Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1919-06-01

between our present aero engineers
and the aero engineers who will de-
sign the craft which will carry out
the mad dreams Of such novelists as
Kiplng will be much smaller than
that.
"All that they must do is to think
in terms of wings with 10000 feet Of
surface instead Of in terms Of the
1000 surface feet Of the naval plane
wings Of the transatlantic flight.
''Other advances than those of size
will come automatically as size de-
velops. Before the NC planes We're
built their very efficient wing
had been developed. In wing
lies the secret Of lifting capacity.
The normal lift of an NC plane at
normal speed is thirteen pounds per
square foot. and that is almost twice
that of the original Wright plane.
which was about seven pounds. Ten
thousand square feet of wing area
driven through the air ~ normal NC
speed will have 10000 pounds of lift.
'As general thing sixty per cent of
a planes total lift goes into carry
ing the plane itself. leaving forty
per cent for load, carrying, including
fuel. passengers and all else. So.
roughly speaking, a plane with 10000
square feet of wing space will have
$4,000 pounds Of useful lift.
+ X X X
us it not clear. therefore, that the
gap between the present stunt plane
and the effective. practical, load-car-
rying and senger-transporting
plane of the future is far less than
was the gap between Fulton's ship
and the Mauretania? To the techni-
cal expert in aviation the gap really
seems slight. Money may be said
to represent the greater part of 1T.
and in the United States money is
factor which never is lacking when
the hour really strikes.
1.-The machine with $4,000 pounds OF
useful load will mean journeying from
New York to anywhere with profitable
cargoes of passengers and freight. 1t
will mean an air monopoly Of the
worlds mails. 1t will mean many
other startling things. This is proved
by simple calculations in which 1t is
impossible to make mistakes.
1.-The development of the immedi-
ate future, as proved by every indi-
cation, by war effort, by the trans
atlantic effort by every careful in
vestigation Of whatever sort, will be
along the lines Of increased size. with
relatively increased power. Large
of
struction, such as the use of hollow
struts and hollow members of other
sorts not permissible to small ma
chimes. Already this one factor has
increased the ratio of useful load by
more than ten per cent.
1.-THE old theory that wing thickness
(and therefore weighD must increase
with speed until it entirely .Oyercomes
their lifting capacity long since has
lifting more than ten pounds per
square foot while weighing less than
one pound per square foot
"Piywood construction already has
done much to help and will do more.
The helicopter has been pronounced
a certainty by nearly every great in
ventor, including Edison. Orville
Wright, .BIeriot. Hewitt and others.
1t will come ere long.
"Airplanes actually have reached
a speed as great as $50 miles an hour.
have carried loads ranging up to four
tons and have reached heights up to
$4,000 feet (greater than the height
of the worlds highest mountains) and
have carried more than fifty passen-
gers at time.
$50, nowadays, we do not guess but
know that great things may be ex-
pected. that that analogy which I
have made between the speed boat
and the ocean greyhound is reason
able with regard to airplanes.
*,* X X
I'VE already have begun to build
small. cheap airplanes, travelling
twenty miles to the gallon of fuel,
representing in the air what the mo-
tor boat does on the water or the
small automobile does on the land.
But in size we have begun to build
only the equivalent of small yachts
saiIboats.
1.-The Curtiss NC flying boat has a
wing spread of 1875 feet with a chord
Cor distance between winss) of IL
feet and four liberty engines of $50