Wilbur and Orville Wright and the First Airplane

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In 1903, I can only imagine that the single thought inside of both Wilbur and Orville Wright’s minds was to get their airplane off the ground. Because of their dream of heavier-than-air flight, mankind has gone from a flight of 120 feet, in an aircraft designed largely out of wood, using bicycle drive technology (World Digital Library, 2013), to a spacecraft that is about to leave our solar system (Voyager I). To quote American author, Napoleon Hill (1992), “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” When we stop to consider how far we have come in just over one hundred years, is it even possible to conceive what air travel might look like a hundred years from now?
From the Wright Flyer to the aircraft we fly today, they all started as a dream that later turned into a design. NASA is not sending astronauts into space at the moment, but that has not stopped the engineers at NASA from working on advanced aerodynamic designs and technologies that would help us achieve the dream of traveling farther, faster and higher. Improved materials such as carbon-fiber give an aircraft lighter weight, improved performance and lower fuel consumption. NASA’s newest design in carbon-fiber is called “PRSEUS” (Pultruded rod, Stitched, Efficient, Unitized Structure), a material that will be stronger than current carbon-fiber technology and will greatly reduce the need for rivets and other fasteners that lead to structural fatigue. NASA believes this new material will help Boeing achieve its goal of an aircraft of blended wing design (Sloan, 2011). Boeing has stated that tests for strength and performance on PRSEUS have exceeded their expectations. Boeing is using this new material in their X-48B, a small scale functional ble...

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...lying cars: Radical concept design aims high. BBC Future. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130523-radical-flying-car-model-unveiled
TheCrit. (2008, June 30). Boeing develops anti-gravity propulsion. Retrieved from http://thecrit.com/2008/06/30/boeing-develops-anti-gravity-propulsion/
Vogel, J. (2013, May 03). The warp speed of today: Boeing's x-51a waverider . Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIbW8-Ow50I
Wiki. (n.d.). Scramjet. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet
Wise, J. (2006, June 05). Introducing the airplane of the future. Popular Mechanics. Retrieved from http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/news/2932316
World Digital Library. (2013, July 16). Telegram from Orville Wright in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to his father announcing four successful flights. Retrieved from http://www.wdl.org/en/item/11372/

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