14-BIS: The REAL First Successful Airplane You Never Heard Of

Welcome to another episode of Trailmakers! Today I am replicating what is controversially known as the first manned powered airplane: the 14-Bis. Most of the world recognizes the Wright Flyer as having the record for the first successful flight, but the story of the 14-Bis has some interesting bits of information that make this record not so clear cut as some people think, at least that's what my limited amount of research for the sake of entertainment has told me.

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About Trailmakers:

In the toughest motoring expedition in the universe, you and your friends will build your own vehicles to cross a dangerous wasteland. Explore, crash horribly, use your wits to build a better rig, and get as far as you can with whatever spare parts you find on your way.

Welcome to the Ultimate Expedition!

Journey over grueling mountains, hazardous swamps, and bone-dry deserts on a distant world far from civilization - it is just you, your fellow adventurers and the amazing, jet-powered hover-buggy you built yourself. Explore, crash your vehicle, build a better one, and get as far as you can with whatever spare parts you find along your way.

Trailmakers is about building very awesome vehicles and machines, but you don’t need an engineering degree to get started. The intuitive builder will get you going in no time. Everything you build is made from physical building blocks. Each block has unique features like shape, weight and functionality. They can be broken off, refitted and used to build something new. Individually the blocks are fairly simple, but combined the possibilities are endless.

Expedition Mode is the challenging campaign mode of Trailmakers. You are competing in an off-world rally expedition with only a few building blocks to get you started. You must build, tinker with and rebuild your machine to progress. Journey through a big world, overcome deep gorges, angry wildlife and dangerous weather to progress and find new parts that will juice up your machine. The world in Expedition Mode will test your survival skills and ingenuity.

Sandbox Mode is where you want to head for an unrestricted, sandbox, vehicle-building experience. Here you can build anything you can dream of, and play around with it in the world of Trailmakers. It is a great place to test out crazy machines, and experiment with the physics engine. With tons of different blocks, hinges, thrusters and interactive vehicle parts - the skybox is the limit.

Trailmakers is even more fun if you play it with other people. Build cool vehicles and compete in mini-game modes with your friends or other Trailmakers online. Build a helicopter, send it to your friend, and shoot them out of the sky. Put two seats on a tank, and let your friend control the turret. As we get further in Early Access development Expedition Mode will also be adapted to multiplayer.

[mateuszzaleski]

I must say these "first flying machines"series is very entertaining to watch, so how about something a bit harder:
The Pescara helicopter(1922-1923) one of the first attempts of a modern helicopter with quite a legacy with few world records and a tech used today like counterrotating rotors.

[melody]

Scrap man I am freaking loving your new videos. The historical things, the bills, the stories, it's literally got everything and I really love what you've done with your channel. Please do more like this.

[narunjoe]

In terms of counteracting torque, i believe it was done by the dihedral (the v shaped tilt of the wings). a plane with a dihedral has a natural tendency to stay straight because any roll inputs would result in uneven forces of lift on the sides, hence it always goes back to the centre. almost all planes have this feature but as seen in the painting, the dihedral was much higher in the 14-BIS in order to constantly counteract torque.

[K-gp]

a bit of an explanation: before the days of fixed wing aircraft where we had metal wings, airplanes were made of cloth. thus, the first airplanes used 'flex wings'.(not related to flex tape). rather than add cuts and hinges to cloth and risk a tear, they instead bent the flexible wings ever so slightly so they could turn. this one has a box on the front that moves, so its pitch and yaw is obvious, but i think the wings themselves are flexing for roll. either that or it has no roll, seeing as the first airplane designers were thinking more in 2d, with turning left and right, but not thinking about flipping around since no ground vehicles needed roll before.

[mky_m]

I love theese videos about replicas, giving backstories and some history while building and how accurate you can build them.

I hope this format continues.
Reading the comments it seems like it would take a while before running out of good ideas.

[LunaIsOnYoutube]

Being brazilian: I was surprised when people told me about the wright brothers because i was always taught about santos-dumont, i actually saw a replica fly at the Aeroclube De Bauru ( my hometown ) during a military event.

[prato_]

I'm brazilian and, if you look carefully, in the same youtube channel that you watched the 14bis's flight, there is a video that he explains that the intial flights of the flyer 1 didn't used any external tool to help the plane takeoff beside the rails, they invented the "slingshot" only on flyer 3 to make it easier, bcz in the desert where they flew, the wind change too often and they needed to keep changing the rails direction in order to takeoff oposite of the wind direction.

[Kk-nuoq]

You should Build the nemet parasol AKA the circular wing plane

[slimedev]

I'm loving this new series, where you make something from real life and then make it in Trailmakers or Scrap Mechanic, It reminds be of YDIB (You Draw, I Build)

[xShadowXxYz]

Hi Scrapman ! What about playing Kerbal Space Program ?

[Prince_Asuda]

After a few more of these weird historical and theoretical flying creations, you should make a compilation video showcasing how all of them perform on the high seas map in low and strong wind conditions. Considering how many sails you have and how delicate some of their mechanisms are, it will probably end very badly, but would still be very interesting to science!!

[riccardopetrina]

Now that we're talking planes, how about you build the biggest plane, made out of wood, which is the
Hughes H-4 Hercules? It would be huge but mechanically shouldn't be. Scrap Mechanic or Trailmakers.

[projectdeveloper]

First of all, yes I'm a brazilian and I studied these two as the some of the first flying machines.

0:45 :That's a very good brazilian channel made by an airfield mechanic that worked on the United Airlines, Lito Sousa.

So, to start with, the diference between the two was their primarily function:
-The Wright brothers wanted the comercial way, a machine to transport goods/people faster that they could use to make some good money. That's why there was so much secrecy about their design at the time, they wanted to get it patented without problems with knock-offs;
-Dumont was a very rich inventor that liked flying machines, hence his passion for airships (that would be originally used to make the flight in order to win a prize for flying machines that existed at that time in Europe), so he wasn't caring about anything except making these machines. Indeed, because of his habit of sharing the blueprints in daylight midstreet, many others took advantage of his design and tecnology advancements to make their own.

Basically, you can think of all this like:
The brothers design was the first flying machine that was built and actually worked to sustain flight, while the Dumont's variant was the first proper airplane as we know today, and helped to create the first steps of the "heavier-than-air flight" industry.

[Franktamas]

Kosmo recreated the first working solidwing plane in Trailmakers.
Scrapman: Hold my 14-bis.

[henrythearcticwolf]

We can all agree that this plane is the most efficient shape

[samfoot]

scrap man ! these historical videos are epic. love watching your brain at work and learning about history while learning the proccess of engineering design. fantastic stuff . keep at it dude

[looksgoodonpaper]

Really, a fantastic idea for a series. Loving this playlist. See you at number 1!

[zh]

The first /practical/ aircraft was Blériot's Type XI. It was very basic, but basically in layout a modern light aircraft, with a propellor at the front, straight wings, and a vertical fin and tailplane at the back. It had the great advantage over the Wright Flyer, 14-bis and other early aircraft that it was STABLE - Blériot basically only had to use the controls to point the aircraft where he wanted it to go, instead of fighting with it to keep it going in a straight line as was clearly the case with the 14-bis reconstruction in the video above. This was very important given his project of flying from France to England across more than twenty miles of cold water and a lot of shipping.

[GreenAppelPie]

It’s often who commercializes the invention who gets the credit. This funds the inventor for further refinements and mass production. The Wright Brothers had to try hard to convince the Army to buy their aircraft, but they did.

[anexesstormlord]

Well, you know you've made a good model of the original when you look at the original and go "Oh God why is it tipping like that when it takes off?" and then yours does the exact same thing lmao