Flight Training - February 2013 - 35

ordered his airplane. One order came from as far away as Wichita, Kansas, placed by Clyde Cessna. So those were the three main control systems developed before World War I. When the war erupted, thousands of pilots from several nations needed to be trained to fly thousands of machines built by dozens of manufacturers. For most of those machines the relatively ubiquitous little Blériot XI became the pattern, from the engine in front, the tail in back, and the simple stick-and-rudder-bar system in the cockpit. Even Curtiss adopted the system for a trainer, the Curtiss Jenny. With the Jenny, the instructor could perform a maneuver, and the student could follow along. The Wrights never did change their system, but by then they had stopped building airplanes. There are minor variations on the stickand-rudder pedals. There were yokes, of course, and the World War II-era ERCO Ercoupe, which had its rudder and ailerons linked together like the Wright Flyer. So simple, anyone could learn to fly. But not everyone should learn to fly. A couple of years ago I flew a two-seat F–16 with a pilot who was discontented because he was stationed stateside instead of in Iraq, so he let me buzz around the

AND SO, ON DECEMBER 17, 1903, THE BROTHERS MADE THE FIRST OF FOUR POWERED, CONTROLLED FLIGHTS: THE INITIAL ONE WAS 120 FEET IN 12 SECONDS; THE LAST, AND LONGEST, WAS 852 FEET IN 59 SECONDS.
tor and learned to operate it the opposite way, and then had to explain what you were doing to your student. Even writing that sentence gets confusing.
MEANWHILE IN NEW YORK, Glenn Curtiss began building machines in which he controlled pitch with a steering wheel mounted on a lever, and he sat encased in a shoulder-high yoke that operated the ailerons when he moved from side to side. In France, a gentleman named Robert Esnault-Pelterie stole the Wrights’ wing-warping system for his REP, which he manipulated with a broomstick mounted on a universal joint on the machine’s floor. Moving the broomstick side to side operated the wings; moving it forward and backward operated the elevator. The REP would have flown perfectly if it weren’t for a lousy engine and no rudder to speak of. A short, stout Frenchman named Louis Blériot adapted Esnault-Pelterie’s system for his eighth machine—named, surprisingly, Blériot VIII. Unlike the Wrights, Blériot barely had to think about controlling the Blériot VIII, although it and the two subsequent ones didn’t fly so great. Then he got to the Blériot XI. In 1909 he flew it across the English Channel, an event that captured the world by storm, and in no time 100 people

desert and mountains near Edwards Air Force Base to my heart’s content while he just went along for the ride. Like many new airplanes with computer controls, the F–16 comes equipped with a sidestick, a grip mounted on the cockpit’s right side. Like the Blériot system, but even more so, all I had to do is think about a maneuver—a roll, loop, or dive, say—and the airplane did it. Yup, the system is an improvement over Louis Blériot’s, and nothing like the Wrights’.
Phil Scott is a freelance writer living in New York. His latest book is Then and Now: How Airplanes Got This Way.
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Flight Training - February 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Flight Training - February 2013