Fixed-wing aircraft

Gliding fixed-wing aircraft, including free-flying gliders and tethered kites, can use moving air to gain altitude.

Leaf kites may have been flown earlier in what is now Sulawesi, based on their interpretation of cave paintings on nearby Muna Island.

[2] Ancient and medieval Chinese sources report kites used for measuring distances, testing the wind, lifting men, signaling, and communication for military operations.

[3] Around 400 BC in Greece, Archytas was reputed to have designed and built the first self-propelled flying device, shaped like a bird and propelled by a jet of what was probably steam, said to have flown some 200 m (660 ft).

A 17th-century account states that 9th-century poet Abbas Ibn Firnas made a similar attempt, though no earlier sources record this event.

[8] In 1799, Sir George Cayley laid out the concept of the modern airplane as a fixed-wing machine with systems for lift, propulsion, and control.

[11] In 1856, Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Bris made the first powered flight, had his glider L'Albatros artificiel towed by a horse along a beach.

[13] Other aviators who made similar flights at that time were Otto Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher, and protégés of Octave Chanute.

In the 1890s, Lawrence Hargrave conducted research on wing structures and developed a box kite that lifted the weight of a man.

[14] Sir Hiram Maxim built a craft that weighed 3.5 tons, with a 110-foot (34-meter) wingspan powered by two 360-horsepower (270-kW) steam engines driving two propellers.

In 1906, Brazilian inventor Alberto Santos Dumont designed, built and piloted an aircraft that set the first world record recognized by the Aéro-Club de France by flying the 14 bis 220 metres (720 ft) in less than 22 seconds.

The earliest known aerial victory with a synchronized machine gun-armed fighter aircraft occurred in 1915, flown by German Luftstreitkräfte Lieutenant Kurt Wintgens.

[citation needed] The so-called Golden Age of Aviation occurred between the two World Wars, during which updated interpretations of earlier breakthroughs.

They were an essential component of military strategies, such as the German Blitzkrieg or the American and Japanese aircraft carrier campaigns of the Pacific.

Later in the war the British Gloster Meteor entered service, but never saw action – top air speeds for that era went as high as 1,130 km/h (700 mph), with the early July 1944 unofficial record flight of the German Me 163B V18 rocket fighter prototype.

A sailplane is a fixed-wing glider designed for soaring – gaining height using updrafts of air and to fly for long periods.

As is the case with planes, gliders come in diverse forms with varied wings, aerodynamic efficiency, pilot location, and controls.

An ordinary sheet of paper can be folded into an aerodynamic shape fairly easily; its low mass relative to its surface area reduces the required lift for flight, allowing it to glide some distance.

Early gliders were built mainly of wood and metal, later replaced by composite materials incorporating glass, carbon or aramid fibers.

To minimize drag, these types have a streamlined fuselage and long narrow wings incorporating a high aspect ratio.

The gliders were towed into the air and most of the way to their target by transport planes, e.g. C-47 Dakota, or by one-time bombers that had been relegated to secondary activities, e.g. Short Stirling.

The advantage over paratroopers were that heavy equipment could be landed and that troops were quickly assembled rather than dispersed over a parachute drop zone.

By the time of the Korean War, transport aircraft had become larger and more efficient so that even light tanks could be dropped by parachute, obsoleting gliders.

Initial research into many types of fixed-wing craft, including flying wings and lifting bodies was also carried out using unpowered prototypes.

Pilots can soar for hours, gain thousands of meters of altitude in thermal updrafts, perform aerobatics, and glide cross-country for hundreds of kilometers.

Captive balloons may be more convenient for such experiments, because kite-carried antennas require strong wind, which may be not always available with heavy equipment and a ground conductor.

Kites and some lightweight gliders and airplanes have flexible wing surfaces that are stretched across a frame and made rigid by the lift forces exerted by the airflow over them.

To travel at transonic speeds, variable geometry wings change orientation, angling backward to reduce drag from supersonic shock waves.

[35]: 224 The flying wing configuration was studied extensively in the 1930s and 1940s, notably by Jack Northrop and Cheston L. Eshelman in the United States, and Alexander Lippisch and the Horten brothers in Germany.

Flexible-wing planes often rely on an anchor line or the weight of a pilot hanging beneath to maintain the correct attitude.