Jetrader - November/December 2011 - 35

aviation history

Glenn Curtiss Bike Racer & Inventor
Part Two
By Bill Bath, Appraiser Fellow-Administrative Director, ISTAT International Appraisers’ Program successfully nine days before the Wrights. It didn’t and they did. Now he turned his attention to building a ﬂying boat America, capable of crossing the Atlantic; this was barely a decade after the Wrights and only two years after he built the ﬁrst one and patented the familiar hull step to break adhesion with the water. It had two engines, and the pilot and mechanic had an enclosed cockpit. However, at full fuel load the two 90-hp engines could not get it airborne, and adding a third increased fuel consumption so it could not make Newfoundland and the Azores. It was shipped to Britain in crates and spent World War I hunting submarines. Several more were purchased by the British, and they modiﬁed the type into the Felixstowe long-range patrol aircraft which in their turn were sold to the U.S. military; Curtiss then built it as the F51. He then built 68 “Large Americas” as the H-12, which was the only American-designed aircraft to experience combat in World War I. In November 1910, a temporary deck on a U.S. cruiser permitted a Curtiss pilot, Eugene Ely, to make the ﬁrst takeoff from a ship, to be followed in January 1911 with the same pilot making the ﬁrst ship board landing; his tail hook engaged arrestor ropes tied to sandbags. The navy requested a plane that could land and take off from the sea; Curtiss complied after making a single 12-foot ﬂoat that would allow him to ﬂy a pusher airplane to a U.S. cruiser, have it hoisted on board while he visited the captain then ﬂy it back to land. Then he ﬁgured out a linkage to retract a landing gear to permit water takeoffs and landings to then taxi back onto the beach and ofﬂoad marines. The type was called the Hydro, short for hydroaeroplane, with two sold to the Imperial German Navy and a number to Russia for the Black Sea ﬂeet. Jetrader 35

Curtiss rebuilt Langley in ﬂight with Gink Doherty as pilot. (Jetrader April/May 2004) 8 Dec. 1903, the government-backed Smithsonian’s third secretary, Samuel Langley, had his Aerodrome ready for launching by being catapulted from the roof of a boat house on the Potomac River. The pilot was a young graduate engineer, Charles Manley, who had aided in the design of its 208pound radial engine with an output of 52.4 hp (39 KW). He signaled he was ready to launch, and as the Aerodrome shot forward, a rear-wing strut snagged the cable, forcing the airplane into a vertical climb. The rear wing crumbled, and it slide gracefully tail ﬁrst into the icy water; Manley was not hurt other than some bruises. The Smithsonian recovered the wreckage and stored it in boxes until 1914, when with a $2,000 grant to Curtiss shipped them to his plant in Hamondsport in upstate New York. What was the reason for that, given the wreckage had been in some warehouse for more than 10 years? On 22 May 1906, U.S. Patent 821.393 was granted to Wilbur and Orville Wright for “new and useful improvements in Flying Machines,” covering the fundamentals of controlled ﬂight as developed in their wind tunnel and 1902 glider, the basis of the successful powered model on its 17 Dec. 1903 ﬂight. Wilbur then requested licensing fees from all builders of airplanes since the 1902 glider tests, with the European pioneers such as Santo Dumont paying up in spite of his being the developer of the aileron instead of the Wrights complex wing warping arrangement for lateral control. However, Curtiss refused to pay for a license as he used two simple and efﬁcient ailerons, one on each side located between the wings. The result was Wilbur’s lawsuits, which dragged on for years and a dispute with the Smithsonian Institution over its claim regarding the potential performance of the ill-fated Langley Aerodrome. Curtiss then had the job of assembling and repairing it while adhering carefully to its original design details; there was one addition, ﬂoats were ﬁtted so that it could take off and land on water—originally it was to splash down under control after ﬂight from the catapult launch. Curtiss made the ﬁrst ﬂight on 28 May 1914, though without lateral control other than the rudder; but for the faulty launch it may have ﬂown

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Jetrader - November/December 2011

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