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Aviation History
1945
1945 - 0121.PDF
JANUARY I8TH, 1945 MONOCO A Brief Survey of the Development and Some 0/ the Problems Involved in the * "—~— Design By MAURICfe F. lsed to do the rit with the smallest It is a fascinatingT HE monocoque fusela, greatest possible am number of corfipoSelat parts. proposition to design a structure in which each member is doing more than one job. There seems to be a general impression, even in the aircraft industry, that stressed-skin construction of air- craft originated in the United States, while others believe Junkers were first in the field. The former are completely V Jt "vronS' anc* the latter only partly correct; for, while Pro- % fessor Junkers was undoubtedly the first to produce an all- metal aircraft, the fundamental principles of his construc- tion do .not appear in modern monocoques. The Junkers effort was based on metal-clad rather than stressed-skin construction, and the covering took little part in bearing the loads. [While it is true that Hugo Junkers was the first to produce a full-size all- metal aircraft, his ideas were anticipated in England by Mr. William Cochrane, who argued strongly in favour of the corrugated-sheet con- struction later adopted by Junkers, and made aircraft models and airscrews long before the German machine appeared.—ED.] The British are often denounced for being slow to try the unorthodox, and while this may h/true generally, it does not apply in the case of stressed skins, for which credit can righjiy' be claimed by us for having been in this particular field very early. It was not the fault of the originators that the scheme was not immediately approved and universally adopted. Very early monocoques were constructed from plywood, and Germany, with ample supplies of good-grade raw Stressed-skin construc-tion in 1920. A portion of the fuselage of theShort "Silver Streak." material (and an eye to the future), was soon in the fore-front of plywood-covered aircraft, in particular the stressed-skin monocoque. Their accumulated experienceresulted in the Albatross DV and, later, in the Heinkel He 70. [Actually credit for the first wooden monocoque fuselage should go to Sir Frederick Handley Page, who, at the Olympia Aero Show of 1911, exhibited a pretty little mono- plane with crescent-stfaped wings and a highly polished mahogany shell fusdage. Somewhat later came the British Deperdussin Company's monoplanes, the " Thunderbug " landplane and the "Seagull" twin-float seaplane, which also had a true monocoque in that the wooden shell The " Silver Streak " was much ahead of its time and combined a stressed-skin fuselage with metal-clad wings.
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