Marked for Death (7 page)

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 ‘Wild 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.
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‘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.’
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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.

The generic problem with biplanes of all kinds was always going to be that of drag, which in turn would limit speed and demand ever more power to overcome it. Biplanes needed struts and wires between the wings, and it hardly helped that they also had fixed undercarriages, a further potent source of drag. There was simply a mass of stuff obstructing the airflow and contributing nothing in the way of lift. In the earlier part of the war aircraft were practically always of all-wood construction, although as engines became more powerful and weight a little less critical metal began to be used for certain parts of the airframe. It was all a matter of weight and the availability of materials. Aerodynamicists realised that in the end the only way to make an aircraft fly faster was to reduce drag and go back to monoplane design; but the problem remained of how to make a cantilever wing stiff enough to withstand the twisting and flexing forces of high-speed manoeuvres. Wood and contemporary glues lacked strength. Making main spars of steel would be too heavy. What was needed were light alloys, but the sort of metallurgical research needed to develop and test them was very time-consuming and besides, even if the ideal metal – both
strong and light – were found, the uncertainties of wartime supply made it unlikely that any sort of mass production could be reliably undertaken. At the same time aviation-quality seasoned wood of all kinds became progressively scarcer as the war went on and frames of steel tubing and even monocoque (stressed metal skin) construction were introduced here and there before the war’s end, most notably by German companies like Junkers. It is a measure of the difficulties that only in the early 1930s did all-metal structures slowly become the norm for larger aircraft, while military biplanes persisted here and there even into the Second World War (the Gloster Gladiators that defended Malta in 1940, for example). These late biplanes now had metal frames even if their flying surfaces were still partially covered with fabric. Debatably the most impressive, as well as the fastest, biplane fighter of all time was the Italian Fiat CR.42 ‘Falco’ that flew in numbers in several theatres in the Second World War. It was actually a sesquiplane, its lower wings being much shorter than the upper. Yet although outstandingly manoeuvrable and quick, it was ultimately no match for that war’s potent all-metal monoplane fighters. Even so, wood continued to be used to advantage in certain airframes, most notably in the Hawker Hurricane and the de Havilland Mosquito.