AVIATION MANAGEMENT

Helicopter
During the 1800s many hours were spent trying to get a rotor-propelled aircraft to take flight. It wasn’t until 1906 that French inventors got a rotorcraft off the ground — they reached a height of two feet, and hovered for about a minute before coming back down. The helicopter industry took off in earnest in the late 1930s, through pioneers such as Igor Sikorsky. Today, because of their ability to take off and land in tight spaces and hover in place, helicopters are used throughout the world for numerous tasks. Medical transport, firefighting, and even aerial cranes make widespread use of rotorcraft technology.

New Materials
Often innovation is as much about persistence as anything else. Although most early planes were constructed from wood and fabric, engineers saw the potential for metal. But while the first all-metal aircraft flew in the early 1920s, it took about 20 years for metal to take over as the principal material for aircraft construction. Initially metal frames and wings were too heavy, not always resilient against corrosion, and reacted strongly to pressure changes. Light aluminum became the favorite material in airplane construction, and eventually exotic, very strong metals such as titanium became widely used. Modern aircraft also have many parts made from advanced carbon-fiber composite materials — effectively extremely strong plastics — and at least 50 percent of the content of the next generation of large airliners, the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350 XWB, will be made from advanced composites.

Transatlantic Flight
The first two transatlantic flights took place within just weeks of each other. The second, piloted by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown in 1919, was the first non-stop flight from North America to Europe. They took off from Newfoundland in a twin-engine Vickers Vimy IV. The following morning, after almost 16 1/2 hours in flight, the pair landed in Ireland, having braved the elements and some engine troubles. Though rumors of Brown saving the flight by climbing on the aircraft s wings to scrap off ice are unsubstantiated, the crew did face fog and could only communicate by hand-written notes due to the noise of the plane. Eight years later, Charles Lindberg completed the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic.

Amphibious Aircraft
World War II also brought advances to the design of amphibious aircraft. Though many seaplanes were already in operation, WWII saw uses of such aircraft expand, as armed forces recognized their potential for air-sea rescue and anti-submarine warfare. Today, amphibious aircraft are primarily valuable to civilians, especially those living in places such as Alaska and Northern Canada where reliable transportation is not always available and communities are far from each other. Also, amphibious aircraft with scoops and large water tanks are used to fight wildfires.

Monoplane
In the early days of flight, the biplane design was simply more practical than the monoplane. Early wooden and fabric planes were very light and hard to control, and were susceptible to structural damage in the air. Once all-metal aircraft became widely used, the weight-efficient and lower-drag monoplane took over. Cantilever technology made fixed-wing monoplanes much stronger and less liable to twist in flight. By World War II biplanes had mostly been replaced, and monoplanes took over as the common aircraft design.