Blog Post #4: This day in aviation history

In this day of history, on April 27^th 1911 the U.S. army bought its second airplane.  We all know that the first airplane was made by the Wright Brothers, but this plane was created by Glenn Curtiss and it was known as the “Curtiss pusher”.  It was slightly different than the Wright Brothers plane in that it had a propeller behind the wheel and a tricycle landing gear.  It was able to go to speeds as high as 60 miles per hour.  If you remember from the online book we read, Curtiss was the company that had a lot of conflict with the patent of the Wright Brothers.  Curtiss couldn’t use Wing warping so instead they had to use allerons (which turned out to be better than wing warping).  This is an interesting article because we usually always talk about the Wright Brothers, but we have not talked much about the other companies that were competing with the brothers.  Curtiss was one of their biggest competitors, but he was still a great inventor and also helped with the creation of aviation. 

Article: http://www.thisdayinaviation.com/