Why flight?

What in heaven's name possessed man to think he could fly? Considering the state of technology at the time man began to dream of flying, it's hard to believe that anyone even bothered to try.

Let's put the dawn of flight into context-although first, we probably ought to recognize that it wasn't a dawn. "Dawn" makes it sound as though it happened overnight; as though Orville and Wilbur got up one morning and said, "Let's build a flying machine," then pushed aside a few bikes and crafted the seemingly crude machine pictured here. It didn't happen that way. The dawn of heavier-thanair flight-"aviation," if you will-wasn't a dawn as much as a century-long twilight that preceded the sun coming up on aviation in December 1903.

No one knows for sure when the quest for flight began, but Sir George Cayley was among the first to gain enough of a public profile that his dissertations and experiments concerning the aerodynamics of birds have been preserved more or less intact. He even invented model (1804) and man-carrying (1853) gliders that actually flew. Germany's Otto Lilienthal, however, was one of the first to actually do something concrete about the concept.

Lilienthal was an active participant in what is sometimes called "the golden age of invention"-the last half of the 19th century. In fact, he was reportedly conducting his gliding experiments in secret by the late 1860s. Again, let's put that into context: Lilienthal began trying to defy gravity at a time when wars were still being fought with muzzle-loading rifles, and internal-combustion engines were still on the horizon. Talk about rampant optimism! Most of his work was pure research in the strictest sense of the word because aerodynamics, as a science, hadn't been invented yet.

Contradictions of the times abound. In 1890, for instance, when American aviation pioneers Samuel Langley and Octave Chanute were beginning their own experimental work on the East Coast and in Michigan, respectively, the U.S. Calvary was still battling the Sioux in the West. The technological revolution was co-existing with nearly Stone Age cultures. Similar dichotomies became very real to us at Flight Journal as we were laying out this issue.

On the one hand, we had Dan Patterson's superb photographic study of the rudimentary technology represented by the 1903 and 1905 Wright flyers. And on the other hand, we had aerodynamicist Barnaby Wainfan explaining how the CarterCopter embodies technology so advanced that it is a pioneering effort in its own right because it challenges conventional aerodynamic wisdom.

Given the fact that we are so aerodynamically sophisticated today (or at least, we think we are), you have to ask: why is Carter even making the effort? If today's theory says it can't be done, why try? The answer is probably the same as the Wrights' answer when they were criticized: you don't know what you don't know until you try it. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about aerodynamics, and if the CarterCopter provides answers to a critical few of them, we may see a new breed of flying machine evolve out of the CarterCopter team's efforts.

Still, no matter how you define it, there is only one first. And ignoring the who-flew-first minicontroversy, the Wrights were it. They made it work. The best we can hope for is to make it work better. -r

Copyright Air Age Publishing Dec 2002
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