Heroic Flights

The First 100 Years of Aviation

John Frayn Turner

• Publisher: Leo Cooper
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780850529708
• eBook ISBN: 9781783379781
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

A century after the Wright Brothers first took to the air, the author records those moments of aviation history that stand out from all the others for their pioneering bravery or gallantry in the face of the enemy. A fascinating potpourri embracing the whole story of aviation from those first faltering flights, through the conquest of the world by flight, the drama of war in the air, right up to the present day and the four ill-fated flights of September 11th 2001. Each story is a superb description of the great moments in the history of aviationA superb read for both the layman and aviation specialist alike

1

THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

The Birth of Powered Flight

The seventeenth of December 1903 was the day that man first flew an aeroplane – when the Wright brothers made the very earliest sustained, controlled flights in a powered plane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA.

This brief but historic event, a week before Christmas, was the culmination of years of thought and effort not only by the Wrights but by other aeronautical pioneers.

Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, began to take a passionate interest in the problems and possibilities of flight from the time of the death of the great German gliding pioneer Lilienthal in 1896.

Starting from the findings of Lilienthal they determined to develop further the art of gliding and eventually to provide power to drive and control flight and make it more or less independent of the elements. But before they could consider powered flight, they had to get as much practical knowledge as possible of the behaviour of gliders.

They kept their bicycle business going, but spent every spare second building a glider. They found the perfect place to test it at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, which gave them the climatic conditions they sought: a steady prevailing wind blowing at around twenty miles an hour. This small settlement stood on a long bleak sandbar that bridged the waters of Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.

It was there in September and October 1900 that the Wrights started the series of trials which would have their climax three years later. The trio of sandhills they chose for the work were about thirty, eighty and one hundred feet high. That first glider was a biplane with an area of 165 square feet, and an eighteen-feet wingspan designed and built from the findings of Lilienthal and others, and intended to fly with a man in a wind of anything over twenty miles an hour.

The Wrights tried it out first as a kind of man-carrying kite-cumglider. Either Wilbur or Orville would lie flat on the middle of the lower wing to minimize head resistance, and then try to fly from one of the sandhills selected. But although the wind blew at twenty-five – thirty miles an hour they found that no matter how they tried, they could not get the upward thrust anticipated, and that the pilot could not control the glider properly.

So they started to modify their ideas, substituting weights for the pilot and flying the glider as a kite. This enabled them to measure the forces operating on the glider in various conditions. They were eventually compelled to the conclusion that this design would never soar but only glide short distances downhill. When they did resume gliding tests again, they took every precaution possible against accidents, although both they and the glider did have one or two close calls in their free glides a couple of yards off the sand.

But by the last week of October 1900, they realized that they had learned all they could from glider number one. Anyway they were getting a little worried about the business, and the weather showed signs of deterioration.

Throughout that winter at Dayton, they busily built glider number two, which was bigger than its predecessor. They increased the wingspan to twenty-two feet; the weight was nearly double, at just under 100 pounds; and it had an overall area of 308 square feet. This glider had the distinction of being the biggest ever made to date. Among other changes, the Wrights decided to try a greater curvature of the wings.

In late July 1901, they carted the new version to Kitty Hawk on what was the equivalent of their summer holidays. The initial test results disappointed them, for it seemed that they had curved the wings too much and produced a loss of control. Each successive test was followed by trial and error modification, but gradually they were coming to understand the concept of control by balancing planes and rudders.

Their glides in August did in fact gradually grow longer in distance and time, but they still felt dissatisfied and made the long trek home to Dayton pretty depressed.

They next turned their attention to the most vital question of all – wing design. They started to devise and carry out small-scale tests with model wings in a wind tunnel they rigged up at home. The tunnel measured about five feet long and sixteen inches square, and by injecting a flow of air from a fan they could observe the reactions of it on miniature metal wings which they developed literally daily.

In this tiny tunnel they could simulate wind speeds of twenty-five – thirty miles an hour and see precisely what effect these produced on as many as two hundred different designs they tried. For hour after hour that winter the Wrights made notes and readings about the various shapes of model wings. And from all the thousands of notes emerged the design of glider number three.

An impartial observer would have been able to detect signs of real advance, but the two brothers were too close to it all and too involved to be able to see it in proper perspective. They only knew they had to fly – somehow.

The wingspan went up from twenty-two feet to thirty-two. This extra width helped to give it greater hoisting power. Other innovations included a double fixed vertical tail and a front elevator. The area of the new glider was about the same as the previous one, at 305 square feet, and it weighed some 116 pounds.

The Wright brothers felt more optimistic this summer and first tried out the glider at Kitty Hawk in September 1902. Kitty Hawk had become their summer residence, but the weeks they spent there were far from a holiday. From dawn to sunset they slogged away, flying the glider again and again.

A few days after their arrival Orville Wright was the pilot during one glide when the right wing started to rise. Trying to control it, however, he made it worse and the wing went on rising, throwing the glider more and more out of balance. The whole glider was now tilted up at a nasty angle.

While Orville grappled with the controls, his brother and a few onlookers below suddenly saw the glider stall and then float backwards and downwards. This was the sort of situation the brothers had struggled to avoid, yet here it was, and those on the ground could only call out vainly. Orville and the glider hit the ground in a spray of sand. The others ran to the wreckage, but luckily Orville was not hurt.

By the following week they had repaired the glider, or rather reassembled it, and at the same time they set about remedying what had gone wrong by changing the double tail into one movable fin. They now reckoned that they could control the glider reasonably in three dimensions – and proceeded to prove it.

Wilbur Wright said:

We made nearly 700 glides in the two or three weeks following. When properly applied, the means of control proved to possess a mastery over the forces tending to disturb the equilibrium. We flew it in calms and we flew it in winds as high as 35 miles an hour. We steered it to right and to left, and performed all the evolutions necessary for flight. The machine seems to have reached a higher state of development than the operators; as yet we consider ourselves little more than novices in its management.

Before they left Kitty Hawk that autumn, the brothers had made no fewer than a thousand actual glides averaging about fifteen seconds each. In one hectic week they clocked up over 375 individual glides, one exceeding 600 feet and lasting nearly half a minute. For those days, that represented an eternity. Most important of all, however, they could now control their flights.

Their next planned step was to add an engine to produce a powered plane – and make the first powered flight of all time. At once a fresh set of difficulties appeared, for as the brothers said subsequently:

What at first seemed a simple problem became more and more complex the more we studied it. With the machine moving forward, the air flying backward, the propellers turning sideways, and nothing standing still, it seemed impossible to find a starting point from which to trace the various simultaneous reactions.

Contemplation of it was confusing. After long arguments we often found ourselves in the ludicrous position of each having been converted to the other’s side, with no more agreement than when the discussion began.

The brothers had not only to design and build an aeroplane, but the engine as well, for when they looked around for a suitable petrol engine on the market, none existed. And at the same time they had to experiment with propellers, for next to nothing was known about the precise behaviour of these strange new devices.

First they designed the aeroplane. They based their design on the third version of the glider, extending its linen-covered wing area still further to 510 square feet. It was a wooden frame biplane spanning just over forty feet and measuring twenty-one feet long, with a twin elevator in front and a twin rudder at the rear.

The Wrights then set about making the components that would produce powered flight – the engine and propellers. They built a four-cylinder engine developing some twelve horsepower at 1,200 revolutions a minute which they mounted on its side on the lower wing in a position calculated to counteract the pilot’s weight.

They christened the aeroplane the Flyer and took it to Kitty Hawk well crated towards the end of September 1903, together with glider number three. They were full of excitement at the prospects ahead of them, but they had to be superhumanly patient. Stormy weather all through that autumn made it out of the question to test the Flyer, but they went on with their glider, getting in all the practice they could before the first attempt to fly a powered aircraft – and sustain and control it.

The wild weather abated at last, and the Wrights made ready on 14 December to test the Flyer. The two undercarriage skids of the machine were placed on a trolley, which in turn ran on a monorail. A wire would hold back the Flyer while the engine revved up; the wire would be slipped; the Flyer would thrust forward and, with any luck, be airborne. That was the theory.

Wilbur and Orville tossed up to see who should have that first flight. Wilbur called correctly, but was less lucky with the actual attempt. The Flyer shuddered down the rail all right, but went up in the air too steeply, stalled, and then crashed. The repairs took a couple of days.

Despite this further setback the Wrights remained so completely confident they were about to make history that they invited the few locals of Kitty Hawk to come and witness the event. Five turned up; three men from the local life-saving station a mile or so away, a lumber buyer and a sixteen-year-old boy. This was the scene on those desolate dunes, as described by Orville Wright:

During the night of December 16, 1903, a strong, cold wind blew from the north. When we arose on the morning of the 17th, the puddles of water, which had been standing about camp since the recent rains, were covered with ice. The wind had a velocity of 22 to 27 miles an hour. We thought it would die down before long, but when ten o’clock arrived and the wind was as brisk as ever, we decided to get the machine out.

Wilbur ran at the side, holding the wing to balance it on the track. The machine, facing a 27-mile wind, started very slowly. The course of the flight up and down was exceedingly erratic, partly due to the irregularity of the air and partly to lack of experience in handling this machine.

The control of the elevator was difficult on account of its being balanced too near the centre. This gave it a tendency to turn itself when started, so that it turned too far on one side and then too far on the other. As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about 10 feet, and then as suddenly dart for the ground. A sudden dart when a little over 100 feet from the end of the track or a little over 120 feet from the point at which it rose into the air, ended the flight.

This flight lasted only 12 seconds, but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it had started.

One of the men, John T. Daniels, had clicked a camera aimed at the end of the monorail runway and recorded for all time the Flyer in flight, with Orville Wright lying prone on the lower wing. In the photograph, beside the starboard wing, trots Wilbur Wright in a peak-cap, just having let go of the wing and now surely willing the Flyer forward with all his soul. And there too is the Flyer itself, a maze of struts and wires and wings, with no wheels, its skids some three feet off the ground. And it is flying.

It was just after 10.30 a.m. on that memorable morning. Then Wilbur took over the controls, while Orville watched and guided. Again the Flyer sailed forward at some thirty miles an hour for eleven seconds. Orville did a third trip for fifteen seconds, and then came the fourth and longest flight of the day.

The time was noon. Wilbur shot forward and upwards. The Flyer steadied and flew on at a good thirty miles an hour, forcing itself forward in the icy Atlantic wind.

A quarter of a minute passed, then half a minute, three-quarters. then Wilbur made rather too sharp an adjustment after negotiating a slight sand hillock. The Flyer dipped, dived, and struck the sand. But by then it had travelled 852 feet from its starting place and remained airborne for fifty-nine seconds.

A few minutes later, a gust of wind caught the Flyer, overturned it, and did damage to various vital parts of it. But although the machine never flew again, the air age had arrived.

The fantastic fact, though, was that none of the press were there to see it – and no one really took much notice of it at the time.

It was not really until five years later in France that the world realized the significance of the Wrights’ achievements, when throughout that year, Wilbur Wright astounded Europe by a succession of sensational flights, culminating in his record at Le Mans on 31 December 1908, of 2 hours 20 minutes 23.2 seconds in the air. It was no accident then that the next famous flight, in the following year, was by a Frenchman, Monsieur Blériot.

2

BLÉRIOT

First to fly the English Channel

A thousand pounds to the first person to fly the English Channel. That was the offer Lord Northcliffe made in the Daily Mail on 5 October 1908. Despite the achievements of the Wright brothers, only a handful of people really recognized the potential of the aeroplane – either for peace or war. Northcliffe was one of these.

This offer of a prize for the Channel flight fired the imagination of the public as well as that of the select band of pioneer aviators in Europe at the time. None of these pioneers wasted any time in trying to win the award – and the prestige deriving from the first successful flight over such a famous stretch of water as the English Channel.

Blériot, who had already covered considerable distances in his No. XI machine, was determined to win this honour for France. But two more airmen appeared on the scene and Blériot realized he would have to hurry if he were to be the victor.

The odds were against him from the outset, for he had suffered quite a bad crash only a matter of days before he finally attempted the Channel project. Blériot’s usual method of extricating himself from fatal or serious injuries was to clamber out on to one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• 1: The Wright Brothers – Birth of Powered Flight
• 2: Blériot – First to Fly the English Channel
• 3: Warneford – Destroying the First Zeppelin
• 4: Albert Ball – The Earliest Air Ace
• 5: Leefe Robinson – Defeat of the Zeppelins
• 6: Avery Bishop – Shot down Seventy-two Planes
• 7: Alan Arnett McLeod – Wing-Walking to Live
• 8: William Barker – Survived Odds of 50 to 1
• 9: Hawker and Grieve – Attempt on the Atlantic
• 10: Commander Read – Across the Atlantic in Stages
• 11: Alcock and Brown – The Atlantic Non-stop
• 12: Alan Cobham – Epic Flight to Cape Town
• 13: Alan Cobham – To Australia by Seaplane
• 14: Byrd and Bennett – To the North and South Poles
• 15: Charles Lindbergh – First Atlantic Solo
• 16: Charles Kingsford Smith – Conquering the Pacific
• 17: Amy Johnson – Solo to Australia
• 18: Jim Mollison – Greatest Solo ever Flown
• 19: Amelia Earhart – First Woman Across the Atlantic
• 20: Colonel Blacker – Looking Down on Everest
• 21: Wiley Post – Around the World in Eight Days
• 22: Scott and Black – The Melbourne Air Race
• 23: Jean Batten – Four Famous Flights
• 24: Beryl Markham – Crash Landing in Nova Scotia
• 25: Scott and Guthrie – The Johannesburg Air Race
• 26: Sydney Camm – Birth of the Hurricane
• 27: R.J. Mitchell – Birth of the Spitfire
• 28: Douglas Bader – The Legless Air Ace
• 29: Butch O’Hare – Saving an Aircraft Carrier
• 30: Guy Gibson – The Dam Busters’ Raid
• 31: Denton Scott – Gunner over Lorient
• 32: Leonard Cheshire – Pathfinder Supreme
• 33: George Bush – The Flying Casket
• 34: The Atomic Bombs
• 35: The Jet Age
• 36: The Firebirds and the Red Arrows
• 37: Test-Flying the VC10
• 38: The Concorde is Born
• 39: Flight 93 – 11 September 2001
• Index