AVIATION HISTORIAN, FUTURIST AVAILABLE
Dec. 17th is the 100th anniversary of Wright Brother's Flight.
If you are looking of someone to talk to about the history and future of aviation, Virginia Tech Professor of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Jim Marchman teaches aviation history and is familiar with the Wright Brothers and their competitors. He can talk about the details of their aircraft and their later successes and failures.
He is also knowledgeable about the future of* Personal aviation* Flying cars "There are a lot of people working on that."* New directions in commercial aviation, and* NASA initiatives regarding small aircraft and small airports
For an article about the NASA initiatives, seehttp://www.research.vt.edu/resmag/2002summer/airtravel.html
VIRGINIA TECH ALUMS REENACT HISTORICAL FLIGHT
When the world celebrates the flight of the first flying machine ever to take off from ground level and land under the control of its pilot, Virginia Tech will have its own reasons to celebrate Orville and Wilbur Wright's Dec. 17, 1903 flight -- and the three that followed on the same day.
Two Virginia Tech alumni, Kevin Kochersberger of Honeoye Falls, N.Y., who received a bachelor's degree, master's degree and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the university in 1983, 1984, and 1994, respectively, and Terry Queijo of Trappe, Md., who earned her undergraduate degree in animal science in 1978, will fly a reproduction of the Wright brothers' four-cylinder, 600-pound glider in Kitty Hawk, N. C., where the first flight made history. The two alumni, who will be wearing period costumes, will flip a coin, much as the Wright brothers did, to see who flies first.
VIRGINIA TECH HAS LINKS TO FIRST FLIGHT
In addition to its alumni playing lead roles in the reenactment of the first flight, Virginia Tech's Special Collections department in University Libraries will exhibit a piece of the actual fabric that covered the first successful airplane. The fabric, just under two square inches certified as original by the Orville Wright Estate, is part of the department's Michael Collins Collection. It was presented to Collins, who circled the moon while Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their historic landing on the lunar surface, as a tribute to his achievements in space.
That fabric, sold as "Pride of the West" muslin, was purchased by the Wright brothers at Rikes department store in Dayton, Ohio, just a few blocks from their Wright Cycle Company building. Today that building houses, among other things, the office of Virginia Tech alumnus Leonard Simpson IV of Dayton, who received his master of architecture degree from the university in 1990. Simpson, a preservation architect for the National Park Service, served as preservation specialist and construction manager for the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center, a museum that opened as part of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park on June 25, 2003, as a precursor to the centennial celebration. Museum exhibits focus on the Wright brothers' printing and bicycle businesses, their family history and their association with poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. While Simpson was enrolled at Virginia Tech, he worked for a summer as a seasonal park ranger at the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk.
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