ABSTRACT

The idea of Žight has always intrigued mankind, but it was only a little over 100 years ago that powered manned Žight was achieved. The ‰rst successful demonstration of a Žying machine is usually credited to the Montgol‰er brothers’ hot air balloon that Žew in June of 1783. Sir George Cayley investigated the aerodynamics of ‰xed wing Žight in the early 1800s, and designed the ‰rst mancarrying glider. Otto Lilienthal’s pioneering work with manned glider Žight between 1891 and 1896 advanced the ‰eld, and Samuel Langley successfully tested a number of model aircraft powered by small steam engines in 1896. The Wright brothers built and Žew a number of gliders before they designed the aircraft that became the ‰rst to demonstrate powered manned Žight in 1903. The theoretical foundations for the discipline of aeronautical engineering began to take form with some of the early work on Žuid mechanics by Newton, Bernoulli, Euler, and d’Alembert in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This work was expanded during the next century by scientists, such as Navier, Stokes, Rankine, Helmholz, Kirchhoff, and Rayleigh (Anderson, 1997), and a number of researchers compiled data ‰les on airfoils during this period. The ‰eld received a large boost in the early 1900s when governments realized the potential military applications of this new technology and began supporting research into the principles of Žight and propulsion.