First off, the spam is getting annoying again. If one of the admins could nuke the above post, I would greatly appreciate it.
Now, on to the actual subject at hand. I had forgotten how useful the book
The Lore of Flight by John W. R. Taylor was in answering some of the "first" questions. Here are a few selections from the book:
The Lore of Flight, page 72 wrote:
Credit for the first [monocoque fuselage] is given to the British air pioneer Handley Page, who exhibited at the 1911 Olympia aero show a monoplane which had a highly polished mahogany shell fuselage.
The aircraft referred to is the
Handley Page Type D.
The Lore of Flight, page 100 wrote:
The ingenious machine devised by the Hungarian Trajan Vuia in 1906 was, prophetically, fitted with pneumatic tires, the first aircraft to be so equipped.
The aircraft referred to is either the Vuia I or Vuia I-bis.
The Lore of Flight, page 100 wrote:
Oil dampening to restrict rebound was first used in a leg made by the French engineer Esnault Pelterie in 1908, and an early form of oleo (hydraulic shock-absorbing) strut was fitted to an experimental British B.E.2 at the Farnborough factory in 1912. Louis Breguet is generally credited with the successful development of the oleo strut, which he used on his aircraft from 1910 onwards.
The aircraft referred to is the
Esnault-Pelterie R.E.P. 1. You may remember that the REP 1 was
mentioned in an earlier post as being the first airplane with a joystick.
The first airplane with de-icing equipment in any form or method appears to be a Fairchild 71 modified by NACA. (Although the report states "Fairchild F-17", a brief Internet search cannot find any evidence of such an aircraft, and, based on the description, I am forced to assume it is a typo.) Note that this was only for testing and did not use boots, but instead hot steam that circulated in the leading edge. It was only later that this plane was modified to use an “ice-removing overshoe”. Later a Lockheed Vega named
Miss Silvertown was equipped with boots.
[ref]Attachment:
(Source:
Popular Science - Google Books)
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