Famous Flyers, Cayley's Glider, The Wright Brothers, and The Spirit of St Louis

Part one of a small history of famous flying machines and their creators.


-Cayley's Glider

When we think of attempts to create flying machines before the great breakthroughs of the 20th century we tend to imagine the kind of contraptions seen in many comedic silent news films. These daft devices nearly always appear to be mimicking the flapping of birds wings in a futile attempt to get airborne. To our more enlightened eyes such machines seem comically misguided and a conformation of the view that whatever great things the people of past centuries thought or created they certainly had not the slightest idea how to create a working plane. In fact while the plane is undoubtedly an invention of our modern times it is grossly unfair to overlook that that invention owes almost everything to the work of others in previous centuries, and that while the inventors of the 18th and 19th century didn't create a plane it wasn't for the wont of trying. The most well known of ancient flying machines are the ones penned by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks, (it is not known if he ever got as far a trying to build his drawing in real life), and it is because of his influence that the popular myth has taken hold that the only way that pre-20th century people thought to fly was by copying bird's flapping wings. Leonardo made thousands of drawings of the anatomy of humans and animals and naturally his curiosity led him the question of birds, bats and insects and how they were able to fly. Leonardo's 'ornithopter' drawings show his attempts to figure out how a human might be fitted into a winged-contraption that the operator could then flap the wings with the aid of a hand crank mechanism. Leonardo's sketches are beautiful and fascinating, but had very little to do with the modern day aeroplane. His drawings of a helicopter-like device are more relevant and prescient than his flights of fancy of human-powered bird wings. In his sketches of a spiral-shaped flying machine Leonardo seems to be interpreting the air as something substantial just like water and that he might create flight much as a person can stay afloat by treading water; the machine might stay up by pushing enough air down. As Isaac Newton would explain in a later century; every action has an opposite reaction, Leonardo was on the right track but apparently never quite made a breakthrough

It would be in the early 19th century when the principles of what would later be called aerodynamics would be explored much more fully by a man who remains a surprisingly obscure figure considering the amazing flying machines he created; Sir George Cayley. Cayley was a Yorkshire baronet, an aristocrat with the time and money to invest in engineering projects. As well as experiments with engines, boats, prosthetic limbs and armaments, Cayley was fascinated with the possibility of creating flying machines. He built a model glider as early as 1804, and a few years later was authoring papers that discussed the fundamental principles of flight including the basic forces at work - lift, drag, gravity and thrust. It was Cayley who first truly understood the airfoil and how wings generate uplift without any bird-like flapping action. Cayley's work had led to him being recognised today as the pioneer aeronautical engineer. In 1853 Cayley put all that he had learnt through half a century of curious experimentation into a full size glider that was flown across a Yorkshire moor called Brompton Dale - possibly by Cayley's footman although the exact pilot is unclear - the first recorded controlled flight of any significant distance with a human pilot aboard.

Cayley's glider resembles a canoe suspended below a leaf-shaped wing and while being undoubtedly primitive it demonstrates it's creators fundamental understanding of the principles of flight and the several exceptional insights that allowed Cayley's glider to work successfully. The structure is light and the wing is large enough to generate sufficient lift; to keep the shape rigid without adding too much weight the craft is intricately braced with wires, some in tension and others in compression, much as in a modern hang glider. The pilot sits well forward in the gondola to counterbalance the weight of the tailplane - the tail plane is separate from the main wing and provides essential stability. As well as the tail there is a rudder to provide steering, and the pilot holds the handle of the rudder is much the same way as a gondolier holds his steering punt. The rudder mechanism is also balanced about it's centre to keep the craft's weight even. Later planes of course would surpass Cayley by giving the pilot direct control of the tail itself. Lastly the glider has landing wheels, again presciently arranged in a triangular shape with two at the front and one trailing wheel. modern replica flights have shown just how successful Cayley's craft was, and how the possibly apocryphal story of his footman telling the baronet wide eyed after his flight "I was hired to drive not to fly!" may have come about.

The Victorians were aware of how to make something fly but had an intractable problem; the steam engine didn't generate enough power to lift it's own (considerable) weight off the ground. The huge weight of steam engines had been the reason that railways developed as the first form of mass transit. Smooth iron (later steel) rails supported and guided heavy engines with their huge boilers. steam powered road vehicles were tried even before the invention of railways but were almost always far too cumbersome and temperamental to control to be of much practical use. The Victorians, despite the best efforts of inventive geniuses like Cayley would remain mostly land bound. it would take the discovery of oil, the distillation of petroleum fuel, and the coming of the internal combustion engine to get humans airborne.


-Wright Flyer

The 19th century, and the Victorian-era, only just missed out being able to claim the credit for inventing the aeroplane. A mere three years after the turn of the century a small craft made of wood and canvas made a controlled, powered flight across some sand dunes in North Carolina USA. At the helm was a bicycle maker from Ohio called Orville Wright. Watching his flight was his brother, and the co-creator of the machine, Wilbur. The flight lasted 59 seconds and covered 35 metres - less, as trivia fans love to recall - than the wingspan of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet that would fly a mere 66 years later. Like many pioneers who are heralded as the 'inventors' of something - Alexander Bell for the telephone, Philo Farnsworth for the television, Henry Ford for the mass produced car - the Wright brothers are frequently dismissed as being the recipients of an unfair amount of attention at the expense of other, earlier inventors. Almost as equally other names are put forward as the 'real' inventor of the aeroplane, with passionate cases argued that powered flights were made many years before the Wrights by other overlooked pilots.

Indeed some inventors did come tantalizingly close to powered flight many years before the Wrights. In 1874 Felix du Temple, a French navy officer, managed a brief "hop" in a steam-powered plane, but never achieved more. The ingenious and compact steam engine that he used for power did become a successful naval engine however. Ten years later another navy officer - this time a Russian called Alexander Mozhaysky - performed a similar feat in a similar steam-powered flyer. In 1890 a French engineer called Clement Ader flew a steam-powered flyer he called the Eole approximately fifty metres. However it was not a controlled flight; the Eole evidently could not be steered, and in all event flew less than a metre off the ground. Subsequent modern day experiments have shown that each of these pioneers could have developed their planes further into something more successful, and that the main sticking point for each was the power -or rather the lack of power - their steam engines could develop. Unlike the Wrights, du Temple and Mozhaysky launched their crafts down ramps, much like a modern day stunt motorbike rider might while jumping over an obstacle, which probably contributed somewhat to the how their craft became airborne.

Modern experiments have also shown that another individual designed a machine that could have flown under it's own power and beaten the Wrights to the claim as inventor of the aeroplane. An English university lecturer called Percy Pilcher built many manned gliders late in the 1890s and drew up plans for what would later be known as a tri-plane. After corresponding with another glider enthusiast, an American railway engineer called Octave Chanute, Both men came up with a simple way of creating more lift from wings; stack multiple wings on top of each other, like the shelves of a bookcase. Alas, Pilcher died in a crash of one of his gliders in 1899 and his plans disappeared into obscurity. A replica of Pilcher's planned plane was built in 2003 by students of Cranfield university and was flown, under control, for over half a minute longer than the Wrights first flight. Another glider pilot, who had also experimented with biplane designs, a German called Otto Lillenthal had also perished three years earlier in a crash, removing another potential usurper of the Wright's achievement. Chanute's 'biplane' gliders influenced the Wrights greatly, and their flyer's wings were essentially copied from Chanute's designs although Chanute, nearing his 70th birthday and already retired and rich, was evidently happy to allow his designs to influence others.

Many commentators have observed that the Wright brothers genius lay not just in creating their flyer but in remembering to pack a camera and to take some photographs of the machine in flight - something the other contenders all evidently failed to do. Most notably a German-born American emigre called Gustave Whitehead. Debate has raged hotly ever since Whitehead's claimed flights in his "No. 21" plane in 1901. Contemporary local news reports claimed that Whitehead flew over 800 metres in Bridgeport Connecticut in the "No 21" but no photographs of the feat were published or have ever been conclusively found. Whitehead, also unlike the Wrights, did not keep a journal or log book to document his claims. Whether or not the Whitehead plane did or did not fly, what is not in doubt is that Whitehead, like du Temple and Mozhaysky before him, did not capitalise on his ideas in the subsequent years and lived the rest of his in relative obscurity.

While the Wright's fame owes something to fortune and timing, they were still brilliant engineers who worked tirelessly and meticulously on their ideas and whose successful designs and flights were the end result of much exhaustive testing and refining of their designs. Like so many great inventors they came from humble backgrounds, worked out of small workshops, and were obsessively dedicated to their pursuits. Neither married or fathered children and they lived together in the same house, devoting all their time to their bicycle manufacturing business and their flying machines. The bicycle business provided them with a keen understanding of precise engineering and of the importance of the fine tuning designs for optimum balance and control - a philosophy that would be reapplied to planes; the Wrights would work for many years on creating their control systems and working on the weight distribution of their gliders before adding an engine. The Wrights did something that was far ahead of it's time; they built a wind tunnel to test models in. The wind tunnel allowed many ideas to be tried out quickly and saved money and time on costly and potentially very dangerous test flights. Both brothers were also both conspicuously free of egos - neither ever tried to claim precedence over the other, they took turns flying their gliders, they would even quarrel furiously with each other before agreeing a truce and that both of them had a valid opinion! Their lack of showiness had a practical benefit too; another competitor in the race to create a plane, the wealthy Samuel Pierpoint Langley, would test his contraptions in the middle of Washington DC in the full view of press, politicians and his sponsors. The Wrights avoided reporters, politics and money-men, something that initially caused a slow recognition of their historic flight, but their meticulous nature in logging and photographing their flights meant that nobody could deny their achievements once they had been achieved.

To modern eyes the Wright flyer is rather odd in arrangement. It has all the familiar pieces; wings, propellers, stabilisers, tail fins, cockpit, flying controls, but laid out back-to-front. The horizontal stabilizers are not on the tail with the vertical fins but in front of the pilot. The propellers are behind the wing not in front and push the plane along rather than pull it. The pilot lies prostrate on their belly on top of the wing and controls the flyer by swinging side-to-side in a cradle. The wings do not have ailerons like a modern plane - these would first appear a decade later - instead the flyer uses 'wing warping'; the wing tips are pulled by the control wires. This difference aside the pilot has the almost the same amount of control as on all subsequent conventional planes. The warping wings controlled the plane's roll (side to side), the front canard wings the pitch (up and down), and the rudder the plane's yaw (left and right) mastering the mechanics involved in providing reliable control over the plane's three axis of movement was the Wright's greatest breakthrough and legacy. In fact, much of the glory for the Wright's breakthroughs should really be reserved for the brother's second and third Flyers. The first Flyer, the one that appears in every history book, and is copied in countless full size replicas, never flew after it's first brief voyages. The brothers second Flyer, built in 1904, flew over one hundred times, flying for up to five minutes and performing the first controlled flying circles. It was dismantled at the end of the year and it's parts salvaged to make a third Flyer - that would fly up to twenty five miles and carry the first ever air passenger. It was also designed to make the rudder entirely separate from the wing warping system, thus giving the pilot exactly the same controls as in any standard aeroplane. Today the Wright Flyer III of 1905 sits quietly in a gallery in Dayton Ohio, part the city wide historic park preserving key Wright brothers locations around the city; their homes, their bicycle shop and office. It is a far cry from the national Air and Space Museum in Washington DC where the original Flyer is stared at by thousands of people every day.

These days the Wright brothers are two of the most famous inventors in the history of the world. But in the immediate years after their first flight their names were not widely known, and when they were mentioned it was often along with doubts about whether they really had built a flying machine or whether they were hoaxers. In the days before radio and television the publicity shy Wrights did not do much travelling to promote themselves and the only way for journalists, photographers and members of the public to see their flights was to chance upon them. As a consequence, especially in the snobbish European establishment, the achievements of the Wrights went somewhat unnoticed for several years. Only when they made public demonstrations in France in the summer of 1908 did the European press and public begin to acknowledge them. By then however they had some serious competition that threatened to overtake their advantage and move the centre of aviation development from eastern USA to Europe.

Alberto Santos Dumont was born in Brazil the heir of family rich from the coffee business, but lived in Paris most of his life. His wealth allowed him to hire private tutors to teach him the sciences and engineering, but like many adventurous young men from wealthy backgrounds Dumont was not content to live an easy life and took to being a balloon pilot, taking joyrides above Paris. He took to designing 'dirigibles' (the french term for airships) and would tour the city, often landing outside his favourite cafe. Dumont was everything the Wright's were not; he became a celebrity, made friends with royalty and the rich, and became a fashion trendsetter. For all his pretensions he was an extremely intelligent engineer and by 1905 was working on his own powered aeroplane. A year later he flew his '14-bis' plane 60 metres - the first powered flight in Europe. The 14-bis was influenced by the Wright's planes; it was a biplane with it's control surfaces in front of the pilot. but Santos introduced an important innovation that the Wright's had not adopted. The wings on Santos's plane swept up in a 'v' shape (called a dihedral angle). the upsweep gave the plane much more stability and reduced 'sideslip' when banking over, meaning the plane would have a greater tendency to fly with it's wings level. This in turn allowed Santos to experiment with more radical moving surfaces to improve maneuverability. His next plane, the Demoiselle was, in the basics, essentially the same layout as any small propeller plane that followed. It was a monoplane, with one large wing, the engine sat at the front, with the pilot behind, and a tailplane mounted out behind. Alas, after creating two revolutionary planes Santos Dumont fell ill with multiple sclerosis and never fulfilled his promise as a engineer. He returned to Brazil and lived in a house of his own design. He died in the 1930s in mysterious circumstances. Wilbur wright died from typhoid fever in 1912, Orville lived till 1948, long enough to see his invention surpass the speed of sound.


-Spirit of St Louis

In the summer of 1927 a quiet 25 year old former ail mail pilot shot from obscurity to being the by far the most famous person in the world. What Charles A. Lindbergh did to become so instantly famous was quite simple - he flew from New York to Paris. To modern eyes not a great challenge, thousands of people do the same thing every day on hundreds of different flights. Even in 1927 it was not an unprecedented feat to fly across the forbidding expanse of the Atlantic ocean. What made Lindbergh exceptional was what he did but how he did it; he flew entirely solo, in a small plane, directly from an airfield near New York to an airfield near Paris. He made no mistakes, did not get lost or run low on fuel, and in the process showed the world that the aeroplane had the potential to travel from any one place on the earth to any other without problems. Plus, from the adoring public's point of view, it helped that "Lindy" was a boyish, modest, polite, wholesome and clean-cut figure who made for a perfect role model. his talent and heroism had also made something extremely dangerous look easy.

What is often forgotten nowadays is that Lindbergh was not the only person trying to cross the ocean at the time. He was in a competition called the Orteig prize - a large cash prize offered up to anyone who could make the trip from New York to Europe. The other teams were all much larger than Lindbergh's - in fact, Lindbergh didn't really have a team, just a very small group of mechanics. Neither did he surround himself with press and publicity people and other frivolous hangers-on who were not essential to his task. And by flying entirely solo he also avoided the internal politicking and arguments that characterised his rivals efforts. For example the great favourite was the team led by Commander Richard Byrd. At the time Byrd was feted as being the first explorer to fly over the North Pole, but there were many mumbled suspicions that he had falsified his logbook and had come nowhere near to overflying the pole. This episode aside, Byrd was a great explorer, but also possessed a great ego. In his journals he barely gave credit to the efforts of his crew,and especially his Norwegian pilot Bernd Balchen. He fell out with the designer of his plane America, the Dutch engineer Antony Fokker, after a crash while testing that plane- a crash that took Byrd's team out of contention just long enough to allow Lindbergh in. Another team vying against Lindbergh was the crew of the Columbia. The plane, designed by a genius engineer called Mario Bellanca was ready well before the rival planes and had already recorded an endurance record circling above New York for 51 hours, earlier in 1927. Their pilot Clarence Chamberlin was almost the equal to Lindbergh in skills and in calm temperament. By contrast their team leader Charles Levine was an extremely unreliable operator who seemed to specialise in causing grief and upset. Levine rarely paid his team the money he said he would and loved to change to crew roster on a whim. One of his changes proved to be costly when his original co-pilot Lloyd Bertaud put in an injunction against Levine to prevent him flying. While the injunction was waiting to be lifted Lindbergh made his historic flight. The designer Bellanca also left the team shortly after. A year earlier Levine had been approached by Lindbergh the year before to sponsor Lindbergh's flight. Levine had agreed but waited until Lindbergh arrived at his offices with a cheque in hand from his backers to tell him that while he would take the money to build a plane he couldn't guarantee that Lindbergh would be the pilot. Naturally the deal immediately fell through and the young air mail pilot went off to find somebody else to build him a plane.

Lindbergh's plane was a relatively straightforward device, compared to the opposition. For a start it only had the one engine. Commander Byrd's America had three 200 horsepower radial engines, giving it three times the power but also three times the weight. The Spirit of St Louis weighed in at just under 1000kg whereas the America was over 3000kg - and that was without the weight of the occupants or fuel. The crucial importance of the planes weight to a successful long distance flight, and the dangers of designing an overweight plane had been demonstrated with the crash in 1926 at Roosevelt Field of another Orteig Prize contender, the Sikorsky S35. Even though the Sikorsky company would later become the name synonymous with the first helicopters, and though the plane was flown by the French flying ace Rene Fonck, the plane never even managed to begin it's planned flight across the Atlantic. Despite the fact that the fully loaded Sikorsky was 1800kg overweight when fuelled, Fonck had ambitiously made an attempt to takeoff. The plane never came close to flying and crashed heavily when it's landing gear collapsed. Only two of it's four occupants - Fonck and his co-pilot managed to escape before the wrecked plane exploded.

Fonck's plane had far more powerful engines than either Lindbergh or Byrd, but his rushed preparation had doomed his attempt and destroyed the first serious contended for the prize. The Americans were all using Wright Company 'Whirlwhind' engines, but these were far from guaranteed to be powerful enough for the job. A month before Lindbergh's flight two US Navy pilots, Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster, had unveiled their Orteig prize contender, a three engine plane called the Pathfinder. The Pathfinder's original engines were far more powerful than the Wright engines, but also consumed far too much fuel for a practical non-stop Atlantic crossing, so they were replaced with Wright engines. Unfortunately little about the design of the plane was changed to account for the reduced power. On a test flight shortly before their planned trans=Atlantic flight, Davis and Wooster both perished when the underpowered and overloaded plane crashed after failing to climb over a row of trees. A few weeks later came yet another challenger; this time aiming to fly in the opposite direction, from Paris to New York. This was thought to be a much harder challenge - the 'jet stream' was unknown in the 1920s but the prevailing winds were known to blow mostly from west to east. The two pilots, experienced French flyers called Charles Nungessor and Francois Coli, knew this too but reckoned they did not had time to ship their plane - the Oeseau Blanc (White Bird), to America. Their plane too was heavy, and only had enough fuel for an almost direct flight to New York, there was no margin for error. Nungessor and Coli took off from Paris early in May 1927, were briefly sighted heading out to sea of the southern tip of Ireland, and disappeared forever somewhere over the ocean. What happened to them remains a mystery.

The crashes underlined the importance of good preparation and, perhaps even more importantly, patience. Unfortunately not a virtue that was encouraged by the race for the glory and the prize on offer for the first to make the flight. Experienced designers were being rushed into creating half-baked and underpowered planes, and some of the world's best pilots were rushing to get them ready and paying the price. Curiously enough Lindbergh's preparations were a strange mixture of prudence and recklessness. When he took delivery of the plane from it's builders, the Ryan Aircraft company, he flew it single-handedly from California to Lindbergh Field, across an entire continent's worth a adverse weather, including thunderstorms and the rains that were causing the great Mississippi floods of that summer. Though somewhat foolhardy (and nerve racking for his backers) his combined delivery and test flight made him familiar with the characteristics of his plane, including it's somewhat unbalanced nature - something Lindbergh didn't mind, as he thought that his plane's slightly unpredictable tendencies would help keep him alert on the long Atlantic crossing. Aside from his individualistic testing methods, in other ways Lindbergh was very prudent and his care and attention to detail was reflected in the design of the Spirit. Ballanca's Columbia, the plane Lindbergh might have ended up piloting but for the machinations of it's owner Levine, was a very similar design to the Spirit. It too had one engine, was made of a steel frame wrapped in fabric, and had proven it's ability to fly long distances - far more so, in fact, than the Spirit. But Lindbergh's plane was purely a single seater, and was far more purposeful. Many thought Lindbergh hopelessly out of his depth deciding to fly solo for such a long distance. But Lindbergh was an experienced air mail pilot, and used to navigating on his own. He also reasoned there was no need for a radio operator; either he would make it or he wouldn't, and a radio introduced a risk of fire in the cockpit. One feature of the plane that Lindbergh specified can still raise eyebrows even today - it seem to have no forward visibility at all. To Lindbergh's highly rational mind he didn't need to see forward over the open ocean, and the nose would be a good place to put the main fuel tank. To see he would side-slip the plane and look out the door window, like a steam engine driver. Having the heavy fuel tank in the nose would make the plane safer if he did crash; he wouldn't be crushed by the tank.

On May 20th 1927 Charles Lindbergh arrived at Roosevelt Field early in the morning and readied his plane for it's planned flight. 1200 kg of fuel was pumped aboard and Lindbergh climbed into his small wicker cockpit seat - a seat made intentionally uncomfortable, again to help keep the pilot from dozing off. At ten minutes to eight in the morning the fully loaded Spirit took off, lumbering past a row of power lines at the end of the runway by barely six metres. Although the plane had flown across America in the weeks previously it had never flown across a long stretch of water and the small channel between Long Island and the main land was the first time it had done so. Lindbergh followed the coast all the way up to Newfoundland, all the while sightseers underneath kept a lookout. The new contender had so suddenly appeared in the race that not many people knew much about him, and many doubted he could really make the journey single handedly. Finally he made the turn away from land and disappeared from all sight and radio contact until he reached France. The modern day airliner captain flying from New York to Paris get a comfortable ride that takes around six hours. The jet engines power them up to over 500 mph, the pressurised cabin means they can fly at over 9 km up high above most of the world's weather, the computerised flight controls can fly the plane automatically - the pilot is really only a supervisor to the computer - and the computer can navigate itself from the departure gate at one end to the arrival gate at the other. Lindbergh had none of these things. His plane had one piston engine, could fly at up to 130 mph, and as high as 5 km. His journey would take over thirty hours, trying to claw over storm clouds, and descending frequently to try to de-ice his control surfaces. He had to navigate with pencil and notepaper, relying on the stars, and keeping track of his speed and heading, all while juggling the fuel valves leading from the several tanks to the engine, and manually steering the stick and rudder pedals. All while sitting in a small wicker chair inside a metal frame covered in doped fabric like a giant tent, strapped behind a deafening engine thundering away in front - an engine on which his life entirely depended. If it were to fail, only he would know of his fate, as there was no radio to summon any help.

When Lindbergh appeared over Paris after over a day of silence, the Parisian public reacted not so much with a jubilation but with something approaching rapture. They were pleased to see him alive and well, of course, but there was far more it than that. His arrival signalled the beginning of a new era. One French politician referred to the intrepid pilot as the first "citizen of the world", as indeed he was. He would return to New York by steamship, but his flight had clearly foreshadowed the what the future could hold. For the next few months he would fly the Spirit around America on a goodwill tour. Ironically while he would be remembered for his brave flight over the Atlantic it would his tour of America that would be more influential, as American industry woke up to the possibilities of aviation. For half a year Lindbergh and the Spirit would hop around a giant continent, a continent whose inhabitants were used to travelling around by long distance sleeper train - if they travelled at all. Lindbergh and his sleek silver bird became a mascot for the aeroplane, and he was greeted by huge crowds everywhere he landed. After a year the Spirit would be retired to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. The Ryan company of San Diego that built it carried on under the name of Mahoney-Ryan for two more years, building a plane based around the Spirit's design for general aviation use, before being sold and disbanded in 1929.