Tag Archive for 'Aviation'

Vintage Aircraft Tool Cataloging, Re-housing and Preservation Project

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on November 8, 2010 in Aviation, Behind The Scenes, Hidden Treasures, History, Research and restoration.
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In the years following WWII the United States and her Allies conducted engineering and flight tests of many different types of captured or surrendered Axis aircraft, primarily from Germany and Japan. Many of these aircraft were acquired by Allied and US technical intelligence collection teams.  It was ordered that at least one of each type of enemy aircraft be captured and evaluated by these teams, and that each aircraft type be maintained in flyable condition for a minimum of one year. To make this possible all technical data and support materiel available (such as tool kits, parts, etc.) had to also be captured to meet this requirement.

fuselage

Fuselage of a captured German WWII FockeWulf Ta-152H-0 advanced fighter, currently stored at the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility. This aircraft was surrendered to an RAF intelligence team and later transferred to the US for evaluation.

Several of these captured aircraft were donated to the National Air and Space Museum upon completion of US Air Force testing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and much of the supporting parts and tools came along with them. At the time loose tools and toolkits were not seen as accessionable objects, merely as tools to be used for repair and possible future restoration purposes. They remained in storage for years. Today this collection of tools contains some of the very last examples of their kind to be found anywhere in the world. It is due to the historically important and unique nature of these objects that a Collections Care and Preservation Fund (CCPF) has enabled a project to catalog, re-house, and preserve these irreplaceable examples of tools and kits.

tools

One of several large crates filled with hundreds of loose tools of various types. Sorting these loose tools and beginning a comprehensive identification and inventory process has been the first priority of the 2010 CCPF Vintage Aircraft Tool project.

The  project began in July of 2010. The cataloging, condition assessment, and digital photography of this varied and unique collection was begun immediately so that a comprehensive inventory of this diverse collection could be created.

tools

Examples of sorted and inventoried tools. Upon identification it was discovered that these tools were highly specialized and potentially one-of-a-kind examples. The left tool was designed to cool large bearings with a cryogenic liquid to aid their removal during overhaul of a BMW 801 engine, like the one used to power the Focke Wulf FW-190. The right tool was designed to be used on the cylinder heads of several different types of Daimler-Benz engines, such as those used to power the He-219 Night Fighter currently being restored at the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility.

One goal of the project is to create a curatorial and collections guideline for the proper and safe use of these tools, ensuring they remain in an accessible yet preserved condition. To ensure future access to restoration specialists and researchers, a series of protective storage cabinets will provide adequate space that maximizes accessibility yet minimizes unnecessary handling. This system of storage will also allow for easier transportation of the collection to the new Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

Additionally, it is necessary to prepare most of these tools for long-term, stable storage via thorough cleaning to remove old, soiled, or failing preservative coatings and service-related grime, and also treating areas of active surface corrosion. Once cleaned and treated each tool will then have a modern preservative coating reapplied, ensuring long-term stabilization and usability.

engines

Both engines above are from the He-219 Night Fighter being restored at the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility. The left engine has already undergone restoration at the time this image was taken, while the right engine has yet to be restored. Being able to use or copy examples of purpose-built tools is important to restorers. If these necessary and unique tools are misplaced, damaged beyond usability or disappear, restoration is seriously hindered.

Copies of these tools have been made in the past to perform vital restoration work on some of the associated captured aircraft, and in some instances the tools themselves have been used. But once they are lost, then any similar restoration or stabilization work will be made much more difficult, if not impossible. This project will help ensure that these important objects are preserved.

Ray Barnett is a contractor working with the collections division of the National Air and Space Museum.

The Airplane and Streamlined Design

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on October 25, 2010 in Aviation, Exhibitions and History.
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To American industrial designers of the 1930s airplanes were not simply machines of transport, but emblems of technological innovation and progress. The National Air and Space Museum’s newly redone Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery includes a unit devoted to “The Airplane and Streamlined Design,” which demonstrates how industrial designers appropriated the imagery of the modern airliner for their products.

streamline

The dynamic look of streamlined aircraft captured the imagination of industrial designers in the 1920s and the 1930s, who translated that look into a new design expression. They borrowed motifs from the airplane’s curvilinear appearance and incorporated them into railroad locomotives, automobiles, architecture, appliances, and household objects.

From the time of George Cayley, a nineteenth-century British aeronautical experimenter who coined the phrase “solid of least resistance,” aircraft designers had searched for a shape that would create the least drag—the resistance to a body’s movement through air. The ultimate result was the Douglas DC-3 (an example of which is on view in the Museum’s America by Air exhibit at the National Mall building), the most advanced in a line of streamlined designs that went back to the Deperdussin Racer of 1913. The DC-3 boasted several important technological advances, but its shiny metallic look, with a pronounced parabolic curve, suggested speed and motion.

In his 1932 book Horizons, industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes wrote that “when the design of an object is in keeping with the purpose it serves, it appeals to us as having a distinctive kind of beauty. That is why we are impressed by the stirring beauty of airplanes. The underlying principle of the emotional response that the airplane stirs in us would seem to be the same as that which accounts for the emotional effect of the finest architecture—the form, proportion, and color best suited to that object’s purpose.”

And in 1940 Walter Dorwin Teague spoke directly of the DC-3 as an example of the pleasurable connotations of modern aircraft and cited “the constant ratios of proportion” and “the quality of line which we find most highly developed  … in a Douglas transport plane, where you see the same type of form repeated in the engine and in the fuselage, in the wings and the tail—the same line recurring again and again; that long line with a sharp parabolic curve at the end, which we have come into the habit of calling ‘streamline.’”

Bel Geddes and contemporary designers like Teague, Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, and others began to apply the functionality and imagery of aerodynamics to the design of cars, trains, and mass-produced merchandise. These artist/businessmen wanted to take advantage of the DC-3’s streamlined look to create a new design expression as a way to sell products and services during the Great Depression. The unstated message of streamlining was an optimistic one: advanced technology as exemplified by modern streamlined aircraft would help to move the country out of its economic despair.

Streamlined Automobiles

In 1933, the Chrysler Corporation undertook the design of the first truly mass‑produced streamlined automobile, the Chrysler Airflow, under the leadership of Carl Breer. The Airflow had a welded, trussed-box frame construction (designed by Alexander Klemin, head of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics at New York University) in which girders and body panels were integrated into a shallow frame, yielding a highly rigid but sturdy structure. The Airflow’s style grew out of hundreds of wind tunnel tests that were completed on models of the automobile by the design team to reduce drag and noise and to improve stability; these features were promoted in advertising as growing out of its functional design.

Streamlined Trains

In 1936, Raymond Loewy and the engineering staff of the Pennsylvania Railroad designed the K4S streamlined shroud for the steam locomotive that pulled the famous Broadway Limited train. In 1938, Loewy collaborated on the design of the S‑1 locomotive, a sleek horizontally lined machine reputed to be the “largest and fastest high‑speed steam engine ever to be placed in service in this country.” Henry Dreyfuss worked for the New York Central Railroad to design the J3A locomotives that hauled the Twentieth Century Limited. These, however, were after-the-fact imitations of the Union Pacific Railroad’s truly innovative M10000 City of Salina (1934) and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad’s Zephyr (1934). Both were powered by diesel-electric locomotives, wind tunnel tested, and, like modern aircraft, designed with monocoque construction (i.e., a hollow structure without internal bracing in which all of most of the stresses are carried by the skin).

Streamlined Consumer Products

By the middle to late 1930s, streamlining was also becoming common in a number of consumer goods. Designers employed the metaphor of streamlining to design refrigerators, radios, electric clocks, and other goods, using such elements as speed lines—three parallel lines in metal to connote motion; rounded corners; teardrop shapes; new materials—polished metal alloys, bakelite, vitriolite, and glass block; and metal stamping and casting processes. (Examples of these, such as the Petipoint Flat Iron, Firestone Air Chief Radio, Kodak Bullet Camera, designed by Walter Dorwin Teague, Westinghouse Table Fan, and Sunbeam T9 Toaster, are shown in “The Airplane and Streamlined Design” pictured above.)

The New York World’s Fair

Aquabelles

Modern aircraft played an important part in the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair, the showplace of the streamline style in American culture. Here, the Aquabelles, a group of swimming performers, and U.S. Army Air Corps officers pose on the wing and streamlined engine nacelle of the Boeing XB-15 long-range bomber.

The 1939-40 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows was the showplace and culmination of the streamline style in American culture. Among the fair’s many streamlined buildings was the General Motors Pavilion, designed by Albert Kahn Associates and Bel Geddes. In the pavilion’s Futurama exhibit, a visitor could board a rubber-tired train and embark on a 15-minute simulated airplane flight westward over a vast futuristic diorama of  the U.S. in 1960. This was a streamlined country of 14-lane superhighways divided into 50-, 75-, and 100-mph traffic lanes with a metropolis dominated by streamlined skyscrapers.

The fair’s utopian prospect of a better future through technological progress did not materialize. The threat of an impending world war hung palpably over the Flushing Meadows fairground, and concerns of world survival had by 1940 begun to take precedence over the promise of a streamlined future.

Dominick A. Pisano is a curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum

Eugene J. Bullard

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on October 12, 2010 in Aviation, History, On View at the Museum and Stories.
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October 12, 2010, marks the forty-ninth anniversary of the death of Eugene Jacques Bullard at the age of 67. Bullard is considered to be the first African-American military pilot to fly in combat, and the only African-American pilot in World War I. Ironically, he never flew for the United States.

Born October 9, 1895, in Columbus, Georgia, to William Bullard, a former slave, and Josephine Bullard, Eugene’s early youth was unhappy. He made several unsuccessful attempts to run away from home, one of which resulted in his being returned home and beaten by his father.

In 1906, at the age of 11, Bullard ran away for good, and for the next six years, he wandered the South in search of freedom. In 1912 he stowed away on the Marta Russ, a German freighter bound for Hamburg, and ended up in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there  he made his way to London, where he  worked as a boxer and slapstick performer in Belle Davis’s Freedman Pickaninnies, an African American entertainment troupe. In 1913, Bullard went to France for a boxing match. Settling in Paris, he became so comfortable with French customs that he decided to make a home there. He later wrote, “… it seemed to me that French democracy influenced the minds of both black and white Americans there and helped us all act like brothers.”

After World War I had begun in the summer of 1914, Bullard enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. While serving with the 170th Infantry Regiment, Bullard fought in the  the Battle of Verdun (February to December 1916), where he was wounded seriously. He was taken from the battlefield and sent to Lyon to recuperate. While on leave in Paris, Bullard bet a friend $2,000 that despite his color he could enlist in the French flying service. Bullard’s determination paid off, and in November 1916 he entered the Aéronautique Militaire.

Eugene Bullard

Eugene Bullard

Bullard began flight training at Tours in 1916 and received his wings in May 1917. He was first assigned to Escadrille Spa 93, and then to Escadrille Spa 85 in September 1917, where he remained until he left the Aéronautique Militaire. In November 1917, Bullard claimed two aerial victories, a Fokker Triplane and a Pfalz D.III, but neither could be confirmed. (Some accounts say that one victory was confirmed.) During his flying days, Bullard is said to have had an insignia on his Spad 7 C.1 that portrayed a heart with a dagger running through it and the slogan “All Blood Runs Red.”  Reportedly, Bullard flew with a mascot, a Rhesus Monkey named “Jimmy.”

Eugene Bullard

Eugene Bullard with his Rhesus monkey, Jimmy

After the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard attempted to join the U.S. Air Service, but he was not accepted, ostensibly because he was an enlisted man, and the Air Service required pilots to be officers and hold at least the rank of First Lieutenant. In actuality, he was rejected because of the racial prejudice that existed in the American military during that time. Bullard returned to the Aéronautique Militaire, but he was summarily removed after an apparent confrontation with a French officer. He returned to the 170th Infantry Regiment until his discharge in October 1919.

After the war Bullard remained in France, where he worked in a nightclub called Zelli’s in the Montmartre district of Paris, owned a nightclub (Le Grand Duc) and an American-style bar (L’Escadrille), operated an athletic club, and married a French woman, Marcelle de Straumann. During this time Bullard rubbed elbows with notables like Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Josephine Baker.

By the late 1930s, however, the clouds of war began to change Bullard’s life dramatically. Even before World War II officially began in 1939, Bullard became involved in espionage activities against French fifth columnists who supported the Nazis. When war came he enlisted as a machine gunner in the 51st Infantry Regiment, and was severely wounded by an exploding artillery shell.  Fearing capture by the Nazis, he made his way to Spain, Portugal, and eventually the United States, settling in the Harlem district of New York City.

After his arrival in New York, Bullard worked as a security guard and longshoreman. In the post-World War II years, Bullard took up the cause of civil rights. In the summer of 1949, he was involved in an altercation with the police and a racist mob at a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York, in which he was beaten by police. Another incident involved a bus driver who ordered Bullard to sit the back of his bus. These events left Bullard deeply disillusioned with the United States, and he returned to France, but was unable to resume his former life there.

During his lifetime, the French showered Bullard with honors, and in 1954, he was one of three men chosen to relight the everlasting flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris. In October 1959 he was made a knight of the Legion of Honor, the highest ranking order and decoration bestowed by France. It was the fifteenth decoration given to him by the French government.

In the epilogue to his well-researched book, Eugene Bullard, Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2000), Craig Lloyd points out the poignancy of Bullard’s situation in the United States: “The contrast between Eugene Bullard’s unrewarding years of toil and trouble early and late in life in the United States and his quarter-century of much-heralded achievement in France illustrates dramatically … the crippling disabilities imposed on the descendants of Americans of African ancestry … .”

In 1992, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation donated to the National Air and Space Museum a bronze portrait head of Bullard, created by Eddie Dixon, an African American sculptor. This work is displayed in the museum’s Legend, Memory and the Great War in the Air gallery.

Eugene Bullard

Bronze sculpture of Eugene Jacques Bullard, currently on view at the National Mall Building

Postscript:

On September 14, 1994, Bullard was posthumously commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. A display case in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, honors him.

Dominick A. Pisano is a curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum

Amelia Earhart: Viva la Vega

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on May 20, 2010 in Aviation and History.
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It was 78 years ago, on May 20, 1932, that Amelia Earhart set out in her Lockheed 5B Vega to become the first woman to fly nonstop and alone over the Atlantic Ocean.  Departing from  Harbour Grace, Newfoundland and landing in Londonderry, Northern Ireland about 15 hours later, she also became only the second person to solo the Atlantic, the first being Charles Lindbergh in 1927. It was also her second trip across the Atlantic.  Earhart first came to the public’s attention four years earlier, in June 1928, when she made headlines for doing nothing more than riding as a passenger–but she was the first female to do so.  And although it didn’t matter to the public that she never touched the controls of the aircraft during the transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to Wales, it mattered to Earhart.  After all, she had insisted on and been promised a chance to fly the Fokker F.VII Friendship aircraft.  Instead, pilot Bill Stultz flew the entire time, giving Earhart the controls only on the short final hop from Wales to Southampton, England (Lou Gordon was along as co-pilot and mechanic as well).

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart, dressed in flying suit, standing on steps on left side of nose of her Lockheed 5B Vega amidst a crowd of people at Culmore, North Ireland after her historic solo flight across the Atlantic from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, c. May 21, 1932.

Why was it so important to her to fly the Atlantic herself?  To prove she could do it.  She wanted the respect of other pilots, especially the other female pilots of the era.  Despite her fame, Earhart knew she wasn’t fully accepted as an accomplished pilot.  Since the 1928 flight, she had some modest success setting speed records and placed a respectable third in the 1929 Women’s Air Derby, the first cross-country race for women pilots.  She was the first woman to fly an autogyro in 1931 and she set an altitude record in it too, but her otherwise wildly popular cross country tour was marred by two accidents.

Earhart , who began flying in 1921 and earned a license in 1923, wanted a career in aviation and she was ably assisted in this goal by George Palmer Putnam, a master promoter and publisher who had arranged the publicity surrounding the flights of Charles Lindbergh and polar explorer Richard Byrd. Together she and Putnam formulated plans for her career:  “I make a flight, then I lecture on it.”  She wrote about the 1928 flight in her book, 20 hours and 40 minutes, and then traveled all over the country lecturing in support of aviation and careers for women.  She wrote about her flights in magazine articles, helped found the women’s flying organization the Ninety-Nines, and did public relations for early airline companies.  But she knew her career needed a shot in the arm from an ambitious and high profile flight–and she wanted to fly the Atlantic alone.

Other women pilots were nipping at her celebrity heels.  In 1928, Louise Thaden was the first woman to simultaneously hold the women’s altitude, endurance, and speed records in light planes and in 1929 she won the Women’s Air Derby.  Young record-setter Elinor Smith was named one of the three best pilots in the U.S. in 1930 and in 1931, Ruth Nichols held the women’s world speed, altitude, and distance records.  Nichols also wanted to solo the Atlantic but her first attempt ended with a crash at her planned takeoff location in Newfoundland in the summer of 1931.  Both Earhart and Nichols continued to prepare for transatlantic flights though it was not an acknowledged race between the two friends.

But by May 1932, Nichols was not ready.  Earhart and her Lockheed Vega, thoroughly prepared and tested by veteran pilot Bernt Balchen, were.  Finally, when the weather cleared enough for her to fly to Newfoundland, the timing was perfect for her and George Putnam: May 20, five years to the day after Lindbergh’s epic flight.

Lockheed Vega

Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Model 5B Vega on display in the Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight gallery at the National Air and Space Museum.

Earhart departed Harbour Grace in the evening but soon ran into poor weather. During her 2,026-mile nonstop flight she fought fatigue and nausea, a leaky fuel tank, and a cracked manifold weld that spewed flames out of the side of the engine cowling.  Ice formed on the Vega’s wings, causing an unstoppable 3,000-foot descent to just above the waves.  When she sighted land she came down into a farmer’s field and asked, “Where am I?”  It was Culmore, near Londonderry in Northern Ireland.   Although it wasn’t Paris, it was the first solo transatlantic flight by a woman.  Amelia Earhart had reached her immediate goals of completing a challenging flight, receiving the respect of her fellow aviators and carving out a career in aviation.   She would not rest on those laurels.

Dorothy Cochrane is a curator in the Aeronautics Department of the National Air and Space Museum

Diversity in Air and Space

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on February 26, 2010 in Behind The Scenes and News & Events.
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Greetings, from the Astronomy Intern here at the National Air and Space Museum!

I will admit that despite being the Astronomy Intern, I am not a science person by background.  In fact, my experience is in world literature, history, and multicultural advocating.  So what am I doing here, you ask?

Well, for professional reasons, my plan as a budding museum educator is to promote the further diversification of the museum field by learning how to draw in a stronger minority presence.  I chose to intern here at the National Air and Space Museum to see how particularly challenging it is for science museums to weave a cultural thread into their programming.

For more personal reasons, I wanted to rekindle an old love for astronomy.  I was once that kid who would post myself in the street late at night and stare resolutely up at the sky in search of Comet Hyakutake.  I never found it, but I have fond memories of recruiting my family to stand in the streets and stare up with me.

It is in the spirit of these ambitions and memories that I am thrilled to report that the Museum offers an array of family-oriented, culturally diverse experiences.  For instance, the series of upcoming Heritage Family Days are definite celebrations of multiple perspectives in the history of aviation and space.

African American Pioneers in Aviation Family Day

Special guests at the Family Day, including the first all-female, all-African American commercial flight crew, Space Shuttle astronaut, Leland Melvin, and former NASA astronaut and first African American woman in space, Dr. Mae Jemison.

Just this past Saturday, February 20, we held African American Pioneers Family Day.  We enjoyed quite a successful turnout as thousands came to partake in some aviation and space-related arts and crafts, and also to see historic figures speak live:

  • The Tuskegee Airmen: the first squadron of African American pilots in WWII
  • The Atlantic Southeast Airlines Crew: the first all-female, African American flight crew
  • Dr. Mae Jemison: former NASA astronaut and first African American woman in space
  • Leland Melvin: NASA astronaut and educator who recently returned from his thrilling trip to space

Aside from being an all-around good time, the Family Day also conveyed truly empowering messages.  Particularly poignant was Dr. Jemison’s tale of how she was determined to break the mold that was cast upon her as an African-American woman.  I also loved that Leland Melvin took time out of his presentation to personally address the school group of 3rd and 4th graders I was hosting for the day.  Because of such dynamic, inspiring individuals, the face of science and aviation has continued to become ever more multifaceted.

Explore the Universe Family Day

Explore the Universe Family Day

Stay tuned because there’s even more exciting programs in Family Days to come. Currently, part of my role as an intern is to assist in planning events for April’s Family Day: Explore the Universe.  Our goal is to represent as many cultures across the globe as possible and educate visitors on how different people have interpreted the skies.  It’s sure to be a smile-inducing, eye-opening, and mind-bending experience!

So keep checking back in for the dates of these fun events.  We have such great ideas brewing, and I hope to see many of your fresh – and diverse– faces here at the National Air and Space Museum.

Sharleen Eusebio is an intern in the National Air and Space Museum’s Education Division.

Fly Now! Making the National Air and Space Museum's Poster Collection Accessible, Online

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on October 17, 2009 in Aviation, Behind The Scenes, Hidden Treasures, Highlights from the Collection and Web & New Media.
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As mentioned in Dom Pisano’s recent post “From Collecting to Curating,” six interns, including myself, and two volunteers (with our supervisor, enough for a baseball team!) photographed, scanned and catalogued much of the museum’s collection of over 1,300 posters at the Paul E. Garber Facility‘s collections processing unit this summer. It sounds like a lot of posters, but you may not have seen any of them, unless you have a great memory of advertisements you glimpsed in airports over the years while running to catch your plane. Selections from the posters have been published, but the collection is now receiving the “full treatment” by museum staff, interns, and volunteers.

Intern Mark Leadenham prepares to examine posters with a microscope to determine what printing method was used. Photo by Amelia Kile.

Intern Katy Osterwald measures and cuts archival folders to appropriate sizes for housing the posters. Photo by Carl Bobrow.

This marks the first time the poster collection, which includes graphic art published from as early as 1827 up to the twenty-first century, has been accessible to the public as an archive, since the majority of it has remained in storage in Suitland, Maryland. The collection provides a wealth of information related to balloons, early flight, military and commercial aviation, and space flight, documenting aerospace history and technology while providing a window into popular culture. As a student of art history, I found the collection visually engaging and historically significant. As a young museum professional, I gained experience physically working with the objects, recording and organizing information, photographing, identifying methods used to print the posters, and even had a lot of fun!

The “Artbox,” where the unframed art is stored, before the new storage cabinets are installed. Photo by Katy Osterwald.

Contractors, volunteers and interns install all the shiny new cabinets in 3 hours. Thanks everyone! Photo by Ben Sullivan.

Now that the collection is online, scholars will be able to contribute to knowledge, study and discussion of this valuable resource. Working hands-on within a collection that was not accessible to many people, the group working on the project developed the feeling that this was “our” collection in a sense, and it is a thrill to now be able to share it. It is a diverse collection, wide-ranging in terms of subject, country of origin and time period, and thus it will make an excellent educational tool. Photographing and documenting the posters was part of a larger, ongoing effort to provide images and relevant information about the National Air and Space Museum’s art collection to the public, all while preparing the collections to move to the new Phase Two Collection Storage Facility at the Steve F. Udvar-Hazy Center. So, take a look at the collection and tell us what you think!

Amelia Brakeman Kile is an intern in the Collections Processing Unit at the National Air and Space Museum’s Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility.