Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 12/03/2025 09:04, c186282 wrote:

On 3/10/25 11:51 AM, Don_from_AZ wrote:

Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> writes:
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c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> writes:
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On 3/9/25 3:07 AM, rbowman wrote:

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It uses wing warping rather than ailerons. I asked him how he learned to
fly it and he said you keep taxing a little faster and getting a few feet
higher off the ground until you decide to go for it.

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Wing-warping decidedly WORKS. The downside is that it only works at very LOW
speeds. Beyond that the necessary flexibility works against you - flapping/
oscillation sets in. Seeing this, Curtiss came to the idea of the aileron.

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The original Tom Swift books date to before Curtiss, so that Tom Swift's
airplane (or was it still aeroplane?) used wing warping.

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The Wright brothers and others were trying to fly like the birds could,
right? It doesn't seem surprising to me that they would hit upon wing
warping before thinking of ailerons.

    And so they did.
    But it was not the future-looking solution.
    As I said, nobody can think of *everything* ...

In the end the key to powered flight turns out to be simple
Enough power to weight ratio.
Almost any shit will fly with enough power.
The Wright brothers built their  own, and as far as I am concerned that is what they get my salute for. The airframe was horrible, barely stable   and barely flew, but the engine pushed it into the air just fast enough to take off.
Once they showed it was possible, the sky (sic!) was the limit, and people started looking at engines that were more powerful, and light, and at control and stability issues, so that 10 years later by the outbreak of WWI there were 100bhp or more planes in the air with ailerons, that could climb to the limits of human endurance, and top it at over 100mph.
What made powered flight possible was the gasoline engine, and the aluminium block
If the Wright bros hadn't done it someone else would. There is argument to this day as to whether Santos Dumont beat them to it...
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.
-- Yogi Berra