Wings (3 page)

And then there is the woman whose eagerness to get close to the action proved fatal. There were many more like her in the crowd. Photographs of early displays show broad-brimmed bonnets
scattered abundantly among the flat hats and homburgs. Women did not want to just watch what was happening. They were eager to take part. Almost from the beginning adventurous females were
clamouring to ‘go up’, despite the obvious dangers, first as passengers, then as pilots. At the same time as the Worcester air show, the first flying school was opening its doors at
Brooklands motor-racing circuit in Weybridge, Surrey. Mrs Hilda Hewlett, a forty-six-year-old mother of two who was the first woman to gain a Royal Aero Club certificate, co-owned it with her
French lover.

What was it that drew the crowds? In part they had come to witness what was manifestly a great step forward in the history of mankind. The skeletal monoplanes and biplanes, constructed from
homely materials of wood, canvas and wire, had realized the ancient human dream of defying gravity. They were oddly beautiful and the men who flew them seemed to earthbound mortals like elevated
beings.

The spectators also enjoyed the frisson of danger. Newspapers – then as now eager to create alarm – presented flying as a suicidal activity. Some claimed that the crowds went to air
shows in the base hope that someone would come a cropper. The chances were high. Early aviators showed an almost insane disregard for risk.

Even in this company of daredevils Sam Cody, a naturalized American who was the first man to fly in Britain, stood out. In a routine accident in the spring of 1912, while
instructing Lieutenant Fletcher in his biplane, nicknamed the ‘Cathedral’ on account of its comparatively impressive size, Cody was ‘thrown out and fell a considerable distance,
sustaining injuries to his head and legs’.
²
He continued in this nerveless fashion until he met his death in August 1913 over Laffan’s
Plain near Aldershot, in an accident apparently caused by a panicky passenger, who wrapped his arms around him so tightly that he was unable to operate the controls.

Pilots seemed to consider even the most basic safety measures unmanly. In August 1912 an Australian aviator called Lindsay Campbell was killed in a crash at Brooklands. Medical evidence at the
inquest recorded he had fractured his skull. Campbell had not been wearing a helmet. A correspondent to
Flight
noted that ‘aviators, and especially English aviators, have a
constitutional objection to wearing helmets for the reason apparently that . . . it is too much a concession to the idea of danger.’

Aviation was married to death from the start, but there was nothing morbid about the instant fascination felt by the public. The instinct that pulled in the air-show crowds and that swelled the
ranks of aero-modelling clubs, inducing people to subscribe to a crop of aviation magazines, was optimistic and life-affirming. It was the sense of possibility, the feeling that the frontiers of
existence were expanding, that gave them a thrill. They recognized, even if they did not understand, the
enormity of what was happening and accepted that for things to
progress, risks would have to be taken. A great enterprise was worth sacrifices. Men would die, but not for nothing.

Few of those doing the flying had much idea of where aviation would lead. It was enough that humans could now take to the air. All most of them asked of an aeroplane was that it allowed them to
get as close to the sensation of flight as the laws of nature allowed. In 1946, two years before his death, Orville Wright was guest of honour at a military conference in New York. The American air
ace Eddie Rickenbacker hailed him as a visionary who had foreseen how aeroplanes would transform the twentieth century. But Wright told Rickenbacker that he was talking nonsense.

‘Wilbur and I had no idea aviation would take off in the way it has,’ he said. ‘We had no idea that there’d be thousands of aircraft flying around the world. We had no
idea that aircraft would be dropping bombs. We were just a couple of kids with a bike shop who wanted to get this contraption up in the air.’
³

Poignantly, given what was to come, the Wright brothers believed that their invention might actually reduce the incidence of war. They cherished the thought that ‘governments would realize
the impossibility of winning by surprise attacks . . . no country would enter into war with another of equal size when it knew that it would have to win by simply wearing out the
enemy.’
⁴

The joy that aircraft excited was almost immediately matched by unease. Long before the Wright brothers got airborne, a great English poet had glimpsed one direction
in
which the aeroplane would take us. In 1835 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote a poem,
Locksley Hall
, in which the narrator tells how he

However, it was not this benign presentiment of celestial trade routes that would be remembered so much as the couplet that followed. For he also

This was a remarkable prophecy – that once the opportunity arose, the sky would become a battlefield. It would come to pass only eleven years after that first callow skip
over the sands of Kitty Hawk. The yearning to fly was very old, but the itch to fight was older. Aviation’s passage from innocence to experience was depressingly swift.

It was apparent immediately that the invention of the aeroplane raised important military possibilities. In terrestrial warfare possession of the high ground brought benefits, notably the
ability to calculate the enemy’s strength and work out
what he was up to. Hovering over the earth increased the purview dramatically. After hot-air balloons appeared in
France in 1783 they were soon put to military purposes. Gasbags, tethered to the earth, were seen intermittently around battlefields throughout the nineteenth century. Spotters, equipped with
spyglasses, yelled down to the ground details of what they could see of enemy movements and dispositions. Unlike balloons, aeroplanes could move about under their own power and seemed able to do
the job of reconnaissance better.

Their arrival, however, provoked unease among a significant section of the British military establishment. The army was slow to accept change. Reconnaissance had always been the preserve of the
elite cavalry regiments. This attitude was summed up in a story that their officers were concerned that noisy aeroplanes would ‘frighten the horses’.

Initially it seemed as if aircraft might turn out to be merely a passing craze. Early aero-engines were weak and unreliable, prone to chronic overheating. As performance improved, however, the
realization grew that aeroplanes would shape the future – political, economic, social and military.

In July 1909 Louis Blériot flew across the Channel in a monoplane of his own design. It looked like a dragonfly, or a Leonardo da Vinci drawing. Wonder at this achievement was matched by
apprehension. Leading the pessimists was H. G. Wells whose science-fiction novels had given him the standing of a seer. The day afterwards he judged Blériot’s feat to be a blow to
British prestige. ‘We have fallen behind in the quality of our manhood,’ he wrote in the
Daily Mail
. ‘Within a year
we shall have – or rather
they will have – aeroplanes capable of starting from Calais . . . circling over London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive upon the printing machines of the
Daily Mail
and
returning securely to Calais for another similar parcel.’
⁵

The
Mail
’s proprietor Lord Rothermere was a noisy advocate of ‘air-mindedness’. It was he who had put up the £1,000 prize that inspired Blériot’s
attempt. The fact that a Frenchman had won it seemed proof of his conviction – echoed by Wells – that national virility was drooping. Britain was lagging behind in the air race and an
urgent effort was needed to catch up.

The perils of complacency were apparent across the water that Blériot had conquered. A few weeks after the historic flight a Grande Semaine d’Aviation was held at Reims. It was a
heady event, watched by hundreds of thousands. Spectators drank the local champagne, dined in a 600-seat restaurant and cheered on the aviators, on occasion becoming so excited they swept through
the barriers to mob their heroes. Fliers arrived from all over the world to take part in races offering lavish prize money. An American, Glenn Curtiss, whose receding hairline and chin made him
look more like a bank clerk than a knight of the air, triumphed in the main event, a time-trial, beating Blériot with an average speed of less than 50 mph.

The show nonetheless established France’s dominance in the air. All but two of the twenty-two aviators were French. Most of the power plants in use were Gnome rotary engines, developed by
the Paris-based Seguin brothers. These engines did what the name suggests, revolving around a fixed
crankshaft. The propeller was simply attached to the rotating engine.
Despite the oddness of the concept to modern eyes, they were efficient and comparatively light. The Seguins used nickel-steel alloy, machined to give the optimum power-to-weight ratio, and the fact
that air cooled the spinning cylinders removed the need for water jackets. Among the spectators was David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He left with the conviction that
‘flying machines are no longer toys and dreams . . . they are an established fact.’
⁶

Above all they were a military fact. By the end of that year the French army had 200 aircraft in service. The Germans – Britain’s rivals in a crippling naval arms race – were
exploring another field of aviation. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a southern German professional soldier, had seen military reconnaissance balloons in action while attached to the Union army
during the American Civil War. Over the next four decades he advanced the concept, developing an airship constructed around a rigid aluminium frame covered with fabric, kept aloft by hydrogen
cells, controlled from an underslung gondola and shaped like a cigar to provide aerodynamic efficiency. Zeppelin’s airship was intended as an instrument of war and the German military bought
its first one in 1908. The following year they went into commercial service.

It wasn’t just the French and the Germans. The Italians had shown far greater energy and imagination than the British in their response to flight, establishing their own military aviation
service, equipped with balloons, in 1884. In October 1911 they became the first to employ aeroplanes in war, flying bombing
sorties against the Turks during a colonial squabble
in Libya, which, although of minimal effectiveness, produced wild projections from the growing claque of air-power advocates of what warplanes might achieve.

It was only in that year that the British government moved to make up for lost ground. In April 1911 an Air Battalion was formed inside the Royal Engineers. Until then military aeronautics had
been confined to a small unit which experimented with balloons and man-lifting kites from headquarters at Farnborough, near the army’s headquarters in Aldershot, Surrey. Its balloon factory
produced small, non-rigid airships and from 1910 a handful of experimental aeroplanes. The chief designer – and test pilot – was Geoffrey de Havilland, a vicar’s son and
engineering maestro, who went on to become one of the great names of British aviation. The Aircraft Factory, as it became, was superintended by Mervyn O’Gorman, a dapper Irish civil engineer,
described by a contemporary as a ‘thruster, possessing brains, flamboyance, courage and imagination’.

The Air Battalion was staffed by mechanics drawn from the Royal Engineers. The task of piloting aircraft was deemed to be a job for officers. Initially there were no aeroplanes for the
volunteers to fly. The quality of the early training was apparent in a report in
Flight
of 25 June 1910. ‘At last an official start has been made with the instruction of British Army
officers in the art of flying,’ it ran. ‘On Monday evening the Hon C. S. Rolls [of Rolls Royce fame] visited the balloon factory at Farnborough and explained to a number of officers . .
. the workings of his Short-Wright machine which has been at
the balloon factory for some time.’ However, ‘no attempt at flight was made.’ Instead ‘the
motors were started up and the method of handling the machine was demonstrated.’

The Short-Wright was one of only a handful of assorted flying machines available, and if O’Gorman had his way the factory – despite its name – would not be making up the
shortfall. He regarded his establishment as a research and design centre rather than a production line, so training craft had to be bought in from private aviation companies.

The navy had viewed the birth of aviation coolly. When the Wright brothers approached the Admiralty in 1907 with a view to selling them their invention they were told that ‘in their
Lordships’ opinions aeroplanes would not be of any practical use to the naval service’
¹
. Events made continued indifference impossible. It was
obvious to the open-minded that aircraft had the potential to transform warfare at sea.

The navy’s preoccupation with the activities of their German rivals meant their attention was first focused on airships. Concern at the appearance of the Zeppelin had led to the Admiralty
ordering a rigid airship of its own,
Naval Airship No. 1
, popularly known as the
Mayfly
, and built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness. The nickname would turn out to be tragically
appropriate, given its ephemeral life span. The specifications kept changing as the navy sought to load it with more and more equipment. The framework, made from a new alloy, duralumin, was too
weak to bear the extra weight. On 24
September 1911, when the
Mayfly
was towed out of her shed, stern first, for what was supposed to be her maiden flight, she
crumpled and sank, her back broken by three tons of surplus equipment.