From George Cayley’s time, the importance of aerodynamics for airplane design was well understood. However, it took a time (and some remarkable people) for the theoretical side of aerodynamics to catch up with progress in aviation and start providing reliable predictions, that would allow much faster design optimization…
As almost everybody knows, the Wright brothers carried out the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine on December 17, 1903 in Kitty Hawk. But there is much more depth to this history than meets the eye…
After George Cayley set up the fundamental concepts for flight, putting them into practice should have been a child’s play, and humans should be flying in no time. Or was it?
How did mankind evolve from a short 12-second hop to flying at 850 kilometers per hour, at 11000 meters altitude in an almost fully automatic machine that can carry 315 passengers from New York to Bangkok, non-stop? One might be tempted to think that this was a rational, linear and predictable process. Or was it?
This article summarizes some principles in order to help guide spacecraft grounding architecture design.