Wickramasinge at it again

On Feb 14, 7:53*am, Pat Flannery wrote:

[ The Patent War between Wright and Curtiss]

The Wrights took him to court, but the judge found in favor of Curtiss,
and a major legal hurdle to others making their own aircraft designs in
the US was cleared.

This is completely incorrect. The Wright's won at the regular level in
Feb 1913. Curtiss appealed and the Wright's won that in Jan 1914.
Curtiss continued to find legal tricks to avoid having to pay, but
there was considerable uncertainty about whether their legal trickery
could continue: hence no one else in the US was making airplanes to
sell. (And the Wright company was spending so much on lawyers that
they were not able to keep up with airplane innovation overseas.) The
courts ruled that the patents covered any means of 'lateral' (what we
now call roll) control of a flying machine, whether it was via wing-
warping or anything else.

The Smithsonian Institution played a discreditable role in the Patent
War: after the appellate court loss Curtiss decided that the best way
forward was to try and find prior art to invalidate the patent. He
went to the SI and took their Langley Aerodrome #5 and modified it to
make it into a flyable machine with roll control. Then he got the SI
to swear that he hadn't modified it and it was just in the condition
that Langley had left it in. This is why Orville Wright originally
loaned the 1903 Flyer to the British Museum, and gave his papers to
the Franklin Science Museum. Just before his death he and the SI
patched up their relationship and he donated the world's first
controllable airplane to the Smithsonian.

What did end the patent war was the US entry into World War One in
1917. The US Government forced the Wrights and Curtiss to end their
patent disputes in order to make airplanes quickly (I seem to recall
there was a one dollar a year license fee, but I'm not sure of that).
After the war ended, Orville Wright had left the company (and Glenn
Curtiss left his company shortly afterwords and got involved in
Florida real estate) and the new leaders of the Wright Co. had little
interesting in resuming the disputes.

Chris Manteuffel

Peter Stickney writes:

I can't imagine Max Immelman inventing the Immelman Turn in that beast.

I can't help but think of the line:

"There are bold pilots
and there are old pilots.
But there are no old bold pilots."

Immelman was killed in WWI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Immelmann

According to Wikipedia the turn we credit as the Immelman today, wasn't
necessarily the turn he invented. I quote:

"1. A half loop followed by a half roll on top, used to rapidly reverse the
direction of flight. This maneuver would not have been practical in the
primitive, underpowered fighters of 1915-16, and its connection with the
German fighter ace is most doubtful.

2. During the First World War an "Immelmann turn" was actually a sharp rudder
turn off a vertical zoom climb (almost to a full stall) or modified chandelle
followed by a steep dive. [1] Immelmann may very well have originated this
maneuver, or at least used it in combat, although this cannot be
authenticated."

Can't track down reference [1], Thompson 2008, p59, a full title would have
been helpful, maybe someone else is familiar with it?

I can't vouch for the validity of #2. However this site claims Immelman employed
"no tricks when I attack". Doesn't say anything about fleeing however, ;-).

http://www.acepilots.com/wwi/ger_immelmann.html

As for item #1, I can personally vouch for its effectiveness. At least in one
primitive air-fight simulator, it not only got me out of jam, but when followed
by a diving turn allowed me to score a kill as well....

Dave

Peter Stickney writes:

Pat Flannery wrote:
Although there weren't runways around in 1903, there were roads, and it
could have used those for takeoff and landings.

Erm, Pat, do you have any idea what a road consisted of at that time?
Outside of the main streets of cities, they were dirt tracks, heavily
rutted, not graded, and with little or no clearance to the sides.
Early automobile and truck traffic found traveling on the railroad roadbeds,
ties (sleepers for you Brits) and all, to be much superior.
There wasn't much of an effort to pave roads until after World War 1.

(I'm very familiar with that subject, being a member of the American Truck
Historical Society, the Military Vehicle Preservation Association, and the
family that built the first paved roads in Central New England.)


That rings true to me as well. More likely pasture[*] land would have
presented a far more favorable landing area, rough, but by the time airplanes
came on the scene most were being cut using horse drawn or steam tractor
drawn (for the well-to-do farmers) mechanical sickle mowers and therefore
had to be smooth enough for the mowers to pass, which would have only helped
an airplane.

Ruts would have been a problem and as you say an even bigger problem would
have been trees and fences right up alonside the road that would have easily
take out wings. Rural electrification, aka power lines and telephone lines,
not so much an issue yet at that time.

Dave
[*] OR freshly cultivated and planted crop fields. However, you will have a
very UNHAPPY farmer you plop down there.

"Jorge R. Frank" writes:

ISTR that a young Army lite colonel's bad experiences during the 1919 Army
Convoy provided part of the inspiration for the Interstate Highway
System. Fortunately he later became president so that he could make that
inspiration a reality, and the system was later named for him.

That and the fact that the German army in WWII could express run their
convoys on the controlled access Autobahnen that were the forerunners
to our interstate highways.

Dave

Chris wrote:
On Feb 14, 7:53 am, Pat Flannery wrote:

[ The Patent War between Wright and Curtiss]

The Wrights took him to court, but the judge found in favor of Curtiss,
and a major legal hurdle to others making their own aircraft designs in
the US was cleared.

This is completely incorrect. The Wright's won at the regular level in
Feb 1913. Curtiss appealed and the Wright's won that in Jan 1914.
Curtiss continued to find legal tricks to avoid having to pay, but
there was considerable uncertainty about whether their legal trickery
could continue: hence no one else in the US was making airplanes to
sell. (And the Wright company was spending so much on lawyers that
they were not able to keep up with airplane innovation overseas.) The
courts ruled that the patents covered any means of 'lateral' (what we
now call roll) control of a flying machine, whether it was via wing-
warping or anything else.

Once again my aging memory has failed me as to what happened here; I
should have checked up on this, as the last time I read anything about
it was around 20 years ago.
I just went digging around for information on the whole patent battle
and found out that the launch track and landing skids versus wheels
argument got involved here also:
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/es...ttles/WR12.htm
....and also that people are still angrily taking sides in this argument
a century later:
http://diskbooks.org/wrongs.html
http://www.wright-brothers.org/Histo...tory_Intro.htm
What makes the whole thing even more interesting is that it's quite
possible to make a perfectly flyable aircraft with no wing ailerons or
wing warping at all; many ultralight aircraft do not use either system.
Thanks for pointing out this screw-up on my part; I'm going to delete my
posting so it doesn't screw people up.

Embarrassed;

Pat

David Spain wrote:
Peter Stickney p_
"1. A half loop followed by a half roll on top, used to rapidly reverse the
direction of flight. This maneuver would not have been practical in the
primitive, underpowered fighters of 1915-16, and its connection with the
German fighter ace is most doubtful.

Assuming that the aircraft would actually be able to take the stress of
a upwards half loop, I can't see how you could do it in a Eindecker
without first diving to pick up speed. Although even worse from a stress
viewpoint, diving into a _outside_ half loop actually might work better.

2. During the First World War an "Immelmann turn" was actually a sharp rudder
turn off a vertical zoom climb (almost to a full stall) or modified chandelle
followed by a steep dive. [1] Immelmann may very well have originated this
maneuver, or at least used it in combat, although this cannot be
authenticated."

Now that I can see, particularly with something as anemic in the engine
power department as a Eindecker, which would stall very soon after being
thrown into a steep climb.


Pat

David Spain wrote:
That rings true to me as well. More likely pasture[*] land would have
presented a far more favorable landing area, rough, but by the time airplanes
came on the scene most were being cut using horse drawn or steam tractor
drawn (for the well-to-do farmers) mechanical sickle mowers and therefore
had to be smooth enough for the mowers to pass, which would have only helped
an airplane.

One problem with pasture land over fields is there's a lot less
incentive to remove rocks from it; wheels won't react well to those, and
wooden landing skids will probably shatter on impact.
The problem as I see it is the inability of an aircraft without wheels
to take off from ground it could safely land on. The Army contract
stated the Wright aircraft had to be able to be assembled or
disassembled and taken away from its landing site in wagons in around an
hour, but that doesn't take into account what getting all the rigging
wires properly tightened up or detached is going to be like.
It certainly would be easier to take the launching track and catapult to
it than have to tow it back to the track after taking it apart.
But how exactly are you going to find it in pre-airborne radio days?
It takes off, heads towards the area where it's supposed to do its
scouting...and that's the last you see of it. Since it didn't return
once its fuel should have been running out, all you know is that it's
out there somewhere on the ground unless your own troops saw where it
came down and were able to contact you regarding its whereabouts.
Assuming that it just glide landed on some flat ground after its crew
got lost or ran into headwinds* the inability to take off again on its
own means your rescue operation moves from getting a tank of gasoline to
it to getting the recovery team and their wagons to it.

*Which brings up another problem with the launch track; if the wind
direction shifts while you are assembling it, you have to move it to
face into the wind again.
That actually happened on the day of the first Flyer flight; they had
intended to lay the track down the side of a shallow hill so that the
Flyer could slide down it to pick up speed for liftoff, but the wind
increased in speed and changed direction, so they had to move it to flat
ground and used the headwind to give it extra lift as it revved up its
props and started to move down the track.

Pat

David Spain wrote:
"Jorge R. Frank" writes:

ISTR that a young Army lite colonel's bad experiences during the 1919 Army
Convoy provided part of the inspiration for the Interstate Highway
System. Fortunately he later became president so that he could make that
inspiration a reality, and the system was later named for him.

That and the fact that the German army in WWII could express run their
convoys on the controlled access Autobahnen that were the forerunners
to our interstate highways.

Yah, there's that too.

Pat Flannery writes:

David Spain wrote:
That rings true to me as well. More likely pasture[*] land would have
presented a far more favorable landing area, rough, but by the time airplanes
came on the scene most were being cut using horse drawn or steam tractor
drawn (for the well-to-do farmers) mechanical sickle mowers and therefore
had to be smooth enough for the mowers to pass, which would have only helped
an airplane.

One problem with pasture land over fields is there's a lot less incentive to
remove rocks from it; wheels won't react well to those, and wooden landing
skids will probably shatter on impact.

Again Pat, if I may refer to a past life, that is why I mentioned pasture
that was mowed. Sickle mowers don't react well to large rocks either,
so if the pasture is routinely mowed it likely has been rock cleared to
some degree. Large rocks need to be removed so that you don't hit
them with the mower when the grass has grown high enough that you can't
see the rocks anymore.

If the rock is too large to remove, you mow around it, and that is a clue
for our hapless pilot as well...

Dave