Aerospace Influence in World War I

John Moss Wathen IV earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from Pennsylvania State University. He also served as a cadet in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps. Today, John Wathen IV is interested in going to flight school after taking courses on flight in college.

Humans generated a need for airplanes after the Wright Brothers completed a successful flight test in 1903. The aerospace attraction grew so quickly that in 1909, Eustace, Horace, and Oswald Short built six planes in Britain using a license the Wright Brothers provided them.

The Wright Brothers created the first military aircraft in 1908, and the First World War accelerated the production of military aircraft so much that by the beginning of the war, France and Germany had over 3,500 military aircraft combined. The United States joined the war in 1917 and, in the same year, embarked on the mass production of military aircraft. By the end of the war, aerospace factories in America could produce up to 21,000 planes per year, contributing to the Allied Powers' victory.

Technology That Makes Plane Tracking

John Moss Wathen IV is an aerospace engineer who studied the subject at Pennsylvania State University. One aspect of aviation that John Wathen IV studied in preparation for being a pilot is tracking planes by control towers and monitoring sites.

Until the past decade, tracking airplanes required the would-be tracker to go through the airport the plane took off from for flight data. The data was always slightly off as the airports had to rely on their instruments to detect the plane’s position. The newest system, called Automatic-Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast or ADS-B, gathers data directly from the plane.

The core of ADS-B technology is a transponder that relays information about the craft (location, altitude, and identification) at a high frequency back to the airport. The weakness of this system is that the high-frequency signal is easily blocked by the curvature of the Earth, meaning that planes need to fly higher to make sure the signal can reach its destination. Regardless, the information is more readily available now than ever in aviation history, allowing airports to be more precise with tracking their planes and for independent plane-tracking sites to gather data quickly and easily.

Wind Tunnels Test Planes Without Flying

John Moss Wathen IV is a student of aerospace engineering. Having completed his degree in 2017, he is currently studying to become a pilot. In his studies, John Wathen IV has studied the technology used to test and assess new plane models.

Testing airplane models can be costly and risky in theory. If it were the case, the only way to test them was to take them for a flight. However, one way to test new airplane models that simulate flight with little risk is wind tunnel tests. A wind tunnel is a large tube containing an aircraft with powerful fans that push wind around the object in the middle.

The object, which is often a plane but could also be a piece of an aircraft or a miscellaneous object like a football, is secured in the middle of the tube, and scientists observe the movement of air around it using smoke or dye. The process of wind tunnel testing is not cheap, but if performed efficiently, it can be one of the quickest ways to test new models and subsequently improve performance.