FROM EDN EUROPE: First principles
By Graham Prophet, Editor -- EDN, February 5, 2004
With all due fanfare, the 100th anniversary of the first manned, powered flight came and went during December 2003. If all of the television documentaries and commemorative programmes achieved one thing, it should have been that the public should more widely recognise the Wright brothers as true engineers and entrepreneurs. Because their main business was bicycle manufacturing, a temptation has always existed to view the Wrights as enthusiastic amateurs, who somehow stumbled on the correct formula for powered flight. The historical examination that people have applied to their story highlights the fact that nothing could be further from the truth. Conveying the essence of what it is to be a good engineer is never an easy task; here was an example, albeit from a different discipline, of exactly that.
Their interest in flight was long-term, and their research and development programme, exhaustive and persistent. They assembled everything they could locate on "prior art," particularly the achievements until that time in unpowered flight, especially those of pioneers such as Otto Lilienthal. They understood the basic concepts they were working with—lift, drag, and so on—and, as far as possible at the time, built a quantitative as well as qualitative understanding of the problem. They knew that their early designs were marginal and that their flight would require a dependable headwind, and so they used the resources of the US Meteorological Services to locate the coastal site at Kitty Hawk, NC. There, statistically, they knew they could rely on the onshore winds to help with their efforts. The fact that their test site was hundreds of miles away from their home base, requiring weeks' long seasonal expeditions over several years to move themselves, their prototypes, and much of their workshops out for field testing, emphasises that their eventual success was no lucky happenstance. Also, others who were seeking the same objectives were less likely to see or copy their design iterations in a remote location.
Above all, perhaps, they followed a structured development programme. They studied, they built as much understanding of the problem as they could, they modelled and analysed, and then they designed a prototype. They tested it in an organised way with hundreds of experimental runs. When it fell short of what they wanted, they persisted until they had extracted all the data they could about how it was failing, and then they went methodically about refining the design. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that, in the optimisation of their first aircraft, they were maximising performance in what we might now call a "local maximum." For example, the layout they chose to use, placing control ahead of the main lifting planes, introduced a degree of positive feedback into pitch control that was hard to master. Nevertheless, by dedicated applications of design principles, they made their chosen approach work.
It was also a development programme that was clear in its objectives. Naturally, they wanted to be the first to make the landmark flight, but the Wrights had commercial targets, too. They do not appear to have wanted to become aircraft manufacturers but to achieve a sufficient level of success in powered flight to sell a body of knowledge and expertise to some organization—preferably, the US Government—that could take the project forward and manufacture viable aircraft. And they wanted a large enough return from the deal to set themselves up to work in any field they subsequently chose to pursue. Ultimately, in this, they did not achieve the success they sought. It was a business plan that, from the perspective of our industry, we can very easily recognise; in today's terms, it is a classic start-up with a predefined exit strategy, looking to sell a portfolio of focussed intellectual property. After 80 or 90 years, you feel that the Wright brothers would have been entirely at home in the atmosphere and ethos of Silicon Valley.
Today, of course, the technology our industry adds to the aviation mix allows high-performance aircraft to dispense some of what the Wright brothers struggled so hard to achieve—intrinsic aerodynamic stability and so on—in what appears to be a cavalier fashion. Although the television-documentary makers pack away the tale of the Wrights to await another anniversary, we should thank them for revealing that the Wright brothers' story had almost nothing to do with luck or serendipity but showed the work of an organised and methodical team that anyone in any branch of engineering can use as a model and relate to, irrespective of the passage of 100 years.
Contact me at gprophet@reedbusiness.com.
