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After the development of gunpowder and weapons came the development of aviation. At first hot air balloons were a common site throughout the developed world.

Next was powered flight in craft designed as birds. In 1972 the first exhibit of ancient Egyptian model aircraft was opened in the Egyptian Hall of the Museum for Antiquities.

Dr. Abide Hatum presented fourteen ancient model aircraft to the public. In the tomb of King Tutankhamen, boomerangs were found. This verifies the Egyptian interest in aerodynamics. It's wings were aerodynamically designed like those of modern aircraft, it had a streamlined fuselage, a horizontal stabilizer and a vertical rudder. There aren't any birds with these features! Was this a glider or perhaps a powered aircraft.

One of the first pioneers of flight was Daedalus who constructed wings for his son Icarus and himself. They were able to have achieved flight however it is said his son flew too high and fell into the sea now called the Icarian Sea.

I however dispute this part of the legend. I believe he didn’t fly to high; he just didn’t master basic flight maneuvers like stall recovery.

Someone once asked me if a helicopter was as safe as an airplane? I replied “that machine is trying to kill you from the moment it leaves the factory!” Although a helicopter doesn’t need a long landing zone to touch down in, it is much more difficult to control. When a helicopter loses lift it falls like a rock.

When an airplane loses power you go into a controlled glide path where you can select a landing site, set up a glide approach, and have a pretty good chance of surviving the crash landing depending on the terrain more than anything else.

This is true for small fixed wing aircraft such as Cessna’s, larger aircraft jets, airliners, fighter jets have a much smaller wing span and rely on thrust propulsion from jet engines to create lift.

It is interesting that the models of the Egyptian “bird” figurines taken from tombs in the Valley of the Kings have a relatively large wingspan in relation to the size of the fuselage of the craft, along with vertical rudders which are not present anywhere in nature.

There is a camber to the leading edge of the wing which affects airflow to the wing. As air encounters the wing part of the airstream goes over the top of the wing and part goes under the wing. The air going under the wing has a higher pressure and flows faster than the air going over the wing which is a lower pressure and thus causes lift.

When you lose power the air stream slows down and thus lift is lost. You either drop the nose of the airplane thus increasing speed and lift or you raise the nose of the aircraft which increases the angle of attack or angle of the leading edge of the wing to the airstream.

When this angle becomes too great you have what’s called a “stall” and the plane looses all of its lift and falls from the sky. This in a controlled fashion is exactly how you land an airplane.

When you select a landing zone, weather it is a runway, or in the case of power failure and you need to make an emergency landing:Typically in a Cessna you reduce power to 1500 RPM as you go into a controlled decent.

You are losing about 500 feet per minute, you are flying down wind along the path of your runway and a couple of hundred of feet to the side of the runway. In the case of an emergency landing you are assessing the landing field for obstructions.

When you have past the end of the runway about a quarter of a mile you make a left turn onto the base leg. Using a standard rate turn of fifteen degrees, continuing in a controlled descent, if you are losing too much altitude you apply power to add lift.

As you pull back on the stick, which controls the rear elevator, which controls vertical descent, as you come abreast of the runway still using standard rate turns of fifteen degrees you turn on to the final approach.

Lining up with the center of the runway, controlling decent with adding or subtracting power, when over the runway at the desired point of touch down, you should only be a few feet over the runway at this point not twenty feet in the air!

You pull back on the stick, you will hear a horn going off when the nose of the aircraft raises and you lose lift, the horn is the stall alarm which is activated from the wings losing lift, and you are falling out of the sky backwards, with your nose higher than the tail of the plane.

You will land on your rear wheels. When you go to a small general aviation airport where private pilots learn to fly you can sit back and watch the planes come in frequently flaring or going into a stall to high off the runway and bouncing down the runway because of landing at too high a rate of speed and at the point of stall you don’t have control of the airplane you have lost all lift.

Gliders also have the same flight characteristics as a powered flight.Going into a stall is the first stage of a plane going into a tail spin. If you don’t recover from a stall given enough altitude you will go into a tail spin, you will be looking straight down at the ground, as your plane is spinning down towards it, your body will be having increased pressure called G-forces, you are vomiting, or wishing you were at this point, and losing consciousness, your body weight has actually doubled, it is difficult to raise your arms, your ears are popping.

The way to recover from this free fall is to push the stick all the way forward, which takes training to do because you are diving towards the ground and it is the natural instinct to pull the stick away from the ground but that keeps you in the spin, as you are pushing forward on the stick you step on the foot pedal opposite of the direction of the spin, hopefully you have enough altitude and you will level off and go into a rapid climb that you will control with your airspeed, as you climb to altitude, and the plane starts to slow down as you enter a normal flight attitude.

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7,000 miles away from Egypt in Columbia South America, on the Magdalene River, there was an ancient civilization 1500 years ago called Telemia. There were hundreds of golden figurines found, but a dozen of them were eerily similar to modern fighter jets.

They were triangular in shape, with a fuselage, a horizontal stabilizer and vertical rudder. They have nothing in common with anything in nature. They had the aeronautical design to travel at high speeds like the space shuttle.

These are just two examples of pre-Columbian evidence that our ancient ancestors knew about aerodynamics. These are examples from opposite ends of the planet, of two different designs of aircraft a third example would be from a pyramid in Mexico.

In 1935 at the site of the Palenque Pyramid was found a stone relief dated to 600 AD, that has historians and archeologists flabbergasted. Every now and then things are found that are so incredible, that even the organized religions, and various governments, after prolonged periods of cover up, and classifying the site as national security risks, at some time they are compelled to say something intelligent about the finds.

The stone relief found at the Palenque site was of a human, at first thought was of a motorcycle rider, but his “hog” was a rocket or missile. The human on the rocket was bent forward just like any biker would be.

The rocket is pointed at the front but then changes to grooved indentations like inlet ports. It then widens out and terminates at the end with flames shooting out of the rocket.

The human like occupant appears to have his foot on a pedal alongside the body or fuselage of the rocket. The occupant appears to have a control panel with dials on it, that the space traveler is adjusting.

He is wearing trousers a jacket with an open collar and tight fitting arm bands and leg bands. On his head he was wearing a helmet with indentations, tubes and an antenna. 

to be continued