Quick's Plane Soared into Future:
Many principles of 1st local flight used in modern designs
By Mary Anne Zollar, Times Staff Writer- 2005 Huntsville Times. All rights reserved- Used by Permission of The Huntsville Times.
Perhaps the Wright brothers stole William Lafayette Quick's thunder when they flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903. After all, the bicycle builders' biplane got off the ground five years before the Madison County sawmill operator's monoplane did.
But the brilliance of the innovative design dreamed up by Quick prevents the April 1908 flight of his aircraft - executed in a bumpy field on family property near Hazel Green - from being tarnished.
The scientist/inventor Quick first began designing his aircraft in 1900. He had taken his first patent in 1884 on a hillside turning plow he developed and sold to the McCormick Implement Co.
As a businessman, he ran a blacksmith and tool shop, a sawmill and a grist mill, collectively known locally as Quick's Mill in Carmichael, a community that once existed between New Market and Hazel Green.
In the late 1800s, he became determined to patent the first motor-propelled, man-carrying aircraft in the world.
Having only a sixth-grade education, he read books and learned volumes from the intriguing creatures of flight. Quick studied the birds circling on warm thermals over his farm's fields. He noted the lessons nature had to teach in the tiny anatomies of dragonflies.
A skillful workman, Quick began to assemble a flying machine, and, within months after the turn of the century, he and his sons were conducting tests on propeller shapes, wing contours and methods of propulsion. His ideas were years ahead of their time, and many of the design principles he originated are still employed to this day.
Quick and his sons built their craft of wood hand-hewn from the family farm and metal parts forged in their blacksmith shop. The plane's delicate wings were covered in canvas and were reminiscent of the gracefully arching wings of a bird. The plane was 18 feet in length and had a wingspan of 38 feet.
Quick and his sons diligently experimented with propeller design. They laminated and carved the wood; they tried out each design until one provided enough thrust to make the airplane seemingly come to life and surge forward against the wheel chocks.
Once Quick had his craft built, he waited many years for an engine to carry him into sustained flight.
"Had he the knowledge, or the resources like the Wright brothers to build their own airplane engine, Will Quick could have been the first to fly," wrote Maj. Ronald Regan Sr., an authority on flight based in Leesburg, Fla.
As it was described in patent papers, the plane fuselage consisted of four bows of wood in a diamond shape, cabled together. The aviator sat in the center of the plane and operated it by tilting his seat, which controlled flexible wings. A twist of the shoulder operated a harness that turned the tail rudder.
It was that feature that ultimately brought the plane down.
William L. didn't fly his own plane. That honor went to his lighter, 16-year-old son, William Massey Quick.
Will Jr., in his moment of triumph and elation, leaned forward in his hinged chair and looked down at the earth passing beneath his feet. Rather like Icarus flying too close to the sun, the plane steered downward and that was that.
Quick toyed with the idea of forming an aircraft company in Huntsville, and drew designs for a decorative trade name, Quick Aero Navigation Co. But men were breaking the bonds of Earth across the country, and perhaps his zeal diminished and the company never came to fruition. He did relish astronomy and talked of possibilities of life on other planets, even how man would visit them.
His seven sons and daughter had been bitten by the flight bug, however, and their interest in aviation soared. Curt Quick bought a Canadian Army training plane in 1913, and the youths taught one another to fly, becoming pioneers in Southern aviation. Cady Quick was one of an extremely small number of female pilots in an era when Amelia Earhart was considered so exotic she made headlines regularly. Joe Quick, retired Madison County commissioner, was renowned as a mechanical genius and was a stunt pilot for years.
The Quick monoplane was the first flown in Alabama and the first of its kind in the United States. It was one of the first designs to use a conventional, streamlined fuselage and to seat the pilot in an upright position.
The Quick monoplane was one of the first airplanes to use a traditional front-mounted engine and aft vertical and horizontal tails. Today's jumbo jets and four-passenger prop planes take their retractable, three-wheel landing gear from that early design. The Wright brothers used landing skids for their model.
The Quick plane had a steering wheel that turned a wheel on the tail to make taxiing easier and used a pivoting main wing spar to provide some measure of pitch control.
The aircraft flew 200 yards at 15 feet above the ground. The plane was stored in a barn where it rested undisturbed for the next 50 years. In 1964, a group from the Huntsville Experimental Aircraft Association restored the aircraft and presented it to the Huntsville Airport Authority. Money was raised by offering pieces of the original canvas as souvenirs in return for a donation.
The plane found a fitting home at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, where it hangs today.
Copyright 2005-The Huntsville Times, www.al.com/huntsvilletimes. All rights reserved. Used with permission of The Huntsville Times. Article 05-24-05
Photos courtesy of: The UAH AIAA student section and students in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering are studying the Quick monoplane.
For more information on the NASA, UAH and US Space And Rocket Center Research on the Quick Monoplane see:www.eng.uah.edu/org/aiaa/QuickMonoplane
