The first airplane to cross the Atlantic was a war-surplus Vickers Vimy bomber with a wingspan of 68 feet. The Spirit of St. Louis had a 46-foot wing. In 1975, I made the 2,000-mile trip from Gander, Newfoundland, to Shannon, Ireland—by then, a commonplace for single-engine planes with optimistic pilots—in a homebuilt of 23-foot span. In 1998, a pilotless airplane of 10-foot span did it, only to be surpassed in smallness a few years later by the Spirit of Butts Farm, a model plane of 6-foot span that reached Ireland with 1.5 ounces of fuel remaining.
Technicalities: Piggybacks and Parasites
Key Takeaways:
- Airplane range is determined by aerodynamic efficiency, propulsive efficiency, and fuel fraction, not size, with the primary challenge being how to get heavily fueled planes airborne.
- The concept of air launching a smaller aircraft from a larger carrier evolved from early transatlantic efforts, such as catapult launches from ships and the Short-Mayo composite system.
- This air launch principle was successfully applied to high-altitude research vehicles (NACA X-planes) and private suborbital spaceflight (Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne).
- The ambitious Stratolaunch project, designed to air launch orbital rockets, represented the largest implementation of this concept but ultimately proved commercially unsuccessful despite its record-breaking wingspan.
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