Background
The AEREON Corporation, established in 1959, at first concentrated on the construction of a prototype three-hull hybrid airship, the AEREON III. Completed in 1965, the prototype was lost during taxiing tests the following year, without having flown.
Following the destruction of the AEREON III, the firm sought "a new and better solution." AEREON's Monroe Drew and John Fitzpatrick employed German physicist Jürgen Bock, formerly of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany, and the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, to develop a list of parameters that would be fed into a computer at the General Electric Space Center, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in order to determine "the optimum configuration for enclosing maximum volume without too much penalty of drag." AEREON 26's deltoid configuration, "a shrewd and practical compromise between an airfoil and a sphere," was the result of these efforts.
Rubber-powered and gasoline-engined models of the configuration were flown and wind tunnel tests conducted before testing of the 26 itself began.
Read more about this topic: AEREON 26
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)