History of Flight - Man tries to fly like the birds

History of Flight - Man tries to fly like the birds
In China about 400 BC
People have always been fascinated by the idea of flying.  Seeing kites flown by Chinese further influenced our thinking.  Chinese kites are both used in recreation and for observance of religious ceremonies.  There is a special kind of kite for testing weather conditions.  The idea of gliders and balloons started from a kite, hence, it is important in mans quest for flight.
Man’s attempt at flight
Man’s idea of flight came from observing flying birds.  They even tried to copy the way a bird flies.  Man copied the bird’s wings and used different materials.  Expectedly man won’t be able to fly with wings like birds.  Our bodies are not designed to be like that.
Aeolipile
An ancient Greek engineer, Hero of Alexandria work with different sources of power, he created the Aeolipile.  It produces rotary motion once steam jets are applied to it.  He used a kettle with water place just above fire.  The Aeolipile was placed on top of the kettle.  When water turns to steam it goes to the sphere and rotates it.  This is important because it was the very first engine.  Engines are important to the history of flight.
1485 – Leonardo da Vinci studies flight
Leonardo da Vinci was the first man to study flight.  He even drew the Ornithopter in the 1480’s.  He made over a hundred illustrations about his ideas on bird flight and mechanical flight.  The drawing consists of machines that carry people to flight, equipment used to test wings and wings and tails of birds.

Leonardo drew the Ornithopter to show his idea on how man could fly but it was never made.  The very first inventors of the airplane studied Leonardo’s drawings.  The ornithopter paved the way for the modern helicopter.
The first hot air balloon flight was made on 1783, by Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier.
The very first hot air balloon was invented by Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier.  The balloon was made of silk bag attach to a basket carrier.  Smoke from a fire caused hot air to blow into the silk bag and created conditions for the silk bag to be lighter than air.  A duck, rooster and sheep were the very first passengers of the balloon.  It reached an altitude of 6,000 feet and went over a mile distance.
Due to the success of their trial flight, the brothers sent people up in their hot air balloons.  Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and Francois Laurent were in the first manned flight made on November 21, 1783.
George Cayley and the glider, 1799-1850

The father of aerodynamics, Sir George Cayley, distinguished the forces that act on object in flight.  These are lift, drag, thrust, and gravity.  He tried different shapes of wings.  He thought of the controls like vertical tail surfaces, steering rudders, rear elevators ad airscrews.  He had many versions of gliders.  Body movements attain control.  His glider is the first to carry humans in flight.
Over 50 years, Sir George Cayley further improved his glider.  He made wing modifications to make the air flow on the wing properly.  To attain stability a tail was added.  To add strength to the glider a biplane design was incorporated.  He recognized that for his glider to stay aloft for a long time machine power was necessary.
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The history of Aerobatic Flight

The history of Aerobatic Flight
All eyes below are fixated to the antique World War II as Stearman falls from above, the downward spiral towards disaster. The vintage biplane fell faster and faster still, the growl of its powerful motor grows louder. The pilot was obviously doomed looses control and almost crashed when suddenly, a few inches from the tarmac, the Stearman roared into the blue sky to the cheering crowd below. This is the exciting world of acrobatic flight!
Aerobatic flight, a special area of aviation, is defined as "precise maneuvering in the three-dimensional space." Maneuvering is broken into three components - position, speed and the altitude. A manual aerobatic plane's position is to be precisely controlled in all three axes (yaw, roll and pitch) and could quickly be shifted to any of the other positions.
Lincoln Beachey has been widely recognized to be the "father" aerobatic flight, even if none other than the Wright Brothers as a first step dismissed his exploits as mere "optical illusions." All these skeptics were changed during a now legendary-multi-city tour Barnstorming during 1914 when Beachey, then known as "the crazy flyer", dazzled crowds all over the country waterfalls at the wheel of his aircraft, Little Looper. Lighting like Thomas Edison or even Carl Sandburg also became aerobatics fans and even the Wright Brothers recanted his original comment, saying Beachey's exhibitions such as poetry.

Evolving from the air at the beginning of the race and had military training, these first aerobatic planes are generally oversized but short. These factors produced a performance aerobatic rather dull (today's standards) for handling aircraft was slow and the ability to mount vertically was challenged.

Despite the improvements of equipment that allows flight capacity reversed (such as improved wings, oil and fuel systems), even the best aerobatic aircraft can not fly for long periods in attitudes abnormal flight. The engine speed and wash from the spinning propeller as a result of an airplane react differently when maneuvered going right than when going to the left of aerobatics-forcing the pilot to learn from their maneuvers in both direction. These limitations are as that no aerodynamic aerobatic plane produced can effectively fight on the side of the claim of the glowing "knife edge" rises or turns notwithstanding.
Strong aerobatic biplanes, Gulfhawk II, aroused much enthusiasm on the air circuit in 1936 until 1948, performing in the World's Fair, Cleveland Air Race, and All-America’s Miami Air Shows. Originally designed by Grumman, Gulfhawk II has been specially designed to support under the high structure stress aerobatic flight and then changed to support upside-down flying for periods of no more than 30 minutes.
The face of aerobatic flight was changed forever around 1945; Curtis Pitts made the first airplane designed specifically for aerobatics, the Pitts’ Special S-1. Pitts had envisioned an aircraft that would defy gravity and meet its controls, on a smaller plane that war era biplane, which could roll, climb, and maneuver quickly. Pitts has dismissed the concept of big radial engines and designed a sweep-winged aircraft powered by a small, light, horizontally opposed motor with the centre of gravity that made it possible to snap tight
Line Pitts aerobatic aircraft-small (with only 17 feet (5 meters) wingspan), light and very agile with great power-weight-soon dominated aerobatics challenges. The more famous of the Pitts planes, a hand-crafted S-1C known as Little Stinker, flown by another pioneer of aerobatics, Betty Skelton, who did win her first wife's International Aerobatic Championship at the age of 23 and she won again the next year. At that time there were few women that were aerobatic pilots.
A Dictionary of acrobatic flight, first published in 1961, all securities listed aerobatic maneuver and definition of the position at that time, 3000 in all. Today, that list has grown to more than 15000 maneuvers that the pilots test the capabilities of their aircraft. This shows that the aerobatic maneuvers conform to the natural evolution of the leak that occurred in the course of history - which the planes continue to improve the capabilities; skilled pilots learn to exploit these improvements.

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