early as 1904. The Wright Flyer was a " canard " type with its elevator controls located in front of the main wing.

Samuel Pierpont Langley

Samuel Pierpont Langley , a secretary at the Smithsonian Institute, tried a few weeks before the Wright flight to get his "Aerodromes" to fly. Although his attempt failed, the Smithsonian Institute claimed for some time that the Aerodrome was the first "airworthy machine". The Wright Flyer was donated to the Smithsonian Institute on the condition that the Institute could not recognize any previous motorized flight. This condition was formulated by the founders in order to prevent the institute's earlier presentation that Langley had carried out the first successful powered flight with the Aerodrome. This requirement repeatedly led to the assumption that there had been successful attempts at powered flight before the Wright Flyers, but that recognition had been suppressed in connection with the foundation requirement.

Traian Vuia

Traian Vuia built a single-seater shoulder decker in December 1905 , which he named Traian Vuia 1 . Vuia found a place in Montesson , near Paris , where he could test his flying machine. Initially, the device, without wings, was tested as a land vehicle. The first flight took place on March 18, 1906 , during which the machine took off after a take-off run of 50 m and flew around 12 m at a height of one meter. Then the engine stopped and the plane landed. Many magazines in France, the USA and England wrote about this short flight. This was the first free flight of a flying machine with a pulling propeller.

In 1907 he built his Vuia II with a 25 HP (19 kW) Antoinette engine . The Antoinette engines and later the Antoinette airplanes were built by Léon Levavasseur , who was at times the fitter of Alberto Santos Dumont . The Vuia II was exhibited at the Aeronautical Salon in Paris.

Between 1918 and 1921 Vuia built experimental helicopters at the Juvissy and Issy-les-Moulineaux aerodromes. Another great invention was the development of a steam generator that could produce steam pressures in excess of 100 atm (10 MPa). These generators are still used in some power plants today.

On May 27, 1946, the Romanian Traian Vuia was made an honorary member of the Romanian Academy. Today Timisoara Airport (TSR) bears his name. It is the second largest airport in Romania.

Alberto Santos-Dumont

The first powered flight in Europe was probably in Paris living Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont . In his first attempts to motorize an aircraft, he attached a 1.75 hp motor to a small gas balloon , but this drive turned out to be too weak. After he had successfully designed and flown several airships from 1898 , he turned to the construction of fixed-wing aircraft.

On November 12, 1906, he flew the first public and official powered flight with the 14 bis without a catapult system and without a headwind. Alberto Santos-Dumont won the prize money of 1,500 francs for the world's first powered flight over 100 meters. His 14-bis was based on experiences he had made with box kites , from which the shape of his wings was derived. Its monoplane (5 meter wingspan), built between 1907 and 1909 , was a forerunner of the light aircraft . In September 1909, Alberto Santos-Dumont designed and flew the Demoiselle , the world's first lightweight sports aircraft . In the same month he flew a speed record of 55.8  mph (18 km in 16 minutes, corresponding to approx. 90  km / h ). The flight model was copied several times in the USA and Europe.

The first powered aircraft were mostly double-deckers . As an experiment, more than three wings were arranged one above the other. Such a multi-decker construction came from the Englishman Horatio Frederick Phillips . With the fifty-decker “Horatio Phillips No. 2 ”he made his first powered flight in England in the summer of 1907.

Ludwig Prandtl, Göttingen Aerodynamic Research Institute

At the end of 1907 the later Aerodynamic Research Institute Göttingen (AVA) was launched. In its founding years it was still concerned with the development of the "best" form of airship, its head at that time, Ludwig Prandtl , became the "father of aerodynamics" worldwide with his research into the scientific basis for boundary layer theory and the theory of the wing.

Louis Bréguet, the first helicopter

Paul Cornu 1907 with his "flying bicycle"
  • In 1907, Louis Bréguet and Jacques Bréguet built the quadrocopter "Bréguet-Richet No. 1" with the help of Charles Richet . The helicopter lifted approx. 1.5 m from the ground with one person. However, the flight characteristics were so unstable that the machine had to be secured to the booms by four men. So the first helicopter flight was a tethered flight.
  • Paul Cornu developed the world's first manned free-flying helicopter, called the "flying bike". During the first flight on November 13, 1907 in Lisieux , Calvados, France, it reached a height of about 30 cm and a flight time of 20 seconds.
  • The first composite helicopter was the "Bréguet-Richet No. 2" in 1908. It reached an altitude of approx. 4.5 m and a flight distance of approx. 20 m. Really usable helicopter designs only came about in the 1930s, for example the Gyroplane Laboratory in 1933 . In the meantime, design features have been developed that are still important today. These are design features such as B. tandem rotor , coaxial rotor arrangement or tail rotor to compensate for the torque or devices for cyclical variation of the rotor blade pitch. In 1909, Grigore Brişcu was the first engineer to experiment with the cyclical variation of the rotor blade pitch in order to ensure the flight stability of a helicopter.

The first high altitude breathing apparatus

In 1907 the Drägerwerk manufactures its first constant- dose breathing apparatus . These devices only become important for airplanes later, because at that time only balloonists reached heights where altitude sickness or lack of oxygen occurs.

Louis Blériot, crossing the English Channel

After Blériot's Canal crossing in July, the flight week in Reims in August 1909 was a major event with worldwide attention

In 1909, Europe set further practical milestones in the history of aviation. On July 25, 1909, Louis Blériot was the first to cross the English Channel in an airplane with his Blériot XI monoplane . His flight from Calais to Dover took 37 minutes at an average altitude of 100 meters. Blériot was thus able to receive the cash prize offered by the English newspaper Daily Mail for the first canal crossing. With the Blériot XI, its designer became the “father of modern monoplane”. The success of the machine made him the first commercial aircraft manufacturer .

Grande Semaine d'Aviation de la Champagne

From August 22nd to 29th, 1909, the “Grande Semaine d'Aviation de la Champagne” was held in Reims , a flight week that set several records: Farman flew a distance of 180 kilometers in three hours. Blériot flew the highest airspeed over the 10-kilometer route with 74.32 km / h. Latham reached the highest altitude at 155 m on an "Antoinette" from the aircraft designer Levasseur . Curtiss won the Gordon Bennett Cup with 76.75 km / h .

In September 1909, the Prussian State Railroad saw itself prompted for the first time to regulate the transport of "flying machines and flying machines" in its tariff for general cargo .

Hans Grade

Hans Grade in his "dragonfly"

The first German motorized aviator within the meaning of the Lanz Prize of the Air was Hans Grade , who won this prize with his monoplane Libelle on October 30, 1909. As early as 1908 he had made his first successful flights with a three-decker. He built the dragonfly in series and served many of the first German pilots as a training aircraft. In 1908 August Euler acquired the license to replicate the French Voisin double-decker aircraft and began series production. Euler and Grade received the first German pilot's license in 1910.

Igo Etrich

"Etrich-Taube" at the start

The Etrich II pigeon developed by the Austrian aviation pioneer Igo Etrich in the winter of 1909/1910 was also one of the first motorized aircraft to be built in large numbers. With the overland flight Vienna - Horn - Vienna over around 140 km on October 10, 1910, Karl Illner won the Grand Prize of the City of Vienna. The machine was also important as a military aircraft well into the First World War.

Armand Dufaux

"Dufaux 4"

On August 28, 1910, the Swiss Armand Dufaux flew with his Dufaux 4 from Noville / St. Gingolph about 66 kilometers across Lake Geneva to Geneva and won a prize advertised by Perrot Duval in 1909.

Henri Marie Coanda

The Romanian physicist Henri Coandă built the Coanda-1, the first aircraft with a jet engine (more precisely: Thermojet ). During the first test flight with his jet aircraft on December 10, 1910, he discovered the Coandă effect named after him . As the aircraft landed, he observed how the gases and flames from the engine spread along the fuselage of the aircraft. The aircraft caught fire and was completely destroyed.

In 1911 Coandă built a twin-engine aircraft with only one propeller. Two Gnome seven- cylinder radial engines were attached parallel to the fuselage and acted on a four-blade propeller made of wood.

From 1911 to 1914 he was technical director of the Bristol Aircraft Company , then until 1916 at Delaunay-Belleville , where he designed some aircraft.

In 1935 he built an aircraft in the form of a flying saucer based on the Coandă effect , which he called Aerodina Lenticulara. This concept was later further developed in Canada by Avro Canada under the name VZ-9AV Avrocar .

Gliding

Sporty gliding began sometime between 1909 and 1911 . In 1910 the first hang-glider flights by engineering students are reported. In 1911 there were flights with gliders on the Wasserkuppe . The Air Sports was born.

Seaplanes

On March 28, 1910, the French engineer Henri Fabre made his first seaplane flight with the Canard Hydravion he had designed .

Monocoque

The first proven use of monocoque construction was presented at the 1911 Olympia Aero Show with a machine designed by Handley-Page. The fuselage shell of type D (retroactively referred to as HP4 in 1924) consisted primarily of mahogany wood. Another early application of the shell construction in aircraft construction was the Deperdussin Monocoque Racer developed by Louis Béchereau in 1912. The fuselages of other contemporary aircraft, on the other hand, consisted of a framework structure covered with lacquered fabric. The "DEP" control was also new, with a steering wheel for the roll movement on the joystick for the pitching movement, a principle that is still widely used today. The aircraft was powered by a special aircraft engine, the Gnôme rotary engine . The Deperdussin Monocoques were the fastest aircraft of their time.

A major technical breakthrough came shortly before the First World War with the Ukrainian designer and pilot Igor Ivanovich Sikorski , who later became known in the USA as a manufacturer of flying boats and a designer of helicopters. From 1913 to 1914 he proved with the first "large aircraft" he designed, the twin-engine Grand Baltiski , the four-engine Le Grande and its successor, the four-engine Ilja Muromets , that such large aircraft can fly safely and stably, even with one or two engines switched off are or fail. These airplanes were originally designed as comfortable passenger airplanes and establish this era. Later the Ilya Muromets are also used as bombers.

The first mail flight

The first officially approved mail flight in Germany took place on June 12, 1912. This is the beginning of the history of German airmail , which was of great importance for the further development of aviation.

First World War

The first fighter planes and bombers

In 1894, Otto Lilienthal wrote in a letter to Moritz von Egidy , a social ethicist he valued : “The mutual barriers between the countries, the compulsory customs duties and traffic constraints are only possible because we do not rule the realm of air as freely as the bird ... The borders of the countries would lose their meaning because they can no longer be locked ... ”Around 20 years later, during World War I, it became clear that aircraft can also be used as weapons. First, airplanes were used for aerial reconnaissance - soon also with powerful cameras (see here and aerial warfare ). Pilots of opposing observation planes initially shot themselves with pistols; The military soon recognized the value of air superiority . Technical advances (increasing airspeed, payload, range, etc.) made it possible to use the aircraft as a bomber and / or as a "flying machine gun"; some bases of air warfare were developed.

First, the observer was equipped with a machine gun. Later, on- board machine guns were synchronized with the aircraft drive using an interrupter gear so that the weapon could shoot at the enemy through its own propeller circle. With that, useful fighter planes were invented. Grenades , flechettes and later the first special high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped from the aircraft ; initially on enemy lines and later on the infrastructure of the enemy (factories, cities, bridges, etc.). At this time, a doctrine developed in both warring parties. B. as area bombing directive the air war the RAF in World War II coined (by way of example, a quote of the Military Council of the Allies in Versailles in the autumn of 1918):

"The best way to do this is to bomb the industrial centers where you:
a) achieved military and vital damage by destroying the supply centers for war material and
b) achieved the maximum effect on morale by destroying the most sensitive part of the population, namely the working class. "

During the First World War, an aircraft industry was built from the ground, the first airfields were built, the technology of aviation radio was developed, and aircraft engines became more and more powerful. Many of the flight figures used in aerial combat later became standard figures in aerobatics such as Immelmann or Looping .

Tied observation platforms

In Austria-Hungary , Stephan von Petročzy , Theodore von Kármán and Wilhelm Zurovec developed the tethered observation platforms PKZ-1 and PKZ-2 ; these machines were helicopters guided on three ropes. The PKZ-2 reached an altitude of 50 m during test flights, but was probably never used in a manned manner.

All-metal aircraft

In 1915 Hugo Junkers tested the world's first all-metal aircraft , the Junkers J 1 . In 1919 Junkers also built the world's first all-metal airliner , the Junkers F 13 , the design principles of which set the trend for subsequent generations of aircraft.

Invention of the parachute

The German Käthe Paulus developed the packing cover for the parachute . On March 1, 1912, the American Albert Berry jumped from an airplane with a parachute for the first time. The attempt succeeded. This meant that a reliable rescue device was available for aircraft crews. Otto Heinecke invented the parachute with forced release, a parachute that was released by a pull-up cord. During the First World War, the parachute was widely used as a rescue device for German aircraft crews. The Entente -Mächte supplied - according to a book of 1917 - their flight crews did not parachuted to prevent damaged aircraft were abandoned prematurely.

The first aircraft carrier

With the HMS Campania , the first aircraft carrier was created in 1916 ; the first aircraft on it were the Fairey Campania and the Sopwith Pup . In 1915, the Short 184 succeeded in sinking a ship for the first time (" torpedo bomber ").

Interwar period

During the First World War, aircraft production had been greatly boosted. After that, the aircraft manufacturers had to struggle to survive as fewer military aircraft were ordered. In Europe in particular, many of the former aircraft manufacturers went bankrupt because they did not succeed in converting their production to civilian goods . In the United States, warplanes were cheap to buy. Former military pilots had to look for new jobs.

In the inter-war period , particularly in the German Empire of the Weimar Republic , where the construction of powered aircraft was initially completely forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles , there was a lively gliding movement . Before the First World War, gliding was only practiced occasionally, but now it has been systematically promoted as a separate direction within aviation ( Rhön-Rossitten-Gesellschaft ). Within a few years, the performance increased rapidly: At the first Rhön gliding competition in 1920 on the Wasserkuppe , a 1.83 km further and 2 minutes and 28 seconds long flight with the Schwatzen Düvel was a record, so in 1929 Robert Kronfeld flew with his glider Vienna already 102.2 km. The Hannoversche Aero-Club, founded in 1921, is one of the oldest air sports clubs .

In the USA as well as in Europe there were many new civil services and airlines , such as Luft Hansa 1926. The most famous passenger aircraft of this time were the Junkers F 13 , the Junkers G 38 , the Dornier Wal , the Handley Page HP42 and the Junkers Ju 52 / 3m .

The Nazi regime began a systematic armament soon after taking power . In 1936 the expenditures in the field of civil aviation were 1.5 billion Reichsmarks (RM). The expenditures for the military aviation are put at 23.5 billion RM, so that the expenditures for the civil aviation amounted to only 6% (see armament of the air force ). Around 700 aircraft were used in scheduled air traffic worldwide; there were also 18,000 military aircraft.

The airmail with aircraft that have emerged during the First World War, has been significantly expanded and operated internationally. The first regular airmail connection was started on April 1, 1918 between Vienna and Kiev, followed by the Vienna – Budapest route in July 1918. The aerial advertising became fashionable, the so-called skywriting 1922 was presented by British Major Jack Savage and enthusiastically received in the US by a growing advertising industry. Traveling trailers in the USA drove from fair to fair with their aerobatics . The first aircraft were used as agricultural aircraft for pest control . The aerial photography was used for surveying purposes used. “Aviator aces” of the First World War like Ernst Udet re- enacted aerial combat as stuntmen for the film industry.

Curtiss NC-4

Long-haul flights , especially crossing the Atlantic, were a major challenge after the war . One of three US Navy Curtiss flying boats launched in Newfoundland , the Curtiss NC-4 , landed in Lisbon on May 27, 1919 after 11 days and Lieutenant-Commander Albert Cushing Read radioed home: “We are safe on the other side of the river Pond. The job is done. ”The other crew members of the flying boat were Walter Hinton and Elmer F. Stone as pilots, James L. Breese and Eugene S. Rhoads as flight engineers, and Herbert C. Rodd as radio operators. The flying boat had to stop in the Azores for repairs ; it was brought back to the US by ship after a visit to the UK.

Alcock and Brown's Vickers Vimy after crash landing at Clifden

In the period from June 14 to 15, 1919, the British pilots Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Your aircraft was a twin-engine modified Vickers Vimy IV bomber with an open cockpit. The planes got caught in thunderstorms, hail and snow. They started from Lester's Field, Newfoundland; they landed on a peat bog near Clifden in Connemara , Ireland . On landing, the aircraft fell on its nose and was damaged. After landing, John Alcock said wittily: Yesterday I was in America, and I am the first man in Europe to say that. ("I was in America yesterday, and I'm the first who can say that in Europe!")

Charles Lindbergh made the first non-stop solo flight from New York to Paris across the Atlantic with his “Ryan NYP” Spirit of St. Louis aircraft between May 20 and 21, 1927 . He won the Orteig Prize, which has been awarded since 1919 . This overflight gave the US aircraft industry and US airlines a significant boost. A Guggenheim- funded trip by Lindbergh to all US states resulted in the construction of airfields across the country.

On April 12, 1928 the Atlantic crossing from east ( Baldonnel in Ireland) to west ( Greenly Island - Newfoundland) by Hermann Köhl , James Fitzmaurice and Ehrenfried Günther Freiherr von Hünefeld with a modified Junkers W 33 (" Bremen ") succeeded.

A regular, non-stop flight connection from Europe to Japan could only be offered when the air traffic gap between China and Japan was closed in May 1936. The flight time for a flight from Berlin to Tokyo via Athens , Hanoi and Hong Kong was a total of ten days.

From the end of the 1920s the age of the large flying boats began , the most famous representatives of which were the Dornier Do X and Boeing 314 . The main areas of use were long transatlantic and Pacific flights. The Short Mayo Composite flying boat combination had been experimented with in England for transatlantic flights from 1937 onwards. The purpose of the Short Mayo combination was to use a lightly fueled flying boat, in this case a Short S. 21, to carry a heavily loaded seaplane (a Short S. 20) to flight level and to release it there. This combination should optimize the relationship between performance, payload and fuel.

Ernst Heinkel is considered a pioneer in catapult aircraft construction, who in 1925 set up a take-off runway (not yet a catapult) with an airplane on the Japanese battleship Nagato and personally commissioned it. On a few large passenger ships, such as the Bremen , with the advent of the catapult technology, catapult aircraft were used, which were started by means of a steam catapult . The aircraft were mostly used for fast mail delivery, such as the Heinkel HE 12 and the Junkers Ju 46 . In the military sector, catapult aircraft were mainly used for aerial reconnaissance. Small machines such as the Arado Ar 196 were deployed from large warships and large catapult aircraft such as the Dornier Do 26 were used by Lufthansa for transatlantic airmail traffic from air base ships in the 1930s and as transport aircraft and long-range reconnaissance aircraft during World War II .

In 1937 the Luftwaffe began building high-altitude aircraft ; these were equipped with pressurized cabins and reached heights between 12,000 and 15,000 m. The most famous representatives were the Junkers EF 61 , later the Henschel Hs 130 and the Junkers Ju 388 . They were used as high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft or high-altitude bombers, but only a few copies were built. As the first passenger aircraft with a pressurized cabin, the Boeing 307 Stratoliner enabled a flight over the weather and thus a significant increase in passenger comfort.

A critical physical limitation of fixed-wing aircraft is that at low speeds the airfoil stalls ; possible consequences are spinning and falling . Such an accident of a large three-engined bomber plane he had designed led the Spanish aircraft designer Juan de la Cierva to develop the gyroplane . In 1922 he developed the articulated rotor head The rotor blades are flapping hinges attached to the rotor head, as a result of the buoyancy difference between pretravel and back running rotor blade is balanced. From 1927 onwards, de la Cierva used flapping joints and swivel dampers as well and designed the mounting of the rotor blades on the rotor head for rotary wing aircraft, which is still common today . De la Cierva crossed the English Channel on September 18, 1928 in his C.8L gyroplane . Aside from Bell's semi-rigid blade connector, most rotary wing aircraft designers used the de la Cierva blade connector principle. Only modern composite materials for rotor blades made hinge-free blade connections possible; the flapping and swiveling movements are now caused by deformations of the more elastic rotor blade (e.g. from 1970 on Bo 105 ).

In the early 1930s, Louis Bréguet and René Dorand built the Gyroplane Laboratoire, probably the first usable helicopter that flew stable over a long period of time. It held all international records for helicopters until the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 took the lead in June 1937 . Both models were prototypes and remained unique.

The interwar period was also the time when the essential instruments for flight without sight were developed. As early as 1914, the American Lawrence Sperry and his French mechanic Emil Cachin demonstrated a gyro-stabilized biplane at an air show in France. This gyro stabilization was the original form of all autopilots . However, the autopilot only gained widespread importance in the 1930s. Elmer Ambrose Sperry , the father of Lawrence Sperry, had developed the artificial horizon (other sources name Lawrence himself as the inventor of this device, father and son had been in competition since 1918). The first instrument flight is attributed to James Doolittle in 1929. He used an accurate altimeter, Elmer Sperry's artificial horizon, and a gyrocompass in his Consolidated NY-2 . It was conducted by an observer on the ground via radiotelephone and aligned with a radio beacon. All important instruments for blind flight based on the gyro were thus introduced around 1930.

By the late 1930s, automatic pneumatic or hydraulic course control was common on larger aircraft. For the pilot, this progress can only be compared with the introduction of the “fly-by-wire” control system today; for him it meant relying on technical instruments instead of his own feelings. The introduction of this course control was received accordingly critically. On the other hand, the instruments also enabled aviation to be expanded to include conditions under which visual flight would never have been possible, in terms of altitude and flight at night and in unfavorable weather.

The radio navigation at that time was based mainly on the still aim for by broadcasters or radio beacons with a loop antenna . Although the first rotary radio beacon had already been developed by Telefunken in 1908 under the name Telefunken-Kompass-Sender, at that time these systems were only relevant for airship travel. Such rotary radio beacons were then in Cleve and Tønder (Tønder) .

The first airliner with retractable landing gear was completed in the USA in 1931.

For the first time in the summer of 1933, a single-engine cantilevered low-wing aircraft ANT-25 designed by Andrei Tupolev flew with a theoretical flight range of 15,000 km. From 1933 onwards, C. Lorenz AG from Berlin developed the ZZ procedure significantly, a ground-based bad weather landing procedure that was approved in 1931 and was first used successfully in the night flight line service between Königsberg and Berlin. On the basis of a principle formulated and patented by Otto Scheller as early as 1907, the engineer Ernst Ludwig Kramar constructed the so-called Lorenz beacon or officially the ultra-short wave radio landing beacon (LFF) as the first beacon system with a range of around 30 km; the evaluation was carried out first acoustically and later by display instruments. During the Second World War, these systems were further developed for greater ranges and used in the opposite direction of flight. Instead of approaching an airport to land, the beacon guided bombers away from the airport to their target with high accuracy ( X-procedure and knee-leg device ).

On June 20, 1939, the Heinkel He 176, the first test aircraft with a controllable liquid rocket drive, took off . His Walter R 1-203 engine was developed by Hellmuth Walter . This aircraft was also the first to have a detachable cockpit capsule with a braking parachute as a rescue device. In an emergency, however, the pilot had to free himself from the capsule and jump off with the parachute. The aircraft reached a maximum speed of about 750 km / h.

Heinkel He 178

The Heinkel He 178 was the first aircraft in the world to be powered exclusively by a turbine air jet engine. His HeS 3 engine was developed by Hans von Ohain . The first flight was carried out on August 27, 1939 in Rostock-Marienehe by Erich Warsitz .

At the same time and independently of Ohain, Frank Whittle developed a jet engine in England. He only received money to build an aircraft with this engine after the outbreak of war in 1939. His experimental aircraft Gloster E.28 / 39 took off on May 15, 1941 for its maiden flight.

Second World War

With the military requirements in World War II , aircraft development experienced an enormous boom. Germany in particular was forced to make up for the lack of resources with a technical lead. The technical highlights of these developments were the jet engines and the series production of jet aircraft such as the Me 163 rocket aircraft , the Me 262 twin- engine fighter aircraft and the Ar 234 jet bomber . However, due to the lack of important raw materials, these aircraft suffered from a very short engine life. On the Allied side, the only jet aircraft that was used until the end of the war was the British Gloster Meteor .

During this time, among other things, the developments in radar technology , the first powerful helicopters , the ejection seat and various cruise missiles and rockets .

Fighter plane

Due to the Battle of Britain , the fighter first came into focus. The two outstanding types of this time were the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Supermarine Spitfire , which were significantly increased in their performance through improvements in aerodynamics and also the performance of the engines in the course of their development. They remained adversaries throughout the war. Both types continued to be built in third countries after the war.

The air war was sometimes waged at increasing altitudes. In order to be able to effectively protect the deployed bomber fleets, long-range fighters were developed, such as the North American P-51 (see also Fighter # Second World War ).

radar

With the Chain Home , the United Kingdom had already set up an effective system of radar stations for detecting incoming aircraft at the beginning of the war . Since attacks often had to be flown at night because of the German air defense, avionics found its way into air warfare. Devices for determining position, such as the GEE method, radar for navigation and night hunting, and radio devices were used during the operations.

Pacific War

The armed forces of the Japanese Empire achieved outstanding success with their light and very agile Mitsubishi Zero Sen in the Pacific. Later developments in the USA made it possible to proceed against the opponent with a chance of success. At the end of 1944, Japan's situation became increasingly hopeless during the Pacific War . The Japanese then devised kamikaze planes , whose patriotic pilots, trained only for this mission, suicidally steered the plane full of explosives onto Allied ships. The destructive effect was devastating in individual cases, but the success in terms of a decisive effect on the war was only moderate. Most of the kamikaze planes were piston-powered planes; some, like the Yokosuka MXY-7 , were rocket or jet propelled.

Japan capitulated after a B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 .

Rocket glider

With the Messerschmitt Me 163 , a rocket glider based on a glider was developed to readiness for use in mid-1944. It impressed with its climbing performance , but only had a short maximum duration of use.

Transonic flow

During this time the airspeed was increased up to the transonic range. Extensive research projects, especially on the German side, led to fundamental discoveries in high-speed aerodynamics, such as the use of wing arrowheads or the discovery of the area rule . The product of these efforts were two prototypes of the heavy jet bomber Junkers Ju 287 with negative sweep of the wings and application of the area rule.

Cruise missiles

The first use of cruise missiles began in 1944 with the German V1 . The V1 had an automatic gyro course control and a small propeller at the tip with a counter for range control. The controls were not very precise, so no point targets could be attacked successfully.

helicopter

The development of the helicopter led to the first operational types in World War II. Towards the end of the war the light helicopters Flettner Fl 282 and Sikorsky R-4 , a successor to the Sikorsky VS-300 , were built in series. The world's first transport helicopter, the Focke-Achgelis Fa 223 , went into series production during the war.

Autopilot

The 1944 Arado Ar 234B-2 was the first four- engine bomber with an autopilot (PDS) .

Ejection seat

Everard Calthrop was the first to experiment with an ejector seat to rescue a pilot. In 1916 he built such a seat that was powered by compressed air. On April 2, 1930, Anastasie Dragomir received French patent No. 678566 for a new type of ejection seat. His invention was tested on August 28, 1929 at Paris-Orly airport in a Fahrman airplane. Lucien Bossoutrot was at the wheel. In Romania he successfully repeated his experiment on October 26, 1929 at Băneasa Airport in Bucharest. The Heinkel He 280 was the world's first twin-engine aircraft. The aircraft with two turbojet engines was also one of the first to be equipped with an ejection seat . The first flight took place on April 2, 1941. The ejector seat was first used as a rescue device on January 13, 1943, when the pilot had to catapult himself out of an He 280 that had become unable to fly due to icing.

1945 until today

In the immediate post-war period, progressive German developments and projects were tested, copied and further developed by the victorious powers. The MiG-15 and F-86 were unmistakably derived from the Ta 183 . Messerschmitt's Messerschmitt P.1101 , which was not yet completely built at the end of the war, was equipped with a US engine in the USA and was used to research the effect of different wing arrows - this resulted in the Bell X-5 , among other things .

In 1947, the Bell X-1 officially broke the sound barrier as the first aircraft ; unofficially, according to reports from German fighter pilots, this was accidentally achieved in 1945 with a Messerschmitt Me 262 . The X-1 was an experimental aircraft with rocket propulsion which was carried by a B-29 at an altitude of about 10 km and released there, whereupon the rocket propulsion ignited and the aircraft broke the sound barrier.

The jet aircraft arms race began with the Cold War and the Korean War (1950–1953). In military aviation this was the end of the propeller era; the age of the jets had dawned. On November 8, 1950, the world's first victory in a dogfight between jet aircraft in which a MiG-15 was shot down by a Lockheed P-80 . Basically, the P-80 and Republic F-84 were not up to the Soviet jets and were therefore soon replaced by the F-86 Saber .

Jet turbine airliners

With the commissioning of the British De Havilland DH.106 Comet for the airline BOAC in 1952, the age of jet turbines appeared to be dawning for commercial aircraft as well. However, the available materials were not yet able to cope with the new loads - the traffic now took place at greater heights and the changing pressure load led to hairline cracks in the hull. When several machines of this type crashed in 1954 and the machines had to stay on the ground, this era in the western world was interrupted for the first time. The situation is different in the Eastern Bloc: with the Tupolev Tu-104 , the Soviet Union established successful liner services from 1956.

Airplane 152 or Baade 152, named after its designer Brunolf Baade , was the first developed German passenger jet aircraft in the 1950s and the most important aircraft construction project in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It was manufactured by VEB Flugzeugwerke Dresden (FWD).

The British had failed because of a phenomenon that had hardly been researched at the time: material fatigue . The Comet had to be largely redesigned. When the successor model DH.106 Comet 4B resumed service after four years, Boeing had already developed and successfully sold a jet aircraft for passenger transport with the 707 , which had a longer range and could carry more than twice as many passengers. The 707's ultimate success from 1962 onwards was the use of the more powerful and fuel-efficient turbofan engines . At the beginning of the 1970s, the Boeing 747 “Jumbo-Jet” wide-body passenger aircraft began to move in . Its dominance in this area only began to decline with the Airbus A380 .

Long range bombers

With the beginning of the 1950s, the development of long-range strategic bombers that could also carry atomic bombs began . The most famous representatives were the Boeing B-52 , Convair B-58 , Myasishchev M-4 and the Tupolew Tu-95 . The B-58 was the first combat aircraft with a central on-board computer that combined the numerous assemblies.

Gas turbine propulsion for helicopters

In 1955, the French company Sud Aviation equipped its Alouette II helicopter with a 250 kW Turboméca Artouste shaft turbine and thus built the first helicopter with a gas turbine drive.

Spy planes

With the Lockheed U-2 spy plane , the Americans began regular flights over Soviet territory in the late 1950s. On May 1, 1960, the pilot Gary Powers was shot down with his U-2 over the Soviet Union. There was a political show trial . The U-2 also played a crucial role in the 1962 Cuba crisis .

Invention of the paraglider

In 1964, Canadian Domina Jalbert files a patent for his Parafoil . He is considered to be the inventor of the rectangular, box-shaped or mattress-shaped surface parachute or paraglider . His work is based on the basic ideas of Francis Rogallo , his invention lays the foundations for paragliding .

Whiz kid

With the Hawker Siddeley Harrier , the serial production of vertical take-off VTOL aircraft began in 1966. However, almost all other VTOL aircraft did not get beyond the prototype stage. The United States is currently (2005) developing a new generation of SVTOL / -VTOL aircraft with the Lockheed Martin F-35 .

Vietnam War

With the Vietnam War , Soviet and American aircraft collided again. The MiG-21 proved to be superior to the American McDonnell F-4 Phantom II in many cases. The Boeing B-52 was used for large-scale bombardments. The extensive use of helicopters, such as the CH-47 Chinook and Bell UH-1 , became increasingly important.

Tu-144 and Concorde

With the maiden flight of the Tupolev Tu-144 on December 31, 1968 and the Concorde on March 2, 1969, the episode of supersonic passenger air traffic began. The Americans had achieved a monopoly on conventional civil, turbine-jet powered passenger aircraft. The British and French wanted to break through this by building the Concorde. However, high energy costs and greater environmental awareness limited the economy and usability of this model. The last flight of a Concorde took place on November 26, 2003.

Stealth aircraft ("stealth aircraft")

The United States Air Force's Lockheed F-117 A Nighthawk was the world's first ready-to-use aircraft to make consistent use of stealth technology . The first F-117A was delivered in 1982. During the construction of the F-117, American engineers called it a "hopeless" case, suspecting that the shape of the aircraft would never allow it to fly. Before they got an official name, the engineers and test pilots called the unconventional aircraft that were hidden during the day to discovery by Soviet satellite to prevent "Cockroaches" ( cockroaches ). This designation is still widely used because, according to many, these aircraft are among the ugliest ever built. The aircraft is also called "Wobblin Goblin", especially because of its restless flight characteristics when refueling in the air . Due to its unstable aerodynamic properties, it can only be flown with the help of a computer. Russia is developing a stealth aircraft called the Sukhoi Su-57 ; China one called J-20 .

Suborbital space flight

Spacecraft SpaceShipTwo

On June 21, 2004, the SpaceShipOne rocket aircraft was the first privately financed suborbital space flight above 100 km. The machine was developed by Scaled Composites as part of the Tier One project in order to win the Ansari X-Prize competition of the X-Prize Foundation . This promised ten million dollars for those who would be the first to use an aircraft to transport two people or equivalent ballast to a height of more than 100 kilometers in addition to the pilot and to repeat this with the same aircraft within 14 days.

SmartBird

Festo SmartBird shortly before the start

The SmartBird from Festo was presented in 2011 at the Hanover Fair . This is the first time that a technical flying object has been realized based on the flapping flight of birds.

Urban air mobility

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Christof Goddemeier: "The dream of flying" , in: Friday , August 13, 2004.
  2. Lynn White: "Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh Century Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and Tradition", in: Technology and Culture , Vol. 2, No. 2 (1961), pp. 97–111 ( 100-101).
  3. Lynn White: "Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh Century Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and Tradition", in: Technology and Culture , Vol. 2, No. 2 (1961), pp. 97–111 ( 97-99).
  4. ^ Octave Chanute, Progress in Flying Machines
  5. ^ Telegram from Orville Wright in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to His Father Announcing Four Successful Flights, 1903 December 17 . December 17, 1903. Retrieved July 21, 2013.
  6. Petru Ciontu: Inventatori Romani . Editura Osim, 2000, p. 46 .
  7. ^ Eisenbahndirektion Mainz (ed.): Official Gazette of the Royal Prussian and Grand Ducal Hessian Railway Directorate in Mainz of September 18, 1909, No. 48. Announcement No. 681, p. 445; ibid. of December 4, 1909, No. 61. Announcement No. 884, p. 540.
  8. ^ RAF Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Stanley Gould Lee (1894-1975): No Parachute: A fighting pilot in World War I (1917); Harper & Row 1970, ISBN 978-0-06-012548-6
  9. ^ Railways and railway workers between 1936 and 1940 . Redactor Verlag, 1972, ISBN 3-87666-012-2 . P. 71.
  10. Note: It is easier to fly from west to east than the other way round, because westerly winds prevail
  11. ^ Railways and railway workers between 1936 and 1940: Redactor Verlag, 1972, ISBN 3-87666-012-2 . P. 64.
  12. A Century of Aircraft: The History and Technique of Flight . Springer 1990, p. 410
  13. Die Welt : Robot bird “SmartBird” flies like a real seagull ( memento of the original from December 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , April 4, 2011, accessed September 21, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.welt.de