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Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity on the planet. The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. From an anthropocentric perspective, humankind is seen as separate from nature and superior to it, and other entities (animals, plants, minerals, etc.) are viewed as resources for humans to use.

It is possible to distinguish between at least three types of anthropocentrism: perceptual anthropocentrism (which "characterizes paradigms informed by sense-data from human sensory organs"); descriptive anthropocentrism (which "characterizes paradigms that begin from, center upon, or are ordered around Homo sapiens / ‘the human'"); and normative anthropocentrism (which "characterizes paradigms that make assumptions or assertions about the superiority of Homo sapiens, its capacities, the primacy of its values, [or] its position in the universe").

Anthropocentrism tends to interpret the world in terms of human values and experiences. It is considered to be profoundly embedded in many modern human cultures and conscious acts. It is a major concept in the field of environmental ethics and environmental philosophy, where it is often considered to be the root cause of problems created by human action within the ecosphere. However, many proponents of anthropocentrism state that this is not necessarily the case: they argue that a sound long-term view acknowledges that the global environment must be made continually suitable for humans and that the real issue is shallow anthropocentrism.

Environmental philosophy
Some environmental philosophers have argued that anthropocentrism is a core part of a perceived human drive to dominate or "master" the Earth. Anthropocentrism is believed by some to be the central problematic concept in environmental philosophy, where it is used to draw attention to claims of a systematic bias in traditional Western attitudes to the non-human world that shapes humans' sense of self and identities. Val Plumwood argued that anthropocentrism plays an analogous role in green theory to androcentrism in feminist theory and ethnocentrism in anti-racist theory. Plumwood called human-centredness "anthrocentrism" to emphasise this parallel.

One of the first extended philosophical essays addressing environmental ethics, John Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature has been criticised by defenders of deep ecology because of its anthropocentrism, often claimed to be constitutive of traditional Western moral thought. Indeed, defenders of anthropocentrism concerned with the ecological crisis contend that the maintenance of a healthy, sustainable environment is necessary for human well-being as opposed to for its own sake. According to William Grey, the problem with a "shallow" viewpoint is not that it is human-centred: "What's wrong with shallow views is not their concern about the well-being of humans, but that they do not really consider enough in what that well-being consists. According to this view, we need to develop an enriched, fortified anthropocentric notion of human interest to replace the dominant short-term, sectional and self-regarding conception." In turn, Plumwood in Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason argued that Grey's anthropocentrism is inadequate.

Many devoted environmentalists encompass a somewhat anthropocentric-based philosophical view supporting the fact that they will argue in favor of saving the environment for the sake of human populations. Grey writes: "We should be concerned to promote a rich, diverse, and vibrant biosphere. Human flourishing may certainly be included as a legitimate part of such a flourishing." Such a concern for human flourishing amidst the flourishing of life as a whole, however, is said to be indistinguishable from that of deep ecology and biocentrism, which has been proposed as both an antithesis of anthropocentrism and as a generalised form of anthropocentrism.

Judaeo–Christian traditions
In the 1985 CBC series "A Planet For the Taking", David Suzuki explored the Old Testament roots of anthropocentrism and how it shaped human views of non-human animals. Some Christian proponents of anthropocentrism base their belief on the Bible, such as the verse 1:26 in the Book of Genesis: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

The use of the word "dominion" in the Genesis has been used to justify an anthropocentric worldview, but recently some have found it controversial, viewing it as possibly a mistranslation from the Hebrew. However an argument can be made that the Bible actually places all the importance on God as creator, and humans as merely another part of creation.

Moses Maimonides, a Torah scholar who lived in the twelfth century AD, was renowned for his staunch opposition to anthropocentrism. He referred to humans as "just a drop in the bucket" and asserted that "humans are not the axis of the world". He also claimed that anthropocentric thinking is what leads humans to believe in the existence of evil things in nature. According to Rabbi Norman Lamm, Moses Maimonides "refuted the exaggerated ideas about the importance of man and urged us to abandon these fantasies.

Catholic social teaching sees the pre-eminence of human beings over the rest of creation in terms of service rather than domination. Pope Francis, in his 2015 encyclical letter Laudato si' , notes that "an obsession with denying any pre-eminence to the human person" endangers the concern which should be shown to protecting and upholding the welfare of all people, which he argues should rank alongside the "care for our common home" which is the subject of his letter. In the same text he acknowledges that "a mistaken understanding" of Christian belief "has at times led us to justify mistreating nature, to exercise tyranny over creation": in such actions, Christian believers have "not [been] faithful to the treasures of wisdom which we have been called to protect and preserve. In his follow-up exhortation, Laudate Deum (2023) he refers to a preferable understanding of "the unique and central value of the human being amid the marvellous concert of all God's creatures" as a "situated anthropocentrism".

Human rights
Anthropocentrism is the grounding for some naturalistic concepts of human rights. Defenders of anthropocentrism argue that it is the necessary fundamental premise to defend universal human rights, since what matters morally is simply being human. For example, noted philosopher Mortimer J. Adler wrote, "Those who oppose injurious discrimination on the moral ground that all human beings, being equal in their humanity, should be treated equally in all those respects that concern their common humanity, would have no solid basis in fact to support their normative principle." Adler is stating here that denying what is now called human exceptionalism could lead to tyranny, writing that if humans ever came to believe that they do not possess a unique moral status, the intellectual foundation of their liberties collapses: "Why, then, should not groups of superior men be able to justify their enslavement, exploitation, or even genocide of inferior human groups on factual and moral grounds akin to those we now rely on to justify our treatment of the animals we harness as beasts of burden, that we butcher for food and clothing, or that we destroy as disease-bearing pests or as dangerous predators?"

Author and anthropocentrism defender Wesley J. Smith from the Discovery Institute has written that human exceptionalism is what gives rise to human duties to each other, the natural world, and to treat animals humanely. Writing in A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy, a critique of animal rights ideology, "Because we are unquestionably a unique species—the only species capable of even contemplating ethical issues and assuming responsibilities—we uniquely are capable of apprehending the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, proper and improper conduct toward animals. Or to put it more succinctly, if being human isn't what requires us to treat animals humanely, what in the world does?"

Animal rights
Anthropocentrism has been criticised by animal rights and welfare advocates, who contend that the belief that humans are more important than other animals is false and that like humans, non-human animals have intrinsic value. One of the earliest of these critics was the zoologist and philosopher J. Howard Moore, who in The Universal Kinship (1906) argued that Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) "sealed the doom of anthropocentricism [sic]" and that:"The supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human beings has no more existence, outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure fiction. The supposition is a relic of the rapidly dwindling vanity of anthropocentricism [sic], and is perpetuated from age to age by human selfishness and conceit. It has no foundation either in science or in common-sense. Man strives to lessen his guilt by the laudation of himself and the disparagement and degradation of his victims."Philosophers such as Peter Singer and David Pearce have argued against anthropocentric ethics, instead advocating for antispeciesist or sentientist ethics, which rather than giving more value to humans based on their species membership, assert that "other things being equal, equally strong interests should count equally." This utilitarian principle is based on the dictum "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one" attributed to Jeremy Bentham by John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism (1876).

Cognitive psychology
In cognitive psychology, the term anthropocentric thinking has been defined as "the tendency to reason about unfamiliar biological species or processes by analogy to humans." Reasoning by analogy is an attractive thinking strategy, and it can be tempting to apply one's own experience of being human to other biological systems. For example, because death is commonly felt to be undesirable, it may be tempting to form the misconception that death at a cellular level or elsewhere in nature is similarly undesirable (whereas in reality programmed cell death is an essential physiological phenomenon, and ecosystems also rely on death). Conversely, anthropocentric thinking can also lead people to underattribute human characteristics to other organisms. For instance, it may be tempting to wrongly assume that an animal that is very different from humans, such as an insect, will not share particular biological characteristics, such as reproduction or blood circulation.

Anthropocentric thinking has predominantly been studied in young children (mostly up to the age of 10) by developmental psychologists interested in its relevance to biology education. Children as young as 6 have been found to attribute human characteristics to species unfamiliar to them (in Japan), such as rabbits, grasshoppers or tulips. Although relatively little is known about its persistence at a later age, evidence exists that this pattern of human exceptionalist thinking can continue through young adulthood at least, even among students who have been increasingly educated in biology.

The notion that anthropocentric thinking is an innate human characteristic has been challenged by study of American children raised in urban environments, among whom it appears to emerge between the ages of 3 and 5 years as an acquired perspective. Children's recourse to anthropocentric thinking seems to vary with their experience of nature, and cultural assumptions about the place of humans in the natural world. For example, whereas young children who kept goldfish were found to think of frogs as being more goldfish-like, other children tended to think of frogs in terms of humans. More generally, children raised in rural environments appear to use anthropocentric thinking less than their urban counterparts because of their greater familiarity with different species of animals and plants. Studies involving children from some of the indigenous peoples of the Americas have found little use of anthropocentric thinking. Study of children among the Wichí people in South America showed a tendency to think of living organisms in terms of their perceived taxonomic similarities, ecological considerations, and animistic traditions, resulting in a much less anthropocentric view of the natural world than is experienced by many children in Western societies.

In popular culture
In fiction from all eras and societies, there is fiction depicting the actions of humans to ride, eat, milk, and otherwise treat (non-human) animals as inferior. There are occasional fictional exceptions, such as talking animals as aberrations to the rule distinguishing people from animals.

In science fiction, humanocentrism is the idea that humans, as both beings and as a species, are the superior sentients. Essentially the equivalent of racial supremacy on a galactic scale, it entails intolerant discrimination against sentient non-humans, much like race supremacists discriminate against those not of their race. A prime example of this concept is utilized as a story element for the Mass Effect series. After humanity's first contact results in a brief war, many humans in the series develop suspicious or even hostile attitudes towards the game's various alien races. By the time of the first game, which takes place several decades after the war, many humans still retain such sentiments in addition to forming 'pro-human' organizations.

This idea is countered by anti-humanism. At times, this ideal also includes fear of and superiority over strong AIs and cyborgs, downplaying the ideas of integration, cybernetic revolts, machine rule and Tilden's Laws of Robotics.

Mark Twain mocked the belief in human supremacy in Letters from the Earth (written c. 1909, published 1962).

The Planet of the Apes franchise focuses on the analogy of apes becoming the dominant species in society and the fall of humans (see also human extinction). In the 1968 film, Taylor, a human states "take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!". In the 2001 film, this is contrasted with Attar (a gorilla)'s quote "take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!". This links in with allusions that in becoming the dominant species apes are becoming more like humans (anthropomorphism). In the film Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Virgil, an orangutan states "ape has never killed ape, let alone an ape child. Aldo has killed an ape child. The branch did not break. It was cut with a sword." in reference to planned murder; a stereotypical human concept. Additionally, in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar states "I always think...ape better than human. I see now...how much like them we are."

In George Orwell's novel Animal Farm, this theme of anthropocentrism is also present. Whereas originally the animals planned for liberation from humans and animal equality, as evident from the "seven commandments" such as "whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy", "Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend", "All animals are equal"; the pigs would later abridge the commandments with statements such as "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", and "Four legs good, two legs better."

The 2012 documentary The Superior Human? systematically analyzes anthropocentrism and concludes that value is fundamentally an opinion, and since life forms naturally value their own traits, most humans are misled to believe that they are actually more valuable than other species. This natural bias, according to the film, combined with a received sense of comfort and an excuse for exploitation of non-humans cause anthropocentrism to remain in society.

In his 2009 book Eating Animals, Jonathan Foer describes anthropocentrism as "The conviction that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, the appropriate yardstick by which to measure the lives of other animals, and the rightful owners of everything that lives."

title: Anthropocentrism


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Coandă-1910

The Coandă-1910, designed by Romanian inventor Henri Coandă, was an unconventional sesquiplane aircraft powered by a ducted fan. Called the "turbo-propulseur" by Coandă, its experimental engine consisted of a conventional piston engine driving a multi-bladed centrifugal blower which exhausted into a duct. The unusual aircraft attracted attention at the Second International Aeronautical Exhibition in Paris in October 1910, being the only exhibit without a propeller, but the aircraft was not displayed afterwards, and it fell from public awareness. Coandă used a similar turbo-propulseur to drive a snow sledge, but he did not develop it further for aircraft.

Decades later, after the practical demonstration of motorjets and turbojets, Coandă began to tell various conflicting stories about how his early experiments were precursors to the jet, even that his turbo-propulseur was the first motorjet engine with fuel combustion in the airstream. He also claimed to have made a single brief flight in December 1910, crashing just after takeoff, the aircraft being destroyed by fire. Two aviation historians countered Coandă's version of events, saying there was no proof that the engine had combustion in the airstream, and no proof that the aircraft ever flew. In 1965, Coandă brought drawings forward to prove his claim of combustion ducting, but these were shown to be reworked, differing substantially from the originals. Many aviation historians were dismissive, saying that Coandă's turbo-propulseur design involved a weak stream of "plain air," not a powerful jet of air expanding from fuel combustion.

In 2010, based on the notion that Coandă invented the first jet, the centennial of the jet aircraft was celebrated in Romania. A special coin and stamp were issued, and construction began on a working replica of the aircraft. At the European Parliament, an exhibition commemorated the building and testing of the Coandă-1910.

Early developments
Coandă was interested in achieving reactive propelled flight as early as 1905, conducting tests of rockets attached to model aircraft at the Romanian Army arsenal in Bucharest. In secret, at Spandau in Germany, Coandă successfully tested a flying machine equipped with a single tractor propeller, and two counter-rotating propellers providing lift, powered by a 50-horsepower (37 kW) Antoinette engine. Positioned along the fuselage centreline, the smaller rear lift propeller was mounted vertically, while the larger front one was inclined slightly forwards at 17 degrees. According to later claims, Coandă tested the aircraft at Cassel, witnessed by the Chancellor of the German Empire Bernhard von Bülow. It was around this time that Coandă's interest in jet propulsion began, claiming that the aircraft and a jet-propelled model were displayed in December 1907 at the Sporthalle indoor sports arena in Berlin. Coandă continued his studies at Liège, Belgium, where with his roommate and friend Giovanni Battista Caproni he built the Coandă-Caproni box glider, based on the plans of gliders designed by Otto Lilienthal and Octave Chanute which he previously studied at Charlottenburg and Spandau. In 1909 he was employed as technical director of the Liège-Spa Aeroclub, and at the end of that year, with the help of car manufacturer Joachim he built the Coandă-Joachim glider. Caproni was present when the glider was flown at Spa-Malchamps, Belgium.

1910s

With the opening of the École supérieure d'aéronautique et de constructions mécaniques on 15 November 1909, Coandă moved to Paris. As a continuation of his Belgian experiments, and especially looking for a way to test wing aerofoils at higher speeds, he contacted Ernest Archdeacon, the co-founder of L'Aero-Club de France, who in turn directed Coandă to Gustav Eiffel and Paul Painlevé. With their assistance, he gained approval to test different wing configurations and air resistance on a platform built by Eiffel at the front of a locomotive on the North of France railway. In March, he started flying lessons at Reims in a Hanriot monoplane.

Helped by his schoolfriend Cammarotta-AdornoIn, Coandă started to build his slender sesquiplane and the unusual powerplant in a workshop in the courtyard of his house where he tested the thrust of the powerplant on a dynamometer, tests which are described in detail in the April 1910 edition of La Technique Aéronautique. He filed for several patents for the mechanism and aircraft on 30 May 1910, with later additions to the existing patents.

Coandă exhibited the aircraft at the Second International Aeronautical Exhibition (commonly referred to as the Paris salon, or Paris flight salon) held from 15 October to 2 November 1910. Together with Henri Fabre's Hydravion, the first floatplane, Coandă's aircraft and devices used for aerodynamic experiments were placed "in solitary state" in an upstairs gallery, separated from the more usual types of aircraft on the main exhibition floor.

The aircraft's construction was a novelty for the time. In contrast to the monoplane described in the July 1910 patent application, the exhibit was a sesquiplane which complicated the construction, but in return solved lateral stability control issues. The cantilevered wings were held in place at three points by tubular steel struts without any bracing from flying wires. According to Coandă's description the wings were built with metal spars, but existing photographs of the construction show a completely wooden internal structure. The trailing edges of the upper wing could be twisted separately or together for lateral control or braking during landing, and were controlled by pedals in the two-seat open cockpit. The fuselage, painted reddish-brown and highly polished, was described by The Technical World magazine as having a framework of steel, though the construction photographs indicate that it had a wooden framework. This was triangular in cross-section with convex ribs edged with strips of steel, and strengthened with a covering of heat-shaped moulded plywood. Tubular radiators for engine cooling were located on either side of the cockpit. The vertical struts from the wings were secured to the fuselage with steel collars fixed with screws. The fuselage terminated in a cruciform empennage with control surfaces at 45° angles to vertical and horizontal. Four triangular surfaces at the rear of the tail were controlled using a pair of large Antoinette VII-style steering wheels mounted outside of the cockpit, one on each side, and were used for pitch and directional control. It was an early instance of what are now known as ruddervators. Forward of the tail was a small horizontal stabiliser. The fuel tank was located in the fuselage between the engine and the cockpit.

The most remarkable feature of the aircraft was its engine. Instead of a propeller, a 50 hp (37 kW) inline water-cooled internal combustion engine built by Pierre Clerget at the Clément-Bayard workshop with funding from L'Aero-Club de France, placed in the forward section of the fuselage drove a rotary compressor through a 1:4 gearbox (1,000 rpm on the Clerget turned the compressor at 4,000 rpm), which drew air in from the front and expelled it rearward under compression and with added heat. The compressor, with a diameter of 50 centimetres (20 in), was located within a cowling at the front of the fuselage. According to later Coandă descriptions, cast aluminium components were also made by Clerget to create an engine with a weight of 2.9 lb/hp – equivalent to a power-to-weight ratio of 0.36 hp/lb, a considerable achievement at the time.

Coandă's 1910s-era patents describe the inline piston engine's exhaust gases as being routed through heating channels or heat exchangers in contact with the central air flow, then sucked into the compressor inlet to reduce back-pressure on the engine while adding more heat and mass to the airflow. The turbo-propulseur was claimed to be capable of generating 2.20 kN of thrust. The powerplant was referred to in reports at the time by different terms: a turbine without propellers, turbo-propulseur, ducted fan or a suction turbine.

Aviation reporters from The Aero and La Technique Aeronautique were doubtful that the engine could provide sufficient thrust. The engine was noted in The Aero, reprinted in Aircraft, as being "of remarkably small proportions in relation to the size of the machine." The writer said the turbo-propulseur was "claimed to give an enormous wind velocity", but the intake area seemed too small to produce the stated thrust, and that "it also appears as if enormous power would be necessary to drive it", more than supplied by the Clerget.

The Coandă-1910 was reportedly sold to Charles Weymann in October 1910. A daily newspaper from Bucharest wrote in 1910 that the aircraft was constructed in Clerget's workshops and that it "will fly in 6–7 weeks near Paris, piloted by Weymann, one of the pilots celebrated at the Rennes aviation meeting." Another Bucharest newspaper listed the aircraft in November as "sold twice-over". It may be that Weymann expressed his willingness to buy the aircraft once tests had been carried out.

At the exhibition, reaction among observers was mixed. Some doubted the aircraft would fly, and focused on more likely machines such as the Sloan, the Voisin, or Louis Paulhan's design. Others gave special notice to the Coandă-1910, calling it original and ingenious. The reporter from La Technique Aeronautique wrote, "In the absence of definitive trials, permitting the precise yield of this machine, it is without doubt premature to say it will supersede the propeller ... the tentative is interesting and we watch it closely." The official exhibition report ignored the turbo-propulseur engine and instead described Coandă's novel wing design, and the unusual empennage. On 15 November 1910, L'Aérophile wrote that if the machine were ever to develop as the inventor hoped, it would be "a beautiful dream".

After the exhibition the aircraft was moved to a Clément-Bayard workshop at Issy-les-Moulineaux for further testing. This work is reflected by additions to the powerplant-related patents of 3 December. A group of modern-day Romanian investigators led by Dan Antoniu, having examined photographs from 1910, concluded that the rotary compressor featured at the exhibition was a hybrid between the one described in the initial 30 May 1910 patent and that shown in a later patent application. They felt that the exhibition machine had a simpler director system, a different rotor with a smaller intake cone, and that the exhaust gas heat transfer system had not been implemented. According to Gérard Hartmann in his Dossiers historiques et techniques aéronautique française, the propulsion system generated only 170 N of thrust, and to generate enough thrust for the aircraft to take off (estimated by Coandă at 240 N) Coandă would have had to spin the "turbine" (the rotary compressor) at a speed of 7,000 rpm with the risk of it exploding. This was not tried, but Hartmann concluded that the experiment proved that the solution worked perfectly.

Henri Mirguet writing for L'Aérophile magazine in January 1912, recalled the previous exhibition's machine as the "chief attraction" of the 1910 salon. He wrote that Coandă answered his "pressing—and indiscreet—questions" about the turbo-propulseur-powered aircraft at that earlier exhibit, telling him that the machine had attained a speed of 112 kilometres per hour (70 mph) during several "flight tests", an improbable answer about which Mirguet "reserved judgment", waiting for confirmation that never materialised.

Related developments
The additional turbo-propulseur patent application 13.502, dated 3 December 1910, was implemented on a double-seat motorised sled commissioned by Cyril Vladimirovich, Grand Duke of Russia. With the help of Despujols, a boat maker, and the motor manufacturer Gregoire, Coandă supervised the building of a motor sled, powered by a 30 hp (22 kW) Gregoire engine driving the turbo-propulseur. The sledge was blessed by Russian Orthodox priests at the Despujols plant near Paris on 2 December 1910. Starting the next day, it was exhibited for two weeks at the 12th Automobile Salon of France, alongside Gregoire-powered automobiles on the Gregoire stand. A number of automobile and general interest magazines published photographs or sketches of the sledge. A version of Coandă's turbo-propulseur design was shown for the second time in late 1910 at the Grand Palais of Paris. One of the periodicals reported an expected speed of 60 mph, but no account exists of the sledge being tested.

Coandă continued to work on the Coandă-1910 project at the beginning of 1911, aiming to improve stability, increase the power of the turbo-propulseur, and to implement aerofoil improvements. He applied for new patents for aerodynamic investigations and improvements of the Coandă-1910. Coandă described a different, more sturdy system for the attachment of the wings, which also enabled changes in the angle of attack and the centre of gravity. He aimed to obtain more power from the propulsion system, and design drawings show the arrangement of two air-cooled rotary engines on the sides of the fuselage. The placement of the engines indicates that Coandă did not intend to inject fuel into the jet stream and ignite it as the cooling of the engines would have been compromised. The patent was annotated with an additional claim on 19 July 1911 which brought significant changes including the addition of retractable landing gear with dampers inside aerodynamic fairings with skids, removal of the horizontal stabiliser, a supporting surface was provided for each engine and their accessories were covered to improve aerodynamics. Though Coandă continued to study rotary propulsion mechanisms, Antoniu believes that Coandă never implemented a practical solution because of the lack of funds. In May 1911 Coandă filed English-language patents on the turbo-propulseur design in the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as a second French-language patent filed in Switzerland, and he described it for the 1911 publication of L'Annuaire de l'Air.

The very expensive project of 1910, costing Coandă about one million francs, left him with limited funds. The possibility of a new contract with the French government led Coandă to build the Coandă-1911. He wished to win the French Army-organised Military Aviation Competition at Reims in October, one that required two engines in each aircraft as a fail-safe strategy. At the third aviation salon in Paris 1911, Coandă displayed a scale model of the aircraft which used two Gnome rotary engines mounted back to back, connected by a bevel gear to a single two-bladed propeller. The combination of two engines connected to one propeller was originally intended to drive a new turbine, but Coandă was unable to fund one. During trials the assembly did not provide enough traction and a four-bladed propeller was ordered. The mounting support of the engines, initially intended for a jet propulsion version, was not adequate for the new configuration so the forward chassis had to be modified. Henri Mirguet writing for L'Aérophile magazine in January 1912 said that the new 1911 aircraft retained the fuselage, the frame and the wing of Coandă's 1910 design, but did not keep the turbo-propulseur or "the wooden wingloading surface including the forward longitudinal ribs". The aircraft was flown on 21 October 1911, but with modest results as the latest modifications, especially those related to the powerplant, did not compensate for the increased total weight of the aircraft. At the military contest, it did not meet the requirement for independent operation of each engine.

Following the 1911 exhibition, at the personal request of Sir George White, Coandă moved to the United Kingdom to take a position as chief engineer or chief designer at British and Colonial Aeroplane Company for a few years. In the next four decades Coandă worked on a great variety of inventions. During World War II he revived his earlier turbo-propulseur engine when he was contracted by the German Army in late 1942 to develop an air propulsion system for military ambulance snow sledges much like the one made for the Russian Grand Duke. The German contract concluded after one year, yielding no plans for production. Though Coandă had experimented with a variety of nozzles, and said that he had achieved a degree of success, no turbojet-engine-style fuel injection or combustion in the air stream was attempted.

Coandă and his 1910 aircraft were absent from much of aviation literature of the day. None of the annual issues of Jane's All the World's Aircraft ever mentioned the Coandă-1910 or its turbo-propulseur powerplant. The Soviet engineer Nikolai Rynin made no mention of Coandă in his exhaustive nine-volume encyclopaedia on jet and rocket engines, written in the late 1920s and early '30s.

Later claims
With the arrival of the practical jet engine, several histories of the technology to date were written. A once-classified Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory and Jet Propulsion Laboratory study completed in 1946 described the Coandă-1910 as "probably not flown" but featuring "a mechanical jet propulsion device with a centrifugal blower", one in which heat from the Clerget piston engine "furnished auxiliary jet propulsion." In the editorial lead to their 1946 article on Coandă's "Augmented Flow", Flight terms it, "scarcely a jet". In the same year Geoffrey G. Smith chronicled technological development in his book Gas Turbines and Jet Propulsion for Aircraft, but did not mention Coandă.

In 1950's l'aviation d'Ader et des temps héroiques, the authors assert that Coandă flew the first jet aircraft at Issy-les-moulineaux for 30 metres (100 ft), ending with a crash. In 1953, Flight's treatment of aircraft in the 50 years since the Wright brothers' flight included the Coandă-1910 "ducted fan" and said of Coandă that he "believes that he 'took off for a few feet, then came down hurriedly and broke two teeth, quoting J.W. Adderley's 1952 letter to the editor of Flight after Adderley's discussion with Coandă in Paris at the end of World War II. Adderley said he "can definitely confirm that the power unit was of the ducted-fan type, similar in basic principles to the Caproni-Campini aircraft of the 1930s" (referring to the Caproni Campini N.1).

In the early 1950s Coandă began to claim that he had flown his 1910 aircraft himself, and that the 1910 engine was the first motorjet, using fuel injection and combustion to create its thrust. In 1955 and 1956, a number of aviation articles presented the Coandă version of 1910 events. He said he took off and crashed in December 1910 in the presence of aircraft makers Louis Charles Breguet and Gabriel Voisin. Coandă himself spoke on the subject, notably before the Wings Club at New York's Biltmore Hotel on 18 January 1956 where he said "I intended to inject fuel into the air stream which would be ignited by the exhaust gases also channelled through the same circular vent", implying that he never finished the powerplant. Martin Caidin wrote "The Coanda Story" for the May 1956 issue of Flying, based on a personal interview. For his article "He Flew in 1910", René Aubrey interviewed Coandă and wrote a contradictory story in the September 1956 Royal Air Force Flying Review, saying that Coandă had flown his unusual aircraft on 16 December 1910, that fuel was certainly injected, and that it was "the first jet flight in the world". In Aubrey's relation of the interview, the aircraft stalled after take-off, throwing Coandă clear, and "gently collapsed to the ground" where it burned. Aubrey wrote that the aircraft engine was "designed by a friend to Coandă's specification", and that its burning exhaust was "directed below and to each side of the fuselage, which was protected by asbestos in vulnerable places."

In Jet Age Airlanes of 1956, Coandă himself published an article entitled "The First Jet Flight". He submitted the same text that Caidin had written for Flying in May: "'In December, we brought the airplane out of its hangar at Issy-les-Moulineaux and, after a bit of coaxing, started the motor. I must admit that I was never a very outstanding pilot. I always seemed unable to shake off a vague apprehension and, that morning, in addition to my usual uneasiness, I was rather excited. I climbed into the cockpit, accelerated the motor, and felt the power from the jet thrust straining the plane forward. I gave the signal to remove the wheel blocks, and the plane started moving slowly ahead. I had anticipated that I would not attempt to fly today, but would make only ground tests on the small field at Issy-les-Moulineaux. The controls seemed too loose to me, so I injected fuel into the turbine. Too much! In a moment I was surrounded by flames! I had to cut back and reduce my power quickly. I worked the throttle and the flames subsided. Only then did I have opportunity to lift my head. I saw that the plane had gained speed, and that the walls of the ancient fortifications bordering the field were lunging toward me. I pulled back on the stick, only much too hard. In a moment the plane was airborne, lunging upward at a steep angle. I was flying—I felt the plane tipping—then slipping down on one wing. Instinctively, I cut the gas with my left hand and the jet fuel with my right. The next thing I knew, I found myself thrown free of the plane, which slowly came down, and burst into flames. It was impossible to determine from the wreckage whether the celluloid or the fuel was the cause of the fire. But the test was over. I had flown the first jet airplane.'"

A collection of aviation stories was published in 1957 by Major Victor Houart, a friend of Coandă's, who wrote that he was an eyewitness the day Coandă flew and crashed. One chapter of the book describes how Houart, together with a group of French dragoons, watched as Coandă taxied twice around the airfield, lifted off to avoid the ruins of an old fortification wall, started flames from the engine by applying too much power, and was thrown from the aircraft the moment it hit the wall, with Coandă "not badly hurt". Houart's version put the fuel tank in the overhead wing, which was metal. In further statements, Coandă said that his 1910 aircraft had movable leading edge slots, retractable landing gear and a fuel supply which was held in the overhead wing to reduce fuselage profile and thus drag. In 1965, Coandă presented a set of drawings, photographs and specifications of the 1910 aircraft to the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), prepared by Huyck Corporation and received by Director S. Paul Johnston and early aviation curator Louis Casey.

Rocket engineer G. Harry Stine worked alongside Coandă from 1961 to 1965 at Huyck Corporation, and interviewed him in 1962. In 1967, the magazine Flying printed an account written by Stine, which described the landing gear as retracting into the lower wing, with the fuel tank hidden in the upper wing. Stine wrote that Coandă flew on 10 December 1910, and described the heat from the "two jet exhausts" as being "too much for me" after the powerplant was mounted in the aircraft. In the 1980s after Coandă's death, Stine wrote a magazine article and a book mentioning the 1910 aircraft, including new details such as the name of master mechanic Pierre Clerget as the friend who helped build the turbo-propulseur. Stine's recounting of the 10 December flight included the group of eyewitness French dragoons, asbestos heat shields and metal deflector plates aft of the engine, intended taxiing with unintentional flight, a steep climb with a stall, Coandă thrown clear, and the aircraft crashing to the ground, burning. Stine gave his assessment that "Coanda's turbopropulseur had elements of a true jet", but that the patent application had no indication of the "critical stage—injection of fuel into the compressed air". He wrote that "although there were several jet-propelled aircraft in existence at an early time—the 1910 Coanda Jet and the 1938 Caproni Campini N.1—the first pure jet aircraft flight was made in Germany in 1938".

In 1965, Historian Emeritus Paul E. Garber of the NASM interviewed Coandă, who related that the December 1910 flight was no accident, that he had seated himself in the cockpit intending to test five factors: aircraft structure, the engine, the wing lift, the balance of controls, and the aerodynamics. He said that the heat from the engine was "fantastic", but that he placed mica sheets and deflecting plates to direct the jet blast away from the wooden fuselage. Garber wrote that as Coandă's aircraft began to move forward and rise from the ground, "the exhaust flame, instead of fanning outward, curved inward and ignited the aircraft." In this interview Coandă said that he brought the aircraft back to earth under control, but the landing was "abrupt" and he was thrown clear of the airframe which was consumed completely by flame, the engine reduced to "a few handfuls of white powder."

Rebuttals
In 1960, Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith, aviation historian at the Science Museum in London, reacted to the mid-1950s assertion that Coandă built and flew the first jet engine aircraft. Gibbs-Smith wrote that "there has recently arisen some controversy about this machine, designed by the Rumanian-born and French-domiciled Henri Coanda, which was exhibited at the Paris salon in October 1910. Until recently it has been accepted as an all-wood sesquiplane, with cantilever wings, powered by a 50 hp Clerget engine driving a 'turbo-propulseur' in the form of a large but simple ducted air fan. This fan was fitted right across the machine's nose and the cowling covered the nose and part of the engine: the resulting 'jet' of plain air was to propel the aeroplane." He wrote that "no claims that it flew, or was even tested, were made at the time", and that the story of it flying suddenly appeared in the 1950s —the aircraft was thus "disinterred from its obscurity." He wrote that the airfield at Issy-les-Moulineaux, a former military exercise ground where the test supposedly took place, was under the constant observation of the French Army who owned it, by French aviation reporters and photographers, and by aviation experts from other countries. He said that the airfield was the "most famous, most used, most observed, and most reported-on 'airfield' in Paris", and that all events, let alone an exciting crash and destruction by fire, would have been carried in local papers and described in military reports, but no contemporary accounts exist of the Coandă-1910 being tested, flown or destroyed. Gibbs-Smith countered the Coandă assertions point by point, saying that the aircraft did not have a retractable undercarriage, did not have leading or trailing edge wing slots, did not have a fuel tank overhead in the wing, and did not have fuel injected into any turbine. Gibbs-Smith pointed out that the pilot would have been killed by the heat if any combustion had been initiated in the engine's air stream.

In 1970 Gibbs-Smith wrote another account of the Coanda-1910, using much the same phrasing as in 1960: "'Another unsuccessful, but prophetic, machine was the Coanda biplane (strictly speaking a sesquiplane) exhibited at the Paris Salon in October. It was of all-wood construction, with fully cantilevered wings—which did not look very robust—and an Antoinette-like fuselage with obliquely cruciform tail-unit; it was equipped with a reaction propulsion unit consisting of a 50 hp Clerget engine driving a large ducted fan in front of it, the latter enclosed in a cowling which covered the nose of the machine and part of the engine: the fan was a simple air-fan driving back the air to form the propulsive 'jet'. Although inevitably earth-bound, this aircraft stands as the first full-size attempt at a jet-propelled aeroplane.'"

In 2010, Antoniu wrote that he thought Gibbs-Smith speculated on the basis of the evidence of absence that the aircraft was never tested or flown, but that Gibbs-Smith did not find any concrete evidence to support his position. Similarly, Antoniu was unable to find concrete proof of a test flight. Antoniu also wrote that Gibbs-Smith did not check the French patents claimed by Coandă in 1910 and 1911, describing the retractable gear, leading edge wing slot and upper wing fuel tank, and that he did not see photographs from private collections demonstrating aspects about which he wrote.

In 1980, NASM historian Frank H. Winter examined the 1965 drawings and specifications Coandă prepared while at Huyck Corporation and wrote an article about Coandă's claim: "There is a wholly new description of the inner workings of the machine that does not occur in any of the accounts given [in the 1910s] and which defies all of the patent specifications." He said Coandă told various conflicting stories about his claimed 1910 flight, and that Coandă produced a set of altered drawings as proof of his claims: "'The differences between this version of Coanda's story and his earlier one are marked and hardly need to be pointed out; though the obvious ones are: the planned versus the completely accidental and unintentional flight; the immediate flight versus the busy taxiing about the field; Coanda being thrown from the plane after it stalled versus Coanda pitched forward after landing, and so on. Apart from his personal recollections, Henri Coanda also bestowed upon the museum some drawings and illustrations of his turbo-propulseur. The drawings, purporting to show internal details of the machine, are unfortunately modern. That is to say, they were obviously executed in the 1960s, not in 1910 or 1911; worse, the fuel injection outlet tubes into the aft end of the turbine seems to be an even later addition to the original drawings. In brief, the drawings by themselves do not constitute evidence in Coanda's claim.'"

In his article, Winter wondered why Coandă did not add the novel feature of fuel injection and air stream combustion to his May 1911 patent applications if that feature had been present during his supposed flying experience five months earlier. Rather, Winter noted that the August 1910 patent filings in French were essentially the same as the May 1911 ones in English, and that all the descriptions were applicable to air or water flowing through the device, meaning that the patents could not possibly include fuel combustion in the jet stream. He also noted that no mention was made in the early patents of asbestos or mica heat shields, or of any fuel injection or combustion.

While looking through aviation periodicals and Paris newspapers reporting for the month of December 1910, Winter found that there was a spell of bad weather at Issy during which no flying took place. This situation occurred mid-month, the period covering the conflicting dates (10 and 16 December) that Coandă said his aircraft was tested, flown and crashed. In their regular "Foreign Aviation News" column, Flight magazine reported that the "blank period" of inclement weather at Issy ended on the 19th when Guillaume Busson tested a monoplane made by Armand Deperdussin. Other aircraft tests and piloting activities were listed, with no mention of Coandă or his machine.

Winter found that Camille (or Cosimo) Canovetti, an Italian civil and aviation engineer, had been working on a turbo-propulseur-style aviation engine before Coandă, and had attempted to show an aircraft with such an engine at the Aviation Exposition in Milan in 1909. Canovetti took out patents on his machine in 1909, and more in 1910. Canovetti wrote in 1911 that the 1910 appearance of the Coandă engine "called general attention" to designs like his.

After Coandă's death
Modern reference books about aviation history represent the Coandă-1910 in various ways, if they mention the machine or the inventor at all. Some acknowledge Coandă as the discoverer of the Coandă effect but give Hans von Ohain the honour of designing the first jet engine to power an aircraft in manned flight, and Frank Whittle the honour of completing and patenting the first jet engine capable of such flight. In their 1994 book American Aviation, authors Joe Christy and LeRoy Cook state that Coandă's 1910 aircraft was the first jet.

Aviation author Bill Gunston changed his mind two years after publishing a 1993 book in which he gave Coandă credit for the first jet engine. Gunston's 1995 description began: "Romanian Henri Coanda built a biplane with a Clerget inline piston engine which, instead of turning a propeller, drove a centrifugal compressor blowing air to the rear. The thrust was said to be 220 kilograms [490 lb], a figure the author disbelieves. On 10 December 1910 the aircraft thus powered inadvertently became airborne, crashed and burned. Often called 'a turbine aeroplane', this was of no more significance than the Campini aircraft mentioned later, and Coanda wisely decided to switch to a propeller." In his publication of 1998, World Encyclopedia of Aero Engines: All major aircraft power plants, from the Wright brothers to the present day, Gunston did not include Coanda; nor did he include Coanda in 2005's Jane's Aero-Engines or 2006's World Encyclopedia of Aero Engines.

Walter J. Boyne, director of the National Air and Space Museum and a prolific aviation author, mentions Coandă in passing a few times in his works. Boyne discusses Coandă briefly in one of his books, The Leading Edge: "Professor Henri Coanda, whose scientific work was impeccable, designed and built a jet aircraft in 1910; it, like Martin's Kitten [the Martin KF-1 biplane], was superbly built and technically advanced—and could not fly." In a later magazine article sidebar, Boyne described more details: "Romanian inventor Henri Coanda attempted to fly a primitive jet aircraft in 1910, using a four-cylinder internal combustion engine to drive a compressor at 4,000 revolutions per minute. It was equipped with what today might be called an afterburner, producing an estimated 500 pounds [2.3 kN or 230 kgf] of thrust. Countless loyal Coanda fans insist that the airplane flew. Others say it merely crashed."

In 1980 and 1993, Jane's Encyclopedia of Aviation included an entry on the 1910 aircraft, calling it the "Coanda turbine" and describing it as "the world's first jet-propelled aircraft to fly". In 2003, Winter co-authored a book with fellow NASM curator F. Robert van der Linden: 100 Years of Flight: A Chronicle of Aerospace History, 1903–2003. In the book the Coandă-1910 is described as an unsuccessful ducted fan aircraft lacking documentation to substantiate any flight test.

Citing Carl A. Brown's 1985 A History of Aviation, Tim Brady, the Dean of Aviation at Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University, wrote in 2000: "the development of the jet is, broadly, the story of three men: Henri Coanda, Sir Frank Whittle, and Pabst von Ohain..." His description of Coandă's disputed test flight agreed that fuel injection and combustion had been initiated in the rotary compressor's vent, with the novel detail that the aircraft "flew for about a thousand feet [300 m] before crashing into a wall." In 1990 at the 24th Symposium of the International Academy of Astronautics, one of the papers presented included this sentence: "It is to Henri Coanda (1886–1972), a world famous inventor and pioneer of jet flight, that space engineering owes—beside one of the first model planes provided with a rocket engine (1905)—the construction and engine experiment of the first jet aircraft, the 'Coanda-1910'." In 2007 in his popular book Extreme Aircraft, Ron Miller wrote that the powerplant in the Coandă-1910 was one of the "earliest attempts" at a jet engine, but was unsuccessful—it was "incapable of actual flight", unlike the engines designed by Whittle and Ohain. The question of the Coandă-1910 being the first jet aircraft does not appear to be resolved, supporting Stine's view: "Whether Henri Coanda built the first true jet will probably be argued interminably."

In the 2000s, Dan Antoniu and other Romanian aviation experts investigated existing photographs of the Coandă-1910, leading them to believe that the aircraft presented at the exhibition was not finished, that it was exhibited with many improvisations. Antoniu published Henri Coandă and his technical work during 1906–1918, a 2010 book in which he said that the unfinished state of the aircraft led to Coandă filing several extra patents and starting a new series of studies with the aim of making the machine airworthy. For instance, Antoniu wrote that the exhaust pipes of the Clergét engine appeared free; there were no devices to redirect exhaust gases to the turbine as described in the patent, and there were no heat shields for crew protection. As well, the central attachment of the tubular struts holding the wings to the fuselage, with mere collars secured with screws, was judged by Antoniu as appearing potentially unsafe during take-off or landing because of the "considerable loads on the struts". The X-shaped empennage was covered at high angles by the horizontal stabiliser making it unusable, and any high-speed taxi would put the machine in danger of a nose-over.

Memorials and models
A full-size replica of the Coandă-1910, built in 2001, is displayed in Bucharest at the National Military Museum, and a scale model is displayed in the French Air and Space Museum at Paris – Le Bourget Airport. At the site of the historic Issy-les-Moulineaux airfield, a large plaque lists the three pioneers of flight most closely associated with the airfield: Louis Blériot, Alberto Santos-Dumont and Henri Farman. Later, a plaque honouring Coandă and Romanian aviation engineer Traian Vuia was placed on a nearby building under the auspices of the mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux, L'Aéroclub de France, and the Romanian Association for Aviation History.

Construction on a full-sized functional replica of the plane began in March 2010 at Craiova, Romania, by a team of engineers and former test pilots from I.R.Av. Craiova. The replica is based on plans that Coandă reworked in 1965 because the 1910 plans were lost. It uses metal for the fuselage rather than wood, and its intended engine is a true jet, the Motorlet M-701, made for the 1960s-era Aero L-29 Delfín military trainer.

In October 2010 the National Bank of Romania issued a commemorative silver coin for the centennial of the building of the first jet aircraft. The 10-lei piece is intended for coin collectors, with the official purchase price set at 220 lei. It represents the aircraft on the obverse side and a portrait of Coandă on the reverse, including Romanian words which translate to "first jet aircraft". The same month the philatelic section of the Romanian Post, Romfilatelia, produced a limited edition philatelic folder and a stamp commemorating the centennial of jet aircraft. The stamp presents a modern internal schema of the Coandă-1910, a drawing of the injectors and burners, and a quote from Gustave Eiffel: "This boy was born 30 if not 50 years too early". At the European Parliament in December, president Jerzy Buzek opened a centennial exhibition celebrating the building and testing of the Coandă-1910.

Related

 * Stipa-Caproni

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Coandă-1910


text:
Darmstadt (region)

Darmstadt is one of the three Regierungsbezirke of Hesse, Germany, located in the south of the state. The other two Regierungsbezirke are Giessen and Kassel

Economy
The Gross domestic product (GDP) of the region was €207.7 billion in 2018, accounting for 6.2% of German economic output. GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power was €47,800 or 159% of the EU27 average in the same year. The GDP per employee was 127% of the EU average. This makes it one of the wealthiest regions in Germany and Europe.

title: Darmstadt (region)


text:
Rid of Me

Rid of Me is the second studio album by the English singer-songwriter PJ Harvey, released on 26 April 1993 by Island Records, approximately one year after the release of her critically acclaimed debut studio album Dry (1992). It marked a departure from Harvey's previous songwriting, being more raw and aggressive than its predecessor.

The songs on Rid of Me were performed by Harvey's eponymous trio, consisting of Harvey on guitar and vocals, Rob Ellis on drums and backing vocals, and Steve Vaughan on bass guitar. Most of the songs on the album were recorded by Steve Albini, and it was the last album they recorded as a trio before disbanding in late 1993. Rid of Me was met with critical acclaim, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s and of all time, ranking at number 153 on the 2020 version of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (up from 406 on the list's previous edition).

Background and history
Harvey's first two studio albums were recorded in quick succession and their histories intertwine. In October 1991, she released her debut single "Dress". She signed a recording contract with indie record label Too Pure and relocated to London with her bandmates. Almost immediately after the single's release, she began to receive serious positive attention from music critics in both the UK and United States. This led to several major record labels vying to sign her. Harvey was initially reluctant to sign to a major label fearing she might lose artistic control of her music, but eventually decided to sign with Island Records in February 1992. A month later, Too Pure released her debut studio album Dry, containing both "Dress" and "Sheela-Na-Gig", her second single. Island would later distribute Dry under its Indigo imprint.

The band toured extensively in the UK and US to support Dry. Harvey turned down an offer to play the Lollapalooza festival in the summer of 1992, but did play the Reading Festival that August. By this time, non-stop touring had begun to take its toll on Harvey's health. She suffered from what has been described as a nervous breakdown, brought on by a number of factors including exhaustion, poor eating habits, and the break-up of a relationship. Making matters worse, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where she had been accepted for study, refused to hold her place for her any longer. She left her London apartment and retreated to her native Dorset. While recuperating in October 1992, she worked on the songs that would appear on Rid of Me.

Music and lyrics
Structurally, Harvey continued to complicate her songwriting by utilising "strangely skewed time signatures and twisty song structures", resulting in songs that "tilt toward performance art".

The album's lyrics have been widely interpreted as being feminist in nature. Harvey, however, repeatedly denied a feminist agenda in her songwriting, stating "I don’t even think of myself as being female half the time. When I'm writing songs I never write with gender in mind. I write about people's relationships to each other. I'm fascinated with things that might be considered repulsive or embarrassing. I like feeling unsettled, unsure." Some of the lyrics were inspired by her personal experiences. The title track, for instance, was admittedly influenced by one of Harvey's relationships coming to an end. When told by an interviewer that "Rid of Me" sounded psychotic, she replied that she wrote the song "at my illest" and added "I was almost psychotic" at the time. But, she made it clear that not all of the lyrics were to be read autobiographically, saying "I would have to be 40 and very worn out to have lived through everything I write about".

The album also includes a cover version of Bob Dylan's 1965 song "Highway 61 Revisited". Harvey's mother and father, both Dylan fans, had suggested that she record the track.

Recording
In the late fall of 1992 the trio embarked on a short US tour. When the tour concluded in December they stayed in America to record their new album at the secluded Pachyderm Recording Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. Harvey chose Chicago musician and sound engineer Steve Albini to record the album. Harvey had admired Albini's distinctively raw recordings of bands like Pixies, Slint, the Breeders and the Jesus Lizard.

The recording session took place over a two-week period, but according to Harvey the bulk of the recording was done in three days. Most of the songs were played live in the studio. Harvey spoke highly of Albini's recording, stating, "He's the only person I know that can record a drum kit and it sounds like you're standing in front of a drum kit. It doesn't sound like it's gone through a recording process or it's coming out of speakers. You can feel the sound he records, and that is why I wanted to work with him, 'cause all I ever wanted is for us to be recorded and to sound like we do when we're playing together in a room".

She also gave insight into his recording methods, saying "The way that some people think of producing is to sort of help you to arrange or contributing or playing instruments, he does none of that. He just sets up his microphones in a completely different way from which I've ever seen anyone set up mics before, and that was astonishing. He'd have them on the floor, on the walls, on the windows, on the ceiling, twenty feet away from where you were sitting... He's very good at getting the right atmosphere to get the best take."

The song "Man Size Sextet" was not recorded by Albini. It was instead produced by Harvey, Rob Ellis, and Head.

Artwork
The cover of the album depicts Harvey topless and swinging her drenched hair into the air. The photo was captured by Harvey's friend and photographer Maria Mochnacz, and was taken in Mochnacz's bathroom in her flat in Bristol. Due to the small size of the room, she had to place her camera against the wall opposite Harvey and could not look through the camera's viewfinder. The photo was taken in total darkness and only illuminated by the split-second flash.

When the photo was delivered to Island Records, Mochnacz was told that the imperfections in the picture (such as the water drops on the wall and the house plant) could be removed. She protested this decision, responding, "It's supposed to be like that – It's part of the picture".

Release and critical reception
Rid of Me was released in the United Kingdom on 26 April 1993, and was met with widespread critical acclaim. Melody Maker raved that "No other British artist is so aggressively exploring the dark side of human nature, or its illogical black humour; no other British artist possesses the nerve, let alone the talent, to conjure up its soundtrack." Veteran UK disc jockey (DJ) and radio presenter John Peel, a supporter of Harvey since the beginning of her career, added "You're initially so taken aback by what you're hearing. But you go back again and again and it implants itself on your consciousness." The San Francisco Chronicle called Harvey "A talent and a singular voice that demands to be heard." Evelyn McDonnell of Spin wrote that Harvey made it a point to "confound expectations and stereotypes". The album also drew attention from more established musicians. Elvis Costello, for example, commented that a lot of Harvey's songs "seem to be about blood and fucking", a statement Harvey disagreed with.

Steve Albini's production of the record proved controversial. Critics were divided over whether his recording complemented Harvey's voice or buried it. On the positive side, it was written that "Albini deftly balances heavy feedback and distortion with unexpected quiet breaks, making this release more musically diverse – and ultimately more satisfying – than PJ Harvey's debut." But others considered the recording too harsh, saying "Steve Albini's deliberately crude production leaves everything minimal and rough, as if the whole album were recorded in somebody's basement, with the drums set up in a bathroom to clatter as chaotically as possible." Another review called it simply "a trial to endure". Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine tried to reconcile Albini's production with Harvey's songs. He admitted the album has a "bloodless, abrasive edge" that leaves "absolutely no subtleties in the music", but theorises that Albini's recordings "may be the aural embodiment of the tortured lyrics, and therefore a supremely effective piece of performance art, but it also makes Rid of Me a difficult record to meet halfway."

Harvey herself was pleased with the result. "I do everything for myself primarily," she said, "and I was happy with it. I don't really listen when people say good things about my work because I tend to not give myself praise about anything. But I was really pleased with Rid of Me. For that period of my life, it was perfect. Well, it wasn't perfect but as near to as I could get at that time". She remained friends with Albini afterward, finding in him a kindred spirit. "People read things in and make him what they want him to be," Harvey said. "He's the only other person I know that that happens to besides myself. People have a very specific idea of what I am – some kind of ax-wielding, man-eating Vampira – and I'm not that at all. I'm almost the complete opposite."

The album yielded two singles: "50ft Queenie" and "Man-Size". The music videos for both songs were directed by Maria Mochnacz. "50ft Queenie" was named a buzzworthy video by MTV in the Spring of 1993.

Legacy and impact
Rid of Me is regarded as an iconic album within alternative music. In 2016, Zach Schonfeld of Stereogum dubbed it not just one of the alternative era's "greatest [and] scariest rock albums," but that "of any era." In 2022, it was included on an Alternative Press list titled "20 albums that paved the way for alternative as we know it". The following year, Louder Sounds Emma Johnston saw that, in Rids wake, the genre's "host of uncompromised confessionals" drew inspiration from it.

Rid has impacted and garnered admiration from various musicians in the years since its release. In 2005, Spin's Caryn Ganz saw that the way for the band Elastica and musician Karen O was paved by the album's "poetically demented blues". In 2009, BBC Music's Mike Diver wrote of its part in ushering its era's wave of "angst-ridden" women songwriters in. He saw Jagged Little Pill, the 1995 album by singer Alanis Morissette, bear the imprint of Harvey's "bare-all performances" on Rid. Albumism's Liz Itkowsky called Harvey's guitar work on "Missed" "almost emo" and felt that it anticipated Midwest emo band American Football. Emma Johnston called the album "a touchstone" for modern musicians like Phoebe Bridgers and Ethel Cain.

Some of Harvey's peers have expressed their admiration for the album. Reflecting on her band Hole's second studio album Live Through This (1994) in a 2014 Spin interview, musician Courtney Love admitted to seeing Rid as "a far superior record" compared to theirs. In a 2022 MusicRadar interview, Gavin Rossdale of Bush dubbed it "a groundbreaking record from a groundbreaking artist", feeling that "the earthiness [and] truth of it are just fucking too good."

Tour
Harvey and her band toured in the spring and summer of 1993 to support Rid of Me. The tour began in the UK in May and moved to America in June. Maria Mochnacz documented aspects of the tour, and her footage was used to create the long-form video Reeling with PJ Harvey (1994). Harvey's concert setlist drew from Dry and Rid of Me, but also highlighted songs that did not appear on either of those recordings. For example, she regularly performed a cover version of Willie Dixon's 1961 song "Wang Dang Doodle". One reviewer praised Harvey's version and called it "perhaps the definitive version of that song."

In August, they finished the tour with a string of dates opening for the Irish rock band U2 during their Zooropa tour. In the fall the trio started to disintegrate, first with the departure of Ellis and then Vaughan shortly afterward. By September, Harvey was performing as a solo artist.

Accolades
Rid of Me entered the UK Albums Chart at number three and quickly went silver, and enjoyed a top-30 hit in the single "50 ft. Queenie". In the US it generated major college-radio airplay and expanded her growing fan base. It also won considerable critical acclaim and featured in various top ten album-of-the-year lists in respectable press, like The Village Voice, Spin, Melody Maker, Vox and Select. Spin gave it a rare ten out of ten review rating. Rid of Me was shortlisted for the 1993 Mercury Prize, but lost to Suede. If anything its critical stature has grown over the years—Rolling Stone selected it as one of the Essential Recordings of the 90s, and in 2005, Spin ranked it the ninth greatest album of 1985–2005 after it had ranked it only the 37th greatest album of the 90s after To Bring You My Love at number 3. In 2003, the album was ranked number 405 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time; the list's 2012 edition had it ranked 406th. In 2011, Slant Magazine ranked Rid of Me as the 25th greatest album of the 90s. In 2014, the album placed tenth on the Alternative Nation site's "Top 10 Underrated 90’s Alternative Rock Albums" list. The title track was ranked #194 on the 2021 version of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Personnel
All personnel credits adapted from Rid of Me's liner notes.

PJ Harvey Trio
 * PJ Harvey – vocals, guitar, organ, cello, violin, producer (6)
 * Steve Vaughan – bass
 * Rob Ellis – drums, percussion, backing vocals, arrangement, producer (6)

Technical
 * Steve Albini – producer, engineering, mixing
 * Head – producer, engineer (6)
 * John Loder – mastering

Design
 * Maria Mochnacz – photography

title: Rid of Me


text:
Differential rotation

Differential rotation is seen when different parts of a rotating object move with different angular velocities (or rates of rotation) at different latitudes and/or depths of the body and/or in time. This indicates that the object is not rigid. In fluid objects, such as accretion disks, this leads to shearing. Galaxies and protostars usually show differential rotation; examples in the Solar System include the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn.

Around the year 1610, Galileo Galilei observed sunspots and calculated the rotation of the Sun. In 1630, Christoph Scheiner reported that the Sun had different rotational periods at the poles and at the equator, in good agreement with modern values.

Cause
Stars and planets rotate in the first place because conservation of angular momentum turns random drifting of parts of the molecular cloud that they form from into rotating motion as they coalesce. Given this average rotation of the whole body, internal differential rotation is caused by convection in stars which is a movement of mass, due to steep temperature gradients from the core outwards. This mass carries a portion of the star's angular momentum, thus redistributing the angular velocity, possibly even far enough out for the star to lose angular velocity in stellar winds. Differential rotation thus depends on temperature differences in adjacent regions.

Measurement
There are many ways to measure and calculate differential rotation in stars to see if different latitudes have different angular velocities. The most obvious is tracking spots on the stellar surface.

By doing helioseismological measurements of solar "p-modes" it is possible to deduce the differential rotation. The Sun has very many acoustic modes that oscillate in the interior simultaneously, and the inversion of their frequencies can yield the rotation of the solar interior. This varies with both depth and (especially) latitude.

The broadened shapes of absorption lines in the optical spectrum depend on vrotsin(i), where i is the angle between the line of sight and the rotation axis, permitting the study of the rotational velocity's line-of-sight component vrot. This is calculated from Fourier transforms of the line shapes, using equation (2) below for vrot at the equator and poles. See also plot 2. Solar differential rotation is also seen in magnetograms, images showing the strength and location of solar magnetic fields.

It may be possible to measure the differential of stars that regularly emit flares of radio emission. Using 7 years of observations of the M9 ultracool dwarf TVLM 513-46546, astronomers were able to measure subtle changes in the arrival times of the radio waves. These measurements demonstrate that the radio waves can arrive 1–2 seconds sooner or later in a systematic fashion over a number of years. On the Sun, active regions are common sources of radio flares. The researchers concluded that this effect was best explained by active regions emerging and disappearing at different latitudes, such as occurs during the solar sunspot cycle.

Effects
Gradients in angular rotation caused by angular momentum redistribution within the convective layers of a star are expected to be a main driver for generating the large-scale magnetic field, through magneto-hydrodynamical (dynamo) mechanisms in the outer envelopes. The interface between these two regions is where angular rotation gradients are strongest and thus where dynamo processes are expected to be most efficient.

The inner differential rotation is one part of the mixing processes in stars, mixing the materials and the heat/energy of the stars.

Differential rotation affects stellar optical absorption-line spectra through line broadening caused by lines being differently Doppler-shifted across the stellar surface.

Solar differential rotation causes shear at the so-called tachocline. This is a region where rotation changes from differential in the convection zone to nearly solid-body rotation in the interior, at 0.71 solar radii from the center.

Surface level
For observed sunspots, the differential rotation can be calculated as: $$\Omega = \Omega_{0}-\Delta\Omega \sin^{2}\Psi$$ where $$\Omega_{0}$$ is the rotation rate at the equator, and $$\Delta\Omega = (\Omega_{0}-\Omega_\mathrm{pole})$$ is the difference in angular velocity between pole and equator, called the strength of the rotational shear. $$\Psi$$ is the heliographic latitude, measured from the equator.
 * The reciprocal of the rotational shear $$\frac{2\pi}{\Delta\Omega}$$ is the lap time, i.e. the time it takes for the equator to do a full lap more than the poles.
 * The relative differential rotation rate is the ratio of the rotational shear to the rotation rate at the equator: $$\alpha=\frac{\Delta\Omega}{\Omega_{0}}$$
 * The Doppler rotation rate in the Sun (measured from Doppler-shifted absorption lines), can be approximated as: $$\frac{\Omega}{2\pi} = (451.5-65.3\cos^{2}\theta - 66.7\cos^{4}\theta) \, \mathrm{nHz}$$ where $θ$ is the co-latitude (measured from the poles).

Sun

On the Sun, the study of oscillations revealed that rotation is roughly constant within the whole radiative interior and variable with radius and latitude within the convective envelope. The Sun has an equatorial rotation speed of ~2 km/s; its differential rotation implies that the angular velocity decreases with increased latitude. The poles make one rotation every 34.3 days and the equator every 25.05 days, as measured relative to distant stars (sidereal rotation).

The highly turbulent nature of solar convection and anisotropies induced by rotation complicate the dynamics of modeling. Molecular dissipation scales on the Sun are at least six orders of magnitude smaller than the depth of the convective envelope. A direct numerical simulation of solar convection would have to resolve this entire range of scales in each of the three dimensions. Consequently, all solar differential rotation models must involve some approximations regarding momentum and heat transport by turbulent motions that are not explicitly computed. Thus, modeling approaches can be classified as either mean-field models or large-eddy simulations according to the approximations.

Disk galaxies
Disk galaxies do not rotate like solid bodies, but rather rotate differentially. The rotation speed as a function of radius is called a rotation curve, and is often interpreted as a measurement of the mass profile of a galaxy, as: $$v_{c}(R)=\sqrt{\frac{GM(<R)}{R}}$$ where
 * $$v_{c}(R),$$ is the rotation speed at radius $$R$$
 * $$M(<R),$$ is the total mass enclosed within radius $$R$$

title: Differential rotation


text:
Flying wing

A flying wing is a tailless fixed-wing aircraft that has no definite fuselage, with its crew, payload, fuel, and equipment housed inside the main wing structure. A flying wing may have various small protuberances such as pods, nacelles, blisters, booms, or vertical stabilizers.

Similar aircraft designs, that are not technically flying wings, are sometimes casually referred to as such. These types include blended wing body aircraft and lifting body aircraft, which have a fuselage and no definite wings.

A pure flying wing is theoretically the lowest-drag design configuration for a fixed wing aircraft. However, because it lacks conventional stabilizing surfaces and the associated control surfaces, in its purest form the flying wing suffers from being unstable and difficult to control.

The basic flying wing configuration became an object of significant study during the 1920s, often in conjunction with other tailless designs. In the Second World War, both Nazi Germany and the Allies made advances in developing flying wings. Military interest in the flying wing waned during the 1950s with the development of supersonic aircraft, but was renewed in the 1980s due to their potential for stealth technology. This approach eventually led to the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. There has been continual interest in using it in the large transport roles for cargo or passengers. Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Armstrong Whitworth have undertaken design studies on flying wing airliners; however, no such airliners have yet been built.

The flying wing concept is mostly suited to subsonic aircraft. No supersonic flying wing has ever been built.

Overview

A flying wing is an aeroplane that has no definite fuselage or tailplane, with its crew, payload, fuel, and equipment housed inside the main wing structure. A flying wing may have various small protuberances such as pods, nacelles, blisters, booms, or vertical stabilizers.

A clean flying wing is sometimes presented as theoretically the most aerodynamically efficient (lowest drag) design configuration for a fixed wing aircraft. It also would offer high structural efficiency for a given wing depth, leading to light weight and high fuel efficiency.

Because it lacks conventional stabilizing surfaces and the associated control surfaces, in its purest form the flying wing suffers from the inherent disadvantages of being unstable and difficult to control. These compromises are difficult to reconcile, and efforts to do so can reduce or even negate the expected advantages of the flying wing design, such as reductions in weight and drag. Moreover, solutions may produce a final design that is still too unsafe for certain uses, such as commercial aviation.

Further difficulties arise from the problem of fitting the pilot, engines, flight equipment, and payload all within the depth of the wing section. Other known problems with the flying wing design relate to pitch and yaw. Pitch issues are discussed in the article on tailless aircraft. The problems of yaw are discussed below.

Engineering design
A wing that is made deep enough to contain the pilot, engines, fuel, undercarriage and other necessary equipment will have an increased frontal area, when compared with a conventional wing and long-thin fuselage. This can actually result in higher drag and thus lower efficiency than a conventional design. Typically the solution adopted in this case is to keep the wing reasonably thin, and the aircraft is then fitted with an assortment of blisters, pods, nacelles, fins, and so forth to accommodate all the needs of a practical aircraft.

The problem becomes more acute at supersonic speeds, where the drag of a thick wing rises sharply and it is essential for the wing to be made thin. No supersonic flying wing has ever been built.

Directional stability
For any aircraft to fly without constant correction it must have directional stability in yaw.

Flying wings lack anywhere to attach an efficient vertical stabilizer or fin. Any fin must attach directly on to the rear part of the wing, giving a small moment arm from the aerodynamic centre, which in turn means that the fin is inefficient and to be effective the fin area must be large. Such a large fin has weight and drag penalties, and can negate the advantages of the flying wing. The problem can be minimized by increasing the wing sweepback and placing twin fins outboard near the tips, as for example in a low-aspect-ratio delta wing, but given the corresponding reduction in efficiency many flying wings have gentler sweepback and consequently have, at best, marginal stability.

The aspect ratio of a swept wing as seen in the direction of the airflow depends on the yaw angle relative to the airflow. Yaw increases the aspect ratio of the leading wing and reduces that of the trailing one. With sufficient sweep-back, differential induced drag resulting from the tip vortices and crossflow is sufficient to naturally re-align the aircraft.

A complementary approach uses twist or wash-out, reducing the angle of attack towards the wing tips, together with a swept-back wing planform. The Dunne D.5 incorporated this principle and its designer J. W. Dunne published it in 1913. The wash-out reduces lift at the tips to create a bell-shaped distribution curve across the span, described by Ludwig Prandtl in 1933, and this can be used to optimise weight and drag for a given amount of lift.

Another solution is to angle or crank the wing tip sections downward with significant anhedral, increasing the area at the rear of the aircraft when viewed from the side. When combined with sweepback and washout, it can resolve another problem. With a conventional elliptical lift distribution the downgoing elevon causes increased induced drag that causes the aircraft to yaw out of the turn ("adverse yaw"). Washout angles the net aerodynamic vector (lift plus drag) forwards as the angle of attack reduces and, in the extreme, this can create a net forward thrust. The restoration of outer lift by the elevon creates a slight induced thrust for the rear (outer) section of the wing during the turn. This vector essentially pulls the trailing wing forward to cause "proverse yaw", creating a naturally coordinated turn. In his 1913 lecture to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, Dunne described the effect as "tangential gain". The existence of proverse yaw was not proved until NASA flew its Prandtl-D tailless demonstrator.

Yaw control
In some flying wing designs, any stabilizing fins and associated control rudders would be too far forward to have much effect, thus alternative means for yaw control are sometimes provided.

One solution to the control problem is differential drag: the drag near one wing tip is artificially increased, causing the aircraft to yaw in the direction of that wing. Typical methods include:
 * Split ailerons. The top surface moves up while the lower surface moves down. Splitting the aileron on one side induces yaw by creating a differential air brake effect.
 * Spoilers. A spoiler surface in the upper wing skin is raised, to disrupt the airflow and increase drag. This effect is generally accompanied by a loss of lift, which must be compensated for either by the pilot or by design features that automatically compensate.
 * Spoilerons. An upper surface spoiler that also acts to reduce lift (equivalent to deflecting an aileron upwards), so causing the aircraft to bank in the direction of the turn—the angle of roll causes the wing lift to act in the direction of turn, reducing the amount of drag required to turn the aircraft's longitudinal axis.

A consequence of the differential drag method is that if the aircraft maneuvers frequently then it will frequently create drag. So flying wings are at their best when cruising in still air: in turbulent air or when changing course, the aircraft may be less efficient than a conventional design.

Related designs
Some related aircraft that are not strictly flying wings have been described as such.

Some types, such as the Northrop Flying Wing (NX-216H), still have a tail stabilizer mounted on tail booms, although they lack a fuselage.

Many hang gliders and microlight aircraft are tailless. Although sometimes referred to as flying wings, these types carry the pilot (and engine where fitted) below the wing structure rather than inside it, and so are not true flying wings.

An aircraft of sharply swept delta planform and deep centre section represents a borderline case between flying wing, blended wing body, and/or lifting body configurations.

Early research

Tailless aircraft have been experimented with since the earliest attempts to fly. Britain's J. W. Dunne was an early pioneer, his swept-wing biplane and monoplane designs displayed inherent stability as early as 1910. His work directly influenced several other designers, including G. T. R. Hill, who developed a series of experimental tailless aircraft designs, collectively known as the Westland-Hill Pterodactyls, during the 1920s and early 1930s. Despite attempts to pursue orders from the Aviation Ministry, the Pterodactyl programme was ultimately cancelled during the mid 1930s before any order for the Mk. VI was issued.

Germany's Hugo Junkers patented his own wing-only air transport concept in 1910, seeing it as a natural solution to the problem of building an airliner large enough to carry a reasonable passenger load and enough fuel to cross the Atlantic in regular service. He believed that the flying wing's potentially large internal volume and low drag made it an obvious design for this role. His deep-chord monoplane wing was incorporated in the otherwise conventional Junkers J 1 in December 1915. In 1919 he started work on his "Giant" JG1 design, intended to seat passengers within a thick wing, but two years later the Allied Aeronautical Commission of Control ordered the incomplete JG1 destroyed for exceeding postwar size limits on German aircraft. Junkers conceived futuristic flying wings for up to 1,000 passengers; the nearest this came to realization was in the 1931 Junkers G.38 34-seater Grossflugzeug airliner, which featured a large thick-chord wing providing space for fuel, engines, and two passenger cabins. However, it still required a short fuselage to house the crew and additional passengers.

The Soviet Boris Ivanovich Cheranovsky began testing tailless flying wing gliders in 1924. After the 1920s, Soviet designers such as Cheranovsky worked independently and in secret under Stalin. With significant breakthrough in materials and construction methods, aircraft such as the BICh-3, BICh-14, BICh-7A became possible. Men like Chizhevskij and Antonov also came into the spotlight of the Communist Party by designing aircraft like the tailless BOK-5 (Chizhevskij) and OKA-33 (the first ever built by Antonov) which were designated as "motorized gliders" due to their similarity to popular gliders of the time. The BICh-11, developed by Cheranovsky in 1932, competed with the Horten brothers H1 and Adolf Galland at the Ninth Glider Competitions in 1933, but was not demonstrated in the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin.

In Germany, Alexander Lippisch worked first on tailless types before progressively moving to flying wings, while the Horten brothers developed a series of flying wing gliders through the 1930s. The H1 glider was flown with partial success in 1933, and the subsequent H2 flown successfully in both glider and powered variants.

In the United States, from the 1930s Jack Northrop independently worked on his own designs. The Northrop N-1M, a scale prototype for a long-range bomber, first flew in 1940. In 1941 Northrop was awarded a development contract to build 2 examples of the YB-35 flying wing, a very large 4 engined flying wing with a span of 172'. Development and construction of this aircraft continued throughout World War II.

Other 1930s examples of true flying wings include Frenchman Charles Fauvel's AV3 glider of 1933 and the American Freel Flying Wing glider flown in 1937. featuring a self-stabilizing airfoil on a straight wing.

Second World War
During the Second World War, aerodynamic issues became sufficiently understood for work on a range of production-representative prototypes to commence. In Nazi Germany, the Horten brothers were keen proponents of the flying wing configuration, developing their own designs around it - uniquely for the time using Prandtl's birdlike "bell-shaped lift distribution". One such aircraft they produced was the Horten H.IV glider, which was produced in low numbers between 1941 and 1943. Several other late-war German military designs were based on the flying wing concept, or variations of it, as a proposed solution to extend the range of otherwise very short-range of aircraft powered by early jet engines. The Horten Ho 229 jet fighter prototype first flew in 1944. It combined a flying wing, or Nurflügel, design with a pair of Junkers Jumo 004 jet engines in its second, or "V2" (V for Versuch) prototype airframe; as such, it was the world's first pure flying wing to be powered by twin jet engines, being first reportedly flown in March 1944. V2 was piloted by Erwin Ziller, who was killed when a flameout in one of its engines led to a crash. Plans were made to produce the type as the Gotha Go 229 during the closing stages of the conflict. Despite intentions to develop the Go 229 and an improved Go P.60 for several roles, including as a night fighter, no Gotha-built Go 229s or P.60s were ever completed. The unflown, nearly completed surviving "V3," or third prototype was captured by American forces and sent back for study; it has ended up in storage at the Smithsonian Institution.

The Allies also made several relevant advances in the field using a conventional elliptical lift distribution with vertical tail surfaces. During December 1942, Northrop flew the N-9M, a one-third scale development aircraft for a proposed long-range bomber; several were produced, all but one were scrapped following the bomber programme's termination. In Britain, the Baynes Bat glider was flown during wartime; it was a one-third scale experimental aircraft intended to test out the configuration for potential conversion of tanks into temporary gliders.

The British Armstrong Whitworth A.W.52G of 1944 was a glider test bed for a proposed large flying wing airliner capable of serving transatlantic routes. The A.W.52G was later followed up by the Armstrong Whitworth A.W.52, an all-metal jet-powered model capable of high speeds for the era; great attention was paid to laminar flow. First flown on 13 November 1947, the A.W.52 yielded disappointing results; the first prototype crashed without loss of life on 30 May 1949, the occasion being the first emergency use of an ejection seat by a British pilot. The second A.W.52 remained flying with the Royal Aircraft Establishment until 1954.

Postwar
Projects continued to examine the flying wing during the postwar era. The work on the YB-35 long-range bomber begun in 1941, had continued throughout the war with pre-production machines flying in 1946. This was superseded the next year by conversion of the type to jet power as the YB-49 of 1947.

Initially, the design did not offer a great advantage in range compared to slower piston bomber designs, primarily due to the high fuel consumption of the early turbojets, however, it broke new ground in speed for a large aircraft.

On February 9, 1949, it was flown from Edwards Air Force Base in California, to Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, D.C., for President Harry Truman's air power demonstration. The flight was made in four hours and 20 minutes, setting a transcontinental speed record. The YB-49 presented some minor lateral stability problems that were being rectified by a new autopilot system, when the bomber version was cancelled in favour of the much larger but slower B-36. A reconnaissance version continued in development for some time but the aircraft did not enter production.

In the Soviet Union, the BICh-26, became one of the first attempts to produce a supersonic jet flying wing aircraft in 1948; aviation author Bill Gunston referred to the BICh-26 as being ahead of its time. However, the aeroplane was not accepted by the Soviet military and the design died with Cheranovsky.

Several other nations also opted to undertake flying wing projects. Turkey was one such country, the Turk Hava Kurumu Ucak Fabrikasi producing the THK-13 tailless glider during 1948. Multiple British manufacturers also explored the concept at this time. Early proposals for the Avro Vulcan, a nuclear-armed strategic bomber designed by Roy Chadwick, also explored several flying wing arrangements, although the final design had a fuselage.

There has been continual interest in the flying wing for large transport roles for cargo or passengers. Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Armstrong Whitworth have undertaken design studies on flying wing airliners; however, no such airliners have yet been built.

Following the arrival of supersonic aircraft during the 1950s, military interest in the flying wing was quickly curtailed, as the concept of adopting a thick wing that accommodated the crew and equipment directly conflicted with the optimal thin wing for supersonic flight.

Interest in flying wings was renewed in the 1980s due to their potentially low radar reflection cross-sections. Stealth technology relies on shapes that reflect radar waves only in certain directions, thus making the aircraft hard to detect unless the radar receiver is at a specific position relative to the aircraft—a position that changes continuously as the aircraft moves. This approach eventually led to the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, a flying wing stealth bomber. In this case, the aerodynamic advantages of the flying wing are not the primary reasons for the design's adoption. However, modern computer-controlled fly-by-wire systems allow for many of the aerodynamic drawbacks of the flying wing to be minimized, making for an efficient and effectively stable long-range bomber.

Due to the practical need for a deep wing, the flying wing concept is mostly adopted for subsonic aircraft. There has been continual interest in using it in the large transport role where the wing is deep enough to hold cargo or passengers. A number of companies, including Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Armstrong Whitworth, have undertaken design studies on flying wing airliners to date; however, no such airliners have yet been built as of 2023.

The bi-directional flying wing is a variable-geometry concept comprising a long-span subsonic wing and a short-span supersonic wing, joined in the form of an unequal cross. Proposed in 2011, the low-speed wing would have a thick, rounded airfoil able to contain the payload and a long span for high efficiency, while the high-speed wing would have a thin, sharp-edged airfoil and a shorter span for low drag at supersonic speed. The craft would take off and land with the low-speed wing across the airflow, then rotate a quarter-turn so that the high-speed wing faces the airflow for supersonic travel. NASA has funded a study of the proposal. The design is claimed to offer low wave drag, high subsonic efficiency and reduced sonic boom.

Since the end of the Cold War, numerous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) featuring the flying wing have been produced. Nations have typically used such platforms for aerial reconnaissance; such UAVs include the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel and the Northrop Grumman Tern. Civilian companies have also experimented with UAVs, such as the Facebook Aquila, as atmospheric satellites. Various prototype unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) have been produced, including the Dassault nEUROn, the Sukhoi S-70 Okhotnik-B, the DRDO Ghatak and the BAE Systems Taranis.

title: Flying wing