A Short History of Flight
by No one knows how long humans have dreamed of flying, but this concept informed some of Western culture’s earliest stories. Around the time BC became AD, the Roman poet Ovid told the tale of Daedalus and his son Icarus. The first storytellers as well as their audiences could see snow persisting on the highest mountain peaks during warm weather; clearly, air did not grow warmer with altitude, and the sun would not have melted the wax holding Icarus’s feathers to his wings.
The aircraft industry received a tremendous boost in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh had a first successful trans-Atlantic ferry flight using with a Ryan Aeronautics tri-motor by enlarging its fuel tank. Lindbergh’s brave and almost deadly stunt so strongly improve interest in aviation that investments of millions of dollars pumped into aircraft companies. In August of 1929, Allan Loughead and Fred Keeler sold the Lockheed Company to a group of automotive investors calling themselves the Detroit Aircraft Company. The company drew tremendous investor interest after aviatrix Amelia Earhart crossed the Atlantic with one of the company’s Vegas aircraft. One month later, world financial markets were buffeted by the stock market crash that plunged the nation into the Great Depression. Aviation company stocks, valued at more than $1 billion on total earnings of more than $9 billion, were decimated. The Depression would have destroyed the aircraft industry were it not for government support. It became official policy to award contracts to an increasingly privileged club of manufacturers, so that their expertise could be preserved and developed for military purposes. American aviation was controlled by three huge vertical monopolies, each maintaining huge airframe and engine manufacturing facilities and airline services.
While military preparations were stepped up in the 1940s, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sparked tremendous growth in the aircraft industry. Huge amounts of government money were poured into engineering and production facilities. President Roosevelt ordered 60,000 aircraft in 1942 and 125,000 the year after.
Emerging from the war with tremendous manufacturing capacity and engineering talent, the Douglas, Boeing, and Lockheed companies dominated the commercial aircraft industry. Competitors, including Curtiss, Martin, and Convair, were forced to exit the market in rapid succession, taking refuge in the more protected military businesses. Hughes Aircraft, famed for its massive Spruce Goose amphibian freighter, failed to break into the production market.
With fixed-wing designs having reached the peak of their development in the 1960s, we can glance back to the early Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci, who drew many flying machine designs. Whether any of these devices were constructed remains a matter of debate, but it is clear from his notebooks that human-powered flight fascinated da Vinci. However, the only materials he had access to were hardwoods and linen, and they were too dense to support this dream. Almost five centuries later, and bringing matters neatly full-circle, in 1977 the Gossamer Condor, built mostly of lightweight plastics, enabled the first human-powered flight.
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