Wings Over Water

The Story of the World's Greatest Air Race and the Birth of the Spitfire

Jonathan Glancey

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786494214
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786494207
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Announced in 1912, the Schneider Trophy stole the imaginations of pioneering aircraft manufacturers in America, France, Britain and Italy, as they competed in a series of air races that attracted a hugely popular following. Perhaps inevitably, the dynamism of rival engineering led to the most potent military fighters of World War Two and Reginald Mitchell's record-breaking Supermarine seaplanes morphed into the Spitfire. Wings Over Water tells the story of the Schneider air races afresh and also examines the wider politics and society of the early twentieth-century that framed the event. It is an exhilarating tale of raw adventure, public excitement and engineering genius.

PART ONE

The Race

ONE

The French Connection: 1913–22

Owned by the Royal Aero Club, the Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider can be seen today in London’s Science Museum. A florid sculpture, it takes the form of a silver-plated bronze casting mounted on a dark-veined marble base and depicts a winged and naked Spirit of Flight kissing one of four cherubic faces – Neptune and his sons – emerging from the crest of a wave. Its sculptor, Ernest Gabard, was an early aviation enthusiast, although it is clear from the design of this trophy that artists had yet to respond in kind to the true thrill and excitement of flight. They would come to do so, especially in Italy some 20 years later. By then the aircraft themselves were becoming not just highly potent machines, but sleekly streamlined kinetic sculptures, too.

Gabard’s trophy, known by competition pilots as the ‘flying flirt’, was commissioned by Jacques Schneider, son of the owner of a mighty iron foundry, engineering and armaments works founded by Schneider’s grandfather and great-uncle at Le Creusôt in eastern France in the mid-1830s. By the twentieth century this works was a volcanic realm of iron and steel mills, steam hammers, steam locomotives, submarines, armoured vehicles, machine guns and artillery pieces.

Born in 1879, Schneider was trained as a mining engineer, an occupation that might have kept his thoughts earthbound. This wealthy young man, however, was as excited as his contemporaries by the newfound freedoms and sheer excitement offered by novel ways of moving through the world at speed. Motorcycles. Motor cars. Powerboats.

In 1908, Schneider witnessed Wilbur Wright in the air above Le Mans. He learned to fly both heavier- and lighter-than-air machines, setting a French altitude record of 10,081 metres (33,074 feet, the height airliners cruise today) in his balloon Icare – named, of course, after the mythical Icarus, who, fleeing Crete and the threat of the Minotaur with his inventor father, Daedalus, flew too close to the sun with fatal results, his waxed wings melting over the sea. While pushing himself hard in a competition held in 1910 at Monte Carlo with his racing hydroglisseur – a shallow punt powered by an air propeller – Schneider suffered multiple arm fractures and, handicapped for life, was no longer able to fly. Not that this dimmed his enthusiasm for sea, speed and powered flight. Far from it.

At an Aéro-Club de France dinner held in Chicago on 5 December 1912, to celebrate the French team’s first and second places in that year’s Gordon Bennett contest held in Clearing, Ohio, Schneider announced his competition. It would be unlike any other that had gone before. His vision was not one of small aircraft taking off and landing from inland airfields, with just a pilot on board, but of commercially viable seaplanes or flying boats that would carry useful payloads and passengers from port to port around the world. His was a big picture of what aviation might be, and his logic was sound. Given that most of the world’s surface is water and that most key trading cities are by the sea, seaplanes made good sense. And from a twenty-firstcentury perspective, the idea is certainly appealing. Imagine being able to travel from city centres by fast trains to seaports free of all the encumbrances and frustrations of sprawling modern airports, as free as a seabird.

Schneider’s vision was exciting, not least because of the challenges it offered aircraft designers and pilots. Seaplanes were new and largely untried and untested. Early manufacturers had concentrated on land-based machines. The most potent of these at the time of the Chicago dinner was, significantly, the Deperdussin Monocoque, flown by Jules Védrines and winner of the 1912 Gordon Bennett Trophy event. Where no American aeroplane had been able to better 78 mph, Védrines had flown the Deperdussin at over 100 mph. And it was the Deperdussin that was to rise to the occasion in the first Schneider Trophy contest the following year.

Schneider explained that the trophy would be awarded to the first national aero club to win the annual event three times within five years. The victorious nation would get to keep the trophy in perpetuity. There would also be a cash prize of 25,000 gold francs (£1,000, or about £100,000 in 2020) for the winning pilot of the deciding event. The rules were clear. The contest was to be held over the sea, the distance to be flown not less than 150 nautical miles. Aircraft must be seaworthy. Each country could enter a maximum of three aircraft in the annual competition. Each team had to be sponsored by the governing body for aviation sports in that country, which in turn had to be affiliated to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. The winning team would be responsible for hosting the next annual contest.

While the national rivalries would encourage the development of the fast and reliable commercial seaplanes Jacques Schneider had imagined flying from seaport to seaport around the world, it also led to the rise of the supremely powerful, fast and deadly fighter aircraft of the late 1930s. To win the Schneider Trophy, aircraft would have to develop the ability to take off from and land on water. But because seaplanes needed more power to lift off from water than aircraft running on wheels along airfields, competitive aircraft of this type demanded increasingly powerful engines. And while these were to equip steady, comfortable and sensibly quick payload-carrying seaplanes and flying boats, they also paved the way for puissant British, American, Italian and, to an extent, German military designs.

This was not foreseen at that Chicago dinner in 1912. Aircraft competing in the early Schneider events were for the most part, and to their detriment, converted landplanes; while hydro-aeroplanes – as they were known in Britain until Winston Churchill insisted on calling them seaplanes in 1913 – were truly in their infancy.

In March 1910, Henri Fabre, the Jesuit-educated and scientifically minded son of a wealthy ship-owning family who lived to be 101, made the first successful take-off from water in a heavier-than-air machine. This was achieved in the Hydravion, powered by a 50-hp Gnome engine, at the Étang de Berre, a Mediterranean lagoon near Marseilles. Never having flown before, not even as a passenger, Fabre lifted the machine – which looked like an illustration from a fairy tale – to six feet above the ripples for a distance of 1,500 feet in four consecutive flights. Happily, the Fabre Hydravion is on display today at the Musée de l’Air in Paris.

The following January, Glenn Curtiss – winner of the first international air race, the Gordon Bennett Trophy at Reims in 1909 – made a sustained flight at 50–55 mph from San Diego Bay, California, in a biplane powered by a water-cooled engine of his own design. Curtiss had been in touch with Fabre beforehand.

That same month, Eugene Ely, a private pilot, landed a Curtiss biplane on a platform mounted on the stern deck of the four-funnelled armoured cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay; and, in doing so, initiated the era of aeroplanes that could fly around the world without needing to take off from or land on water. Eugene Ely was killed aged 24 in October 1911, when, unable to pull out of a dive, he crashed into the ground while performing at an air display at Macon, Georgia. He climbed out of his machine, but his neck was broken. He died seconds later.

By then, Glenn Curtiss had sold the US Navy its first aircraft: the amphibious A-1 Triad, fitted with floats and retractable wheels. Today, this elegant, insect-like machine hangs from a roof in the National Naval Aviation Museum, Florida. On the much colder and damper Cumbrian coast, at Barrow-in-Furness, in January 1911 Commander Oliver Schwann RN (later, and with a less German-sounding surname, Air Vice Marshal Sir Oliver Swann) experimented with a modified Avro Type D machine. Like Henri Fabre, Schwann had never flown before. While he entered the aviation book of fame as the first person in Britain to take off from salt water, he crashed the Avro on that very same flight. Under considerable strain, the aeroplane’s 35-hp Green inline engine overheated and lost power. The Avro had begun life as a landplane weighing just 500 lbs; shipped by train from Brooklands to Barrow and fitted with floats by a Royal Navy team, it weighed a full 1,000 lbs by the time Schwann coaxed it up from the water to 40 mph.

Clearly, there was much to learn. It was found, for example, that hydroplanes were unable to take off from a smooth surface; they needed some chop to the water for their floats or hulls to break adhesion, especially because early floats were rudimentary, boxy devices and barely aerodynamic. To push through the weight and resistance of choppy water, hydroplanes needed more power than landplanes, yet while existing inline water-cooled engines fitted to contemporary racing cars and aeroplanes could be powerful enough for the job, they were also very heavy. Beyond these challenging constraints, the stresses on the timber frames of early aircraft were immense as they battled through seawater.

Solutions to these problems came quickly, making the Schneider Trophy contest a valid proposition by 1913. In France, Laurent Seguin, the inventor and industrialist, had developed his Gnome rotary air-cooled engine, first shown at the Paris Aero Salon in December 1908. Cylinders arranged in a star pattern rotated around a central crankshaft. Although heavy on the castor oil that spattered pilots’ goggles and gave Gnome-powered aircraft their distinctive smell, Seguin’s motor was small and powerful. The seven-cylinder model exerted 50 hp from 75 kg, or twice the power-to-weight ratio of contemporary water-cooled engines. With air flowing freely around its finned cylinder blocks as the aircraft took flight, it was not prone to overheating. Compared with rival motors, the Gnome rotary was also reliable.

The oldest-known airworthy British aircraft – a 1912 Blackburn Monoplane currently in the care of the Shuttleworth Collection, Bedfordshire – still flies today courtesy of its Gnome Omega engine, while the prototype of the revolutionary Gnome Omega is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. By 1912, the year of the first hydroplane meeting at Monaco, the Gnome et Rhône company offered a choice of six engines of up to 160 hp.

One particular advantage seaplanes and flying boats had over landplanes was – although at first this sounds counterintuitive – the pronounced length of their take-off runs. As was commonly understood by 1913, landplanes needed long wings to lift them as quickly as possible above trees, buildings and power lines. A seaplane, with plenty of space to manoeuvre, could make do with shorter wings, and because of this it promised tighter turns and less drag in flight than many landplanes. As the military began to take a close interest in the Schneider contests, the event developed into an increasingly nationalistic race for sheer speed and power that, when backed by governments, led to the design of a new generation of competing military aircraft very unlike the timber and canvas ‘stringbags’ of 1913.

The first outing for the Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider was on 16 April 1913 during the Grand Prix de Monaco. This two-week-long meet was a gala affair with as many as a quarter of a million people attending from across Europe. South Eastern and Chatham Railway adverts posted in Victoria and Charing Cross stations promised ‘Frequent Daily Express services from London to the Riviera’.

For the Schneider event, a triangular 10-kilometre course was superimposed on the Baie de Roquebrune between Monte Carlo and Cap Martin. There were entries from Belgium, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United States, although just four aircraft were turned out on the day, all French landplanes equipped with temporary floats and powered by Gnome engines.

Luckily the weather was good. The day before, the cold mistral had scythed through Monte Carlo and across the bay. A French Artois flying boat piloted by François Louis Gaudart was upended by the fierce wind and vanished into the sea. Three weeks after the crash, local fishermen found his body near the harbour entrance.

On the morning of the Schneider contest, the mistral had given way to a gentle breeze. The sea was calm, the sky clear blue and the temperature comfortably warm. The pilots drew lots to see who would go first. This was not an out-and-out race, but a contest with aircraft setting off at different times and aiming to fly the circuit in the fastest time. The winner was 25-year-old Maurice Prévost, pilot of a deep blue and beautiful Deperdussin monoplane.

Designed by 32-year-old Louis Béchereau for Armand Deperdussin, a wealthy silk trader turned aircraft maker, this new type – flying at over 100 mph – had taken first and second place in the 1912 Gordon Bennett Trophy held in Chicago. With its revolutionary monocoque fuselage inspired by contemporary racing yachts and formed from hickory, ash, pine and tulipwood ply, its streamlined nose cone, aerodynamic floats by Alphonse Tellier (an expert in hydroplaning hulls), small wings and batwing tail, the Deperdussin monoplane was – certainly in terms of aesthetics – a nod to the future. It marked the end of wholly exposed airframes, looking like cat’s cradles or big and complicated kites. Powered by a double-row Gnome Lambda-Lambda 14-cylinder rotary engine of 160 hp, the Deperdussin was as fast as it looked. Black-and-white photographs of the time are unable to do full justice to the appearance of this bright blue mechanical insect.

The temptation to paint too rosy a picture of even this – the best racer of its short-lived day – must, however, be tempered by the fact that no aeroplane of the time was particularly easy to fly, and mechanically they left much to be desired. During trials for the first Schneider contest, two Deperdussin machines were wrecked and a third was declared uncompetitive. One of the wrecked machines was a single-seater designed specially for the race, leaving Prévost with a heavier two-seater.

On 16 April, Prévost set off at 8 a.m., powering along the water as demanded by the contest rules as a test of seaworthiness, and then taking to the air for what seemed an all-but-effortless 28 laps flown at a height of around 50 feet and an average speed of 61 mph. But because after flying those 28 laps he chose to taxi across the finishing line rather than pass over it, Prévost was initially disqualified.

Prévost was followed by Roland Garros, a bantamweight 24-year-old pilot born in Réunion and with several aviation records to his credit. Much was expected of the dashing young aviator, but in his bumpy attempt to get his 80-hp Gnome-powered Morane-Saulnier monoplane off the water and into the air, he soaked the engine. It stopped, and Garros was towed back to port.

Gabriel Espanet, a doctor and aviation enthusiast, was next, in a 100-hp Gnome-powered French Nieuport monoplane. Espanet made a good start, but on the eighth lap a fuel-line fracture took him out of the running. In a second Nieuport – a 100-hp Gnome engine again – Charles Weymann, the fourth contender, lapped the circuit at 70 mph, faster than Prévost. After 20 laps, Weymann was in the lead by three minutes with a best lap average so far of 71 mph. On lap 25, an oil pipe burst and the Haitian-born Franco-American pilot was forced to land.

With his Morane-Saulnier dried and firing anew on all cylinders, Garros set out again, prompting Prévost to take off, fly an extra lap and cross the finishing line in the air. His average speed was now down to just 45.75 mph, but he had won the contest after all. There is a delightful photograph of Prévost at the end of the race and back on terra firma, dapper in a polo-neck jumper, a leather jacket with silk handkerchief, and lace-up leather shoes, standing alongside his mother, a fur over her arm, and Louis Béchereau in flat cap, tweed plus fours and leather boots. Soon enough, flying suits would be de rigueur, yet in these early days of competitive flying, collars, ties, tweeds and caps were in vogue among the young pilots who, judging from photographs, appeared keen to cut a dash.

From a modest background, Maurice Prévost had studied at the Practical School of Commerce and Industry of Reims before joining the Betheny Deperdussin Aviat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction: The Wright Stuff
• Part One: The Race
• Part Two: The Legacy
• Epilogue: Each a Glimpse
• Schneider Trophy Contest Results
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Index
• Picture Section