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Romanian engineer and inventor
Aurel Vlaicu is the prototype of the inventor who showed skill since early childhood. He was famous in his village, then in the secondary schools he attended, for his "fabrications" of all kinds and for the crafts he ruled with startling ingenuity. Of all his technical passions, the one closest to his heart was making aircraft. Someone wrote so beautifully: "The soul of man became unchained to the ground, when science opened up to the air". It was undoubtedly our most popular inventor, admired and loved by Romanians on both sides of the Carpathians, supported warmly by scholars of the nation.
Born in Binţinţi - today the village is called Aurel Vlaicu (Hunedoara county) - he attended high school in Orăştie and Sibiu, then higher technical education in Vienna and Munich (1902-1907), during which he developed an aircraft project. After a short stay as engineer to the automotive factory "Opel" in Germany, where he failed to persuade the factory owners to build the airplane designed by him, he returned to his home village, where he built a glider, made in 1909, which experienced a great success. Urged by his school friend and poet fellow Octavian Goga, he came to Bucharest, where he made his successful aircraft model demonstrations in front of Spiru Haret and other personalities of the time. Confident and supported, he built the first airplane "Vlaicu I" (first "national plane", i.e. made by a Romanian on the Romanian land) - and then the model "Vlaicu II". He taught himself to fly the equipment and gradually came to an ability that allowed him to surpass many aces of acrobatics. "Romanian Aviation Day" is celebrated every year on the first Sunday of June, remembering his first flight in June 1910.
Flights made by him later, often as part of meetings, which gathered thousands of enthusiastic spectators, at increasing heights, sometimes in adverse weather conditions, attracted a well-deserved prestige, not only inside the country, but also abroad. At the air show at Aspern, near Vienna (23 to 29 June 1912), he earned important awards on the plane "Vlaicu II", based on his quite remarkable performance (Vienna press wrote then that Vlaicu "is not just a brilliant pilot but also a genius builder"). His daring attempt to be the first to pass Carpathians, the symbol of the unity of all Romanians, was very cost full - his very own life - on September 13, 1913, as the plane crashed at Banesti, near Campina, probably due to a heart attack of the inventor. Planes "Vlaicu I" and "Vlaicu II" showd some original features: body composition in a single plane aluminum tube, which carried all other elements, placing the center of gravity under the wings, which provided very good stability, the use of two coaxial propellers counter-rotating (spinning in opposite directions), independent wheels landing assembly, wings with variable profile, extremely low weight of the plane. The plane "Vlaicu III", designed by him, but constructed after his tragic death by two collaborators, was almost entirely metal framed and featured a unique aerodynamic shape to that time, substantially lowering the air resistance to progress. For this type of aircraft, Vlaicu designed the cooling metal ring around the engine cylinders, later widely introduced abroad, but without mentioning the name of the Romanian inventor. The poet Octavian Goga rightly characterized Aurel Vlaicu as "a light wave, which broke out from the vast regions of our popular genius." And how many things would have been done by the famous inventor, if death would not have caught him young, as he was not even 31 years old.
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Schreibweisen:
Vlaicu, Aurel
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Lebenslauf
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* 1882
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Bintinti, Romania
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geboren
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1907
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München, Wien
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Technical education
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† 1913
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gestorben
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