Airplane Transportation is a big part of our world. One of the things we use for transportation is the airplane. Did you know the airplane is the second quickest way of transportation? The quickest way of transportation is a rocket. Airplanes are mostly used to help fight wars, and forest fires, vacations, carrying emergency aid, and short business trips!

Most large airplanes travel at a speed of 500-600 mph. Airplanes that fly faster than sound are called supersonics. Sound travels at a speed of about 760 mph. Some supersonics can fly at a speed of 1,350 mph.

Airplanes come in different sizes, like a two seat training jet to jumbo jets that can carry hundreds of passengers. About 90% of airplanes in the U.S. have 1 or 2 engines. Airplanes have turbine or piston engines, which are rotating blades, to push it through the air. Those designs have either 2 propellers, 3 propellers, or 4 propellers. In small airplanes the piston engine is used, and in the large ones the turbine engine is used. The piston engine either pulls or pushes the airplane with its propellers. The turbine engine uses a propeller or uses jet thrust to push the airplane through the air.

An airplane has a lot of gadgets that make it fly. The wings are most of what makes the airplane fly. The wings are extended from both sides of the airplane. Some spots on the wing can be moved by the pilot’s controls. Those spots help the pilot turn the airplane. The whole wing on an airplane cannot move. Did you know the top of the wing is curved? If the wings weren’t curved then the airplane would not be able to fly properly because it wouldn’t be able to take off.

In order for an airplane to get lifting force for it, it must be going very fast. It also has to have low pressure above the wings as it is flying.

An airplane achieves flight in a different way than a blimp. A blimp rises and floats in the air because it is filled with a gas that is lighter than the air around it. In the late 1700’s people used balloons for their first flights and developed into blimps.

Gliders (engineless planes) were experimented with inventors, which found out that birds’ wings are curved. They started making their gliders wings curved so that it could fly hundreds of feet. If the gliders had engines then they could even go longer distances. During the late 1800’s the same inventors put an engine on their gliders. The inventors were the first ones to fly the powered airplane in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright, the Wright Brothers. After their discovery the airplanes started to develop into better ones. In the 1950’s the airplanes turned into passenger planes with jet engines, and the turned into then airplanes we have today.

The Wright Brothers

My name is Orville Wright. My brother’s name is Wilbur. We live in Dayton, Ohio. I was born in 1871, and Wilbur was born in 1867. My brother and I are interested in building things, but before we built anything we had our mom draw it. If it looked right on the drawing we would build it.

One day we built a sled and went to a hill where our friends were. Our friends didn’t look confident in the sled. We ended up racing and beating them. We had gone farther than any other sled on that hill.

There was going to be a bicycle race in town. So we made a bicycle. We decided that I was going to race. I started at a normal pace, so I wouldn’t lose all my energy. Then, I started to go full speed. I was in first. CRASH! I lost my balance and fell to the ground. That cost me 1st place. Everyone wanted a bicycle, so we made a bicycle company called The Wright Cycle Company.

We made some kites, and they flew. We got interested in flying after the kites. Our mother had died about a year before. I caught a cold. It turned out to be typhoid fever. As I was recovering, Wilbur was reading books to me about flying (a person tried to fly and died). We built a glider and went to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. We tested our glider, and it worked. We kept on building better gliders that flew. We got the idea to build one with an engine. When we tested that it flew.

We went back to Dayton to tell everybody the good news, but the townspeople didn’t believe us. There were people who believed us elsewhere in the world. They were curious about our "airplane". The U.S. Department of War came to watch. We drove it three times around a field that a farmer let us use. Then we landed it. They were amazed. We signed a contract that we would build planes for the U.S. Department of War.

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