Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings by Jay Spenser (@2008 by Jay Spenser).

The invention of the airplane was a battleground for two warring paradigms about what the airplane would be like Paradigms are mind-sets created by what we think we know. Depending on how closely they match the actuality, these mental models either can help us succeed or can place blinders over our eyes that keep us from perceiving what we later realize was obvious all along.

Working under the right paradigm helped Americans Orville and Wilbur Wright to succeed even as a wrong one sabotaged the hopes of Europes many experimenters. If not for this situation, the French—who felt they had invented flight because of the success of the Montgolfiers' hot-air balloons in 1783—might well have been first. If so, the airplane, like the automobile before it, would have been a European invention.

What led Europe's aerial experimenters astray? It was William Samuel Henson. Or more accurately, it was the powerful sway of Hensons persuasive vision of what aviation would be.

First published in the early 1840s, the engraved illustrations of the Henson Aerial Steam Carriage (a passenger-carrying airplane) continued to appear off and on in newspapers, magazines, and books for more than a half century. More thrilling artwork of heavier than-air flying machines was hard to imagine, and the very sight of this aerial stagecoach spurred Europe's aerial experimenters to redouble their efforts. Unfortunately, however, it also handed them a lot of incorrect notions.

The concept of an aerial carriage brought with it a concomitant expectation that people would drive air planes around the sky making flat turns as they did in horse-drawn vehicles. This unquestioned assumption shaped how France's early experimentation approached airplane design, and it cost them dearly.

Part of Henson's paradigm worked. For example, airplanes would indeed pitch their noses up or down to climb or descend. This was intuitive because horse drawn carriages do just that when traversing hilly countryside. But carriages don't tilt sideways, or at least not very far, because that leads to a catastrophic upset.

Henson's vision told Europe's early experimenters that their airplanes must not be permitted to tilt side to side or else catastrophe would ensue. To ensure that this never happened, some experimenters used strongly upward-angled wings so that the airplane would be self-righting in flight. Others placed vertical fore-and-aft fabric panels between the wings of their biplanes to prevent sideslips. Both these features suggest that Europe's pioneers were terrified of banking, or drop ing a wing in flight.

Another place where Henson's Aerial Steam Carriage paradigm misled people was the vital issue of controllability. Controlling horse-drawn vehicles does not require constant active involvement on the driver's part. The horses are set in motion and the reins are not used again until the horses need further instruction.

Consequently, Europe's "early birds" were remarkably cavalier about controllability. To them, all one needed to do was create an inherently stable craft whose wings never dropped to either side. After nosing his vehicle aloft, one would simply "drive" it around the sky.

A wealthy Brazilian named Alberto SantosDumont performed Europe's first heavier-than-air flights late in 1906. His 14-bis was largely uncontrollable, but that didn't bother him; his goal was simply to get into the air. This disregard for a key requirement of flight was then so pervasive that more than a year would pass before any European figured out how to actually land where he had taken off.

Wilbur and Orville worked under a different mind-set. They too had seen Henson's artwork, but it didn't sing to them because they were bicyclists. Their intimate association with this vehicle, its operation, and its manufacture led them to approach flight development in a different way than their European counterparts.

Wilbur and Orville were not in the least scared of tilting to one side or the other in flight. Banking in flight seemed natural to them because a bicyclist leans into turns. What's more, they understood from the outset that the airplane needed to be controllable around all three axes and that the pilot had to be intimately involved with this process while aloft. These two insights were intuitive because the bicyclist must constantly direct his two-wheeled vehicle by means of a combination of active balance and coordinated use of handlebars, acceleration, and braking. If the bicyclist doesn't stay on top of these things every minute, he's in for a spill.