Archive for the 'Aviation' Category

Air Rivalry

THE FORD-GENERAL MOTORS rivalry has gone abroad. It has even ascended into the clouds. Let General Motors announce that its new automobile plant near Antwerp, Belgium, is nearly completed; Ford buys a site at Edgewater, N. J., at which to assemble Ford parts and load ships for the export trade, and his son Edsel bends [...]

Aircraft Traffic Rules 1927

TRAFFIC RULES FOR AIRCRAFT
LIKE THE RULES FOR AUTO DRIVERS are the traffic rules for aircraft just issued for the first time by the Aeronautics Branch of the U. S. Department of Commerce, reports H. C. Davis in The Popular Science Monthly (New York). Reading them, he says, it is easy to imagine the day when [...]

Plane Repaired in the Air 1929

Repairs on the Fly
BOARDING a flying plane by a sixty-five-foot rope ladder and leaving via parachute was the unusual performance of Dale Dryer, airplane mechanic, when an endurance plane over Buffalo, N. Y., sent a call for repairs.
Heavy weather had damaged the stabilizer of the airplane, which had been aloft more than 190 hours. First [...]

Radical Aircraft Design 1929

Tailless “Flivver” Plane
V-SHAPED wings and the absence of any tail whatever are novelties combined in the latest German plane tested recently at Berlin. It demonstrates, as did the “windmill” autogiro plane, that radical ideas may still have a place in airplane design.
The tailless machine is shaped like an arrow, with the pilot’s cockpit in a [...]

Airborne Bacteria Survey 1929

Planes Hunt Bacteria
AN AIRPLANE hunt for bacteria was a recent novelty at Cambridge, England. Its object was to determine how plant and crop diseases are spread in upper air currents.
Several kinds of germ traps were used by the airplane that made the tests. Glass slides smeared with petrolatum, and test tubes and glass dishes filled [...]

Dornier Monster Seaplane 1929

Seaplane Up with 170 Passengers
WITH 169 persons numbered in the official list of passengers and crew, the Dornier monster seaplane DO-X recently made a flight of nearly an hour over Lake Constance, Switzerland. A four-year-old boy not counted in the records brought the total to 170 persons, by far the largest number ever taken aloft [...]

Advances in Aviation 1929

AERONAUTIC ADVANCES
by ALEXANDER KLEMIN, Sc.M.
Professor of Aeronautics,
New York University
ONEÂ ofÂ the most striking developments of the year in aeronautics has been the use of ethylene glycol in the cooling of aircraft engines. Since water boils at 212 degrees F., operating temperatures must be kept down to 180 degrees. With ethylene glycol an operating temperature of [...]

World Aviation Code Required 1930

Lindbergh Urges World Air Code
IMPOSSIBLE TO DEVOTE too much attention to overcoming obstacles to international flying!”
So speaks Lindbergh, “aviation counsel to the world,” of what is most needed for development of air travel and commerce in the shrinking distances around our globe.
His plea for securing a uniform standard of regulations for international flyers by all [...]

The First All-Metal Airplanes 1927

This 1927 discussion on the use of metal in airplanes is extremely interesting in that it also predicts with uncanny accurracy how air travel would progress, and how modern aircraft would be constructed.
LONG-DISTANCE records will be held in future by high-flyers in all-metal airplanes. So at least predicts Albert Lapoule, in an article contributed to [...]

Supermarine sets seaplane Speed Record in 1927

HURTLING THROUGH THE AIR at the rate of almost five miles a minute, a twenty-seven-year-old British flight lieutenant won the coveted Schneider trophy for seaplanes at Venice on September 26. Only two planes of the six competing were able to finish the 217-mile triangular course, and both were English entries. All three Italian competitors, including [...]