this article begins with a subtle slander against the brothers Wright, where the endless attempt to steal thier achivements never goes away, Langley's "pilot" crashed/fell strait into the river in 1903,and the Wrights achived controlled extended flight

the rest of the article must therfore push some tedious agenda

One area that has pushed the state of the art in large aerodynamic structures is the wind turbine industry. Blades are huge (100m long), need to be relatively accurate in shape and structure, quite light and definitely cheap and fast to produce.

They're made by resin infusion molding two halves, then putting a spar web in the middle and gluing it all together. The spar web glue is a thick paste that accounts for minor alignment / shape mismatch issues.

Quite ingenious in my opinion. It's definitely hard to hand-build a good product with large hours of specialist labor from expensive materials. And even more impressive to create a mass scaled process that produces still good enough products at reasonable cost.

I have a couple of close relatives that are AEs. Across several generations, everyone one of them agrees that "AE Structures" were the hardest classes they took.