Lol I was 58 at one time I’m past that now.
By eating your young I was referring to discouraging a conversation and thus limiting threads and thread length.
The Very things that this forum is made of.
When we point out that answers to questions can often be found in the archives, we mean it. We often answer the same old questions and ideas over and over again, and it's frustrating to be challenged on the answers by people who don't like their wishful thinking critiqued, just because they can't be bothered to do a little research first. There are many well-educated people on this forum with qualifications and experience far beyond the rest of us, people who have already made some really good points about why we have the airframes and engines we have and why just about every "new" idea is not new at all. Our dearly departed Orion, a Boeing engineer, had as his tagline "What you believe or do not believe does not change the facts." Good advice.
The Wright Brothers have been held up as examples of ordinary guys who created an airplane. The inference is that any old dude can create some spectacular new design. They don't stop to find out that the Wrights were bicycle mechanics who also built and sold their own line of bicycles and worked with printing presses and motors and engines and other stuff and therefore had a strong mechanical background. Their research into flight started
seven years before their famous flight. People don't think about the gliders the Wrights built and tested for
three years before they made their first powered flight. How about the machinist they had in their shop to build that first engine? An engine, by the way, that weighed 180 pounds and produced 12 HP. Building engines is not easy.
The whole effort wasn't a quick-build instant flyer at all.
When I was young, finding good books on aircraft and aircraft building was hard and they weren't cheap. The libraries didn't have much at all, not surprising considering that the pilot population in the US and Canada is about one-fifth of one percent of the population, and many pilots aren't interested in building an airplane. Books like that would get read by very few people, so libraries didn't bother with them. (I couldn't find decent books on electronics, either.) Ignorance could therefore be excused to a great degree. Now, however, the internet has changed all that and there isn't much you can't find info on if you just do a search or two. For instance, we sometimes get folks that have picked up the idea that diesel engines are the next great aircraft engine. They appear to not have even Googled it. There are at least two certified diesel engine manufacturers, and diesel engines are available. They're expensive because the research and development costs ended up being far beyond expectations, so we don't see them in homebuilts. Cessna planned to install the Continental Diesel (they bought the technology from SMA) in their production 182s, and cancelled it. Price was too high. Pilots are cheapskates. Zoche has been promising a diesel for homebuilts for what? 25 years now? It won't be cheap, either. Flying cars? Moller promised us that for 40 years. People have been trying to do that for a very long time, and the horsepower required remains a pretty solid barrier. The bumblebee will have that privilege to himself for a while yet.
Most improvements are gradual, and are based on the work other have done. I can't think of a single flying machine that was spectacularly, radically different from anything else before it and that was an instant success. Even the first jets had their serious drawbacks.
