The airplane in question (Photo: Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome)

While meandering around aviation web sites, I came across an item that said the Blériot XI at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in upstate New York might have been the one from which Harriet Quimby and a passenger fell to their deaths in 1912. Could this be true, or is it another aviation urban legend?

Photo and illustrations editor Caroline Sheen put the question to a couple of knowledgeable folks. Says Andrew King, once an Old Rhinebeck pilot and one of the most experienced fliers of early aircraft: “Harriet was killed in a two-seater, and the Rhinebeck one is a smaller one-seater. I think it is thought to have been at the [1912] Boston meet though, so that might be where the rumor started.”

And from early aircraft photographer Gilles Auliard, who has been shooting at Old Rhinebeck since 1988: “The Old Rhinebeck Blériot (c/n 56) was found in Lacomia, New Hampshire, in the early 1960s and is reputed to have participated in the Squantum meet, or so [Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome founder] Cole Palen told me. According to the Blériot production list, it was completed in 1909 (and it actually makes sense, as Blériot was turning out models XI like pancakes).

“Harriet Quimby was flying a brand new Blériot XI at the meet, which would imply a 1912 building date, and it was reported as a two-seater version (even though this is also questionable as pictures of the meet show her in a single-seater).

“Three years of flying in the early 1900s was long time. The life expectancy of an airplane was computed in months, not in years (even though they could be repaired and modified at will to reappear later).

“It also remains to be seen if Quimby bought a French-made Blériot or a U.S.-made copy or licensed version, as there was a plethora of authorized/unauthorized manufacturers.

“If one could determine that it was a U.S.-built machine, this would be the end of the controversy.”

So, the verdict: likely an urban legend.

Want a Jupiter missile rocket engine?

The National Air and Space Museum recently posted a list of some 300 objects it wants to de-accession (translation: get rid of). The items run the gamut from socks, a comb, and mittens to a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine, a Sikorsky UH-34D Seahorse, a WACO primary glider, and a Lockheed C-130 Hercules.

One small catch: The accessioner (taker) must be a museum or an educational organization. Hey, can do! Just hire an accountant and a lawyer to negotiate 501C status and the Internal Revenue Service paperwork.

I’ve got my eye on a G-suit so I can go swagger around a Cessna 172 at the local airstrip.

Military pilots wear G-suits and/or tense their muscles to prevent blood from draining from the torso, but civvies are on their own, and rarely make it through six Gs, let alone eight. At six Gs, your vision begins to “gray out,” narrowing to a tunnel as blood drains from your head. It can take several seconds for pilots and joyriders to wake up from their involuntary nap, and several more seconds to realize where they are, which is why G-LOC can be deadly. Even more uncomfortable is the onset of negative Gs, when you “red out” from the blood rushing to your head.  Pilots and airplanes can cope with only fairly light negative-G force — maybe one half of the positive G-load they can withstand.

At least Denyer wasn’t caught drooling on camera, something I fear when I doze off on a commercial flight.

Have you seen me?

It appears to have, uh, gone missing. Mitchell Yockelson, an investigative archivist for the National Archives Recovery Team, says that the Wright brothers’ patent for their 1903 Flying Machine, application number 821,393, is among several aviation-related items lost or stolen from the Archives over the years, including a Charles Hubbell print of the 1912 Fokker Spider (Anthony Fokker’s first airplane) and Army Air Forces Nagasaki and Hiroshima target maps from 1945.

Yockelson is a member of a team formed by the Archives’ Inspector General that tracks down and recovers items pilfered from the vast collection of largely federal government documents, photos, and artifacts. The Archives Recovery Team has prosecuted several cases in which the perpetrators were jailed and the items recovered. But the Most Wanted list includes civil war swords, a large portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin patent, and telegrams signed by Abraham Lincoln.

From 1969 to 1980, the patent file for the Wright Flyer was passed around various National Archives offices, and it spent some time at the National Air and Space Museum. The document was returned to the Archives in 1979, and somebody there remembers laying eyes on it in 1980, says Yockelson. When curators began planning a commemoration of the Centennial of Flight, in 2003, the patent file had vanished.

What might it fetch on eBay, where missing items regularly turn up? “Millions, I assume,” Yockelson says. “No, wait: actually, it’s priceless.”

A relic R-12 missile from the time of the October 1962 Cuban crisis, at a site near Havana. Photo: Martin Trolle Mikkelsen

At a Smithsonian Associates lecture, “Airborne Intelligence Collection,” held at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., this morning, speaker S. Eugene Poteat, a retired senior CIA Intelligence Officer, talked about U-2, A-12, and other aircraft ops during the cold war. All good stuff, sure, but the audience tittered like 5th graders at one anecdote in particular.

Seems that a new device to alert RF-8 Crusader pilots to missile launches had a tendency to slip from its moorings and bounce around the cockpit during low-level, high-speed recon passes. Pilots returning from such missions complained they were unsure of what they feared most: bullets, missiles, or getting conked by the launch signal receivers. Poteat and his people found an all-night drugstore, where they loaded up on dog collars (fasteners) and sanitary napkins (protective padding), and strapped the errant receivers to pilots’ thighs.

Would have loved to hear the pilots’ responses. And also the responses of the feminine hygiene industry ad men.

Peter Garrison dissected the phenomenon of flutter in his 2001 article, “The Hammer.”

Seldom reported and little understood, [flutter] occupies one of those dimly lit and unsafe places that decent people prefer not to visit. The idea that an airplane could shatter—disintegrate—for no reason other than its own motion through the air—better to let sleeping horrors lie.

Garrison went on to explain that flutter is a form of resonance, or sympathetic vibration, as seen in an out-of-balance tire. However, “Out-of-balance tires seldom lead to structural failure of the car because automobile suspensions are vastly overbuilt for the loads they normally encounter. But airplanes, which must be kept as light as possible, are not superfluously stout. They are capable of failing with sudden explosiveness when flutter sets in.”

In our April 1987 article on the Dash 80 (the prototype Boeing 707), test pilot Dix Loesch recalled that the Dash 80′s tail also was prone to flutter, and that “flutter was a black science then [in the 1950s]. When the flutter guys started talking to their bosses, everybody else just sort of looked at the ceiling.”

The vibration frequency of an aircraft section in the throes of flutter is so fast that it can’t be detected by eye. It’s visible only in slow-motion videos like these:

Sea Shadow in San Francisco Bay in 1993 (U.S. Navy photo by George F. Champagne)

Caveat emptor for propeller-heads: This Lockheed Martin ship is not of the winged variety. And the U.S. government has been trying to get rid of it for years.

In the 1980s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Navy, and Lockheed Martin outfitted a twin-hull surface ship with the latest in marine and stealth technology. Sea Shadow had originally been built in the Hughes Mining Barge; it was designed, along with Hughes’ Glomar Explorer, to retrieve the Soviet ballistic missile submarine, K-129, which sank in 1968.

After a partially successful retrieval, the barge was towed to Lockheed Martin’s Redwood City site in California, where the re-outfitting commenced in 1982. After night tests off the Santa Cruz Islands in the late 1980s, the $50 million ship went public in 1993. Testing continued through 1999, with the barge and ship docked in San Diego; in 2006, both went into Navy storage. The radical design of  Sea Shadow — its angular shape, like the panels on Lockheed’s F-117 stealth fighter, rendered it nearly invisible to radar — inspired a lookalike in the 1997 James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies.

The General Services Administration auction site is taking bids on Sea Shadow through 5:00 Central Time on May 4 (the bid as of late Friday morning was $299,085). You won’t be able to use it for transportation, however. According to the GSA, “The ex-Sea Shadow shall be disposed of by completely dismantling and scrapping within the U.S.A. Dismantling is defined as reducing the property such as it has no value except for its basic material content.”

I applaud Terrafugia’s up-front marketing strategy: they have always marketed the Transition to pilots and those who are willing to earn a pilot’s license. The company has never claimed that road-ragers can untangle themselves from traffic jams by pressing a GO UP button in their Transitions and VTOL-ing up and away, like a scene from The Fifth Element.

But here’s the catch: All involved admit a flying car tends to combine the worst of both vehicles, so for $279,000, you get an underperforming car AND an underperforming airplane in one silly-looking vehicle. In its FAQs, Terrafugia notes, “If bad weather is encountered en route, the pilot can land and drive without worrying about ground transportation…”

Sounds nifty keen-o, but most pilots planning a cross-country flight will check the weather on their route, and prepare to file an instrument flight plan if need be; if they lack an instrument rating, they will schedule the flight for another day. I doubt they find much of an advantage in buying a so-so airplane with which they can land in case of bad weather and continue on in a so-so car. Why not just drive your car to the airport and fly your airplane, like pilots have done since dinosaurs roamed the earth? Not to be a Luddite, but If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, especially with a $279,000 patch kit.

On the other hand, Maverick, the ITEC flying car, does make sense for missionary pilots, the military, poaching patrols, and powerline surveys. It’s a straightforward all-terrain vehicle with a parasail-type wing in which one can navigate dunes and grassland and skim over floodplains or other deal-breakers — for about $90,000.

I’m not bad-mouthing Terrafugia: their hearts and minds are in the right place. It’s just that the idea of a flying car has been around for decades, and there’s a reason why we don’t have one by now:  no market beyond novelty buyers.

Igor Sikorsky hovering in his VS-300 (NASM Photo SI-82-3591~A)

AND the company will pay you for the privilege, with a year’s worth of shop space, resources, mentorship and development aid in the Sikorsky Innovation Center in Stamford, Connecticut. All you have to do is submit a winning proposal, by March 30, on an innovation related to vertical-flight technology. Says Marianne Heffernan, Sikorsky Aircraft communications manager, proposals could easily come from people “who don’t even realize they have a technology…relevant to the rotorcraft arena.”

Details are here.

And fine-print stuff is here.

Photo: Icon

…with a nose job.

The Los Angeles firm Icon just sent out a press release about certifying its new Light Sport amphibian, the A5, as spin-resistant—an admirable quality for any aircraft. But older prop-heads will do a double-take at the A5 photo: It looks like a slicked-up Republic Seabee.

Let us wish for clearer skies for the A5, which Icon put together shortly after the Federal Aviation Administration created the Sport Flying class in 2004. Airplanes in that class, and their pilots, can be up and running in much less time, and with less expense, than standard lightplanes and pilots aiming for a private license.

Seabee sales suffered from bad timing in the late 1940s, as did those of many lightplanes marketed to returning World War II pilots who supposedly would want to continue flying—in their own airplanes. Those pilots had more pressing concerns, and the lightplane market tanked. The Seabee’s reputation for being overweight and underpowered also helped sink it.

A Seabee at rest. Photo: Andrew W. Sieber

The Icon will sell for around $140,000. Ads in Trade-A-Plane are asking around $40,000 – $50,000 for a Seabee. You can swap out the 215-hp Franklin engine for a more powerful model of recent vintage, and have gas money left over.

Movie still: Space Junk3D, LLC

Serendipitously well-timed with the upcoming deorbit of the Russian Phobos-Grunt satellite, the IMAX film “Space Junk 3D” will open on January 13 in giant-screen theaters, in 2D and 3D. Melrae Pictures and Red Barn Productions worked with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and NASA’s Orbital Debris program to combine science and special effects in a 38-minute film covering impacts from Arizona’s Meteor Crater to satellites in geostationary orbit and all threat levels in between. A press release notes that the film “allows us to witness massive collisions in space, both natural and man-made.”

“Woo-hoo!” [in Homer Simpson voice]

"Have you seen me?" (Photo: Museum Vliegbasis Deelen)

The Museum Vliegbasis Deelen in The Hague, Netherlands, is missing its F-104 Starfighter. The 33-foot-long model of D-8105, with dummy missiles on the wingtips, had been mounted on tripods outdoors — until Sunday morning, when museum workers Twittered what they call an Amber Alert:

“A shocking discovery! Our Starfighter has fallen prey to people who use the current high metal prices to earn their keep. Or is it a practical joke? To kidnap the model, you need some seriously heavy machinery. If you see a Starfighter in a parking lot or on a flatbed trailer, contact us.”

Museum chairman Edwin van Brakel told reporters, “It would not fit in the back of a Fiat 500,” adding that it may be a prank because a note said, “Fly away. See you next year.”

An F-16 goes belly-up. (Photo: ACC)

Although the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds will still fly at 2012 airshows, as will the Air Force Heritage team, the service recently announced that its A-10, F-16, and F-15 single-ship demonstration teams will not. These teams used to appear at dozens of military and civilian shows.

Citing “significant fiscal constraints” and “best ways to provide combat airpower to warfighting commanders,” Air Combat Command said it will “scale back from six teams we’ve historically sponsored” to only the F-22, which will fly at some 20 shows. “Reallocating those sorties will provide an increase in more than 25 combat-ready fighter pilots, and that’s a very good thing for our Nation.”

Translation: “Dammit, Jim, we’re a fighting Air Force, not the Weekend Playhouse. And we’re broke. On top of that, we’ve got terrorists to fight. We’re giving you the F-22. So suck it up and deal with it.”

Airshow organizers fear that the loss of loud, pointy jets will mean a loss of revenue in attendance. On the other hand, airshows may come out even in the end, since they won’t have to pay for hotels, cars, maintenance equipment rental, security, and music licensing for the demo teams. Aviationist.com suggests the Air Force Secret Hidden Message is, “The F-22 is good for airshows. All the other combat planes are good for war.”

Six Mustangs in trail: Now THAT’s a tight formation. (Photo: GatheringFoundation.org)

In 2007, 77 North American P-51s and 49 World War II pilots converged on Rickenbacker International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, for the final Gathering of Mustangs & Legends (the first was held in 1999). We previewed some of the aircraft in our September 2007 issue.

The Gathering Foundation has spent the years since producing a handsome book that documents the rodeo with hundreds of photos, a history of each Mustang that attended, and presentations on the military demonstration teams and airshow pilots who performed during the four-day extravaganza. The Gathering of Mustangs and Legends: The Final Roundup will be available in early December for $70, but the Foundation is offering a 20 percent discount for orders placed by November 25.

Proceeds benefit the Foundation’s mission: the archiving and exchange of information on vintage military aircraft and their pilots and crews.

A few days later, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space retiree Art Jesensky wrote to us, “I have enclosed some photos and a story I wrote about the day the last HEXAGON satellite was launched. The pictures (click on the images below to see them larger) were taken by an oil company employee just offshore on an exploration platform.”

Here’s Jesensky’s account:

In April 1986, the space community and media were still reeling from the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and its seven-member crew just three months earlier, so it’s not surprising that the failed spy satellite launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on April 18 received little notice. Secrecy prevented public announcements of such launches, and information on mission success or failure was never revealed.

April 18 dawned over California’s central coast bright and beautiful—unlike many summer days when the marine fog layer rolled in off the Pacific in early afternoon, hung around all night, and didn’t burn off until noon the next day.

Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4) is about a mile from the Pacific Ocean, an ideal location for launching satellites to the south for injection into polar orbit. Known formally as Point Arguello, it is commonly referred to as South Vandenberg. SLC-4 was originally built to launch Atlas/Agenas for the GAMBIT reconnaissance satellites but was modified in the 1960s for Titan boosters. The west pad launched Titan/Agenas and the GAMBIT; the East pad launched the larger heavy-lift Titan 34D and HEXAGON recon satellites.

Lockheed built both the Agenas and HEXAGONs. As a Lockheed engineer for 25 years, I worked at SLC-4 or SLC-3, just a few miles east, testing, servicing, and launching these payloads. That day, I was huddled with about 100 other Air Force, booster, and satellite contractor personnel in the launch operations building (LOB) preparing to launch the 20^th and last HEXAGON (the first of which was launched in 1971). The countdown had started the previous day and was progressing smoothly. In the final hours the complex had been cleared of all nonessential personnel, and blast doors to both the outside and the cable tunnels leading to each pad were closed and sealed. The LOB is a mere 500 yards from the pad, but was built of concrete reinforced with steel. Air conditioning systems were switched to recirculate mode and final satellite and booster checks completed. In the final minutes, range clearance was granted, all flight systems switched to internal power, and final “go”s received from contractors and the Air Force. The Titan entered automatic launch sequence. At zero, the Titan engines started, then the solid rocket motors ignited. Liftoff! Umbilicals out! As the launch vehicle clears the service tower, everyone in the control room stands up as if to see better at an athletic event. At 500 yards away, you see it, hear it, and feel it.

Less than 10 seconds after liftoff, at an altitude of 700 feet, a massive fireball blossomed. We heard what can only be described as bombs bursting. The solid rocket motors’ propellant used a rubber compound as a binder, and as they broke up, fiery chunks, some the size of Volkswagens, rained down on the complex.

The power sub-station to the complex was wiped out—we were left blind and in the dark. Communication lines were also severed, so we lost touch with the outside world. There was only quiet talking, listening and waiting. There was much apprehension on the outside about our safety. After a couple of hours someone made contact via two-way radio, but it wasn’t until four hours later that firefighters were able to gain access to the complex and open the doors to the LOB.

The scene resembled a moonscape. The fires had mostly burned themselves out except for the smoldering brush. A layer of fine gray ash covered everything. The service towers on both pads were badly burned, damaging cabling, piping, and lighting. Anything that could melt, did. The two engineering buildings on the complex were unusable.

It was determined that a burn through a seal on the side of one of the solid rocket motors caused the accident, similar to what happened to the shuttle Challenger. After over a year of repair and rehab, at a cost of over $100,000,000, the complex was finally reactivated. In 1991, as I was getting ready to retire, Lockheed and Martin were in the midst of a merger. The east pad was undergoing another major modification to fly the even larger Titan 4, and as part of that modification, all final launch operations were to be controlled from a remote location. No longer would anyone be within miles of the complex at launch.

SLC-4E went on to launch Titan 4s until 2005 when the complex was deactivated.