TRAIL Spotlight

The first thing that you feel when an airplane lands is the effect of the brakes to slow it down. But, as the report “The Use of Wheel Brakes on Airplanes” points out, the use of brakes had to be proven to be safe before becoming part of standard operating procedures.

Long and grassy landing strips were used in the earlier days of aviation; brakes on the wheels were thought to cause planes to tip over after landing. By testing three different weight conditions and a well-thought out placement of the brakes, these engineers from 1927 proved that brakes were safe to add to airplanes.1

Figure 1. Image of a Brake Test Graph.

NACA (The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) was the U.S. agency that produced this report. NACA started in 1915 and was merged into National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958.

Reference

1. Thomas Carroll, “The Use of Wheel Brakes on Airplanes,” NACA-TN-311 (1929), http://www.technicalreports.org/trail/detail/113097/.

Isabel Altamirano (isabel.altamirano@library.gatech.edu), Georgia Tech University.