Beautiful and Ugly Airplanes
IF IT IS TRUE that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," then the same must hold true for ugliness. Except that when it comes to the beauty or ugliness of airplanes, the eye is often overriden by the brain. Some airplanes, by their outstanding performance, become "beautiful" even though their contours may be awkward and their proportions so aesthetically unbalanced that an outsider must wonder how anyone in his right mind could see beauty in such a collection of confusing lines, angles, and shapes. The labeling of one airplane as "beautiful" and another as "ugly" depends on highly conflicting motivations. Obviously, anyone who spends hours and hours looking at a wide variety of airplanes (either in person or in pictures) will develop standards.
Nieuport
AS AVIATION has grown from infancy to maturity, the means by which airplanes are identified has grown more complicated, more precise, and, unfortunately, more impersonal. The Wright brothers called their first successful airplane simply the 1903 Flyer, and that said all there was to be said. Today, Boeing identified one of many versions of its jumbo airliner as a 747-121, which means it is a type 747-100B powered by Pratt & Whitney JT9D-7A engines and is operated by PanAm. The new way tells so much more than the old that sometimes one wishes people had been as conscientious in bygone eras, so that a lot of confusion could have been avoided. Take the Nieuport 13, for example. There really wasn't any such animal. It was the Nieuport 11, but it had 13 sq. meters of wing area, and for some reason it was sometimes called the Type 13, even in official records.
75th Anniversary of Air Racing - Part 2
When World War II ended in 1945, the great urge was to return to a normal way of life immediately, especially for the millions of GIs back home after years of living from minute to minute. Among the returnees were thousands of very skilled pilots - for whom the terrors of war had been tempered by the thrill of flying some of the finest airplanes in the world. Not all of them were ready to settle down to ordinary lives after so much excitement. Fortunately for them, there was a great surplus of the airplanes they had grown to love: P-38 Lightnings, P-51 Mustangs, F4U Corsairs. With jets replacing them in the military, they could be bought for as little as $1,000.
75th Anniversary of Air Racing
SEVENTY-FIVE years ago, in August of 1909, something so spectacular happened in Reims, France, that it took everyone's mind off the world-famous cathedral and the nearby Champagne vineyards . . . at least for a few days. It had to do with airplanes-lots of them-engaging in an orgy of record setting and pylon racing. Nothing remotely like this had been seen before, anywhere. In fact, hardly any of the tens of thousands of spectators, including princes and presidents, had seen even a single airplane propelling itself through the air. As for several of them flying at once, that was almost beyond imagination. After all, the European aviation community was still not over the shock of having seen Wilbur Wright fly routinely at LeMans, the year before, while none of their brave inventors had come close to a real flight.
AJ~2
THE WINNER of the 1982 Indianapolis 500 Race drove the 500 miles at 162 mph and used almost 280 gallons of very expensive racing fuel. The winner of the 1982 Oshkosh 500 flew just as far, but averaged 223 mph and used just over 18 gallons of ordinary aviation gas, for an imposing 27 1/2 miles per gallon. There must be an important lesson in there, someplace, especially since the airplane carried a passenger during the efficiency race. Maybe it proves that it's possible to build an airplane that's more fuel-efficient than a racing car . . . but so what? They're two totally different kinds of animal.
