1. From reader Jim Clarkson: What is the definition of a safe airplane?
2. Structural icing on the leading edges of horizontal stabilizers typically causes an airplane to
A. pitch down.
B. pitch up.
C. roll left.
D. pitch up and roll left.
3. The Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) is a military decoration awarded to a member of the U.S. armed forces who has distinguished himself or herself in support of operations by heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight. Who was first to receive an actual DFC?
4. True or false? The first woman to get a U.S. pilot certificate, Harriet Quimby, was killed in 1912 when she fell out of her airplane.
5. What role did the famed Parisian department store, Galeries Lafayette, play in the early history of aviation?
6. A four-place airplane with a normally aspirated engine that can cruise in excess of 1 mph per horsepower is unusually efficient. What was the first production airplane that could do this?
7. Who was so instrumental in developing a specific type of aircraft that these aircraft became synonymous with his name?
8. Which of the following does not belong?
A. decalage
B. open cockpit
C. sesquiplane
D. stagger
Test Pilot Answers
1. It is one that climbs like a safe and glides like a safe. (Sorry about that.)
2. The correct answer is A. The normal function of a conventional horizontal stabilizer is to produce a downward force that prevents the nose from dropping. Ice interferes with this function and allows the nose to pitch down.
3. Army Air Corps Capt. Charles Lindbergh was presented the first DFC by President Calvin Coolidge on June 11, 1927, following his flight to Paris. Ten Air Corps aviators who had participated in the Pan American Good Will Flight had been designated as recipients a month earlier, but the medal had yet to be struck. (Amelia Earhart was the first woman and the first civilian to receive a DFC. Dick Rutan has been awarded five DFCs.)
4. True. Neither she nor her passenger were wearing safety belts when the aircraft pitched nose-down for unknown reasons, and the pair were jostled from their seats.
5. It offered 25,000 French francs to the first pilot to land an airplane on the 92-feet by 39-feet roof of the store. Frenchman Jules Védrines and his Caudron G–3 did so on January 19, 1919, and became first to land on any building, although both airplane and pilot were injured in the process.
6. The Mooney Mark 20, which first flew on August 10, 1953, cruises at more than 150 mph with a 150-hp engine.
7. A Zeppelin (or zeppelin) is a rigid airship named after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a German who pioneered rigid-airship development early in the twentieth century. (A rigid airship has a skeletal structure that gives the Zeppelin its shape as compared to a blimp, which has no internal structure; inflation gives the blimp its shape.)
8. The correct answer is B. The other three items relate exclusively to biplanes. Decalage is the difference in the angles of incidence between the two wings. A sesquiplane is a biplane on which one wing has less than half the area of the other (such as the Nieuport 27).
Related Articles
