Concept Map

Protagonists

Some protagonists of the flight presented in chronological order:

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)

was an Italian painter, scientist and engineer. As many men following the dream of flight, he drew and designed several flying machines.

Joseph Michel Montgolfier (1740 - 1810) and Jacques Étienne Montgolfier (1745 - 1799)

were the inventors of the balloon that runs on hot air.

Wilbur Wright (1867 - 1912) and Orville Wright (1871 - 1948) were the two inventors, pioneers in aviation. They were the men to manage the first flight on a totally controlled vehicle heavier than air. The flight took place December 17, 1903 aboard the Wright Flyer, or Kitty Hawk.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902 - 1974)

On May 20, 1927 Lindbergh made the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic without stops. He left at 7:52 from Roosevelt Field, near New York, and arrived at destination at 22.00, after 33 hours and 30 minutes and 29 seconds of flight at Champs de Le Bourget, near Paris, on board his light monoplane, named Spirit of Saint Louis.

Charles "Chuck" Yeager (1923 - present)

The first man was in the air continued to exceed the speed of Mach 1 (the sound barrier) on board the Bell X-1, 14 October 1947.

Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin (1934 - 1968)

was a Soviet cosmonaut and pilot. It was the first man to fly in space successfully carrying out its mission April 12, 1961.

Neil Alden Armstrong (1930 - present)

(1930 - present) is a U.S. Air Force pilot and astronaut, first man to walk on the moon.

Dennis Tito (1940 - present)

was the first "space tourist" . He reached the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft remaining there from April 28 to May 6, 2001.

Images

Film

Top Gun, 1986, directed by Tony Scott.

Stamp

USA stamp printed to celebrate 100 years
since the first flight of the Wright brothers.

Book

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 1972, by Richard Bach.

Article

Lindbergh does it! To Paris in 33 1/2 Hours,
The New York Times, May 21, 1927.

Innovation



Draw of the jet engine.



ABC

A   Airport
B   Boeing
C   Cessna
D   Douglas (McDonnell Douglas)
E    Eurofighter (European milatry jet)
F    Flight simulator
G   G (gravity acceleration)
H   HUD (Head Up Display)
I     IFR (Instrument flight rules)
J    Jet
K   Kitty Hawk
L    Lift (force)
M   Mig (russian military jets)
N   Night
O   Ornitophter
P    Pilot
Q   Quantas (Australian flag carrier)
R   Rocket
S   Space Shuttle
T   Top Gun
U   USA Air Force
V   VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing)
W  Winglet
X   X-43
Y   Yoke
Z

HUD - Head Up Display

The planes flying over our heads are always more and more technologically advanced products. one of the latest technologies developed for pilots is the HUD (Head Up Display).

HUD of an F/A-18C.

 The Head-Up Display is a type of display that allows the display of flight data, directly on the screen. In this way the pilot doesn’t need any more to draw his eyes equipment. So the pilot must checks all data keep watching out of the plane. This device is very important since it helps the pilots during the most delicate phases of flight, what are the takeoff and landing, or in case of poor visibility.

Flight Simulator

Adults and children have always been keen on flight, but not everyone can get the yoke of a real plane. Computer programmers found a solution creating flight simulators for PC or console.The flight simulators, in fact, were among the first types of programs developed for personal computers, first as a training system for pilots and then as entertainment software.

Airbus A380 on Flight Simulator X.

Some famous simulators available for PC are:

• IL-2 Sturmovik: simulator dedicated to the aircraft of the Second World War;
• Lock On: Modern Air Combat: simulation of modern combat aircraft;
• Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator: A series of three titles set in World War II;
• Microsoft Flight Simulator, one of civil flight simulators of the most successful, has reached its tenth edition (Microsoft Flight Simulator X); 
• X-Plane: For now the best simulat civilian flights, the only one certified by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) for training purposes;

Supersonic Flight e X-43

What is meant by supersonic flight? The supersonic flight is when aircraft exceeds the speed of sound (about 340 m/s). The first man to exceed the continued flight speed of Mach 1 (the sound barrier) was Charles "Chuck" Yeager on the Bell X-1, 14th October 1947.
Not only military planes were able to break the sound barrier, even the Concorde (France),  a particular aircraft for intercontinental flights, regularly travelled at supersonic speed. This aircraft, however, was banned from service because of the disastrous accident of July 25, 2000.

Bell X-1.

The invention of the jet engine  allowed to travel at much higher speeds and to perform air tricks that couldn’t  be done before. The speed record for an aircraft registered is that of the Boeing X-43, an experimental aircraft developed by NASA to study the various aspects of supersonic flight.



Boeing X-43.

From the propeller to the jet engine

Messerschmitt Me 262A.

In the three decades following the Wright’s flight, aircrafts were always equipped with a propulsion system with internal combustion engines. Towards the end of World War II, however, Germany developed a new propulsion system, more powerful than internal combustion engines. This new system put in troubles  the RAF (Royal Air Force), with the construction of the Messerschmitt Me 262, decimating British aircrafts and turning around the fortunes of war for the Reich. The concerning innovation is that of the jet engine. This is engine uses the “principle of action and reaction” to transform the mass expelled, or jet, into kinetic energy. The impulse response, which allows the movement is proportional to the mass flow of gas passing through the engine and the speed difference between the exhaust and the speed of the aircraft. As other events of major importance in the evolution of flight, the jet engine has made possible intercontinental flights, but also because it allowed spaceflights, where propellers can’t be used.

Air Force Blue

Royal Air Force Ensign, Flag Ratio: 1:2.

A special feature of these pages is the colour of the text of the posts: it's the Air Force Blue, concerning the topic of the blog.

Air Force blue is a variety of colours that are a form of blue. These colours are used by air forces for colour identification. Air Force blue or RAF blue is a medium shade of the colour azure. The shade derives from the light blue uniforms issued to the newly formed British Royal Air Force in 1920, which were influential in the design of the uniforms of some other air forces around the world. The choice of blue uniforms for the RAF was the result of a surplus of inexpensive sky blue twill in the United Kingdom, which had been intended for use in the uniforms of Czarist Russian imperial cavalrymen before the Russian Revolution occurred (1917).

KItty Hawk (1903)

One of the first flights of the Kitty Hawk in 1903.

At end of the nineteenth century, in the United States, technological advances in materials and advanced internal combustion engine began to make more realistic the possibility of building a flying machine heavier than the air, so many engineers, scientists and inventors were forced to follow research in aeronautics beginning a sort of race for success. The Wright Flyer, known also as Kitty Hawk, was one of the most important pioneer-era aircrafts. Designed and built by two brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright at the beginning of the twentieth century is generally regarded as the first half heavier than air to have performed a controlled flight, December 17, 1903. Wright brothers’ deed was a real step in the history of flight.

LIft (force)

How many times have we seen a plane flying over us, but do we ever wonder how something so big can fly? Everything depends on the lift of the wing. The key to understand the miracle of flight is Bernoulli’s principle, which describes the behavior of a viscous fluid under the action of the force-weight. One consequence of this is that the pressure that presses under the the wing is greater than the one which is exercised on the top, what determines the force called lift that supports the aircraft in flight.

Buoyancy

The time passed and people thought to solve the problem of flight by using Buoyancy, based on the studies of Archimedes of Syracuse, greek mathematician and physicist, who lived in the third century BC that enunciated in his work "About Floating Bodies". Shortly, this principle states: "any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object". The most interesting thing is that this principle can be applied to both liquids and gases and it involved the development of the balloon first and then the airship.

Leonardo da Vinci and the flight

Leonardo's draft for the ornithopter.

The dream of human flight is lost in the mists of time. The old chronicles relate the many failed attempts by real daredevils. Leonardo da Vinci based his studies on the observation of birds, unlike all his predecessors, however, he develops a genuine theory of flight, from which develops the design of some flying machines. The studies are based on the laws of physics, air, wind and their behavior. He is convinced, unlike the scientists of his time, that the flight has nothing mysterious in itself, since it is a purely mechanical phenomenon, due to the movement of the wings in the air. The air is compressible, and therefore it can have a resistance that can support a body. this is one of his most brilliant intuitions.
These studies led him to devise some of his inventions, even if sometimes it's just drawings, among which include the ornithopter inspired the birds' flight and the aerial screw, embryonal idea of helicopter.

The myth of Deaduls and Icarus

The Lament For Icarus by Herbert James Draper.

Minos, king of Crete, asked Daedalus to build the labyrinth for the Minotaur (half man, half bull). Daedalus and his son Icarus, having built the labyrinth and knowing its structure, were precluded any escape from Crete by Minos, because he feared that the secrets would have been revealed and so Dedalus and Icarus were imprisoned in the labyrinth [This last sentence is missing the source: Apollodorus in the second century BC support that Daedalus is confined in the labyrinth because Minos accused Dedalus of being responsible for the "success" of Theseus, which can go through the expedient of the ball from the Labyrinth that Daedalus had just suggested.

There are other ancient sources that set Daedalus and Icarus imprisoned in the Labyrinth, even Ovid in  Book VIII of his Metamorphoses].

Daedalus built wings of feathers and attacked their bodies with wax to escape from the labyrinth. Despite the warnings of his father not to fly too high, Icarus overwhelmed by the elation of flight, got too close to the sun and the heat melted the wax. He lost his wings and fell into the sea where he died. The father arrived safely in Sicily, where he built a temple dedicated to Apollo, in memory of his son Icarus.

Definition

Flight is the process by which an object moves either through an atmosphere, especially the air, or beyond, as in the case of spaceflight, by propulsive thrust or aerostatically using buoyancy, or by simple ballistic movement.


Flight (English)
Volo  (Italian)
Fuga  (Latin)
Vol  (French)
Vuelo  (Spanish)
Flucht  (German)
飞行 [Fēixíng]  (Chinese)

Introduction

This blog was created as a complementary part of the lectures about "History of technology", taught by Professor Vittorio Marchis at the Politecnico di Torino in the academic year 2010-2011.


The reason for the choice of the theme of flight, as individual study, comes from my passion for planes, flight and the field of challenge that flying offers to the human being, who always tries to fly, to "rise" to something more from its earthly nature.