Langley B: Fill & Download for Free

Langley, B. C. is a wonderful place to live. The rent is lower than Vancouver or Burnaby, and it has all of the conveniences of the rest of the GVRD. I recently visited Walnut Grove, a community within Langley, and found it to be a very pleasant place. Schools are apparently quite good in that area. There are also some great churches in Langley.My biggest beef to life in Langley is the commute. Commuting from Langley westward is time consuming, and can be costly. If you have a long commute, I suggest be ready to move elsewhere. For example, if you live in Langley and work in downtown Vancouver you may wish to relocate to a place that’s closer to downtown, say Burnaby or Coquitlam.Thanks for the question,R. Ridgway

Because the RN kicked alone the arse of both Kriegsmarine and Regia Marina.Royal Navy won the battles of Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean single-handedly.RN losses wereHMS Courageous - to a submarine 1939HMS Glorious - to battlecruiser gunnery 1940HMS Ark Royal - to a submarine 1941HMS Hermes - to aircraft 1942HMS Eagle - to a submarine 1942Note that both Hermes and Eagle were old and small carriers - hardly fleet carriers, having a capacity of 20–25 aircraft. They were comparable to USS Langley (CV-1), which was sunk by Japanese aircraft in 1942.HMS Royal Oak - to a submarine in harbour 1939HMS Prince of Wales - to aircraft 1941HMS Barham - to a submarine 1941Note that HMS Prince of Wales had no functional anti-aircraft system on her demise.HMS Audacity - to a submarine 1941HMS Avenger - to a submarine 1942HMS Dasher - an internal explosion in harbour, 1943HMS Hood - to battleship gunnery 1941HMS Repulse - to arcraft 1941This is hardly more than the USN losses. Note the great proportion of the losses due to submarine torpedoes. They were all caused by Kriegsmarine, while the Japanese did not sink one single RN capital ship by a submarine torpedo. The reason was that the Germans really knew their sh1t on submarine warfare, while the Japanese didn’t.Note that almost all of the losses happened 1939 to 1941, and during the Battle of Atlantic, and before USA joining the war. This coincides with the period when a) Kriegsmarine was still a formidable opponent and b) it could hit and hurt and c) USA had not joined the war yet.The only “real” fleet carrier loss for the RN was that of HMS Ark Royal. The two tin-clads, Courageous and Glorious, were way obsolete former WWI heavy cruisers converted into carriers, while both Hermes and Eagle were small vessels and comparable to USS Langley.

In Brazil, pretty much no one acknowledges the Wright brothers invented the airplane. Most say it was Santos Dumont who did. Was that really the case?I’m not a professional historian, but I have been an airplane nut since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. And I am a trained investigator, as both a lawyer and a cultural anthropologist, as well as an avid fan of aviation history.Here’s the truth.First of all, nearly EVERY process, and EVERY invention, builds upon discoveries and concepts that preceded it. That’s just how it works — innovators are always standing on the shoulders of giants who went before.It’s also true that, in an atmosphere where certain facts are widely known and certain theories and scientific interests have wide circulation worldwide, independent discovery or invention may occur at widely separated places, at nearly the same time, by investigators working toward the same goal from approximately the same starting place.Newton and Leibnitz independently invented calculus at nearly the same time, for instance. And Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution; other researchers had already made evolution the default paradigm for understanding natural diversity and all Darwin did when he added his two cents to the mix was come up with the idea of “natural selection” as the mechanism driving evolution, and he didn’t publish his idea until Wallace independently conceived the same idea on the other side of the world.Now, BOTH the Wright Brothers, and Alberto Santos-Dumont, and many other aeronautical experimenters — including the already-famous and already-rich “inventor” of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, and the director of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel Pierpont Langley (what is it with the middle names of these patricians, eh? But that’s a different thread) — were trying to figure out how to make a practical, controllable, useful human-carrying, powered, heavier-than-air flying machine.I include all those qualifiers because they are important. It’s not just a simple matter of who “invented the airplane.”Even putting aside the Renaissance and Classical-period advances in aeronautical understanding and design that other answers discuss — none of which came anywhere close to developing a successful, human-carrying, powered flying machine of any kind, so I won’t belabor them — there WERE many successful precursors to both the Wright Brothers and Santos-Dumont.The Montgolfier brothers, for instance, had invented a successful, human-carrying flying machine back in the 18th century. But it wasn’t HEAVIER-THAN-AIR — it was a hot-air balloon. And it wasn’t POWERED — it would only be carried wherever the winds would take it. And it wasn’t CONTROLLABLE in all respects — the pilot had ways to make it GO UP or GO DOWN but could not directly control its horizontal motion OR, for that matter, any rolling motions.See the point? Each of these elements also had to be developed separately.LOTS of inquisitive people were working on these issues in the 1890s and early 19-oughts.Pioneers like Octave Chanute (who advised the Wright Brothers) and Otto Lilienthal later developed successful, heavier-than-air, somewhat-controllable, human-carrying gliders by the 1890sLike modern “hang gliders,” the Chanute and Lilienthal efforts achieved stability by having the center of weight of the wing-occupant combination be below the center of lift — i.e. the rider hangs below the wings — and achieved pitch and roll control by shifting the rider’s weight.But they were not powered, and they were only moderately controllable, because nobody had figured out yet that airplanes operate in three dimensions and thus need to be controllable in all three at once.In France, in the 1890s, an engineer named Clement Ader had put a powerful steam engine in a flying machine equipped with wings patterned on those of a bat, and reportedly did succeed in getting it off the ground for short hops. But Ader’s “Eole” was not capable of sustained, or controlled, flight.FLYING MACHINES - Clement AderThen, pioneers like Langley (and his skilled engine-maker and pilot, Charles Manley) developed successful, SMALL-scale (non-human-carrying) powered flying models, which flew brilliantly, and Manley did develop a powerful, light gasoline (petrol) engine capable of powering a man-carrying plane. But when the brilliant Professor Langley tried to scale that up to full size, and launch it in front of the world’s press in mid-1903, their resulting “aerodrome” crashed ignominiously in the Potomac River. People laughed at the very idea that human-carrying, heavier-than-air flying machines could ever succeed.Langley Aerodrome - WikipediaMeanwhile, lighter-than-air flying machines were not holding still. Mr. Santos-Dumont actually did invent one of the earliest, if not the earliest, controllable lighter-than-air craft, a dirigible. (The word “dirigible” means “capable of being directed.”) Santos-Dumont, a wealthy adventurer and tinkerer of Brazilian heritage, became famous beginning in the 1890s for flying around in public displays in his various dirigible designs.Santos-Dumont AirshipsSee also:Alberto Santos-Dumont - WikipediaI will not re-iterate the entire Wright Brothers story, which has been told well in many readily-available sources; but the point to remember here is that they were the first ones to realize BOTH (A) that roll control (in addition to pitch control up-down, and yaw control right-left, was necessary to keep an airplane stable for any length of travel, and ALSO (B) that roll control was the way airplanes (and birds) actually turn. They came up with the idea of twisting the wings — exactly as birds and bats do — through cables and pulleys, controllable by the pilot. That, together with the vertical “rudders” and horizontal “elevators” that other inventors had already come up with, gave the Wrights’ airplanes full three-axis control.Wright Flyer - WikipediaBack to Santos-Dumont. He was already both rich and famous and prone to giving public exhibitions. He put together all the known elements of proven aircraft design into a plane he called the “14bis:”Santos-Dumont 14-bis - WikipediaHowever, even then, his plane was only controllable in two dimensions, pitch (up and down) and yaw (swinging the nose left or right) and so it “turned” the way an ocean ship does — with its vertical rudder. In lieu of actual roll control, Santos-Dumont’s airplane had its wings built with a steep dihedral angle, resembling many free-flight modern model planes; these upturned wingtips add inherent roll stability to the vehicle as it travels through the air, since any tendency to roll will add lift on the “down” wing and reduce lift on the “up” wing, thus tending to restore the balance.This provided inherent roll stability but did not allow for efficient banked turns. As a result, like other early aircraft before the Wright’s roll control invention was adopted, it was difficult and slow to turn— AND difficult or near-impossible to restore to an upright configuration in the event a roll (induced by a gust of wind, or whatever) exceeded the inherent, fixed stability of the wing dihedral. NOT a good thing, safety-wise, in a plane meant not just for quick demonstration hops in calm winds, but for actually travelling from point A to point B across varying weather and terrain.In 1906, Santos-Dumont put on an exhibition in France in his 14bis, a heavier-than-air, powered airplane he had designed. This was the first time in history that anybody had successfully flown a powered, heavier-than-air, human-carrying aircraft any significant distance (as opposed to the short hops of Ader’s Eole), in public. As a result, Santos-Dumont was widely hailed by the world press as the “inventor” of the powered, controllable, human-carrying airplane. It was in fact the first powered, heavier-than-air, human-carrying flight to be certified by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), which is still the certifying body for official “world records” in the aviation field.But they were wrong to call Santos-Dumont the first to succeed. Leery of the consequences of public failure such as that experienced by Langley after the Aerodrome crashed into the Potomac, the Wrights — a pair of bicycle-makers from Dayton, Ohio — carried out their aerial experiments in secret, at a remote location — the dunes of the Atlantic barrier island on the Outer Banks near the town of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, beginning in 1900. They started with gliders, based on Chanute and Lilienthal ideas, then by 1902 they added the 3-axis control system the Wrights had developed themselves, and, finally, by December, 1903, they added a lightweight, gasoline-powered engine (also of their own design) to their “Flyer” and tried it out, successfully, in multiple flights at Kitty Hawk. THAT fully controllable, powered, heavier-than-air, human-carrying flight was the first of its kind in history.But NOBODY KNEW ABOUT IT yet. Though the Wrights telegraphed their success to their father back in Dayton and asked him to announce it to the press — stop and think for a minute. Two amateur experimenters from a small Midwest town, complete unknowns with no institutional affiliation, succeeded in inventing heavier-than-air flight when the Director of the Smithsonian Institution, the most prestigious scientific establishment in the USA (and one of the top in the world) at the time, had failed? As had Dr. Bell, the high-tech entrepreneur telephone magnate, despite the vast resources (and ingenuity) he had at his command? People laughed. And then, when Santos-Dumont came along and flew in a public exhibition with grand hoopla and self-promotion, he got the credit (FOR A WHILE) for being first.The world heard rumors of the Wrights’ developments, of course, but the brothers were still secretive until they had developed the controllability, endurance, and practicality of their invention to a higher degree. In 1908, the Wrights finally put on a public exhibition of their Flyer, at an international aviation fair in LeMans, France. Santos-Dumont was there as well, along with other pioneer aviators who had flown by then, including Henri Farman and the Voisins and others. The long and short of it is, the Wright machine was the only one that had developed full three-axis controls, and it flew rings around the other entries. The aeronautical thinkers of the day readily admitted how superior the Wright machine was to all the others. And, yes, the Wright machine had in fact flown before any of the others.1908: The Year the Airplane Went PublicSee also:Michael Jacobs's answer to How did the Wright brothers' airplane work?Michael Jacobs's answer to What was the second airplane produced after the Wright Flyer?So, Santos-Dumont was a great aviation pioneer. And, Brazil is rightly proud of their native son. But he did not in fact invent the first successful heavier-than-air, powered, fully-controllable, human-carrying aircraft. That goes to the Wrights.Thanks for the A2A.