Volume II: Reinventing the Airplane

A curriculum for grades 5-8 The History and Physics of Flight curriculum was designed during the summer of 1998 in a one week curriculum development workshop sponsored by the Mn/DOT Office of Aeronautics. Close attention was paid to the Minnesota Graduation Standards during the development of this interdisciplinary curriculum. To e-mail your comments about the curriculum or for more information about aviation education, please visit our website:

International Journal of Professional Aviation Training & Testing Research, 2016

On 17 December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright entered the record books when their heavier-than-air flying machine became the first capable of manned, powered, sustained, and controlled flight. However, the Wrights did not invent the airplane. This is a general misconception. A closer examination of aviation history reveals that the accomplishment of the Wright brothers was the final step in a work that started much earlier than them. A review of the literature demonstrates that some historians may have disregarded certain unpopular characteristics in the Wrights' behaviors, namely their legal battles with the rest of the aviation world to attain wealth and recognition.

Brazilian Journal of Physics, 2014

How to cite Complete issue More information about this article Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Scientific Information System Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative

The Western Historical Quarterly, 2013

Revised and adapted as Chapter 2 of my book Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture (2003)

Breathless announcements of the Next Big Thing, and glittering promises about how it will Change Your Life are part of everyday life in the late 20th century. Yet—if you take the long view—that state of affairs is unusual. The idea that you can forecast technological change only makes sense if you think of it as a constant, ongoing part of life. The idea that you’d want to only makes sense if technology changes fast enough for your audience to see the future you’re describing. Broadly speaking, that makes technological forecasting a pastime of the industrialized world in the 20th century. Powered flight became possible at just about the time citizens of the industrialized world began to find technological forecasts interesting. Not surprisingly, a great deal of ink was expended imagining the future of flight. Between 1900 and 1915 alone, the subject inspired novels, short stories, poetry, paintings, and scores of magazine articles—the latter not just in specialized titles, but in the likes of Harper’s Weekly and The North American Review. These forecasts—like most technological forecasts from years past—are interesting not for being right or wrong but for being revealing. They are windows into the early workings of the aviation business, into the minds of the writers who produced them, and into the workings of the societies (for my purposes, Britain and America) that produced them, fa"

The prevailing view is that we cannot witness biological evolution because it occurred on a time scale immensely greater than our lifetime. Here, we show that we can witness evolution in our lifetime by watching the evolution of the flying human-and-machine species: the airplane. We document this evolution, and we also predict it based on a physics principle: the constructal law. We show that the airplanes must obey theoretical allometric rules that unite them with the birds and other animals. For example, the larger airplanes are faster, more efficient as vehicles, and have greater range. The engine mass is proportional to the body size: this scaling is analogous to animal design, where the mass of the motive organs (muscle, heart, lung) is proportional to the body size. Large or small, airplanes exhibit a proportionality between wing span and fuselage length, and between fuel load and body size. The animal-design counterparts of these features are evident. The view that emerges is that the evolution phenomenon is broader than biological evolution. The evolution of technology, river basins, and animal design is one phenomenon, and it belongs in physics. V C 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.

2018

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Isis, vol. 81, no. 4, 309, 1990