HAMILTON, Ont. — In a word, Bjarni Tryggvason described the first flight of the Silver Dart in nearly a century as “majestic.”
Adjunct Engineering Research Professor Bjarni Tryggvason makes final adjustments to a volunteer-built replica of the historic Silver Dart before piloting the craft through several test runs. The craft, tested in the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory at Western, will feature Tryggvason back in the pilot’s chair later this month in Nova Scotia to re-enact the first flight in Feb. 23, 1909.
And coming from a retired astronaut who flew as a payload specialist aboard Space Shuttle Discovery, that’s saying something.
On Feb. 6, the 64-year-old Tryggvason, now an Adjunct Research Professor in the University of Western Ontario’s Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, successfully test piloted a replica of the first aircraft flown in Canada and the British Empire. The test occured at John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport – 18 days before the 100th anniversary of the historic first flight.
“When I was flying I was just focused on what I had to do. But thinking back on it, the best way to describe it is majestic,” says Tryggvason, who guided the aviation marvel into the air six times in total, the longest flight being approximately two kilometres, 4.5 metres off the ground.
“It just lifted off the ground beautifully. It flew reasonably well. It was just a majestic experience.”
The Silver Dart, brainchild of Alexander Graham Bell, first flew off the ice of Baddeck Bay in Nova Scotia on Feb. 23, 1909. John McCurdy, one of the designers working under the heading of Aerial Experiment Association, was the original pilot.
Tryggvason is set to join the volunteer members of the Silver Dart Centennial Celebration committee in Nova Scotia later this month for a re-enactment and official flight of the aircraft on Mon., Feb. 23.
After completing postgraduate work in engineering with a specialization in applied mathematics and fluid dynamics at Western, Tryggvason was a meteorologist with the cloud physics group at the Atmospheric Environment Service from 1972 and 1973. He then returned to Western as a research associate in industrial aerodynamics at the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory from 1974 to 1979.
A guest research associate at Kyoto University in 1979 and at James Cook University of North Queensland, in Australia in 1980, Tryggvason returned to Western once again from 1980 to 1982 as a lecturer in Applied Mathematics. In 1982, he joined the Low Speed Aerodynamics Laboratory at the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa and was selected as a Canadian astronaut in 1983. Tryggvason retired from the Canadian Space Agency in 2008.
Over the past year, Tryggvason has worked with models of the Silver Dart with two Western fourth-year students and a Masters of Engineering student in the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel.
For more on the Silver Dart Centennial Celebration 2009, visit www.flightofthesilverdart.ca
Read more about this historic flight on Western’s Flight of the Silver Dart microsite.
