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:
- Despite the decreasing size of aircraft capable of crossing the Atlantic, an airplane's range is primarily determined by aerodynamic efficiency, propulsive efficiency, and fuel fraction, not its physical size.
- To address the challenge of getting heavily fueled or specialized aircraft airborne, innovative solutions like ship-borne catapults and the "air-launch" concept (where a smaller craft is carried by a larger mothership) were developed throughout aviation history.
- This air-launch principle was extended to spaceflight with projects like SpaceShipOne for suborbital flight and the massive Stratolaunch system for orbital rockets, which, despite its scale and potential, ultimately proved commercially unsustainable.
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