Let’s hear it for the mighty fuselage! Yay, the fuselage! The fuselage?
Yeah, it doesn’t get much press, the fuselage. Nobody writes mediocre, sentimental poems about one touching the hand of God or glinting in the sun—they’re all into wings or propellers; sometimes, engines; or when inspiration grows meager, maybe rudders. Not that I can quote any quatrains concerning rudders. Certainly none come to mind about longitudinal stability, which began the whole fuselage craze among aircraft designers.
The earliest pre-Wright-brothers designs didn’t carry much in the way of a fuselage anyway, unless you consider a bird’s stubby body to be a fuselage. In 1850 or so, copying Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Capt. Jean-Marie Le Bris killed an albatross—and then discovered that he could still make the dead bird fly when he spread its wings to meet the oncoming wind, sort of like a zombie glider.
Inspired, Le Bris scaled it up large enough to hold him, which turned into a wingspan of 50 feet, but a body (the actual word "fuselage" hadn’t been invented yet) barely 13.5 feet in length. When he finished, a windy Sunday morning in 1857, Le Bris lashed his Albatross to a horse cart with a slipknot and had the cart driver trot the horse directly into the 10-knot wind. As the cart picked up speed, the Albatross started lifting off, and Le Bris tugged on the rope, trying to release the bird from its Earthly burden. The slipknot refused to slip, however, and the Albatross still lifted, pulling the cart with it like a kite’s tail. Now relieved of the weight, the horse galloped away, and the cart disintegrated, entangling the driver in the rope.
The Albatross shot 300 feet into the air (according to Le Bris), dragging the screaming driver with it. Le Bris said he descended and gently laid the driver on the ground, but now relieved of its tail and longitudinal stability, the Albatross swiftly pitched up and down—crushing a wing when it hit the ground. Still jazzed up, Le Bris rebuilt the wing and tried again, but with a different approach—this time suspending the Albatross from a mast he erected on the cliff overlooking a 100-foot-deep quarry. Le Bris unhooked the Albatross and, without the driver hanging on for dear life—or, speaking more aerodynamically, without longitudinal stability—the Albatross behaved in the same way, oscillating into the bottom of the pit, breaking Le Bris’ leg and killing any more interest he had in resurrecting the Albatross.
At the end of that century another birdman, Otto Lilienthal, began build
ing stubby gliders that also were all wing and tail, controlled by the German throwing his weight around. One of Lilienthal’s gliders stalled and he died after a crash that broke his back. Control was the biggest problem—Lilienthal's body was the only movable control surface his glider had—but if he’d had a little more longitudinal stability, it would have helped lend some balance to the act.
Forty-three years after Le Bris, the Wright brothers began traveling to Kitty Hawk every summer, building a series of ever-more-refined gliders. The first summer, 1900, they assembled a rudderless glider, more wing than anything, that turned out too small to support a man. They flew it like a box kite anyway, because they wanted to test their wing-warping system, in which the wing flexed to control roll; that was their focus, above powered flight and above longitudinal stability. A year later the brothers built a second glider (which could carry one of them); then the third, now perfected enough to build the famous one with the engine and two propellers, and, well, the rest is history.
The subsequent airplane, which resembled the brothers’ first, wasn’t longitudinally stable, but the third, longer one in 1905 was—although in a turn, the nose slipped sideways. They mounted canvas half-circles on the front elevator and that prevented the slip. Since the half-circles resembled the blinkers on a horse’s bridle, they called them blinkers.
Louis Blériot copied their blinkers, only before he learned that his little airplane, the Blériot XI, didn’t need them because its engine was in the nose, and the forward fuselage was covered with canvas past the pilot’s seat. It was the no-slip, longitudinally stable airframe. After the famous 1909 cruise across the English Channel, the Blériot XI became the first airplane to be widely sold and manufactured and copied. The platform advocated by the Wrights—the pusher engine with its unstable, aft center-of-gravity—fell from favor; that eliminated any need for exposed aft longerons to accommodate whirling propellers and supporting the tail surfaces. Now the entire fuselage except the cockpit was covered with canvas, protecting the control wires from dirt and foreign-object damage.
But the engines were still lubricated with castor oil.
Besides being the perfect light lubricant for an early airplane engine, castor oil has a number of uses. Back in the day, mothers pinched their children’s noses and forced a daily medicinal spoonful down their protesting throats to keep their bowels, uh, well-lubricated. With the engine in front, the pilots inhaled enough castor-oil vapor to suffer bouts of post-flight diarrhea. The cure for that came from A.V. Roe.
I don’t want to say that Roe was a repulsive, anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, but, gee, he really was. In his 1939 autobiography The World of Wings and Things, Roe wrote, “One should not overlook that [Jews] are the race who form the backbone of the underworld…Hitler, in my opinion, has been forced to do what he has done in order to save his country.”
Yet we owe the creepy Roe a deep debt of gratitude for something he did 27 years earlier: His 1912 Avro F came with an enclosed cockpit. Still, don’t fly around feeling guilty about Roe enabling you to stay out of the rain, snow, sleet, and nightly gloom; if he hadn’t covered the cockpit, someone less repugnant would have.
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