If you look at the history of aeronautics, its amazing that amateurs were able to do aircraft design…until the 1950’s, at least. For example, the Brazilian (Santos-Dumont) designed his own aircraft (1900-1914); Howard Hughes (1930’s-40’s), the Horton Brothers (Germany, 1940’s). None of these people were trained engineers-yet they were able to come up with some amazing designs.
This I find remarkable-since aeronautics was a hard science since the 1920’s-what was it about the field that made it possible for talented amateurs to actually come up with good aircraft designs?
because the goal was to “get off of the ground.” the “trained engineers” came in when the goal turned to “get off the ground and get back on the ground safely after flying a couple thousand miles. Oh, and do it multiple times a day for 40 years.”
They still can, and do.
You just don’t hear much about them because, presumably, all of the easy stuff has been done. And as jz78817 pointed out, anything new and notably improved is going to take professional skills and training. Maybe not to conceive, but certainly to implement.
The home built field is largely unregulated, and most of the regulations that there are are to keep you from bashing into the big boys.
Alberto Santos-Dumont: His French-born father was an engineer, and made extensive use of the latest labor-saving inventions on his vast property. So successful were these innovations that Santos-Dumont’s father gathered a large fortune and became known as the “Coffee King of Brazil.” Santos-Dumont was fascinated by machinery, and while still a young child he learned to drive the steam tractors and locomotive used on his family’s plantation. Later, he pursued studies in physics, chemistry, mechanics, and electricity with the help of a private tutor.
Howard Hughes: Showing great aptitude in engineering at an early age, Hughes built Houston’s first radio transmitter when he was 11 years old. At 12, Hughes was photographed in the local newspaper, identified as being the first boy in Houston to have a “motorized” bicycle, which he had built himself from parts taken from his father’s steam engine. He was an indifferent student with a liking for mathematics, flying, and things mechanical, taking his first flying lesson at 14 and later auditing math and aeronautical engineering courses at Caltech.
Walter and Reimar Horten: German military flying became semi-clandestine, taking the form of civil ‘clubs’ where students trained on gliders under the supervision of decommissioned World War I veterans. As teenagers, the Horten brothers became involved in such flying clubs. This back-to-the-basics education, and an admiration of German avant-aircraft designer Alexander Lippisch, led the Hortens away from the dominant design trends of the 1920s and ‘30s, and toward experimenting with alternative airframes—building models and then filling their parents’ house with full-sized wooden sailplanes.
So all of these men had some experience and education in engineering and mechanics.
Someone google check me, but IIRC, the designer of the SR71 Blackbird Kelly Johnson. CBS 60 minutes interviewed him in the 70s
The fastest Mach 3 plus, highest flying jet ever.
And now Boeing and Airbus designs like the A380 and 787 are put on hold and sent back to the drawing board for months, even years.
Kelly Johnson won an award for his first airplane design at age 13
For the same reason that most branches of science and engineering were accessible to amateurs for so long - the beginning steps are easy. Many of the earliest physicists did their experiments with equipment inferior to what the average well-equipped high school now has; these days, you need a multi-billion dollar collider to make progress. As others said, simple aircraft with undemanding specs are pretty easy to build once someone shows you the basics. Getting them faster, higher, more reliable and safer takes increasing steps of engineering ability.
And I hear that the beginning steps of being a barbarian are also pretty easy. I’ve already mastered wine, and only halfway toward women, but I fear I’ll never get to song.
Nothing has changed. Most small planes have been designed by amateurs, then and now.
I think calling those first steps “easy” shortchanges the work done by those amateurs - there’s nothing easy about building a machine that few (if any) people have built before. Instead, I’d say that the beginning steps didn’t require the same investment of resources that later advances need. Given the parts and time, you can whip up some amazing stuff (including mechanical breakthroughs) in your garage. Ultimately, though, you want to scale up those developments to be reliable and profitable. This requires better materials, more precise fabrication, and more attention to detail than is feasible for an amateur tinkerer.
I don’t in any way mean to undercut the genius and dedication of those who found the first paths in any field. But the Wright brothers built nearly all of their aircraft with tools and technology almost any homeowner has in his garage. With the inspiration and effort, the first steps are easy, forgiving and flexible. All the Wrights had to do was fly gently around in good weather when they could get the engine to run. Ditto for Benz, minus the need to fly. All Rutherford had to do was observe scintillations under a low-power microscope. The conceptual genius behind these was irreplaceable; the execution took no more than competent average man skills.
The genius now at work needs a Pratt & Whitney, a Boeing, an Intel, or a coalition of governments to implement.
Howard Hughes was a very interesting case…his great idea (building aircraft with flush surfaced rivets) gained his “H-1” and extra 50 MPH in speed. Nobody had thought of this.
Later, hi design skills floundered with his giant “Spruce goose”-the severely underpowered plane barely was able to take off-it would have been a total failure:mad:
Something to mention here, it is not difficult to design a basic airplane. I did it while I was a child (okay, it was a model, but the principles of flight don’t change). Most small planes are still based on Glenn Curtiss’s design, an offshoot from the Wright’s original design. Thousands of amateurs have designed perfectly good small planes. The difficulty in plane design comes from getting bigger, faster, more efficient, and flying higher and further. Without a lot of engineering effort planes would tend to scale linearly and a plane would have to be larger than could be practical to carry hundreds of passengers.
However, individuals designing and building planes that carry more than two passengers is somewhat rare. Simply dealing with the impact of weight distribution in plane where the passengers don’t sit right on the center of gravity makes the task much more difficult. The larger engine and heavier airframe needed are enough to stretch the limits of practicality.