So far I've been doing the "I told you so" showing how a few planes actually flew before the Wright brothers. This time I`m going to talk about a steam powered airplane that flew over 25 years later than their first flight.
The year is 1933, and rumblings from Europe are starting make North American`s nervous. For the Besler brothers, George and Bill, steam was on their mind. Heirs to railroad fortunes, these Princeton graduates had a thing for steam engines. They embarked on a project build a viable steam powered airplane and succeeded.
Their craft was powered by a high efficiency steam power plant that generated 90 HP and weighed just 500 pounds. With such a good power to weight ratio to start with, they felt confident it would fly. The boiler was heated with fuel oil allowing more maneuverability than coal (good Jesus). The cool thing about this engine is that it could run in both directions at the flick of a switch. This made for very short landings as the pilot could reverse the thrust to slow the plane.
The plane flew just fine for over 15 minutes at 1000 feet and landed in one piece. Maybe they were onto something. With the price of fuel do you think someone could develop a super duper steam engine and power it with cow methane maybe.
2 comments:
Its a plane, not a car, but I'm trying!
http://building.athena.googlepages.com/bapage1.html
Er, I mean, its a CAR, not a plane.
:smacks head:
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