Antarctic's First Plane, Found In Ice

Arvisp writes "In 1912 Australian explorer Douglas Mawson planned to fly over the southern pole. His lost plane has now been found. The plane – the first off the Vickers production line in Britain – was built in 1911, only eight years after the Wright brothers executed the first powered flight. For the past three years, a team of Australian explorers has been engaged in a fruitless search for the aircraft, last seen in 1975. Then on Friday, a carpenter with the team, Mark Farrell, struck gold: wandering along the icy shore near the team's camp, he noticed large fragments of metal sitting among the rocks, just a few inches beneath the water."

Cue the pissing contest

[elrous0]

I have a funny feeling this "Antarctic's First Plane" thing started when an American dared point out that the first plane to fly in Antarctica was the "Stars and Stripes" (built by the legendary Sherman Farchild [wikipedia.org], and one of his pioneering aerial surveys). Then, as is always the case when an American dares claim a "first" in anything, hundreds of Europeans, Canadians, Australians, etc. with inferiority complexes immediately rushed out and found an obscure case of someone *shipping* a plane to Antarctica before this (which never actually flew), so they could once again show those big-shot Americans that their dicks were bigger.

Re:Cue the pissing contest

[elrous0]

Which is exactly why we should end this "first" bullshit in the first place (no pun intended). The fact is that most great accomplishments in history are the result of the hard work of a lot of people working together, on the backbone of the work of generations of predecessors, spurned by the occasional advances of individual brilliant minds, and rarely limited to any one country. Both the Australian plane and the American one were built on the work of the Wright Brothers, whose three-axis control innovation was also dependent on decades of glider innovations an developments in the internal combustion engine needed to build an actual working plane (developments which spanned the continents).

Never flew on the Antarctic

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Can you call a plane that never flew on the Antarctic the first plane on the Antarctic?
Because in that case I'm going to build the first hover-car on Earth.

Re:I guess we can thank global warming

[sycodon]

It was still sitting on the ice when he returned in 1929 and 1931, and in 1975 it was photographed after a big ice melt.

Abandoned in 1914, it was still visible at least until 1931. Between then and 1975 or so it was covered in ice but after "a big ice melt it", was visible again. And now, it is barely visible as it is covered in ice again.

Hardly evidence that can be used to support global warming.

Ahem

[argStyopa]

Since they have found the plane, that then means that the search really wasn't 'fruitless', was it?

Re:Cue the pissing contest

[jc42]

You do realize that the Wright Brothers' plane was not the first airplane invented, right? ... The Wright Brothers' plane was the first to master turning. Only an idiot would claim the WB invented the first airplane; ...

Actually, arguments like this are really just an artifact of the common desire to reduce everything to a bumper-sticker-like slogan. The reality is, as usual, that "the airplane" wasn't invented out of nothing by some single person or team. The real story is more interesting. Powered flight was the result of a century or so of development, in which a large number of people scattered around the globe (but mostly in North America and Europe ;-) figured out parts of the puzzle, learned from each other, built things that did something slightly better than before, etc. Finally, in the early decades of the 20th century, they managed to build flying things that were actually practical transport tools.

But any decent history of flight will list a lot of people and their achievements. The Wright brothers' achievement is yet another case of "standing on the shoulders of giants". Any claim that "the airplane" was invented by one person/team at one place is utterly bogus.

Of course, one of the first things to be transported by air in quantity were bombs, as we might expect from briefly skimming the history of human technology.