 | CHAPTER XX.
SOARING FLIGHT.
By Octave Chanute. Flying Machines: Construction and Operation: A Practical Book Which Shows, in Illustrations, Working Plans and Text, How to Build and Navigate the Modern Airship. |  |
Buzzards Soar in Dead Calm.
A still greater mystery was propounded by the few observers who asserted that they had seen buzzards soaring in a dead calm, maintaining their elevation and their speed. Among these observers was Mr. E. C. Huffaker, at one time assistant experimenter for Professor Langley. The writer believed and said then that he must in some way have been mistaken, yet, to satisfy himself, he paid several visits to Mr. Huffaker, in Eastern Tennessee and took along his anemometer. He saw quite a number of buzzards sailing at a height of 75 to 100 feet in breezes measuring 5 or 6 miles an hour at the surface of the ground, and once he saw one buzzard soaring apparently in a dead calm.
The writer was fairly baffled. The bird was not simply gliding, utilizing gravity or acquired momentum, he was actually circling horizontally in defiance of physics and mathematics. It took two years and a whole series of further observations to bring those two sciences into accord with the facts.
| CHAPTER XX.
SOARING FLIGHT.
By Octave Chanute. Flying Machines: Construction and Operation: A Practical Book Which Shows, in Illustrations, Working Plans and Text, How to Build and Navigate the Modern Airship. | |