News Story

CalTech labels Whalley 'FirstFlight = cool site'

John Domingue, Wednesday 09 April 1997 | Annotate

Peter Whalley's Firstflight project has been dubbed 'cool site' by the California Institute of Technology, in recognition of the project's novel approach to helping students understand the complexities of aeronautics. The project encourages individuals to experiment with the numerous parameter settings concerned with air flow and wing shape, and then puts them directly in the Wright Brothers' cockpit so they can experience what the flight would have been like had their own wing design been implemented.
The CalTech reference, headed "First Flight - Cool Site!" says "Peter Whalley is a multimedia researcher at the Open University in the U.K., and has been working on a flight simulation of the Wright Brother's frist flight. Data for the sim will be from some of the subscale wind tunnel tests and published by Frederick J. Hooven in Smithsonian and Scientific American."
Relevant sites/links (will open in a fresh browser window):

• Peter Whalley's FirstFlight page
• CalTech Wright Flyer Project
• CalTech Cool site mention for Whalley's project