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The Invention of the Air Plane

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Submitted By sweetylavhoo
Words 922
Pages 4
P Dube
Prof: Dr Scogin
Humanities 110 sec 007
March 11, 2007 Air plane invention.

Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur Wright made history on December 17, 1903 at 10:35 am when they invented the First engine airplane. “In August of 1900 Wilbur built his first glider and he chose a remote sandy area off the coast of North Carolina named Kitty Hawk where winds averaged at 13 m.p.h.”(Parker 126). They traveled to Kitty Hawk where they tested the 1900 glider. Using the results of the wind tunnel experiments, they constructed their 1902 glider. “In October they tested it at Kitty Hawk and had a big success gliding a record of 620 feet” (Parker 145). Orville Wright took off into a 27 mph wind and the distance he covered was 120 feet in12 seconds. His flight was exceedingly erratic, mainly due to the irregularity of the air, and partly to lack of experience in operating the air plane.

Despite of the problems encountered with their last attempts at flight, the Wright brothers reviewed their test results and determined that the calculations they had used were not reliable. “They decided to build a wind tunnel to test a variety of wing shapes and their effect on lift” (Stearns and Langer 35). Based upon these tests, the inventors had a greater understanding of how an airfoil also known as wing works and could calculate with greater accuracy how well a particular wing design would fly.

The Wright brothers had been flying with people since May of 1908 but on September 1908, passenger flight took a turn for the worse when the first fatal air crash occurred. “Orville Wright was piloting the plane and he survived the crash, but his passenger Signal Corps Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge died” (McCarthy 107). The Wrights' Vin Fiz was the first airplane to cross the United States in 1911. The flight took 84 days and it stopped 70 times. It crash-landed so many

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