Fixed-wing aircraft: Encyclopedia II - Fixed-wing aircraft - Types of fixed-wing aircraft

Fixed-wing aircraft - Types of fixed-wing aircraft

Fixed-wing aircraft - Propeller aircraft

Propeller airplanes make use of combustion engines, that in turn, turn a propeller, which creates the necessary force for the movement of the aircraft. They are relatively quiet, but they fly at lower speeds, and have lower load capacity compared to similar sized jet powered aircraft. However, they are significantly cheaper and much more economic than jets, and is the generally the best option for people who need to use an airplane in a smaller company to transport a few passengers and/or small amounts of cargo. They are also the aircraft of choice for pilots who wish to own their own aircraft.

Fixed-wing aircraft - Jet aircraft

Jet airplanes make use of turbines for the creation of the necessary force for the movement of the aircraft. Jet airplanes generally have turbine engines that are much more powerful than a reciprocating engine. As consequence, they have greater weight capacity and faster flight speeds than propeller driven aircraft. One drawback, however is the great amount of sound created for a turbine; this makes jet airplanes a source of noise pollution.

The jet airplane was developed in England and Germany in 1931. The first jet was the Heinkel HE 178,which was tested at Germany's Marienehe Airfield in 1939. In 1943 the Messerschmidt ME 262,the first jet fighter airplane,went into service in the German Luftwaffe. In the early 1950's,only a few years after the first jet to be produced in large numbers arrived,de Havilland introduced the Comet airliner which was the world's first jet airliner.

Huge widebodies ("wide bodies"), such as the Airbus A340 and Boeing 777, can carry hundreds of passengers and several tons of cargo, and are able to travel for distances of up to 13 thousand kilometers - a little more than one quarter of the circumference of the Earth.

Jet airplanes possess high cruising speeds (700 to 900 km/h) and relatively high speeds for take-off and landing (150 to 250 km/h). Due to the high speeds needed for takeoff and landing, the jet airplane makes great use of flaps and leading edge devices for the control of lift and speed, and has engine reversers (or thrust reverses) (to direct the airflow frontward) on most engines for slowing down the aircraft upon landing to supplement the brakes.

Fixed-wing aircraft - Super sonic aircraft

Super sonic airplanes, such as military fighters and bombers, the Concorde, also known as the SST (SuperSonic Transport) and others, make use of special turbines (often utilizing afterburners), that generate the huge amounts of power for flight faster than the speed of the sound. Moreover, the design of the supersonic airplane has substantial differences from the design of sub-sonic airplanes, in order to make the transition to supersonic flight smoother and to make supersonic flight more efficient.

Flight at super-sonic speed creates much more sound pollution than flight at sub-sonic speeds, due to the phenomena of sonic booms. This limits super-sonic flights to areas of minimal population density or open ocean. When they approach an area of heavier population density, super-sonic airplanes are obliged to fly at sub-sonic speed.

Due to the high costs, limited areas of use and low demand there are no longer any super-sonic aircraft in use by any major airline, and the last Concorde flight was November 26, 2003. It appears that supersonic aircraft will remain in use almost exclusively by militaries around the world for the foreseeable future.

Fixed-wing aircraft - Rocket-powered aircraft

Experimental rocket powered aircraft were developed by the Germans as early as World War II, although they were never mass produced by any power during that war. The first fixed wing aircraft to break the sound barrier was the rocket powered Bell X-1. The later North American X-15 was another important rocket plane, that broke many speed and altitude records and laid much of the groundwork for later aircraft and spacecraft design. Rocket airplanes are not in common usage today, although rocket-assisted takeoffs are somewhat common for military aircraft. SpaceShipOne is the most famous current rocket airplane that is the testbed for developing a commercial sub-orbital passenger service.

Fixed-wing aircraft - Ramjet aircraft

Ramjet (and the Scramjet variant) aircraft are mostly in the experimental stage. The D-21 Tagboard was an unmanned Mach 3+ reconnaissance drone that was put into production in 1969 for spying, but due to the poor level of success and the development of better spy satellites, it was cancelled in 1971. The SR-71's Pratt & Whitney J58 engines act as ramjets at high-speeds (Mach 3.2). The last SR-71 flight was in October 1999. The Boeing X-43 is an experimental scramjet with a world speed record for a jet-powered aircraft - Mach 9.6, or nearly 7,000 mph. The X-43A set the record on Nov. 16, 2004.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Types of fixed-wing aircraft", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki