Wings #5 - Rachael Kneice

3. What role did the helicopter play in the development of aviation technology?

The helicopter was an entirely new machine to take to the air. The most influential person in this line of research was Igor Ivan Sikorsky. An immigrant to the United States, he and a small team were able to produce a successful helicopter in early 1942. This was of great interest to the military because of its ability to make vertical flight. It could also have a role in urban and regional transportation. During these years, improvements were made on the rotor and blade design, such as more blades, the angle of the blades, and maintaining the position of the rotor disk (Crouch, 470-471). A large step happened when Charles H. Kaman brought the helicopter into the jet age. His aircraft utilized a turboshaft engine powering the vehicle. This allowed for much quicker ascent time, and encouraged the introduction of light and yet powerful turboshaft engines.  Helicopters were experimented with to drop soldiers into battle. This allowed for wars where soldiers could drop down from the sky, fight, and then disappear again. Mobility was the “key to success, and the helicopter the key to mobility” (Crouch, 473). Another side of the fighting, the “Jolly Green Giants” are well known for being heavy-lifting transport choppers, and were used to pick up the wounded.

5. How did the US view the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik and what was the reaction?

Many Americans were bitter about the fact that the Soviets launched the first satellite into space in 1957. According to the book, they considered it to be a “technological Pearl Harbor” (Crouch, 485). President Dwight Eisenhower wanted to persuade the Soviets to accept an open-skies policy. He also decided that there should be a separation between the missile and military space research that was happening to a strong civilian space program. This led to the discontinuing of NACA and the launching of NASA in America. Research was the name of the game at this point in history. The space race was now underway, and NASA became one of the most well-known agencies. NASA was separate from the research that the US Air Force and Navy were doing, but they still held many collaborations with them. During the 1950s, NASA doled out as much as 80 percent of the federal research budget for the company. NASA also distributed much of its money to contractors and subcontractors for more research opportunities. By the time the Apollo moon program had reached its peak in the 1960s, NASA had brought jobs to around half a million American citizens (Crouch, 486). 

7. What effect did the invention of the computer have on aviation technology?

The original computers for airplanes were the humans doing the calculations. This slowly developed into the discussion of a computer that was able to perform scientific computation in the late 1940s by IBM. One of the other struggling points with airplanes was that putting together a bunch of engineers to design a three-dimensional object, but making them use two-dimensional pieces of paper was very hard. Finally in the 1980s, a CAD (Computer-Assisted-Design) program allowed for the precision that was needed to do this. Airplane design had moved from the drawing board to the computer screen, making complex curves and sketching much easier and more precise (Crouch, 513-514). All of the necessary details for the planes could be done with just a few key strokes as well. The new computer system could do all of the required calculations and then assemble an accurate three-dimensional image of any part that the engineer wanted to see, and allowed him to rotate it in any direction he wished. And if the engineer wanted to change something, it was easily done through a few clicks of a button, which then triggered the computer’s algorithms to quickly make the necessary calculation adjustments.