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Aviation History
1913
1913 - 0838.PDF
/OCHf school machines being used daily for instructional pur poses at the Central Flying School, and being subjected to almost daily damage. Thus we find that the War Minister's claim that he had 120 effective machines filters down to a paltry three-and-twenty ! Was ever a more pitiful state of things disclosed or a more painful com mentary upon the low state to which our public life has descended ? We think not. The plain question seems to us to arise: Did the War Minister place before the House of Commons the real position as it was on the 12th of July, or did he lay before the House a statement of alleged facts which were not facts ? What he said was, that we had 120 machines ready to fly—"in first class order." There can be no boggling over this. The statement was made as one of fact, while the plain truth is that we had not half that number ready for war. To us it seems at the moment that the issue is not so much whether the Royal Flying Corps was in a state of efficiency at the time the War Minister made his statement—though in all conscience that is important enough—but whether we have not come to that deplorable pass when it is impossible to accept the ipse dixit of one of His Majesty's Ministers on a plain issue of fact. Let us put the matter as baldly and plainly as possible. When Col. Seely said in the House that we had 120 aeroplanes in first class order, he either knew or he did not know that so far from this being the case the position was as disclosed in the list of machines supplied by the War Office to Mr. Joynson-Hicks a week later. That is a plain pro position, and one from which it is impossible to get away. If he did not know, then he is responsible to the country, as the titular head of the War Office, for the ignorance of himself and his department—in other words, he is incompetent as a War Minister. If he did know, then the plain English of it is that he deliberately told the House of Commons what he knew to be untrue. We can see nothing in between the two. No amount of juggling with figures will explain away a position of the kind that has been disclosed through the controversy between the Secretary for War and Mr. Joynson-Hicks. AUGUST 9, 1913. At last, according to the Daily Mail, which The claims to be authoritatively informed on Naval thg su5ject) tne Naval Air Service is about to be expanded on a scale more appro priate to its importance to this country. Incidentally, it is to be a separate department instead of merely the Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps. The importance of this change in titular dignity interests us less than the far more important issue as to whether the service in question is to be adequately financed. We should be very well pleased to know for certain that the programme of ten additional airships and 200 waterplanes was to be carried out with the utmost liberality and dispatch. We say liberality because the present is not an occasion for the exercise of methods corresponding to those of the Contracts Branch of the War Office, which unquestionably serves a useful purpose to the nation in most of its business, but has been a singularly fussy interrupter in the matter of aeroplanes. The thing that we must most avoid in England, in our opinion, is a one-sided programme. We need dirigibles as well as waterplanes. Indeed we need to know everything that there is to know about any sort of aircraft that shows itself capable of being navigated under the sky. The opportunities for dealing with the question of dirigibles are few and far between, but we trust no one has any doubt about our favourable attitude towards them. To-day it is of first-class importance that, we should possess British-built airships, but these we cannot have unless the Naval Air Service is provided with enough money to develop them properly. It cannot afford to stint the expenditure on seaplanes for the purchase of airships. We have very little hesitation in saying that three seaplanes need to be constructed for every one that can be regarded as fit for service at a moment's notice under present conditions, although, of course, in time, this proportion will alter vastly. If the idea is to have 100 aeroplanes in active commission, without doubt the Navy must possess 300 machines in order to allow for those placed horsde combat by temporary damage and complete wreckage. ® ® ® ® LE IT is very interesting at this time, when the Federation Aeronautique Internationale has just decided to make the qualifying tests more difficult, to recall that it was Lewis W. F. Turner who practically inaugurated the new era in England in 1911 as he was the first pilot to get his " ticket" under the revised regulations which came into force in April, 1911. Under these regulations it became necessary to make the right-hand turn, which had up to then been considered a somewhat hazardous undertaking, but Turner showed that there was really nothing to be feared in this direction. Turner qualified at the Grahame-White school at Hendon on the Farman biplane on April 4, his certificate being numbered 66. Soon after securing his brevet, Lewis Turner joined the Valkyrie school at Hendon, as pilot-instructor, and then later in the year he was was engaged by Mr. Mackenzie Kennedy, as chief pilot and engineer, to go to Russia and test a new machine which was being built near St. Peters burg. Although, as a matter of fact, this experimental machine had not been finished by the time Turner returned to London in the following year, he had plenty of opportunity of keeping his hand in, as he was given the run of the Farman machines at the club school, and PILOT-INSTRUCTOR. 864 on one occasion he was flying over the suburbs of the Russian capital with the temperature 12 degs. below Zero. Returning to England in January, 1913, Turner was engaged as a chief pilot at his old school, the Grahame-White, and during the succeeding months he steadily built up a splendid reputation as an instructor and as a passenger carrying pilot. In cidentally, too, he was the most successful of the Hendon. pilots in the competitions, and his bag for the season included eleven firsts, nine seconds, and a dozen thirds, this record including the winning of every bomb- dropping contest held at Hendon. On the 50 h.p. Grahame-White biplane, the Howard Wright and the Henry Farman machines he used to fly in any sort of weather, so that a wag once suggested that his initials really stood for Lewis Will Fly To-day. Towards the end of last year Turner was engaged by the W. H. Ewen Aviation Co., Ltd., as a pilot and instructor at the Caudron school, and there he is to-day continuing his tale of success. His activities lately have not been altogether confined to Hendon, as a little time back he was flying a Caudron biplane up in Scotland for the Ewen Co. "THE HAWK."
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