LESSON 3 General Aviation Takes Flight
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
LESSON 3 General Aviation Takes Flight LYDE CESSNA was born in Iowa in 1879 but grew Quick Write up on a farm in Kansas. His mechanical talents C fi rst became apparent in that rural setting. It was a tough life growing up in a family of nine. He became a self-taught expert in repairing and then After you’ve read about later developing and improving farm machinery. Clyde Cessna’s background, explain in a few sentences He bought one of the fi rst “horseless carriages” how you think his experience in his area and later became a mechanic and an auto might have been different had he been born 25 years salesman. For a time he ran a successful car dealership later. in Enid, Oklahoma. But it was aviation that would capture his imagination. He was fascinated by Louis Blériot’s fl ight across the Learn About English Channel in 1909. He bought his own monoplane and fl ew it. He visited air shows and met many of the • what created the interest famous daredevil pilots of the day. He traveled to New for general aviation York to spend a month at an airplane factory, learning • the different types of aircraft that make general the fundamentals of fl ight and the art of plane building. aviation possible Eventually he spent his life savings at the time to buy • the different categories an exact copy of Blériot’s monoplane. He fl ew this plane, that make up general and others of his own design, all around the Midwest, aviation continually tweaking them for better design. In 1927 he founded the Cessna Aircraft Company. Just a few years later, he abruptly withdrew from aviation after a close friend of his was killed in an air crash of a Cessna-built racing plane. The company survived, though, through the Depression and World War II. Some of the most successful general aviation aircraft Cessna is one of the most popular general aviation aircraft fl ying today. in the world bear the name Cessna. mountainpix/Shutterstock 224 CHAPTER 4 Commercial and General Aviation Take Off What Created the Interest for General Aviation Vocabulary The United States has more than 5,000 airfi elds. Each of these • general aviation has at least one paved runway. But only 500 of these fi elds • bootlegger offer scheduled passenger service—commercial airline service, • winged gospel in other words. • avionics So what’s going on at the more than 4,500 other fi elds? • offshore General aviation (GA). It may be easier to explain what general • liability insurance aviation is by saying what it’s not: General aviation is all aviation • homebuilding except scheduled commercial airline service and military aviation. • bush fl ying That term came into use during the 1950s. Private fl ying and • crop dusting business fl ying are earlier terms that mean the same thing. • aerial fi refi ghting Whatever it’s called, general aviation goes back to the earliest • air tanker days of powered fl ight. It includes a range of aircraft, from small • aerobatics private planes to large business jets. Helicopters can be part of • warbird GA, too. So are aircraft specially modifi ed for particular needs. These planes, jets, and copters are put to a broad range of purposes. Of course they fl y passengers. But GA aircraft also do crop dusting, fi refi ghting, aerial photography and surveying work, medical emergency transportation, and law enforcement. Charles Lindbergh’s triumph in fl ying solo from New York to Paris captured the public imagination in the late 1920s. He gave a boost to all kinds of fl ight. He made people want to learn to fl y. In particular, he encouraged people to explore the uses of aviation technology. General aviation was just coming into its own during this period. The fi rst use of airplanes to spray crops, for instance, was in the 1920s. Aerial surveying was another important early use of general aviation aircraft. And business executives were discovering that a private airplane was Cessna 750 Citation X jet a good way to get to an important meeting. InsectWorld/Shutterstock LESSON 3 General Aviation Takes Flight 225 Earliest Pioneers—and Tinkerers One of the advantages of going to work in a brand-new fi eld is that it may matter less if you have no experience. After all, if the fi eld is new enough, nobody else has much experience in it, either. Eddie Stinson That might have been what Eddie Stinson was thinking when he dropped out of school at 16 and headed for St. Louis. This was just a few years after the Wright Brothers’ fi rst fl ight in 1903. Eddie had a mission. He was determined to pilot an aircraft being made by a couple of novice builders in St. Louis. He pointed out to the builders that they had no real fl ight experience. Therefore, it made sense for them to hire him as their “test pilot.” In fact, he didn’t have any more fl ight experience than the builders. Indeed, he hadn’t even seen an airplane before. But he wasn’t going to let that hold him back. The plane was more of a kite than an aircraft. With a farmer’s fi eld as his runway, young Stinson got the plane off the ground—briefl y. Then it crashed back to earth. It lost a wing on the way down. The builders let Stinson keep what was left of the craft as payment for his work as a test pilot. And then they moved on to other work. For Stinson, though, the episode was the start of a lifelong career in aviation. His next stop: Dayton, Ohio, for fl ying lessons with the Wright Brothers. From there he went on to a career as a barnstormer, stunt pilot, and record-setting aviator. With his two sisters (Katherine and Marjorie, whom you read about in Chapter 1, Lesson 4), he also ran a fl ight school in Texas. They trained aviators for the US Army during World War I. And he founded the Stinson Aircraft Corporation in Detroit. It made aircraft for the US armed forces as well as business jets used to whisk oil company executives around the globe. Like too many early aviators, Stinson died young—in a plane crash while on a sales trip Stinson Reliant SR 10 C in the hangar of the Musée Volant Salis in France on 26 January 1932. He was only 38, but he HUANG Zheng/Shutterstock had already logged more than 16,000 hours of fl ight time—more than any other pilot at that time. 226 CHAPTER 4 Commercial and General Aviation Take Off Benny Howard Off Take and General Aviation Commercial The story of Benjamin “Benny” Odel Howard is similar to Stinson’s. He, too, was a young man with a passion for fl ight. As a 19-year-old, he went to work in the Curtiss aircraft factory in Dallas. He soon bought a used biplane and a book on how to fl y. What more did he need? Once he took to the skies, though, he got into even more serious trouble than Stinson. On one of his early fl ights, he crashed his plane, killing his passenger and seriously injuring himself. After that, proper fl ying lessons seemed a good idea. He got a commercial pilot’s license and then stumbled into the fi eld of aircraft design. A Houston bootlegger asked for his help in modifying an airplane. This was during the days of Prohibition—a period when the sale or production of alcoholic beverages was a crime. A bootlegger is someone who makes or sells illegal liquor. The bootlegger wanted a plane with a cargo hold that could fi t 15 cases of booze. Howard was able to do it, and the bootlegger was delighted. Soon Howard was fl ying a plane he had designed and built himself. He was still just 20 years old, and with a formal education that had ended after just a few months of high school. As you read in Lesson 1, government oversight became more of a presence as aviation developed. Aviators had to pay attention to new regulations, at both the state and federal level. Pilots had to earn licenses. Aircraft had to be certifi ed. The new regulations no doubt made fl ying safer. But they also made it harder for people to learn to fl y. A teenager with a used biplane couldn’t expect to learn to fl y just from reading a book. (And that method didn’t work out too well for Benny Howard in any case.) What you might call a golden age of do-it-yourself general aviation was winding down. The Howard DGA was a high performance airplane of the 1930s. Richard Thornton/Shutterstock LESSON 3 General Aviation Takes Flight 227 The Right Stuff Giuseppe Bellanca: Aviation Pioneer Giuseppe Mario Bellanca was a young Sicilian who came to America in 1910 with a dream: He wanted to build aircraft in the New World. Three years later, in Brooklyn, he had built his fi rst plane, the Parasol. He taught himself to fl y it. The plane incorporated a revolutionary idea—the propellers at the front, and what we now call “the tail” at the back. That sounds obvious. But it’s not how the Wright Brothers and other designers of the time had done it. Many pilots were afraid to try to fl y the Parasol, with its unusual design. But those who dared to try it found it fl ew very well.