{"id":158,"date":"2004-10-31T01:30:02","date_gmt":"2004-10-30T15:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/?p=158"},"modified":"2006-01-28T01:30:20","modified_gmt":"2006-01-27T15:30:20","slug":"leonardos-glider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/?p=158","title":{"rendered":"Leonardo&#8217;s Glider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We will of course never know if Leonardo ever truly flight-tested his glider designs, but there have been a couple of recent attempts to see how sound the design was. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cronaca.com\/archives\/001769.html\">A 1980s reconstruction apparently did fly but has been criticised for its use of modern materials<\/a> such as nylon sail cloth and aluminium, bringing the weight down by a factor of eight. <\/p>\n<p>In 2002, however,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.airsport-photo.co.uk\/miscpages\/leonardo.html\"> the BBC commissioned another reconstruction<\/a> &#8211; this time using materials faithful to Leonardo&#8217;s design &#8211; bamboo for the framework and sealed cotton for the sail. While there were stability problems, the addition of a tailplane &#8211; consistent with Leonardo&#8217;s other work on flight &#8211; provided a workable solution.<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/wp-content\/ldvglider1.jpg' alt='daVinci glider' \/><\/p>\n<p>And this one managed several stable flights, including one as long as 18 seconds with considerable promise for longer flights under better conditions&#8230;<br \/>\n<img src='http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/wp-content\/ldvglider2.jpg' alt='Leonardo da Vinci glider' \/><\/p>\n<p>Cheers<br \/>\nJerry <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We will of course never know if Leonardo ever truly flight-tested his glider designs, but there have been a couple of recent attempts to see how sound the design was. A 1980s reconstruction apparently did fly but has been criticised for its use of modern materials such as nylon sail cloth and aluminium, bringing the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,2,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-journal","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}