HISTORY OF FLIGHT—LOENING 351 
Competition which was specifically designed to advance and encourage 
airplanes that could land in smaller fields over obstacles without sacri- 
fice of useful high speed. This was the real beginning of the STOL? 
in this country. 
The winner of that competition was the Curtiss “Tanager,” a very 
intelligent design that made full use of the then-existing high-lift 
devices. Did all aircraft, the year following, adopt split flaps, or 
Fowler flaps, or Handley-Page slots that had been so successfully 
demonstrated? They did not. There was the usual opposition, criti- 
cism, and delay for several years more before this highly desirable 
development in aircraft wing structure came to its now universal 
fruition. A fine recent example is the Helio-Courier. 
POWERPLANTS 
Let us look for a moment at the history of the development of air- 
craft powerplants. The Wrights designed their own engine for their 
own aircraft, and for its purpose it was correct. In France, in the 
earlier days, most of the early powerplants were derived from auto- 
mobile or motorcycle sources. The first plane to make an officially re- 
corded flight in Europe, the Santos-Dumont “14-bis,” used a 50-horse- 
power, 8-cylinder Antoinette motor. But it was not long (1909) 
before the French had developed the Gnome rotary air-cooled motor 
which in ever-increasing sizes and improved types took over the field 
for several years and saw very wide use in the First World War. 
In this country, Curtiss continued to develop his original motorcycle 
engine into a series of aircraft engines, such as the 90-horsepower 
OX-5 and others of even higher horsepower. Then came the Liberty 
motor development, while in Germany there was wide development of 
water-cooled automobile-type upright engines of this character. 
Very little thought had been given to the fact that whereas in an 
automobile it is desirable, in fact mandatory, for the crankshaft to be 
low, in the case of the tractor-type airplane it was highly desirable 
for the crankshaft to be high, so as to provide propeller-tip clearance, 
to keep the center of gravity low, and enable the pilot to see over the 
engine. It was not until 1924, however, some 15 years after the Curtiss 
and Wright engines, and later the Hall-Scott and the Liberties, had 
gone into extended use, that we in America finally saw the light on this 
and inverted the dry-sump Liberty engine, thus placing it in the con- 
figuration in which it should have been all along. Except for its 
successful use in the Loening amphibian, this development came 
almost too late, because it was shortly succeeded by the radial air- 
cooled engine that developed to such a great extent from the original 
pioneer work done by Charles Lawrance, the designer of Lindbergh’s 
Wright “Whirlwind” engine. 
4 Short takeoff and landing. 
536608—60——24 
