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The VanDersarl Blériot: a 1911 airplane homebuilt by teenage brothers (2017)

42 points by ForHackernews

by consumer451

4 subcomments

Here is one in flight, very recently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRYdpoOakAY

by leobg

1 subcomments

It was also two teenagers who, some 50 years earlier, came up with the idea of flying machines and the aerodynamics of wings in the first place:
The brothers Otto and Gustav Lilienthal were watching the storks take flight in the meadows of Mecklenburg in the 1850s. And it made them think, “We could do that, too, if we only had wings like that”.
Of course, Otto died in a crash of one of his motorless flying machines in 1891, I believe. But the Wright brothers saw the eulogy in the paper… and the rest is history.

by xeonmc

1 subcomments

by jacquesm

3 subcomments

I'm trying to imagine what a bunch of teenagers could do today to get a similar sense of accomplishment. Note that they weren't even doing particularly well at grade school.

by burnt-resistor

0 subcomment

And there's building a (non-replica) plane out of cardboard: https://youtu.be/CTEYcDU91p8

by John-Tony

0 subcomment

by msuniverse2026

3 subcomments

It is so unfortunate that flying has such a credentialist mafia holding it back from more widespread use. Imagine if motorcycles had even half the regulations to ride as single seater aircraft do. Such a ridiculous state of affairs.