ATTH Breakthroughs

At the birth of powered flight, it wasn’t at all obvious that some day airplanes would need to figure out the complications that clouds present. But before long, looking at clouds and the complexities that both sides of them presented was an issue pilots couldn’t ignore. As cross-country flights became a thing, aviators had to […]

With the invention of No. 9 on our list, the aircraft jet engine, planes got faster and faster until designers had to reckon with what was and still is popularly referred to as “the sound barrier.” Pilots take delight in making fun of this term, but in many ways it’s accurate. By the early part […]

The history of the aircraft engine is a busy one, with numerous successfully fielded types, everything from electric motors to rockets. There are turbojets, turbofans, turboprops, V-configuration engines (like the famous Allison and Packard models of WW-II fame), in-line versions, rotary models (in which the cylinders turn with a single shaft) and radial models, with […]

By the early 1800s, balloons were making ascents so high that today’s regulations would require the crews to use supplemental oxygen. But making a practical pressurized gondola was complicated, so attempts were largely abandoned in favor of what we now think of as spacesuits. Airplanes were slower to mature. In fact, for a quarter of […]

Speaking of controls, the fiendishly complicated aileron, French for “little wing,” predated the Wrights by around 35 years. In theory, the interconnected control surfaces, one on each wing’s trailing edge, deflect airflow in order to bank the aircraft (though in practice it’s a little more complicated than that). Despite the prior art (mentioned above) a […]

Even today, the fuselages (the body of the aircraft, to use an automotive term) of some aircraft in production rely on a primitive structure, a skeletal frame with a covering skin, one type of which is often referred to as “tube-and-rag,” for the metal tubing that makes the structure and the treated cloth covering it. […]

Rockets. While rockets using black powder predate 1,000 C.E., when early chemists in China chanced upon the substance, the development of a really useful rocket engine happened in the 1920s. After that, the technology took off, largely thanks to developments in the United States, where Robert Goddard used a more effective nozzle technology to vastly […]

On that chilly December day in 1903 when the Wrights’ Flyer launched on that famous first 12-second journey, Orville, the world’s first PIC, operated a very different set of controls than we’re used to today. Instead of a single integrated mechanism to give the pilot control of two of the three axes of flight (pitch […]