Honors Engineering: Week Five

This week I looked up Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart, while not necessarily successful in flying solo across the Atlantic ocean, is still none-the-less a highly influential member of aviation history. On top of that, she was also a great role model for women. She showed that women could not only be pilots, but enter an engineering based field.

Amelia Earhart was the first woman to attempt flying solo across the Atlantic ocean. Many know the supposed story of how she didn't make it all the way across the ocean, crashing either somewhere in the ocean or on an island. But going beyond that, the fact that a woman would attempt a flight that so few before her had successfully completed, (Charles Lindbergh being one of them) was a huge step in the right direction for not only pilots, but aeronautical engineers and women in engineering.

Earhart had actually made it across the Atlantic previously, she just wasn't flying solo. So already she had completed a rather daunting task. But what the most inspiring part of Amelia Earhart is, (for me at least) is that she gave women the opportunity to shine in a predominantly male field. Earhart gave women the opportunity to become pilots, and engineers. While she might not have been an engineer herself, she definitely knew about planes, and I have to believe that she had some idea how they were put together. She was truly Rosie the Riveter.

Honors Engineering: Week Four

This week I decided to focus on Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh is, (not only on the side of the San Diego airport) but also a majorly influential person when it comes to flight. On top of that, my dad has actually flown with him, so he is of even more interest to me personally.

Both of these people are known for very similar reasons. Charles Lindbergh was the first person to make a non-stop flight across the Atlantic ocean while flying solo. This flight is part of the reason why we are now able to fly regularly into different countries rather than having to take ships everywhere. This task was incredibly dangerous due to the fact that, for one, nobody had ever done it before him, as well as the fact that nobody could be a thousand percent sure that he had all of the supplies he needed, (as in the case of Amelia Earhart).

While this wasn't the only flight by Lindbergh by any means, it was his most important. Charles Lindbergh had several successful flights, especially while he was a pilot for the military, (another reason why successfully completing a transatlantic flight was so important). But without that one flight, people (probably) wouldn't be able to travel internationally by means of airplanes, military planes would probably have to be built within the country they were to be used in, or they just couldn't leave their own country etc. It's interesting how something as common as flying could be such a dangerous task less than a century ago.

Honors Engineering: Week Three

So this week I decided to do a bit of research on important moments in flight history. I have come up with a list of different events that have been critical to modern flight. I have found several interesting sources, but I decided to write down a few in particular:

1. 1500: Leonardo da Vinci sketched (and built?) a parachute, ornithopter (flying machine) and helicopter
2. 1742: Marquis de Bacqueville created imitation flapping wings and flew from his house, (on the Seine) to the Garden of Tuileries. The wings ceased to act mid-flight, ending in apparent disaster.
3. 1890: Sir George Cayley built a glider with a 300 foot wing surface and skimmed the ground and sailed from hilltops
4. 1842: Henson patented a monoplane to be driven by a steam engine. Wing span was 140 feet
5. 1900: Wilbur and Orville Wright begin experimenting with glider with a front rudder. The glider hovered for just over a minute
6. 1903: Wilbur and Orville Wright tested a biplane glider which flew for 59 seconds, covering 852 feet. The plane weighed 750 pounds, first successful sustained flight in the world

These were just the moments in history that really struck me, plus several of these events correlated with research I had completed recently.

Click here to see a complete list of important moments throughout flight history.

Honors Engineering: Week Two

This week I decided to look up the Wright Brothers. The Wright Brothers were not the first people to attempt building an airplane, in fact hang-gliding had been around for years already. Their first flight wasn't even all that impressive, with the airplane only going about twelve feet high and roughly 100 feet forward. The reason why the Wright Brothers were so critical to the history of aeronautical and aerospace engineering is because they were the first people to successfully build a functioning aircraft with a motor. Until this point, all aircrafts were either made powered, wind powered or something of the like. So the fact that a plane could suddenly operate with electronics rather than natural elements opened the doors to all new discoveries.

It wasn't until the Wright brother's second flight that things really got interesting. During the second flight, after some initial problems were fixed and the weather was better, (it was dumping rain during their first flight) the plane ended up going over 100 feet in the air.So while the Wright Brothers might not have been the true fathers of flight, they did understand modern technology better than most, and they gave us the steps we needed to get to where we are now in the aerospace world.