Chasing Icarus (26 page)

As the members of the Aero Club of America took the train to Grand Central Station to welcome Alan Hawley and Augustus Post, the aviators competing in Saturday’s International Aviation Cup remained at the grounds making their final preparations.

Among the items on their checklists was the latest weather forecast, which, as with every such report, was pinned to the bulletin board outside the club house. The weather bureau predicted for Saturday “moderate to brisk westerly winds.”

*
In late November the War Department released the official distances for the race.
America II
’s mileage was reduced to 1,171, thus depriving Hawley and Post of a world record.
Düsseldorf II
’s distance had also been pared, from 1,240 to 1,131 miles, with
Germania
third with 1,079 miles.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I’m Not Hurt Much but I Want

a Long Rest

Saturday, October 29, 1910

Claude Grahame-White Woke early on Saturday morning, not to the sweet smell of clean sheets at the Hotel Astor, but to the pungent odor of engine grease in hangar No. 14. He’d slept the night in his hangar because he wanted to be ready to get into the air the moment the race started at eight thirty A.M. Grahame-White hadn’t been the only flier to remain at the grounds, although the incessant “clatter of preparation” from Charlie Hamilton’s hangar suggested the American hadn’t had much chance to rest his weary head. Now, as a cold dawn broke over Belmont Park, tinkering sounds were also coming from the direction of John Moisant’s hangar. One of Grahame-White’s mechanics brought him a mug of coffee and a bowl of hot water so he could shave. With that done he put on a pair of black-and-white-checked knickerbockers, pulled a thick sweater over his head, and wrapped a white silk scarf around his neck.

In the press stand a smattering of reporters were already at their desks, their legs encased in woolen blankets. The correspondent from the
New York Globe
sipped his coffee and took in the scene before him. “There were almost 1,000 determined aero fans shivering in front of the grandstand,” he wrote, “and vainly seeking to place themselves in the way of some vagrant ray of sun. The wind blew at ten miles an hour from the west, not enough to interfere with flying, but a rate that added to the zest of danger to the competition.”

Some of the spectators had on a heavy black coat of the sort sold by Macy’s for $18, one of several items featured in the store’s “Aeronautic Age” promotion. With the coats came wool-lined, tan gauntlet gloves, just like those favored by the aviators, and several of the men wore under their coats one of the latest styles of starched collar—“monoplane” or “biplane”—but both guaranteed to be “strain-resisting” when it came to scanning the sky. Children waiting impatiently for eight thirty A.M. to roll around played with one of their Macy’s toy airplanes, either an aluminum Blériot monoplane or a wooden Yankee Flier.

The wealthy enthusiasts who arrived by car opened their trunks and removed one of Macy’s leather aviation-luncheon baskets, while others took snapshots of Belmont Park with a Macy’s camera (because, as the store’s ad declared, “You want more than a blur as a souvenir of your day at the Aviation Field”). Eleonora Sears had her camera with her, according to the
New York Sun
’s correspondent, who spied her wandering along hangar row “taking snapshots of the aviators.”

The stalwart one thousand already on the grounds by eight A.M. were the vanguard of a great exodus from Manhattan. The four guards whose job it was to direct the crowds onto the trains at Pennsylvania Station at Thirty-fourth Street established a relay system from the stairs down to the platform in order to best preserve their voices. “Room!” shouted the first guard. “Up forward!” cried the next, ten yards farther on. “Two rear!” hollered the third, glancing toward the guard nearest the train for Belmont Park. “Car smokers!”

The newspapers read by the passengers on the trains out to the grounds were full of race information. The
New York Times
reminded its readers, “Under the rules, the Gordon Bennett Cup race must be flown over a course of not less than five kilometers (3.1 miles)—the exact size of the Belmont Park course—and the distance to be covered may not be less than 100 kilometers (sixty-two miles). Contestants may start at any time within a period of seven hours on the day fixed for the race, and there is no minimum time in which the course must be covered. Landings will be allowed, but each contestant must cross the starting line at least one and a half hours before sunset. The time at which the race may be begun will be 8:30 A.M., giving the aviators until 3:30 P.M. to make their start. A purse of $5,000 accompanies the prize.”

The
New York Times
was one of the few papers to offer a balanced assessment of the likely outcome of the race, estimating that “America’s chances are good.” The
New York Herald
was feeling more bullish, splashing its front page with the titanic headline WRIGHT “BABY GRAND” DRIVEN BY MR. BROOKINS, PICKED TO WIN THE GREAT FLIGHT TO-DAY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL TROPHY. The
New York Sun
, meanwhile, reported “an air of quiet confidence in the hangars of the American aviators,” with John Moisant offering a different view to the
Herald
, saying, “Hamilton is the man who will keep the trophy here.”

Those passengers whose trains approached Belmont Park at eight A.M. stopped reading their papers, stopped talking about Hawley and Post, and looked out of the windows to their left. An airplane was in the air, a biplane, small and compact; could it be the Wrights’ Baby Grand? Then the train curved right and the biplane vanished behind the enormous grandstand. A minute late the train arrived at the Belmont Park station and the doors released a torrent of humanity. Passengers ran down the steps and through the funnel-like passageway that led to the grounds, hoping to catch another glimpse of the biplane, but they were too late.

Walter Brookins’s first flight in the Baby Grand had lasted just three minutes. He went up, flew a lap of the course, and came down ecstatic. “There’s nothing she can’t do,” he said with a whoop. “The Blériots aren’t in it with her!”

At the foot of each of the thirteen pylons staked out around the course were a table and two chairs, which now accommodated two members of the Signal Corps. Telephones connected ten of the pylons to the judges’ box, and each pair of corpsmen had a set of powerful field glasses. The observer’s job was to ensure every airplane passed on the outside of his particular pylon, as well as noting the number of the machine on the underside of the left wing. He was to then communicate the information to his assistant, who was to note the number of the plane and the exact time at which it passed the pylon, and if it was a good passage, he was to write a
G
in the margin of the form in front of him. If the aviator made a bad passage, however, he was to wave a red flag and wait for an ac know ledgment from the judges’ box.

With only a few minutes now until the official start of the race, inside hangar No. 14 Grahame-White was in earnest conversation with his teammates, Alec Ogilvie and James Radley. Although neither Ogilvie, who had learned to fly under the Wrights’ tuition, nor Radley had much time for their leader’s showmanship, they respected his judgment. They listened as Grahame-White explained their strategy for the day.

Farther along hangar row Cortlandt Bishop was introducing Augustus Post and Alan Hawley to some of the American aviators. The pair hadn’t stumbled out of the Hotel St. Regis until the wee small hours of Saturday morning, but they had about them the exhilaration of men whose dream had really come true. Now and again they whispered to each other, “Think of where we were this time last week!”

Everywhere Hawley and Post went at Belmont Park people wanted to shake their hands and tell them how proud they were. The two had been invited to watch the action from the judges’ box, and as they climbed the short flight of steps, they were given a standing ovation by the spectators in the grandstand.

The signal bomb detonated as Cortlandt Bishop was walking back from hangar row toward the clubhouse in the company of a reporter from the
New York evening Sun
. Bishop twirled the ends of his mustache as he predicted, “The race will probably be over by noon.” Really? said the reporter, raising his eyebrows in surprise. Oh, yes, replied Bishop, with his customary know-all air. “Curtiss got away with the cup at Rheims while the Frenchmen were wrangling about who should go up first. Curtiss made his flight early, when there was little wind. Later in the day it commenced to blow hard and the Frenchmen had no chance to better the American’s time.”

Grahame-White was buttoning his brown flying overalls when he heard the boom of the signal bomb. He glanced at his watch, eight thirty-two A.M., they were a couple of minutes behind schedule. He put on his cap— back to front, of course—and drank a glass of water. Then he strode outside to where his Blériot had been for the last hour. Fastened to the wing was the sprig of lucky white heather given him by a female admirer in England. The mechanics had already given the machine a thorough maintenance, oiling and greasing the rocker arms and pushrods, checking that the u-bolts that held the bracing wires in the fuselage were tight, and ensuring the rudders at the rear of the airplane functioned properly. Now Grahame-White made a final inspection, circling the machine, once or twice dropping down on his haunches to test a bolt or a wire. He stopped at the nose of the Blériot—nicknamed the bedstead because of its resemblance to the head of a bed—and examined the fourteen-cylinder Gnome engine that was fastened to, and revolved with, the propeller. This was a stunning innovation by Blériot, a rotating engine that was also an automatic air-cooling device, thereby removing the need for a flywheel. The engine looked good to Grahame-White; so did the dipstick when he checked the plane had a full tank of gasoline. He was ready. Nodding to his mechanics, Grahame-White climbed into the monoplane as his men held the tips of the wings. The machine wobbled slightly under his weight when he slid onto the wooden seat. In front was the the control stick, which enabled him to control the lateral movement of the aircraft by warping the wings,
*
as well as the up-and-down movement of the elevators (tailplane). When Grahame-White pulled back on the stick, the Blériot’s bedstead nose rose, and when he pushed forward, the nose dipped. Moving the stick sideways banked the aircraft, although he often needed to tilt his body in the same direction to assist. A small wooden wheel was bolted to the top of the control stick of every Blériot to make the stick easier to grip.

On a panel to the left of the control stick was the throttle switch and gas cock, and at Grahame-White’s feet the wooden rudder bar, which controlled the four-and-a-half-foot-square rudder at the rear of the Blériot.

He flipped the gas and oil on, and off, and closed the throttle. As he went through his final set of checks, none of Grahame-White’s mechanics wished him luck; an aviation superstition was that such a gesture portended misfortune. He gave a thumbs-up to the mechanic gripping the propeller, who, with one mighty twist, fired the engine. The little plane began to tremble with the power of the hundred-horse power engine, and the mechanics put a hand over their mouths as smoke swirled around them. Grahame-White pulled down his goggles, checked his watch— eight forty A.M.—and applied a little bit of throttle. He began to roll forward across the grass, his mechanics jogging alongside still holding the wings and fuselage as he picked up speed. Then he removed a gloved hand from the control stick and signaled to his mechanics to jump back.

Grahame-White’s rapid departure caught people unawares. The reporter for the
New York Evening Sun
described how most of the crowd in the grandstand were blathering or reading their programs when someone shouted, “Here’s Grahame-White!” “There was an instant turning of faces to the Englishman’s green shed,” the reporter wrote. “They saw the 100 horse power Blériot rise with a rush from the ground and chase through the air channels in the long pylon path. With a deep-throated roar that bespoke power the dragon-winged thing raced over the white canvas band marking the start and dashed through space.”

Grahame-White kept low as, with the wind at his back, he flew east, past the press stand and the ranks of automobiles parked on the grass, many with their wealthy owners watching from the backseat with a rug thrown over their lap. He banked left, and the observer standing at the foot of pylon No. 5 signaled that machine No. 10 had taken the corner without default. Now the aviator headed north for nearly half a mile, away from the stables and over some scrubland. At pylon No. 8 Grahame-White turned ninety degrees west, straight into the freshening breeze, forcing him to grip the wheel ever tighter as he struggled up the lengthy back straight. In the grandstand a mile south, only those spectators with field glasses could see Grahame-White vanish behind some trees and then reappear just in front of pylon No. 11. He cornered it to perfection and flew southwest past the hangars, where his rivals “were clocking him carefully watching every shift of the wind and every drift of the machine as the airplane rounded the pylons.” Now he was coming up to dead man’s turn. Inside the judges’ box just behind the turn, Augustus Post and Alan Hawley looked up as the Blériot came toward them, its body shaking with the power from its engine. In the press stand the reporter from the
New York Herald
had the machine in the lenses of his field glasses when he saw it start to slide sideways with Grahame-White “trying to counteract the effect of the heavy gust of wind that caught him.” For a few moments Grahame-White skidded toward the grandstand, then he brought the machine under control and throttled down the home straight to complete the first of his twenty laps. All eyes turned toward the scoreboard. People who’d clocked him with their own watches proudly shouted out their estimations. But the rest of the spectators demanded official confirmation. Then it appeared: 3 minutes 15.64 seconds. One of the sharper press boys yelled, “He’s doing better than sixty miles an hour but less than sixty-five.”

Grahame-White felt good as he started his second lap. It wasn’t as cold as he’d feared and the Blériot was handling well. Just have to be careful going into dead man’s turn, he told himself. Second time round he took the corner with more finesse, and his lap time set the crowd buzzing: 3 minutes 9.14 seconds—he’d sheared a full six seconds from his first circuit. Lap three was faster still: 3 minutes 8.07 seconds. The time for lap four was 3 minutes 12.11 seconds, but lap five was special: 3 minutes 1.06 seconds. Five laps—over fifteen miles—in 15 minutes and 46 seconds: it was impressive, even to his detractors in the press box. “There was no one who watched Mr. Grahame-White,” said the correspondent from the
New York Herald
, “who did not concede that he was handling his machine in a masterly manner.”