Langley Aerodrome - Design and Development

Design and Development

Langley coined the word "Aerodrome" and applied it to a series of engine-driven unmanned and manned tandem wing aircraft that were built under his supervision by Smithsonian staff in the 1890s and early 1900s. The term is derived from Greek words meaning "air runner".

After a series of unsuccessful tests beginning in 1894, Langley's unmanned steam-driven model "number 5" made a successful 90-second flight of over half a mile at about 25 miles an hour at a height of 80 to 100 feet on May 6, 1896. In November model "number six" flew more than 5,000 feet. Both aircraft were launched by catapult from a houseboat in the Potomac River near Quantico, Virginia, south of Washington, D.C. The flights impressed Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt enough for him to assert that "the machine has worked" and to call in March 1898 for the United States Navy to create a four-officer board to study the utility of Langley's "flying machine," the first documented U.S. Navy expression of interest in aviation.

The full-scale Aerodrome, financed by the United States War Department and piloted by Langley's chief assistant Charles M. Manly, was launched the same way on October 7 and December 8, 1903. On both attempts the Aerodrome failed to fly and crashed into the Potomac River seconds after launch. Manly was pulled unhurt from the water each time. Nine days after the December 8 failure, the Wright Brothers flew into history with their four successful flights near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The Aerodrome's internal combustion engine generated 53 horsepower, about four times that of the Wright brothers' gasoline engine of 1903. However, Langley had not properly appreciated the problems of calculating stress on an airframe or controlling an aircraft, and the Aerodrome broke up on launch. Langley made no further tests, and his experiments became the object of scorn in newspapers and the U.S. Congress.

With Smithsonian approval, Glenn Curtiss extensively modified the Aerodrome and made a few short flights in it in 1914, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to bypass the Wright Brothers' patent on aircraft and to vindicate Langley. Based on these flights, the Smithsonian displayed the Aerodrome in its museum as the first heavier-than-air manned, powered aircraft "capable of flight." This action triggered a feud with Orville Wright (Wilbur Wright had died in 1912), who accused the Smithsonian of misrepresenting flying machine history. Orville backed up his protest by refusing to donate the original 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer to the Smithsonian, instead donating it to extensive collections of the Science Museum of London in 1928. The dispute finally ended in 1942 when the Smithsonian published details of the Curtiss modifications to the Aerodrome and recanted its claims for the aircraft.