How soon could the airplane have been invented

In terms of what technology would allow, what is the earliest possible point in time that manned powered flight could have been successfully developed?
 
Neolithic. Stone airplanes flying across the Atlantic. Cavemen in jets. Coconut-milk-powered bombers, dropping logs with the word BOOM carved on them.
 
Neolithic. Stone airplanes flying across the Atlantic. Cavemen in jets. Coconut-milk-powered bombers, dropping logs with the word BOOM carved on them.

This.

Marginally more usefully, with what as a POD?

You're not going to see airplanes alongside the Crusaders, but a 800 Before Calvin (c. 1179 AD) airplane with a POD before Augustus might be possible.
 
This.

Marginally more usefully, with what as a POD?

You're not going to see airplanes alongside the Crusaders, but a 800 Before Calvin (c. 1179 AD) airplane with a POD before Augustus might be possible.

Agree, I mean when the PODs are that early it is always hard to know how stuff will develop and how fast. Sure OTL is a good thing to go by, but there are certainly setbacks, misses, and bumps that can be avoided and thus tech can develop at different pace in different areas.

TL that comes to mind is MNP's Raptor of Spain where a POD sometime 800sAD leads to caravel-like ships by the late 1100s. Thus exploration and world-trade are given a tremendous head start kickstarting other tech ahead of its time.
 
Agree, I mean when the PODs are that early it is always hard to know how stuff will develop and how fast. Sure OTL is a good thing to go by, but there are certainly setbacks, misses, and bumps that can be avoided and thus tech can develop at different pace in different areas.

TL that comes to mind is MNP's Raptor of Spain where a POD sometime 800sAD leads to caravel-like ships by the late 1100s. Thus exploration and world-trade are given a tremendous head start kickstarting other tech ahead of its time.

Yeah. And the earlier you pick as a POD, the harder it gets to estimate how much you can shift things into moving differently than OTL - since even if OTL setbacks, misses, and bumps are avoided, different ones will crop up.

How well they're coped with is a tough question to answer, especially in something like this.

So for discussion's sake, I'd say up to a century earlier than OTL barring developments like what you mentioned that may or may not be feasible in all PODs of that date.
 
There's three aspects that need to be figured out:

  • The physical construction techniques of the airframe. This is the easy part: you just need to know how to build a strong and lightweight wood frame and stretch canvas over it. It could probably be developed from shipbuilding techniques in a few years (given a reason to do so) at any point back to classical times.
  • The principles of aerodynamics, to build the airframe the right way so that it's get airborne and fly stably if you put enough power on it. This could conceivably have been figured out much early than OTL, based on close examination of the flight of birds, followed by a dangerous and expensive trial and error process. IIRC, the Da Vinci ornithopter (1505) was on the right track, with its main shortcoming being that it relied on muscle power and thus was badly underpowered.
  • The engine, which needs to be strong enough to lift the plane, without weighing so much itself that it can't lift its own weight in addition to that of the airframe, fuel, and pilot. The Wright Flier provides a decent baseline example: its engine was a 12 hp gasoline motor weighing 170 lbs. I've having trouble finding weight/hp specs for 19th century engines, but I suspect you need an internal combustion engine, since steam engines tend to be fairly large, and since you need to haul around water, a boiler, and a condenser; and I suspect ICEs didn't get small and powerful enough to lift a plane until maybe a few years before the Wright Flier.
If you want earlier powered flight, your best bet is probably to find a way speed up the development of internal combustion engines.
 
Neolithic. Stone airplanes flying across the Atlantic. Cavemen in jets. Coconut-milk-powered bombers, dropping logs with the word BOOM carved on them.

Oh, come ON, man. He wants realistic answers.

Modern English was millennia away! They wouldn't be able to say "Boom"; that's anachronistic!
 
If you want earlier powered flight, your best bet is probably to find a way speed up the development of internal combustion engines.
Actually an internal combustion engine is not necessary at all costs. It is possible to get a working steam-powered aircraft. There have been several attempts iotl (and at least one working model) and not all of them did fail due to the engine. Some failed due to faulty aerodynamics or because they did not manage a good compromise between weight and power (at least one steam-powered plane in the 1920s did not take off because the engine was too strong for the frame). Once steam engines reach a certain efficency it could be possible. Though the problems are probably greater than with internal combustion motors, it offers another way it might be achieved several decades earlier.
 
But the problem is that early steam engines are very much not going to work here, so the time it took to develop them to the point it can even be attempted seriously is not much different than "earlier ICE?" or even OTL schedule there.
 
The OP asks for manned, powered flight. It does not mention heavier-than-air flight.

A dirigible lighter-than-air vehicle could carry a significantly heavier engine, and since it does not need to expend power keeping itself airborne, the power requirements would be less as well. (Extra fuel would still be required to heat the air inside the vehicle, if a hot-air design is used, but this would effect only the vehicle's range and/or carrying capacity.) So I would expect that a manned lighter-than-air vehicle could have been flown shortly after the first relatively efficient high-pressure steam engines were developed around 1800.
 
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The OP asks for manned, powered flight. It does not require heavier-than-air flight.

A dirigible lighter-than-air vehicle could carry a significantly heavier engine, and since it does not need to expend power keeping itself airborne, the power requirements would be less as well. So I would expect that a manned lighter-than-air vehicle could have been flown shortly after the first relatively efficient high-pressure steam engines were developed around 1800, 17 years after the first manned hot-air balloons were flown.

This explains why the attempts at steam powered airships wound up with weak engines and little success.

I mean, if you're just concerned with "how fast", they count, but "viable" is some time off.
 
Jules Henri Giffard's Steam Airship

The Wright brothers may be the most famous people in the history of aviation for the first aeroplane flight in 1903, but the first ever powered and controlled flights were carried out in lighter-than-air craft before either of the Wright brothers was even born. Jules Henri Giffard was a Frenchman who made his fortune by inventing the steam injector (a device to prevent steam engine boilers running out of water whilst they were stationary, patented in 1858), but before that in 1852, he built the world's first passenger airship.

Other people had previously built and flown balloons filled with hydrogen, but in order to make the jump from ballon to being a true airship there needed to be both a source of propulsion and a means of changing direction so that there was the control to choose to fly where one wished. The first airships were known as "dirigible balloons" from the French "dirigeable", meaning "steerable". Later they were simply refered to as "dirigibles".

In 1850 Giffard helped fellow French engineer Jullien to build an airship with a propeller driven by clockwork, but it was to be Giffard's knowlege of steam power that would place his own airship in the history books and in 1851 he patented the "application of steam in the airship travel". He managed to build a small and light steam engine weighing just 250 pounds and despite the added weight of the boiler and coke bringing it to over 400 pounds, it was still light enough for his hydrogen filled balloon to lift. The engine drove a large (3.3 metre) rear-facing three-bladed propeller, and although only producing a power of 2,200 watts (three horsepower), it would prove to be enough to demonstrate that controlled flight was possible. The funnel pointed downwards and the exhaust stream was mixed with the combustion gasses to try and prevent sparks which might ignite the highly flammable hydrogen gas in the balloon. The balloon itself was 43 metres (144 foot) long and pointed at both ends. Below it at the rear was mounted a sail-like triangular vertical rudder.

The airship successfully flew on the 24th of September 1852, launching from the Paris Hippodrome and flying 27km (17 miles) to Elancourt, near Trappes. Because the small engine was not very powerful it could not overcome the prevailing winds to allow Giffard to make the return flight (the top speed of Giffard's airship was just six miles per hour). However, he did manage to turn the airship in slow circles, proving that in calm conditions controlled flight was possible.
 
Nope, I don't see "commercially viable" listed in the OP either. It simply asks when the first successful (i.e. the vehicle flew without crashing) powered manned flight could have taken place. In OTL this happened in 1852. I could see it happening as early as the early 19th century, if an inventor had put the proper pieces together at the time.
 
The OP said "airplane" which to me implies heavier-than-air flight. Basically, we're talking about an earlier invention of the combustion engine, since that's the main barrier to inventing the airplane earlier.
 
There is another possibility for an exciting type of early aircraft. Here is a video of a glider with a wooden structure http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9hzyh_messerschmitt-163-komet_people. It is towed into the air but could perhaps be launched with a winch. Here are a few extra details http://aviationtrivia.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/messerschmitt-me-163-komet-takes-to-air.html and note that the DFS-194 was also wooden and flew under power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFS_194.

Now this seems to be cheating for several reasons. The fuel, hydrazine/methanol and hydrogen peroxide, was not produced in quantity before the early Twentieth Century (at least the hydrazine). We could imagine a solid fuel rocket but performance would suffer. We would also not have the windtunnels available to produce good aerodynamics http://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/me163/go765.htm. However, as I commented at the start, we could imagine some designs that would produce spectacular if short displays.
 
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