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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 2/25/2008 5:39:49 P.M. Eastern Standard Time
Subj: First Flight
> Subject: The First Flight Checklist
>
>
> An interesting bit of aviation history.
>
> On October 30, 1935, at Wright Air Field in Dayton,
> Ohio, the U.S. Army
> Air Corps held a flight competition for airplane
> manufacturers vying to
> build its next-generation long-range bomber. It
> wasn't supposed to be
> much of a competition.
>
> In early evaluations, the Boeing Corporation's
> gleaming aluminum-alloy
> Model 299 had trounced the designs of Martin and
> Douglas. Boeing's
> plane could carry five times as many bombs as the
> Army had requested;
> it could fly faster than previous bombers, and
> almost twice as far.
>
> A Seattle newspaperman who had glimpsed the plane
> called it the "flying
> fortress," and the name stuck. The flight
> "competition," according to the
> military historian Phillip Meilinger, was regarded
> as a mere formality. The
> Army planned to order at least sixty-five of the
> aircraft.
>
> A small crowd of Army brass and manufacturing
> executives watched as the
> Model 299 test plane taxied onto the runway. It was
> sleek and impressive,
> with a hundred-and-three-foot wingspan and four
> engines jutting out from
> the wings, rather than the usual two. The plane
> roared down the tarmac,
> lifted off smoothly, and climbed sharply to three
> hundred feet. Then it
> stalled, turned on one wing, and crashed in a fiery
> explosion. Two of the
> five crew members died, including the pilot, Major
> Ployer P. Hill. (thus ...
>
> Hill AFB, Ogden, UT)
>
> An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical
> had gone wrong. The
> crash had been due to "pilot error," the report
> said. Substantially more
> complex than previous aircraft, the new plane
> required the pilot to attend
> to the four engines, a retractable landing gear, new
> wing flaps, electric
> trim
> tabs that needed adjustment to maintain control at
> different airspeeds, and
> constant-speed propellers whose pitch had to be
> regulated with hydraulic
> controls, among other features. While doing all
> this, Hill had forgotten to
>
> release a new locking mechanism on the elevator and
> rudder controls.
>
> The Boeing model was deemed, as a newspaper put it,
> "too much airplane
> for one man to fly." The Army Air Corps declared
> Douglas's smaller design
> the winner. Boeing nearly went bankrupt.
>
> Still, the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing
> as test planes, and
> some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft
> was flyable. So a
> group of test pilots got together and considered
> what to do.
>
> They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo
> more training. But
> it was hard to imagine having more experience and
> expertise than Major
> Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps' Chief of
> Flight Testing.
>
> Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple
> approach: they created
> a pilot's checklist, with step-by-step checks for
> takeoff, flight, landing,
> and
> taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far
> aeronautics had advanced.
>
> In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft
> into the air might have
> been
> nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a
> checklist for takeoff
> would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a
> driver backing a car out
> of the garage. But this new plane was too
> complicated to be left to the
> memory of any pilot, however expert.
>
> With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to
> fly the Model 299 a total
> of
> 1.8 million miles without one accident. The Army
> ultimately ordered almost
> thirteen thousand of the aircraft, which it dubbed
> the B-17. And, because
> flying the behemoth was now possible, the Army
> gained a decisive air
> advantage in the Second World War which enabled its
> devastating bombing
> campaign across Nazi Germany.
>
>
> If it weren't for the United States military,
> there'd be NO United States of America.
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