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WHAT IS AN AIRCRAFT
An aircraft is any vehicle capable of flight .There are several types of international travel insurance aircrafts around the world .They can be broadly classified on the basis of either their structural design or according to their speed of travel.
HISTORY OF FLIGHT
Since the dawn of human intelligence ,the idea of flying in the same realm as birds has possessed human minds .All early thinking of human flight centered on the imitation of birds. Many ancient and medieval people fashioned wings and met with sometimes disastrous and always unsuccessful consequences in leaping from towers or roofs, flapping vigorously .In time, the idea of strapping a pair of wings to arms fell out of favor. It was replaced by the concept of wings flapped up and down by various mechanical mechanisms, powered by some type of human arm, leg or body movement These machines are called Ornithopters.
Human efforts to fly literally got off the ground on November 21,1783,when a balloon carrying Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis darlandes ascended into the air and drifted 5 mi across Paris .The balloon was inflated and buoyed up by hot air from an open fire burning in a large wicker basket underneath .It was the first time in history international travel insurance that a human being had been lifted off the ground for a sustained period of time.
The modern airplane has its origin in a design set forth by George Cayley in 1799.It was the first concept to include a fixed wing for generating lift, another separate mechanism for propulsion, and a combined horizontal and vertical tail for stability .He is responsible for breaking this unsuccessful line of thought; he separated the concept of lift from propulsion and, in doing so, set into motion a century of aeronautical development that culminated in the Wright brothers success in 1903.
William Samuel Henson was a contemporary of Cayley .In April 1843,he published in England a design for a fixed-wing airplane powered by a steam engine driving two propellers called the aerial steam carriage, this design received wide publicity throughout the 19th century.
With all efforts that had been made in the past, it was still not until 1891 that a human literally jumped into the air and flew with wings in any type of controlled fashion .This person was Otto Lilienthal ,one of the giants in aeronautical engineering. Lilienthal designed and flew the first successful controlled gliders in history. He made over 2000 successful gliders.The aerodynamic data he obtained were published in papers circulated throughout the world.
Percy Pilcher was a Scot who lived in Glasgow and had already built his first glider .Under Lilienthals guidance, Plicher made several glides .However, Plichers sights were firmly set on powered flight .In 1897,he calculated that an engine of 4 hp weighing no more than 40 lb, driving a 5 ft diameter propeller,would be necessary to power his Hawk(a type of hang glider) off the ground.Since no such engine was available commercially,Plicher spent most of 1898 designing and constructing one.It was completed and bench-tested by the middle of 1899.Then, in one of those quirks of fate that dot many aspects of history, Plicher was killed while demonstrating his Hawk glider at the estate of Lord Braye in Leicestershire, England. Hence, England and the world also lost the only man other than Lilienthal who might international travel insurance have achieved successful powered flight before the Wright brothers.
In contrast, throughout this time virtually no important progress was being made in the United States. However, this vacuum was broken by Octave Chanute, a civil engineer who became interested in mechanical flight .Chanute was an airman .Following this position,he began to design hang gliders, in the manner of Lilienthal.
About 500 mi to the east, in Washington, DC, the United States second noted pre-Wright aeronautical engineer was hard at work. Samuel Pierpont Langley was tirelessly designing and building a series of powered aircraft ,which finally culminated in two attempted piloted flights, both in 1903,just weeks before the Wrights success on December 17.He built nearly 100 different types of rubber-band-powered model airplanes, graduating to steam-powered models in 1892.Langley was somewhat satisfied with his success in 1896.Recognizing that further work toward a piloted aircraft would be expensive in both time and money,he made a firm resolution not to undertake the construction of a large man-carrying machine.
It was during this time that the Wright brothers became interested in power flight.
THE FIRST FLIGHT
Nobody will fly for a thousand years-these were the words of Wilbur Wright which were spoken in a fit of despair in the year 1901.
The Scene: Wind-swept sand dunes of Kill Devil Hills,4 mi south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The time: About 10:35 AM on Thursday,December17,1903.The characters: Orville and Wilbur Wright and five local witnesses .The action: Poised, ready to make history, is a flimsy, odd-looking machine, made from spruce and cloth in the form of two wings, one placed above the other, a horizontal elevator mounted on struts in front of the wings, and a double vertical rudder behind the wings. A 12-hp engine is mounted on the top surface of the international travel insurance bottom wing, slightly right of center. To the left of this engine lies a man-Orville Wright-prone on the bottom wing, facing into the brisk and cold December wind.
Behind him rotate two ungainly looking airscrews(propellers),driven by two chain-and pulley arrangements connected to the same engine. The machine begins to move along a 60 feet launching rail on level ground. Wilbur Wright runs along the right side of the machine, supporting the wing tip so that it will not drag the sand. Near the end of the starting rail, the machine lifts into the air; at this moment, John Daniels of the Kill Devil Life Saving station takes a photograph that preserves for all time the most historic moment in aviation history. The machine flies unevenly, rising suddenly to about 10 ft, then ducking quickly toward the ground. This type of erratic flight continues for 12 s, when the machine darts to the sand,120 ft from the point where it lifted from the starting rail .Thus ends a flight that, in Orville Wrights own words, was the first in the history of the words in which a machine carrying a man raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started.
AVIATION NOW
The development of aeronautics in general, and
aeronautical engineering in particular, was exponential after the wrights major public demonstrations in 1908 and has continued to be so to present day.
The driving philosophy of many advancements in aeronautics since 1903 has been to fly faster and higher.
The aviation industry is just 102 years old, which is far less in comparision to several other revolutionary industries, but it has carved a very special niche for itself - young children and old people alike want to be a part of this exhilarating world of flying.
The first powered flight lasted only 12 seconds, covering a distance of 120 feet. But now, we are working on flying hypersonic more than five times the speed of sound
By the late 1950s,the aerospace industry considered development of a supersonic aircraft (1.2 to less than 5 times the speed of sound) to be a logical next step in aviation technology. The United States was determined to maintain its global leadership in commercial aviation, while other countries were equally determined to challenge US dominance. During the 1960s,the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union all committed large sums of money and technological effort to put a supersonic transport in the air. The results were decidedly mixed.
A supersonic transport is a civil aircraft designed to transport passengers at speeds greater than the speed of sound. As of 2005, there are no more SSTs used in regular commercial service. The only SST to see regular international service was the Concorde, and the other designs were the Tupolev Tu-144 and the Boeing SST.
At the most exotic, high supersonic designs like Skylon would seem to be capable of reaching Mach 5.5 within the atmosphere, before activating a rocket engine and entering orbit. The design can later reenter the atmosphere and land back on the runway it took off from.
NASA is working on an experimental flight program which is expected to fly about 30 to 35 times faster than the speed of sound.
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