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:
- An airplane's range is primarily determined by its aerodynamic and propulsive efficiency, and its fuel fraction, rather than its size, though heavy fuel loads present takeoff challenges.
- To overcome the difficulty of getting heavily fueled aircraft airborne for long distances, innovators developed solutions like ship-based catapults and composite air-launch systems, where a smaller plane is launched from a larger carrier aircraft.
- The air-launch concept evolved from historical aviation experiments to modern applications for suborbital spaceflight (SpaceShipOne) and ambitious orbital projects like Stratolaunch, which despite its massive scale, ultimately faced commercial failure.
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