Marked for Death Read online

  Meanwhile the aerodrome staff had hastened to the scene of disaster. When the machine’s tail was lifted up we both fell out of the fuselage, whereupon all our rescuers began to laugh. This only sent Marty off into spasms of mirth-provoking Anglo-French fury. All of which may have conveyed the impression that we were rather a heartless set of fellows, but although a pilot who was hurt in a crash came in for his due share of sympathy, it was the custom at Hendon to give him a dose of ridicule if he was fortunate enough to escape injury.20

  This vignette of a typical flying accident a few months before the First World War is revealing on several counts, apart from acting as a reminder that even today, a century later, a stall on take-off still causes multiple fatalities each year around the world, especially in light aircraft like this. At the time it was a familiar occurrence and the writer, Louis Strange, was very lucky. Many such crashes caught fire and their trapped survivors, often still very much alive and all too audible, were burned to death in front of the horrified spectators and ground crews. Aviation spirit, together with the aircraft’s wooden construction covered in doped fabric, could produce a raging bonfire within seconds. Despite the rapid developments in aircraft design that the war was to expedite, flying remained a high-risk pastime for many years, as the aeronautical engineer and future popular novelist Nevil Shute was to discover when working for the de Havilland company in the 1920s.

  The jocular phrase that one was going out to flirt with death was not entirely jocular in 1923. Humour was grim at times on Stag Lane Aerodrome. There was a crash wagon with fire extinguishers on it ready at all times when flying was in progress, as is usual, and this crash wagon was provided with a steel rod about eighteen feet long with a large, sharpened hook at one end. This was for the purpose of hooking the body of the pilot out of the burning wreckage when the flames were too fierce to permit any gentler method of rescue. It was the custom at Stag Lane when a pupil was to do a first solo to get out this hook, to show him that his friends had it ready…21

  As it turned out, Louis Strange’s luck went on holding to a phenomenal extent (as will shortly become even more apparent). He was the pilot mentioned in the previous chapter who had flown the first F.E.2b out to France and he was to have a most distinguished war, emerging practically unscathed from his years as a combat pilot and flying instructor, neither of which profession was noted for longevity. His pilot that day at Hendon, Philippe Marty, was not so lucky. He was to die only a few weeks later from stalling his machine once again, this time at 200 feet.

  The story shows vividly how very susceptible early aircraft could be to chance gusts of wind. This was because they were of the lightest possible construction, which in turn was the result of the aero engines of the day being generally weak. This further restricted what could be achieved by designers’ limited understanding of aerodynamics. Among the earliest pioneers the Wright brothers in America were the most consistently scientific and systematic in their approach to flight, and this undoubtedly formed the bedrock of their success. Not only did they build a primitive wind tunnel to test their wing shapes, they also designed the first true aero propeller. Various propellers had already been tried on dirigibles, but they were mostly based on ships’ screws and even on paddles. It was the Wright brothers who broke decisively with the nautical model and reasoned that a propeller blade was in effect a little narrow wing that needed to be given a twist to ensure it created more lift than drag along its entire length as it revolved. Since the engine was mounted horizontally this lift simply became thrust. The propellers they crafted out of wood for their ‘Flyer’ were a mere 4 or 5 per cent less efficient than are the best computer-designed propellers well over a century later. It was a stroke of engineering genius for two men calculating with paper and pencil in a bicycle workshop.

  Besides adequate thrust, powered flight depended on the aircraft being controllable. The Wrights and the German pioneer of man-carrying kites, Otto Lilienthal, are between them credited with having worked out the basic principles of aerodynamics and control. However, as the Wright brothers themselves acknowledged, credit for that actually belonged to an extraordinary Englishman, George Cayley, who was born in 1773. He was the first person known to have worked out that the four main forces acting on any aircraft as pairs of opposites are gravity and lift, thrust and drag. He also designed the first cambered wing for generating lift; this became the standard aircraft wing shape such as the Wrights tested in their wind tunnel and which has persisted to the present day. Cayley first constructed and flew a model glider as early as 1804, and in 1853 an employee of his bravely made the first manned glider flight in one of Cayley’s designs at Brompton Dale in Yorkshire, nearly half a century before Lilienthal’s experiments with what were essentially the first hang-gliders. Modern replicas of Cayley’s glider have since been flown successfully in Britain and America to prove that, primitive or not, it really had worked.

  As the Wrights and their contemporaries in Europe had learned from their kite-building, there are three basic axes in flight: roll, yaw and pitch. Roll is when an aircraft tilts or banks to one side or the other; yaw is when the tail swings from side to side like oversteer in a car; and pitch is its nose-up or nose-down attitude: climbing or diving. To steer their ‘Flyer’ by using yaw, the Wrights employed the same vertical rudder that they and others had used for their gliders, although they mounted this at the front, canard-style, rather than at the back. To achieve both pitch and roll they devised a system of wing warping, or bending the entire wing. This device was still used extensively on early aircraft like the Morane-Saulnier GB type in which Marty and Strange stalled and crashed at Hendon in 1914, although by then the method was obsolescent: a process that the Wrights themselves had unintentionally hastened.

  For, in the wake of their epoch-making success of late 1903, the brothers made an error of judgement that was to cost America the lead in aviation and cede it to Europe. This was to take out a patent on their aircraft’s control system and then to become litigious. It was not only their own wing-warping they patented but any form of flight control that involved interfering with the airflow over the outer portions of a wing. Their lawyer was quick to bring legal actions against aspiring rivals in the United States and even against visiting aviators from Europe who experimented with any form of wing-bending to control their own aircraft. This was vociferously condemned as selfishly hindering progress, especially in Europe, where no pioneer was about to quit his own researches out of respect for an American patent. This attempt to monopolise the science of controlling an aircraft backfired even in the United States itself where another great figure of early aviation, Glenn Curtiss, was harried by the Wrights’ lawyer. The mantle of leadership effectively passed across the Atlantic to men like France’s Voisin brothers (who had opened their first aircraft factory as early as 1904), the Farman brothers, Armand Deperdussin and Louis Blériot. Other European pioneers included the young Dutchman Anthony Fokker and in Britain the American Samuel Cody, the Irishman J. W. Dunne, A. V. Roe, Geoffrey de Havilland and Claude Grahame-White. In the United States it was a measure of Glenn Curtiss’s brilliance and determination that despite the Wrights’ opposition he still managed to produce original and sound early aircraft as well as founding one of the great American aircraft companies. Generally speaking, however, after its pioneering start in aviation the United States rested on its laurels to such an extent that when it finally went to war on the Entente (Allied) side in 1917 American pilots were obliged to fight in French and British combat aircraft, with the honourable exception of a few Curtiss HS-2L flying boats that performed long-range escort duties for cargo ships running the gauntlet of German submarines.

  British aviation owes a very large debt to Samuel Cody who, as mentioned in the previous chapter, was the first to achieve powered flight in Britain. Calling himself Colonel Cody, he was a barely literate Texan showman with a twelve-inch moustache. At the turn of the twentieth century he was touring British music halls giving ‘W
ild West’ exhibitions of trick shooting and riding. But what really fascinated him was flying, and he devised a series of man-lifting box kites for military observation. These duly caught the eye of both the British Army and the Royal Navy and by 1906 Cody found himself at the Army’s Balloon Section at Farnborough. His problem was money, since at the time the military were still only interested in balloons and could see no future in the powered aircraft he wanted to build. In the teeth of opposition, by one means or another (and mainly by sheer force of ebullient charm) he managed to put together something he called the ‘British Army Aeroplane No. 1’, and on 16th October 1908 he flew it. Like most of the pioneers he had taught himself to fly and had no formal education in aircraft design. Carpers accused him of having cribbed his machine from his fellow American, Glenn Curtiss, but by now there were aeronautical inventors in most European countries, travelling around to displays, swapping information, accusing one other of plagiarism and promoting their own designs while learning from each other. Nevertheless, at Farnborough Cody was often ridiculed as ‘the Texan showman’ and ‘the cowpuncher’ for being no scientist and generally self-taught.

  In 1913 the Daily Mail offered a prize of £5,000 for the first person to fly a ‘waterplane’ around Britain, including a flight across the Irish Sea to Dublin. Cody, by then aged fifty-three, built a new aircraft of his own to meet this challenge. It was his sixth design: a biplane so large it was mocked at Farnborough as ‘Cody’s Cathedral’. The young Geoffrey de Havilland, who as well as being a pilot had formally studied aircraft design, infuriated Cody by sauntering over to his immense machine, plucking its flying wires like harp strings and telling the old showman that he really needed to double them for added strength. Cody assured this whippersnapper that it was as strong as a house. On 7th August, the day Cody was due to fly his ‘Cathedral’ down to Calshot to have its floats fitted for the competition, he decided to give two friends the flights he had long promised them. On the second of these he took up W. H. B. Evans, the captain of the Hampshire cricket team.

  Two of Cody’s three sons, Leon and Frank, were among those watching as Cody circled the clubhouse of Bramshot golf course and turned back towards Laffan’s Plain. They saw the plane stagger and the wings fold upwards. Cody, easily identified by his white coat and cap, followed by his passenger, were catapulted from their seats at a height of between 300 and 500 feet. Their bodies, followed by the wreckage of the plane, fell into a clump of oak trees 50 yards apart. Cody’s publicly expressed wish that, when it came, death would be ‘sharp and sudden, from my own aeroplane, like poor Rolls’, had been granted.22

  ‘Poor Rolls’ was the Hon. Charles Stuart Rolls, who had gone into partnership with Henry Royce in December 1904. On 12th July 1910 Rolls was piloting a Wright ‘Flyer’ at Bournemouth when its tail broke off and he was killed, the first person in England to die while flying a powered aircraft. As for Cody, the Daily Mail gave him an epitaph on 11th August in the form of a bitter poem by a certain J. Poulson.

  Crank of the crankiest, ridiculed, sneered at,

  Son of a boisterous, picturesque race.

  Butt for the ignorant, shoulder-shrugged, jeered at,

  Flint-hard of purpose, smiling of face.

  Slogging along on the little-trod paths of life;

  Cowboy, and trick-shot, and airman in turn.

  Recklessly straining the quick-snapping laths of life,

  Eager its utmost resistance to learn.

  Honour him now, all ye dwarfs who belittled him,

  Now, ’tis writ large what in visions he read.

  Lay a white wreath where your ridicule killed him;

  Honour him, now he’s successful – and dead.

  As a sacrificial victim of early aviation Sam Cody was hardly alone. He had his counterparts all over Europe and elsewhere: men with a mechanical bent who for ten years had been putting together flying machines of their own design in sheds and garages, each convinced that his would prove revolutionary, only for the dream to end in a tangle of wire and fabric in the middle of rough pastureland. ‘The only bones left unbroken in the cadaver,’ as one army medic bleakly observed, ‘were probably those of the inner ear.’

  The single flight that first made it clear aviation was a practical mode of transport and not just a spectacular way of getting killed was Louis Blériot’s across the English Channel on 25th July 1909. His model XI was the world’s first powered and truly airworthy monoplane and it was to inspire several other similar designs, including those by Morane and Fokker. Blériot’s soon became the world’s most-produced aircraft, being bought by flying schools and several European countries for evaluation of its military potential. Indeed, it was Anthony Fokker’s derivation of it, the Fokker E.1 Eindecker (monoplane), that was to establish temporary German air superiority in the skies above France and Belgium in 1915. Yet by then early monoplane design was revealing its limitations. With the exception of the E.1’s forward-firing machine gun the aircraft itself was rather old hat and could be outperformed by several biplanes at the time.

  *

  This prompts a question. Why was it – to judge from contemporary photographs and films and all the popular imagery of the first air war – that the vast majority of aircraft in those days were biplanes and even triplanes? Only part of the answer is that four wings produce more lift than two. Four wings can also be made much stronger, the struts and wires between the pairs producing the effect of box girder construction. A box girder resists torsion, or twisting; and twisting was the inherent problem of the wood-framed wings of the day. Because Blériot, Fokker and many others at first used Wright-style wing warping to control their monoplanes’ pitch and roll, the wings had to be able to twist. But as speeds increased, together with a need for more manoeuvrability, so much torsion could be set up that the wing could be torn entirely off. Aircraft shedding their wings as Cody’s ‘Cathedral’ had were a distressingly familiar sight at air shows and also accounted for a good many deaths in Fokker’s and other monoplanes of the period. Blériot’s famous model XI was similarly plagued by structural failure and earned itself the nickname of ‘The Killer’. It was obvious that as a method of control, wing warping was doomed. Quite apart from anything else, it was mechanically complex. As Fokker himself later admitted of his own aircraft, ‘To warp the wings for elevator action required twelve wires, running on rollers and centring on the control stick. This was bad mechanics, however good a theory it might be.’23 The wings of a biplane, on the other hand, could be made remarkably stiff when built as a box girder, and pitch and roll could then be achieved by the far simpler method of ailerons: hinged flaps on the trailing edges at the ends of the wings. In this way pairs of stiff wings equipped with simple ailerons revolutionised control and effectively became the basic design for most of the aircraft that flew in the First World War.

  However, designers soon found that doubling the number of wings did not double the lift. The reason for this is inherent in the way a wing works. Its cambered shape produces a drop in pressure in the airflow as it passes over its curved upper surface, creating a vacuum effect that ‘sucks’ the wing upwards. At the same time the flatter underside of the wing, at an angle to the airflow (the ‘angle of attack’), produces an increase in pressure that ‘pushes’ the wing upwards. Both these forces together produce lift. In a biplane, though, with one wing above the other, there is interference between the positive pressure beneath the upper wing and the negative pressure above the lower, cancelling some of the potential lift. It was for this reason that, as the war went on, aircraft designers tried either increasing the distance between the top and bottom wings or else ‘staggering’ them so they were not directly above each other. Usually the top pair was placed slightly ahead of the bottom pair.

  It was soon discovered that, with careful placing of a biplane’s centre of gravity and by not designing it for stability at all costs, it could be made much more agile if often trickier to fly. This might be achieved by ‘short-coupling�
�: reducing the length of the fuselage so the aircraft became stumpier. There were subtleties of fine-tuning, too. The diagonal wires between the pairs of wings could be tightened or slackened by means of turnbuckles. By careful alignment of the tail with the centre section (the roofed ‘box’ of struts that surrounds the cockpit), the aircraft could be deliberately trimmed to fly in a particular way. ‘Tuning’ a biplane to suit its pilot became a valued skill on the part of his rigger mechanics.

  Sundry variations in design were tried during the war, including that of adding a third pair of wings. The first triplanes to be seen were the big Voisin bombers of 1915 and 1916, when a third wing was very obviously a load-bearing measure. When Britain’s Sopwith company came up with the first little triplane fighter in 1916 it seemed revolutionary. It was found that three pairs of somewhat shorter wings could confer amazing agility in the air and the design of the ‘Tripe’ was quickly copied. As mentioned earlier, a plethora of different triplanes came from Austro-German manufacturers, most notably Fokker’s Dr.I which today is most associated with Baron von Richthofen. Yet the triplane craze was short-lived. While increasing the number of wings can indeed increase lift, it also adds weight and drag. The Dr.I was noticeably slower than many of its contemporaries and although initially it climbed well it soon became sluggish at altitude.

  The French company Nieuport, which built some of the war’s most successful fighters, went in another direction, that of the sesquiplane. This literally means ‘a wing and a half’, and the Nieuport design was a biplane in which the lower two wings were much narrower and shorter than the upper. They were pretty machines and generally very agile. The flying aces Eddie Rickenbacker, ‘Billy’ Bishop, Albert Ball and Charles Nungesser all flew Nieuports for preference at one time or another. They liked their manoeuvrability and responsiveness to the controls. But even they needed to be careful not to over-stress the aircraft because the narrow lower wings suffered from the same old problem that monoplanes had: they couldn’t be built rigid enough to withstand too much torsion, and the twisting forces sometimes caused the wing to fail, which usually led to the break-up in mid-air of the entire machine.