AERONAUTICS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 7 December 1927, Page 6

AERONAUTICS

NEW TYPE 'PLANE RISES VERTICALLY WITHOVT PROPELLER. New York. Successful tests of two new departures in aeronautics, a vertically rising ’plane of revolutionary design and a propellerless airplane motor, have been announced by the Curtiss Aeroplane Company and Harry N. Atwood, veteran aviator. The obstacles to perpendicular flight have been surmounted in wind tunnel tests at the Curtiss Laboratories at Garden City, N.Y., ot a new type of air machine which can climb at the rate of 1900 feet a minute, it was said, and the Curtiss directors voted to produce a standard ’plane of this type to cost £15,000, The airplane motor, an internal combustion engine developing cower without the use of a propeller by utilising the exhaust to drive itself forward, much like a rocket, was put to successful test at Philadelphia, Mr Atwood announced at Springfield, Mass. The new Curtiss ’plane which embodies some of the principles of the auto-gyro, is the invention of M. B. Bleecker, 24 4 who said the idea came to him while he was a student in tne aeronautical department of the University of Michigan. THE ’PLANE DESCRIBED. The model as tested has four wings, though the proposed standard machine was to have tnree. These wings are on a horizontal plane and rotate above the fuselage. Propellers will be placed in the wing motors half-way out on the landing edge. While the ability of the ’plane to rise vertically was said to be phenomenal, its forward speed will be only trom 50 to 75 miles an hour, though company officials believed this would be no deterrent to its application to commercial and military purposes. Details of the propellerless motor, as announced by Mr Atwood, aive the new engine as being bottleshaped. with all of the mechanism inside. Its exploding gases, fie said, may be discharged either into the air or water, permitting its use either as a marine or as an airplane mptor. Mr Atwood said the first model, as tested in Philadeplhia, weighed 4.8 pounds and developed 3.8 horse-power. Larger engines, he said, would reduce the ratio to less than one pound per horse-power, fess than one-half that of existing standard airplane motors.