Aviation landmarks.

1500 - The Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci made drawings of flying machines with flapping wings.

1903 - Orville and Wilbur Wright of the US made the first engine-powered, heavier-than-air flights.Their first flight went 37 meters and lasted only about 12 seconds.

1909 - Louis Bleriot of France became the first person to fly across the English Channel.

1913 - Igor I. Sikorsky, a Russian inventor, built and flew the first four-engine plane.

1924 - The first all-metal, tri-motor transport, the Junkers G 23, was test-flown in Germany.

1927 - The Lockheed Vega, a single-engine transport, flew for the first time. It became one of the most popular transport planes of the 1920's and early 1930's.

1936 - Douglas DC-3 transport planes entered airline service in the United States. They became the most widely used airliners in history.

1939 - The first successful flight of a jet-engine airplane took place in Germany.

1947 - the first supersonic flight, in a Bell X-1 rocket plane (USA).

1952 - De Havilland Comets, the world's first large commercial jetliners, began service.

1958 - The Boeing 707 began the first US jet transport service between the United States and Europe.

1968 - Russia test-flew the world's first supersonic transport plane, the TU-144.

1970 - The first jumbo jet, the Boeing 747, entered airline service.

1976 - The Concorde, a supersonic transport plane built by Britain and France, began passenger service.

1983 - A Rockwell Sabreliner became the first plane to cross the Atlantic Ocean with a pilot guided only by a satellite navigation system.

1995 - The Boeing 777 airliner, the world's largest twin-engine jet, began passenger service.

World war I and technology.

The first powered biplane consisted of a framework of wood, stretched canvas, and a homemade four-cylinder, 12-horsepower motor, the total weight of the Flyer was 340 kg. Top speed was approximately 48 kph. Europe failed to match the success of the Wright's due to bad reproduction of their design. The reasons why the Europeans could not duplicate the Wrights' success: Insufficient data for them to duplicate the Wrights' glider; They did not understand how it operated or the aerodynamic reasons for its features; They had no extensive glider experience. A Royal Flying Corps was founded in Britain (1912). France and Germany followed suit and France experimented with bombing gear. A US Captain Albert Berry, made the first parachute jump from an airplane (1912). A Morane-Sauliner climbed to 5610 meters.

Dirigibles.

From the successful first flight of LZ-1 on 1900, zeppelin designs offered the only realistic means of long-range air travel, commercial or military, into the first four decades of the 20th century. The zeppelins were huge (was 128 m long, 11.6 m diameter, 8,496,000 liters of hydrogen gas). The last - Graf Zeppelin - was 236 m long. They were rigid airships like a large, trussed frame covered with fabric. The modern airship is a non-rigid dirigible without the structural framework, generally of aluminum. Most European designs used hydrogen while U.S. designs have historically used designs helium.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 1056