Encyclopedia
A
fixed-wing aircraft is a heavier-than-air craft where movement of the wings in relation to the aircraft is not used to generate lift. The term is used to distinguish from rotary-wing aircraft, where the movement of the lift surfaces relative to the aircraft generates lift. A rarer type of aircraft that is neither
fixed-wing nor
rotary-wing is an
ornithopter. A
heliplane is both fixed-wing and rotary-wing.
Fixed-wing aircraft include a large range of craft from small trainers and recreational aircraft to large
airliners and military
cargo aircraft. Some aircraft use fixed wings to provide lift only part of the time and may or may not be referred to as fixed-wing.
The current term also embraces
aircraft with folding wings that are intended to fold when on the ground. This is usually to ease storage or facilitate transport on, for example, a vehicle trailer or the powered lift connecting the hangar deck of an
aircraft carrier to its flight deck. It also embraces "variable geometry" aircraft, such as the
General Dynamics F-111,
Grumman F-14 Tomcat and the
Panavia Tornado, which can vary the
sweep angle of their wings during flight. There are also rare examples of aircraft which can vary the
angle of incidence of their wings in flight, such the
F-8 Crusader, which are also considered to be "fixed-wing".
Two necessities for all fixed-wing aircraft are air flow over the wings for lifting of the aircraft, and an open area for landing. The majority of aircraft, however, also need an airport with the infrastructure to receive maintenance, restocking, refueling and for the loading and unloading of crew, cargo and/or passengers. While the vast majority of aircraft land and take off on land, some are capable of take off and landing on ice, snow and calm water.
The aircraft is the second fastest method of transport, after the
rocket. Commercial jet aircraft can reach up to 875 km/h. Single-engined aircraft are capable of reaching 175 km/h or more at cruise speed. Supersonic aircraft can reach speeds faster than sound. The speed record for a plane powered by an air-breathing engine is currently held by the experimental NASA
X-43, which reached nearly ten times the speed of sound.
The biggest aircraft currently in service is
Antonov An-225, while the fastest is
Mikoyan MiG-31. The biggest supersonic jet ever produced and currently in service is
Tupolev-160.
Conventional aircraft
Conventional aircraft — from small planes such as the
Cessna 210 and
Beech Bonanza to the gigantic
Antonov 225 — consist of a
fuselage, one or more wings to provide the majority of lift, a
tailplane for stability, and a one or more vertical surfaces at the tail for stability.
Fixed parts
- Wings - Each wing is a structure attached to the fuselage of the aircraft. Sometimes, the half of a wing on either side of the fuselage is referred to as a wing, e.g. left wing and right wing. Most aircraft are monoplanes
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A
monoplane is an aircraft [i] with one main set of wing surfaces, in contrast to a biplane [i] ...
having one wing structure for providing lift.
Biplanes or triplanes were popular in the past, and some are still made for special purposes like
aerobatics. Fuel is often stored in tanks in the wing but may be stored in the fuselage as well.
- Powerplants - An engine , also known as powerplants, serve to propel the aircraft on the ground and in the air. Aircraft use a variety of engines, including turbine, reciprocating, and radial engines. The engines are usually located under or on the wings or attached to the fuselage. A few aircraft have engines attached to the vertical or horizontal stabilizer.
- Tailplane - A tailplane is a small wing that provides positive or negative lift to stabilize the aircraft in flight. Most often it is configured to provide negative lift. It may be a fixed horizontal stabilizer with a movable elevator or a stabilator that rotates on a shaft to change the angle of incidence.
- Vertical Stabilizer - A vertical stabilizer or fin is a small vertical wing that is usually attached to the top rear of the fuselage. Some aircraft have two vertical stabilizers attached to the horizontal stabilizer or boom structures. A rudder is attached to the vertical stabilizer.
Control Surfaces and moving parts
- Ailerons - Ailerons are movable surfaces on the wings of the aircraft. They always act at the same time, but in inverse directions, so that the aircraft can be turned along its longitudinal axis. This movement is called roll. Because roll changes the direction of lift of the wings, it is the primary method of changing the direction of travel. Many larger aircraft use spoilers to achieve the same effect.
- Elevators - The elevators are located on the horizontal stabilizer to control the rotation around the lateral axis called pitch. The elevator and horizontal stabilizer may be combined into a stabilator.
- Elevons - On delta-wing aircraft the ailerons and elevators are combined together to perform the same actions and are called elevons.
- Rudder - The rudder is located on the vertical stabilizer and controls movement around the vertical axis called yaw.
- Landing Gear - The landing gear
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The
undercarriage or
landing gear is the structure that supports an aircraft [i] ...
allow the aircraft to take off and land. They usually retract during flight to reduce drag; however, on smaller aircraft the gear may be fixed. Some aircraft are equipped with special landing gear, such as
pontoons or
skis, to allow them to land on water, snow or ice.
- Flaps - The flaps change the profile of the wing of the aircraft, maximizing lift and control of the speed of the aircraft in air, particularly in operations of low speed - especially important in landing and take-off.
Other parts of aircraft include trim tabs, air brakes or spoilers,
slats,
winglets and
canards.
Unconventional aircraft have been built in a variety of forms. For example:
lifting body,
canard,
V-tail,
flying wing and famously, the designs of
Burt Rutan.
Flight
An aircraft flies due to aerodynamic reactions that happen when there is relative motion between air and a wing.
Lift is created as an airstream passes by something which deflects it. The force created by this deflection of the air creates an equal and opposite force on the wing according to
Newton's third law of motion. The deflection of airflow downward during the creation of lift is known as
downwash.
Nearly any shape will produce lift if curved or tilted with respect to the air flow direction. However, most shapes will be very inefficient and create too much drag. One of the primary goals of wing design is to devise a shape that produces the most lift while producing the least
lift-induced drag.
If a cross-section of a typical aircraft wing is viewed, the top of the wing can be seen to be curved downwards, while the bottom of the wing is less curved or straight, but angled to the airflow. This shape, called an
airfoil or aerofoil, creates lift when it travels through the air.
A false explanation for lift has been put forward in mainstream books, and even in scientific exhibitions. Known as the equal transit-time fallacy, it states that the parcels of air which are divided by an airfoil must rejoin again; because of the greater curvature of the upper surface of an aerofoil, the air going over the top must go faster in order to "catch up" with the air flowing around the bottom. Therefore, because of its higher speed the pressure of the air above the airfoil must be lower. Despite the fact that this "explanation" is probably the most common of all, it is false in that there is no requirement that divided parcels of air rejoin again, and in fact they do not do so.
Nevertheless, the deflection of the air does cause changes in the pressure above and below the wing; generally a higher pressure area forms below and a lower pressure forms above; these changes in pressure are necessary for the deflection to occur, and it is these pressure differences over the area of the wing that provides the force that holds the aircraft in the air.
Types of fixed-wing aircraft
Gliders
Gliders or sailplanes are aircraft designed for unpowered flight. Most gliders are intended for use in the sport of
gliding and have high aerodynamic efficiency: lift-to-drag ratios may exceed 60 to 1. The energy for sustained gliding flight must be obtained through the skillful exploitation of naturally occurring air movements in the atmosphere. Glider flights of several thousand kilometres at average speeds higher than two-hundred kilometres per hour have been achieved.
Specialised gliders have been used in war for delivery of assault troops, due to their low noise signature, as well as in atmospheric and aerodynamic research. Sport gliders equipped with engines and capable of self-launching are becoming increasingly common.
Propeller aircraft
Smaller and older
propeller aircraft make use of reciprocating
internal combustion engines that turns a propeller to create thrust. They are quiet, but they fly at lower speeds, and have lower load capacity compared to similar sized jet powered aircraft. However, they are significantly cheaper and much more economic than jets, and are generally the best option for people who need to transport a few passengers and/or small amounts of cargo. They are also the aircraft of choice for pilots who wish to own their own aircraft.
Turboprop aircraft are a halfway house between propeller and jet: they use a
turbine engine similar to a jet to turn propellers. These aircraft are popular with commuter and regional airlines, as they tend to be more economical on shorter journeys.
Jet aircraft
Jet aircraft make use of
turbines for the creation of thrust. These engines are much more powerful than a reciprocating engine. As a consequence, they have greater weight capacity and fly faster than propeller driven aircraft. One drawback, however, is that they are noisy; this makes jet aircraft a source of
noise pollution. However, large improvements have been made in dampening the sound of jet engines.
The jet aircraft was developed in England and Germany in 1931. The first jet was the Heinkel He 178, which was tested at Germany's Marienehe Airfield in 1939. In 1943 the
Messerschmitt Me 262, the first jet fighter aircraft, went into service in the German
Luftwaffe. In the early 1950s, only a few years after the first jet was produced in large numbers, the
De Havilland Comet became the world's first jet airliner, but was removed from service due to structural inadequacies discovered after numerous pressurization and depressurization cycles.
Wide-body aircraft, such as the
Airbus A340 and
Boeing 777, can carry hundreds of passengers and several tons of cargo, and are able to travel for distances up to 13 thousand kilometers.
Jet aircraft possess high cruising speeds and high speeds for take-off and landing . Due to the speed needed for takeoff and landing, the jet aircraft makes use of flaps and leading edge devices for the control of lift and speed, and has engine reversers to direct the airflow forward, slowing down the aircraft upon landing, as well as the wheel brakes.
Supersonic jet aircraft
Supersonic aircraft, such as military fighters and bombers,
Concorde, and others, make use of special turbines , that generate the huge amounts of power for flight faster than the speed of the sound. The design problems for supersonic aircraft are substantially different to those for sub-sonic aircraft.
Flight at supersonic speed creates more noise than flight at subsonic speeds, due to the phenomenon of
sonic booms. This limits supersonic flights to areas of low population density or open ocean. When approaching an area of heavier population density, supersonic aircraft are obliged to fly at subsonic speed.
Due to the high costs, limited areas of use and low demand there are no longer any supersonic aircraft in use by any major airline. The last Concorde flight was on 26 November, 2003. It appears that supersonic aircraft will remain in use almost exclusively by militaries around the world for the foreseeable future, though research into new civilian designs continues.
Rocket-powered aircraft
Experimental rocket powered aircraft were developed by the Germans as early as
World War II, although they were never mass produced by any power during that war. The first fixed wing aircraft to break the
sound barrier was the rocket powered
Bell X-1. The later
North American X-15 was another important rocket plane that broke many speed and altitude records and laid much of the groundwork for later aircraft and spacecraft design. Rocket aircraft are not in common usage today, although rocket-assisted takeoffs are used for some military aircraft.
SpaceShipOne is the most famous current rocket aircraft, being the testbed for developing a commercial sub-orbital passenger service; another rocket plane is the XCOR EZ-Rocket; and there is of course the
Space Shuttle.
Ramjet aircraft
Ramjet aircraft are mostly in the experimental stage. The
D-21 Tagboard was an unmanned Mach 3+ reconnaissance drone that was put into production in 1969 for spying, but due to the development of better spy satellites, it was cancelled in 1971. The
SR-71's Pratt & Whitney J58 engines ran 80% as ramjets at high-speeds . The last SR-71 flight was in October 2001.
Scramjet aircraft
Scramjet aircraft are in the experimental stage. The
Boeing X-43 is an experimental scramjet with a world speed record for a jet-powered aircraft - Mach 9.6, nearly 12,000 km/h at an altitude of about 36,000 meters . The X-43A set the flight speed record on 16 November, 2004.
History
The dream of flight goes back to the days of pre-history. Many stories from antiquity involve flight, such as the Greek legend of Icarus and Daedalus. Leonardo da Vinci drew an aircraft in the 15
th century. With the first flight made by man in an aircraft lighter than air, a
balloon, the biggest challenge became to create other craft, capable of controlled flight.
First attempts
In 1853, Englishman
George Cayley made the first manned glider flight. In 1856, Frenchman
Jean-Marie Le Bris made the first powered flight, by having his glider
"L'Albatros artificiel" pulled by a horse on a beach. On 28 August 1883, the American
John J. Montgomery made a controlled flight in a glider. Other aviators who had made similar flights at that time were
Otto Lilienthal,
Percy Pilcher and
Octave Chanute.
Sir
George Cayley, the inventor of the science of aerodynamics, was building and flying models of fixed-wing aircraft as early as 1803, and he built a successful passenger-carrying
glider in 1853. Self-powered aircraft were designed and constructed by
Clément Ader. On October 9, 1890, Ader attempted to fly the Éole, which succeeded in taking off and flying a distance of approximately 50 meters before witnesses. In August 1892 the Avion II flew for a distance of 200 metres, and on October 14, 1897, Avion III flew a distance of more than 300 metres.
Richard Pearse made a poorly documented uncontrolled flight on March 31 1903 in Waitohi,
New Zealand.
On August 28 1903 in Hanover, the German
Karl Jatho made his first flight.
The
Wright Brothers are commonly credited with the invention of the aircraft, but like
Alexander Graham Bell's
telephone, theirs was rather the first sustainable and well documented attempt. They made their first successful test flights on December 17 1903 and by 1905
Flyer III was capable of fully controllable, stable flight for substantial periods. Strictly speaking, the Flyer's wings were not completely fixed, as it depended for stability on a flexing mechanism named wing warping. This was later superseded by the development of
ailerons, devices which performed a similar function but were attached to an otherwise rigid wing.
However, in some countries, particularly
Brazil,
Alberto Santos-Dumont is considered to be the "Father of Aviation". Though launched after the Wright Brothers' first 150 flights, his
14-bis took off, flew and landed without the use of catapults, high winds, or other external assistance. Most Brazilians, as well as admirers of Santos-Dumont, consider him to be the true inventor of the aircraft, although if full control by the pilot is considered a requisite for an aircraft, the Wright Brothers' 1905 Flyer would take precedence over other machines. Due to competing claims, the concept of the invention of the
first flying machine has substantial ambiguity.
Wars in Europe, in particular
World War I, served as initial tests for the use of the aircraft as a weapon. First seen by generals and commanders as a "toy", the aircraft proved to be a machine of war capable of causing casualties to the enemy. In the first world war, the fighter "aces" appeared, of which the greatest was the German
Manfred von Richthofen, commonly called the
Red Baron. On the side of the allies, the ace with the highest number of downed aircraft was René Fonck, of France.
After the First World War, aircraft continued to advance their technology.
Charles Lindbergh became the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean in solo flight nonstop, on 20 May 1927. The first commercial flights took place between the United States and Canada in 1919. The turbine or the jet engine was in development in the 1930s; military jet aircraft began operating in the 1940s.
Aircraft played a primary role in the Second World War, having a presence in all the major battles of the war, especially in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the battles of the Pacific and
D-Day, as well as the
Battle of Britain. They were also an essential part of several of the military strategies of the period, such as the German Blitzkrieg or the American and Japanese Aircraft carriers.
In October 1947, Chuck Yeager, in the Bell X-1, was the first recorded person to exceed the speed of sound. However, some British Spitfire pilots claimed to have exceeded Mach 1 in a dive. The
Boeing X-43 is an experimental scramjet with a world speed record for a jet-powered aircraft - Mach 9.6, or nearly 7,000 mph.
Aircraft in a civil military role continued to feed and supply
Berlin in 1948, when access to railroads and roads to the city, completely surrounded by Eastern Germany, were blocked, by order of the Soviet Union.
The first commercial jet, the
de Havilland Comet, was introduced in 1952, and the first successful commercial jet, the Boeing 707, is still in use 50 years later.
Boeing 707 would develop into the later in
Boeing 737. The
Boeing 727 was another widely used passenger aircraft, and the
Boeing 747, was the biggest commercial aircraft in the world up to 2005, when it was surpassed by the
Airbus A380.
Designing and constructing an aircraft
Small aircraft can be designed and constructed by amateurs as
homebuilts. Other aviators with less knowledge make their aircraft using pre-manufactured kits, assembling the parts into a complete aircraft.
Most aircraft are constructed by companies with the objective of producing them in quantity for customers. The design and planning process, including safety tests, can last up to four years for small turboprops, and up to 12 years for aircraft with the capacity of the A380.
During this process, the objectives and design specifications of the aircraft are established. First the construction company uses drawings and equations, simulations, wind tunnel tests and experience to predict the behavior of the aircraft. Computers are used by companies to draw, plan and do initial simulations of the aircraft. Small models and mockups of all or certain parts of the aircraft are then tested in wind tunnels to verify the aerodynamics of the aircraft.
When the design has passed through these processes, the company constructs a limited number of these aircraft for testing on the ground. Representatives from an aviation governing agency often make a first flight. The flight tests continue until the aircraft has fulfilled all the requirements. Then, the governing public agency of aviation of the country authorizes the company to begin production of the aircraft.
In the United States, this agency is the
Federal Aviation Administration , and in the European Union, Joint Aviation Authorities . In Canada, the public agency in charge and authorizing the mass production of aircraft is
Transport Canada.
In the case of the international sales of aircraft, a license from the public agency of aviation or transports of the country where the aircraft is also to be used is necessary. For example, aircraft from Airbus need to be certified by the FAA to be flown in the United States and vice versa, aircraft of Boeing need to be approved by the JAA to be flown in the European Union.
Recently, as quieter aircraft are becoming more and more needed due to the increase in air traffic, particularly over urban areas,
MIT has designed a delta-wing aircraft that is almost silent and appears to be a practical design for widespread use.
Industrialized production
There are few companies that produce aircraft on a large scale. However, the production of an aircraft for one company is a process that actually involves dozens, or even hundreds, of other companies and plants, that produce the parts that go into the aircraft. For example, one company can be responsible for the production of the landing gear, while another one is responsible for the radar. The production of such parts is not limited to the same city or country; in the case of large aircraft manufacturing companies, such parts can come from all over of the world.
The parts are sent to the main plant of the aircraft company, where the production line is located. In the case of large aircraft, production lines dedicated to the assembly of certain parts of the aircraft can exist, especially the wings and the fuselage.
When complete, an aircraft goes through a set of rigorous inspection, to search for imperfections and defects, and after being approved by the inspectors, the aircraft is tested by a pilot, in a flight test, in order to assure that the controls of the aircraft are working properly. With this final test, the aircraft is ready to receive the "final touchups" , and is then ready for the customer.
Safety
Statistics show that the risk of an air accident is very small - at least in airliners. Statistically, the chance of an accident while driving to the airport in a car is higher than having an accident during the flight. Many people have a fear of flying because the risk of death in the event of an aircraft accident is extremely high. Furthermore, car crashes rarely feature outside local news whereas air crashes are reported internationally, making the risk seem greater.
Aircraft are the second safest way to travel long distances after
railway trains. The per-trip safety of aircraft is somewhat safer than cars, but over the long distances that aircraft can cover they are much safer than the other types or transport.
The majority of aircraft accidents occur due to human error, that is, an error of the pilot or control tower. After human error, mechanical failure is the biggest cause of air accidents, which sometimes also can involve a human component, e.g. negligence of the airline in carrying out proper maintenance. Adverse weather is the third largest cause of accidents. Icing of wings,
downbursts and low visibility are often major contributors to weather related crashes. Birds actually have been ranked as a major cause for large rotor bursts on commercial turboprop engines, spurring extra safety measures to keep birds away. However, technology like ice detectors help pilots secure the safety of their aircraft.
See also
- Aircraft
- Aircraft flight mechanics
- List of altitude records reached by different aircraft types
