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View Full Version : Some of the original innovators & homebuilders (EAAers?)



Janet Davidson
10-09-2011, 06:59 AM
Some great photos in here from Life magazine's collection of early aircraft photos..... And some serious optimists, judging by some of the machines!

http://www.life.com/gallery/36582/marvelous-early-flying-machines#index/0

Chad Jensen
10-10-2011, 07:32 AM
Fascinating gallery! Many of those I had not seen before...and some of those designs...wow!! Serious optimists is right!

Hal Bryan
10-10-2011, 07:49 AM
That is a great find, Janet! Definitely goes deeper than the usual list of "what were they thinking / flying Venetian blind" sort of photos from that era and after.

Of course there are already two angry comments complaining about the lack of Santos Dumont and his 14-bis.

In my last job (Microsoft), we were legally barred from selling our Century of Flight edition of Flight Simulator in Brazil until we agreed to allow the distributor to shrink-wrap an extra CD to the box that included an add-on for Santos Dumont's airplane...

Call me biased, but I consider this to be the definitive discussion on that topic: :)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4i7yNzsLD0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4i7yNzsLD0

Bill Greenwood
10-10-2011, 11:13 AM
Everyone knows that Santos Dumont flew before the Wright Brothers, don't they? He even carried a passenger and flew in a confined space. I saw him one night. He had Jimmy Hoffa on board and was just emerging from the "LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL", that used to be in the news so much.

There are several interesting possibilities for flight, of some type before the Wrights. One that I know of is John Montgomery, who was just a teenager of about 15 or 16 years old. There are eywitness reports that he flew a hang glider, with control, a Otay Mesa, which is in the southeast part of San Diego, BEFORE, the Wrights did their controlled flights with gliders at Kitty Hawk.
The Montgomery story is hard to prove or disprove, but he later developed powered planes that definitely flew and became an aviation professor at a college at Santa Clara.
Montgomery Field, in San Diego is named after him and where I learned to fly.
I also learned to hang glide in San Diego and there is a lot of it in that area. Great fun.