FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1951
1951 - 1924.PDF
2i September 1951 395 (1) Typical facilities provided by the installa- tion:— (1) and (3) Incoming and outgoing Aircraft ; intarroftting beacon at airfield A. (3) Aircraft approaching airfield B receives con-tinuous distance indication and beacon- idantification; continuous bearing! are re-ceived from the omnidirectional range. (4) Aircraft begins let-down whan beacon D iipassed. (5) Aircraft flying from C to B uses beacon Dbecause terrain blankets beacon B. (t) Aircraft flying offset computer course canCheck track with any beacon within rsnge. (7) Beacon at airfield C, in conjunction Withomni-renge, indicates minimum height for safe terrain-clearance in bad visibility. (2) Visual representation of the coverage pro- vided by a tingle DM.E. beacon. This drawing may be visualized as resembling a vertically bisected mushroom-head. (3) The pilot's D.M.E. instruments:— (1) Distance indicator. (2) Coding lamp. (3) Radial selector. (4) Course deviation indicator. CENEAAL SHAPE OF SIGNAL PATTERN AVEftACE RANCE 120 MILES ACCOR DINC TO TERRAIN first units are being subjected to tests in temperature ranges from minus 40 deg C to 55 deg C. They are working at altitudes up to 20,000ft and are being subjected to severe "bump" tests which involve 2,000 half-inch falls an hour. Other exhaustive tests are made on vibration and swinging machines, both designed to create the most violent conditions and treatment that the apparatus is likely to meet under the worst conceivable flying conditions possible in service. TWO NEW BOOKS A New History of the Wright Brothers' Experiments : and a Novel about U.S.A.F. Bombing "Miracle at Kitty Hawk—The Letters of Wilbur and Orville Wright" edited by Fred C. Kelly. Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc., IOI, Fifth Avenue, New York, 3, U.S.A. Illustrated. $6.00. COMB years ago the vivacious Miss Betty Hutton made a film ^ entitled Miracle of Morgan's Creek—the miracle being the sudden arrival of—if I remember rightly—five lusty offspring. But the production of the world's first successful aeroplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk in December, 1903, was neither sudden nor a miracle, and Mr. Kelly has done the Wrights an injustice in tiding this collection of their letters Miracle at Kitty Hawk. The letters themselves show only too well that the Wrights' success was the logical, well-earned result of three years of painstaking research and practical experiment, with all the usual accompanying setbacks and discouragements. Apart from that title, Fred Kelly has done a first-class job in skimming the cream of nearly 600 letters from 30,000 items which make up the Wright Brothers Collection in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and presenting them in palatable form. He explains in his preface that his main object was to let the Wrights' own letters tell the story of their achieve- ments and reveal their personalities, providing the equivalent of an autobiography. Some enthusiasts will regret his decision to omit letters dealing with the more technical problems encountered by the Wrights; but it was wise in a book aimed at the general reader. Some letters reflect the humour and simple tastes of Wilbur and Orville Wright; such as one from France by Orville to his lather, Bishop Milton Wright, in 1907, which commented : "We ^CJ. rea' Bood over here. We have been in a lot of churches, and haven't got drunk yet!" But the overwhelming impression ™ev give is of the brothers' confidence in the design of their biplane. They developed it so carefully and patiently that Wilbur was able to write : "I have no expectation of being hurt. I think we danger much less than in most athletic games." Nor did they get wildly excited when they finally achieved free, sustained, and contained flight on December 17th, 1903, regarding that success ""•rely as a logical milestone in their work. If anything, they were w> confident, for five years later they still refused tempting busi- es offers for their invention, in the belief that nobody else would py successfully until, at the earliest, 1913, and that they would do T !. theV waited.i concerning negotiations with the U.S. Army and foreign :nts prove that red tape is no monopoly of our present,., Nineteen days after the Wrights made a 38-minute flight of *W miles, on October 5th, 1905, the U.S. Board of Ordnance and """ication wrote that it did not care to formulate any require- ments for the performance of a flying-machine until one was produced which by actual operation was shown to be able to "produce horizontal flight and to carry an operator." Helicopter enthusiasts will hardly approve Wilbur Wright's views on rotating-wing aircraft, expressed in a letter written in 1907. "Like all novices," he writes, "we began with the helicopter in childhood, but soon saw that it had no future and dropped it. The helicopter does with great labour only what the balloon does without labour, and is no more fitted than the balloon for rapid horizontal flight. If its engine stops it must fall with deathly violence, for it can neither float like the balloon nor glide like the aeroplane. The helicopter is much easier to design than the aero- plane, but it is worthless when done." Tnere is much to amuse, and very much to interest in this book, which is a worthy successor to Mr. Kelly's earlier standard biography of The Wright Brothers. J.W.R.T. "The Sky is a Lonely Place," by Louis Falstein. Rupert Hart- Davis, 36, Soho Square, London, W.i. Price IOJ. 6d.T HIS novel tells the story of ten men with a single aim in life —to survive their tour of 50 bombing missions in Europe so that they can return to the United States. They form the crew of a Liberator of the U.S. 15th Air Force, based in Italy in the summer, autumn and winter of 1944, and their lives and deaths are seen through the eyes of the aircraft's rear-gunner—the only one who reaches the elusive half-century. It is not a pleasant story; but war is not pleasant, and Mr. Falstein's narrative rings so true that it does not require the assurance that "some of the events described are real." Seldom has any author been able to give a more vivid picture of the fear, tedium and hell of flying endless missions in daylight over some of the most heavily defended targets in Europe. The reader can almost imagine himself one of the crew of Flying Foxhole on its first mission over Vienna, with cannon shells ripping through the fuselage, the air thick with the reek of explosive and noise of battle. This is no book for the squeamish. The drama of fog, flak, crashes, death, fear and compassion which punctuates the opera- tional narrative is matched by the squalid violence of the crew's off-duty affaires with the demoralized, debased, hungry and bewildered peasants among whom they lived. Their language and actions are often excessively crude, and accounts of their behaviour in combat are seldom flattering; yet one is ltft with the uneasy conviction that real men, no better and no worse than these, flew the bombers which did so much to hasten victory. This is no mean achievement in a first novel.
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
