In 1909, the French experimenter Louis Bleriot made the first crossing of the English Channel by airplane. The aircraft he used, his Model XI, was similar in its general configuration to what we consider conventional today: engine in front, pilot close behind a monoplane wing, horizontal stabilizer and rudder at the tail end of an extended fuselage. The resemblance to a modern airplane is especially striking in light of the fact that just 11 months earlier Wilbur Wright had demonstrated in France a mastery of flight far beyond anything yet achieved in Europe, and had done so in an airplane entirely different in configuration from Bleriot’s. It must have taken considerable strength of mind to resist copying the Wrights’ design. As history shows, however, Bleriot was right, and the Wrights were wrong.
Technicalities: Strange Wings
Key Takeaways:
- Louis Bleriot's Model XI, which made the first English Channel crossing, established the conventional airplane configuration not through an evolutionary process, but after a series of varied and often unsuccessful experimental designs.
- Modern attempts to innovate aircraft efficiency, such as canard, tandem-wing, and closed-wing designs, ironically echo many of Bleriot's early, unconventional, and often failed experimental aircraft configurations.
- While some modern advancements like winglets offer benefits, the article questions the overall aerodynamic merits of many complex or novel wing designs, suggesting that the simple, conventional monoplane may still be the most effective.
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