Talk:Timeline of aviation

message: I would advise against the phrase "Partial list of events that had an impact in aviation" that is used on some of these pages. Impact is not exactly considered desirable in aviation .. --Eloquence 09:54 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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Wouldn't this page be better set out as a Timeline of Aviation?  Or merge it with Timeline of transportation technology?   Besides there is already a Aviation history article, as well as  Incidents in Aviation and Milestones in Aviation, all of which should be expanded with the information that might appear on these pages.   That way all the facts are on one (or a few) page(s) not a hundred pages.   As I understand these list pages, they should refer to already written articles, not articles waiting to be written.  I know AntonioMartin made an attempt with the years 1980-1987, but they are really timelines that would be better pulled into one article.  The current pages all stem from one article (Aviation) and as a single link in the "See Also:" list.  They can easily become a group of orphan pages unless they link logically into the written text of a whole lot of other articles.  The current titles do not lend themselves to easy inclusion in an article's text.  At present these pages are difficult to navigate and do not link to each other.  Also, most of the facts are fairly trivial - especially by the 1980's - I would be inclined to merge these pages and move the information to something more appropriate.  Alternative thoughts?  -- kiwiinapanic 10:56 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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It would be good to know if there are firm plans to put content on, e.g. 1991 in aviation and 1993 in aviation and the others. They now link from 1991 and 1993, which are heavily-accessed year pages, but contain no content. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 14:57, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Early discussions 

message: What is the significance of the four yellow sections of the timeline? --Keeves 03:24, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Those are labled at the right side -- "space race", "wwii", etc. Could be better.  Tlogmer ( talk / contributions ) 23:30, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Yellow? 

message: Jogersbot is removing the "XXXX in aviation" links. Has there been any decision to do so or is it doing something unwanted? diff --MoRsE 14:34, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Please note that the bot only removes piped links to "years in aviation" from full dates. Wikipedia:Piped link specifically says that piped year links should not be used when the date is a full date, including the day and the month, because it stops readers' date preferences working. For example, do not write 5 August 2006 or August 5, 2006. Jogers (talk) 17:35, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Is there a way to fix the "year in X" coding so that both can be accomplished? Forcing these changes effectively makes building and maintaining historical timelines useless if only the year can be piped. Somehow, "2006 in sports" isn't very interesting when all the dates are "2006". Askari Mark (Talk) 01:06, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bot removing links 

message: I'm not sure of the usefulness of this entry - there will always be a largest/fastest/longest/smallest etc aircraft, but should they be in a timeline? Just a thought. --TraceyR (talk) 07:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Largest commercial airliner 

message: I changed the size vertically to avoid text overlapping. I inserted dates for Whitehead flights, see the wikipedia article about Gustave Whitehead and many other wikipedia articles like first flight, Aviation_history, Early_flight, etc.. including the text in this article under the years 1899, 1901 and 1902. I changed and added information about the Wright brothers planes, supported by this text:
"Orville described the final flight of the day: "The first few hundred feet were up and down, as before, but by the time three hundred feet had been covered, the machine was under much better control. The course for the next four or five hundred feet had but little undulation. However, when out about eight hundred feet the machine began pitching again, and, in one of its darts downward, struck the ground. The distance over the ground was measured to be 852 feet (260 m); the time of the flight was 59 seconds. The frame supporting the front rudder was badly broken, but the main part of the machine was not injured at all. We estimated that the machine could be put in condition for flight again in about a day or two." They flew only about ten feet above the ground as a safety precaution, so they had little room to maneuver, and all four flights in the gusty winds ended in a bumpy and unintended "landing".
The Wrights continued flying at Huffman Prairie near Dayton in 1904-05. After a severe crash on 14 July 1905, they rebuilt the Flyer and made important design changes. They almost doubled the size of the elevator and rudder and moved them about twice the distance from the wings. They added two fixed vertical vanes (called "blinkers") between the elevators, and gave the wings a very slight dihedral. They disconnected the rudder from the wing-warping control, and as in all future aircraft, placed it on a separate control handle. When flights resumed the results were immediate. The serious pitch instability that hampered Flyers I and II was significantly reduced. Repeated minor crashes were eliminated. Flights with the redesigned Flyer III started lasting over 10 minutes, then 20, then 30. Flyer III became a practical aircraft, flying consistently under full control and bringing its pilot back to the starting point safely and landing without damage. On 5 October 1905, Wilbur flew 24 miles (38.9 km) in 39 minutes 23 seconds.""
from http://www.aviationexplorer.com/aviation_history.html 
note that wright flyer 1 and 2 had serious problems with controlling the plane and practically all landings were "unintended" or pure crashes, until sept 1905, when they finally managed to build a plane which, in their own words "would land where we wanted it to land, and without risking the life of the pilot". So september 1905 is the right date for the construction of a fully controllable motorized airplane by the Wright brothers. Note also that the Whitehead crash in 1899 was not caused by the plane construction, it was caused by a newly erected 3-storey house which Whitehead had not anticipated to be there. (Roger Johansson)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.249.177.148 (talk) 02:32, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Relevant changes

message: To Rmhermen: 
You reverted my well grounded edits of Timeline_of_aviation without a word on the discussion page, and obviously without knowledge of the facts documented in many wikipedia articles about early airplanes. Please engage in a discussion on the discussion page of this article before making any changes to it again. (Roger Johansson)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.249.177.148 (talk) 21:32, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Not so. I did comment on the article summary - comments on the talk page are not required - and I am well aware of the various claims of a large number of pre-Wright flight claimants. None of them require inclusion in this timeline as none of them - including your candidate - are widely accepted. Rmhermen (talk) 17:16, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reverting my edits 

message: Read also all text on web page:
www dot deepsky.com/~firstflight/Pages/article8 dot html It includes witnesses of the 1899 flight in Pittsburgh which ended in a crash when Whitehead failed to fly over a 3-storey house and crashed into the edge of its roof. Note that this crash was not caused by a construction fault of the airplane which was the case with all Wright brothers flights before september 1905. They had big problems with keeping the flights horizontal, the plane was going up and down, up and down until it ended in an "unintended landing" and damage to the airplane. A frontal height rudder was simply a bad idea, until modern times when fast computers can adjust small wings at the front of an airplane and they are used on fighter planes. A human cannot control a frontal height rudder fast enough to acheive a stable flight. (Roger Johansson)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.249.177.148 (talk) 00:29, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: More quotes

message: Replaced the citations and references needed tag with an explanation. Fixed the links in the diagram so they really work when clicked upon. (Roger Johansson)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.249.177.148 (talk) 03:47, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Several fixes

message: I quote: ":Not so. I did comment on the article summary - comments on the talk page are not required - and I am well aware of the various claims of a large number of pre-Wright flight claimants. None of them require inclusion in this timeline as none of them - including your candidate - are widely accepted. Rmhermen (talk) 17:16, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Widely accepted, in USA

message: Quotes from Wright_Flyer_III:
"Orville suffered a serious nose-dive crash in the Flyer on July 14, 1905. When rebuilding the airplane, the Wrights made important design changes.
....
When testing of Flyer III resumed in September, improvement was immediate. The pitch instability that had hampered Flyers I and II was brought under control. Crashes, some severe, stopped." 
I could quote a lot more evidence if needed, like the words of the Wright brothers in october 1905 to the effect of: We have finally managed to build an airplane which we can land where we want to land it, and without risking the life of the pilot. 
I don't have time to find that quote now, but those words show that their airplanes before september-october 1905 suffered from big problems, and all flights before that date were uncontrolled, resulted in "unintended landings", crashes, and usually damage to the airplane. So it is incorrect to call their 1903 flights controlled. (Roger Johansson) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.249.177.148 (talk • contribs) 
:You may have read WP:OR but you don't seem to have understood it. Rmhermen (talk) 14:18, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Wright flyer problems

message: If you insist on the majority view you must use the word God in every sentence in every article in Wikipedia, because the majority believes that God controls every thing that happens. Popular american myths can not rule the content of Wikipedia, we must base our articles on available evidence.(Roger Johansson)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.249.177.148 (talk) 15:07, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Majority view

message: I can accept DonFB's version, a third person arbitrating between you and me, Rmhermen, can you?
(sorry for misspelling your signature in the version history, but it is not easy to remember strange signatures when people are not using their real names like I always do)  (Roger Johansson)—Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.249.177.148 (talk) 05:11, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Building a consesus

message: wants to offer a third opinion. To assist with the process, editors are requested to summarize the dispute in a short sentence below.
; Viewpoint by (Roger Johansson): ....
From the documentation we can see that there are at least 25 witnesses to at least four flights by Whitehead during the summer 1901, reaching from 200 to over 2000 meter (1½ miles) in length. The flight witnessed by the journalist from Bridgeport Herald, and other witnesses, was 800 meter. The journalist was always truthful and his drawings were always very good, this was checked by O'Dwyer. That journalist, Dick Howell,  later became chief editor for the newspaper. 
The argumentation against Whitehead's achievements reach from devious to outright silly. For example: ""Perhaps the last word in the matter should be left to Gustave Whitehead's wife, Louise Tuba Whitehead, who never recalled seeing her husband fly in his flying machines."[30]" And the text under the drawing of nr 21 in the air on an anti-Whitehead web site which says "Imaginative drawing... "suggesting that it never really happened, when the text should have been Sketch by Dick Howell, of Whitehead's airplane in the air, from Bridgeport Herald August 14, 1901.
They argued about the delay of the publishing with a few days, saying "why would a newspaper not publish such a fantastic news item immediately if it was true?" missing, deliberately or not, that the Bridgeport Herald was a weekly newspaper, being distributed every Sunday, and not every day.
The actions of people associated with the Smithsonian have also been very strange, like denying that they had ever heard of Whitehead when they had actually published a book about early aviators where he was mentioned hundreds of times. That Langley secretly sent a spy to take a look at Whitehead's plane, instead of approaching him openly. That the Smithsonian never, during his lifetime or after his death contacted Whitehead or his family. That the Wright brothers denied ever having visited Whitehead in spite of two witnesses who described two visits. That the Smithsonian denied the existence of the contract forbidding them from mentioning Whitehead or any other motorized aviator before the Wright brothers until they were forced to show it. 
Quote: "O'Dwyer renewed his efforts to obtain a copy of the agreement, which he had long suspected might be a key to NASM's reticence about Whitehead. Letters and visits between O'Dwyer and Senator Lowell Weicker, Jr., of Connecticut, plus senatorial clout and the Freedom of Information Act, were required to extract a copy of the contract from the Smithsonian."
Dr. Peter L. Jakab said that his wife had never heard of Whitehead flying, when he should be well aware of her words in an interview: "In a 1940 interview with reporter Michael D'Andrea of the Bridgeport Sunday Post, Louise Whitehead said her husband was always busy with motors and planes when he wasn't working in coal yards or factories to earn money for his aeronautical efforts. "I hated to see him put so much time and money into that work," she said.
Mrs. Whitehead said her husband's first words upon returning home from Fairfield on August 14, 1901, were an excited, "Mama, we went up!""
The construction of nr 21 and 22: We can see that the plane has a very large wing area well placed around its center, which was the reason why it always landed on its wheels, it worked a little like a parachute. That is also the reason why it lifted off at relatively low speed and needed a very short start and landing stretch, and it was stable in the air. The construction itself lends a lot of credibility to the story of Whitehead's early flights. Somebody said that the construction has a lot in common with modern light and small airplanes. Reproductions of it has been flown and they have been stable in the air.
So there is no technical reason to doubt the over 25 witnesses who say they saw Whitehead fly.
Whitehead had tried to build 50 airplanes before his nr 21 in 1901, while the Wright brothers built their first glider in 1901, I think, and their first motorized airplane in 1903. So Whitehead had a lot more experience and lay many years ahead of the Wright brothers in his development as an aviation engineer. So it is natural that he succeeded before them, and built a stable and safe airplane 4 years before them.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.249.177.148 (talk) 18:57, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually third opinions are for situations in which two editors are involved.  I suggest a content RfC to get a broader array of opinions on this issue. Figureofnine (talk) 21:22, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

text: Just to clarify: I am not on R.Johansson's side as he claimed earlier in this discussion. I chose not to get into an edit war with him over inclusion of the Whitehead items, but I have no problem if those items are excluded from the timeline. Also, I do not agree with anything Roger said about the Wright brothers. DonFB (talk) 07:54, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Third opinion 

message: Hello, I'm interested to see how the timeline covering the Pre-WWI period of aviation is being developed. I have a deep and long-term interest in that period of aviation. I also am compelled to correct Roger J.'s characterization of my flyingmachines.org web site as "anti-Whitehead" - it is not and neither is it pro-Whitehead. Carroll F. Gray (talk) 09:52, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Auditing, for the time being

message: From: http://www.historynet.com/gustave-whitehead-and-the-first-flight-controversy.htm/9
"Whitehead's efforts to solve the problems of flight took their toll on the family budget. Louise Whitehead had to work to help meet expenses. But the couple was able to buy land on Tunis Hill, where, with the help of their son Charles, Whitehead built two homes, in 1903 and in 1912. The two houses still stand. He also planted a large orchard from which he sold fruit, and kept a cow and chickens to help with the family's food supply."
As Gustave Whitehead used all his time to his aviation experiments Mrs. Whitehead had to take care of the home, their children, work outside the home to support the family economy, take care of the plucking and selling fruit, take care of the cow and the chickens, so how could she witness any flights? She also hated her husband's great investment of time and money in the aviation experiments, so her motivation in witnessing any flights was obviously nil.  
I hope this explains why I consider your statement "Perhaps the last word in the matter should be left to Gustave Whitehead's wife, Louise Tuba Whitehead, who never recalled seeing her husband fly in his flying machines." one of the most irrational and outrageously confused statements ever made in the history of mankind.  
"In a 1940 interview with reporter Michael D'Andrea of the Bridgeport Sunday Post, Louise Whitehead said her husband was always busy with motors and planes when he wasn't working in coal yards or factories to earn money for his aeronautical efforts. "I hated to see him put so much time and money into that work," she said.
Mrs. Whitehead said her husband's first words upon returning home from Fairfield on August 14, 1901, were an excited, "Mama, we went up!"" Peter L Jakab did obviously not mention this interview when he said that it was strange that Whitehead had not even mentioned to his wife that he had managed to fly, and this was also used to discredit Whitehead. 
Maybe Mr. Jakab should feel the need to apologize for making that statement when he now knows that Whitehead told his wife about it in the evening of August 14 1901. But remember that Mrs. Whitehead was very uninterested in his work in aviation, in fact she hated to see him invest so much time and money into it, so he probably did not go into detail about the events of that day with his wife. Roger491127 (talk) 12:37, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mrs. Whitehead, a very busy woman 

message: I would like to build consensus for a new guideline regarding the introduction or retirement of an individual aircraft type: typically, a Year in Aviation page should only discuss the very first airline or military air arm to introduce an aircraft type into active service, and similarly, only its retirement by the very last operator should be listed. (Vintage aircraft operated by museums, historical societies, and suchlike are excepted; I'm talking about revenue passenger or cargo service, or active military squadron service.) I feel this is warranted by WP:INDISCRIMINATE to prevent these articles from eventually drowning in trivial introduction and retirement dates that are meaningless to aviation as a whole; such dates are better placed on the page about the individual airline or military organization. Carguychris (talk) 18:32, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, the current production dates are too open to interpretation and the deliveries would be more precise.--Marc Lacoste (talk) 06:12, 23 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, especially since some military aircraft programs have included ambiguous "pre-production" or "trials" versions that never actually entered service. Carguychris (talk) 13:51, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

text: I think Carguychris suggestion seems reasonable to base entries related to a type not operator. MilborneOne (talk) 07:47, 23 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Service introductions and retirements on individual Year in Aviation pages