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Aviation History
1934
1934 - 1340.PDF
1344 FLIGHT. DECEMBER 20, 1934. EXPOSED! The Chief Photographer of " Flight " Recalls Some Experiences, Amusing and Otherwise, During Twenty-one Years of Pictorial Reporting " Once, when I wanted a head-on picture . . . George Bulman said, ' That's all right; we'll try it.' Try it we did ... " I WANT a good mosaic of Wytschaete village. Mr.will take you up." This sounds like Belgium,but the scene is laid at the Artillery Observation School, Almaza, Egypt. It was here we had the famous village laid out in stones on the desert for pupils to observe gunfire. The machine on this occasion was an R.E.8, and it was my first flight in this type. Many were the frightening things we had heard about them. . . . They broke in the air, they wouldn't come out of a spin, they caught fire ; in fact, they had a reputation for doing anything but fly. Actually, handled properly, they were quite good aircraft for their time. We duly took off and proceeded towards our objective. The weather was bumpy and the overhang on our top wings seemed to me to be flapping a good deal. I passed a note to the pilot to this effect, only to receive the answer: " It's all right—if they weren't flexible they'd break." Considerably comforted, 1 proceeded to take the neces- sary strips of photographs, signalled "finished" to the pilot, and we turned for home. No, the wings did not break on the way back, but the pilot just pushed that "Harry Tate" straight into the ground, apparently without making any sort of attempt to land. He was in front, and got a smashed jaw; I scraped my arms, and the taxpayer had to pay for a new machine ; which was just too bad. Looking back, that was one outstanding memory in twenty^one years of camera-wielding. Others bring on<- nearer home. For instance, Firle Beacon and Itford Hi!! provided some grand sport during the glider contests of 1922. Maneyrol, on the last afternoon of the six-day meeting, brought his Peyret monoplane to the top of the hill to start. This glider was an extraordinary affair, with a tailplane of the same span as the main plane. When, at last, the " bunjy " was stretched and the Frenchman was ready for certain death (as many thought) almost everybody (except the Press photographers, they being somewhat hard-boiled) turned their heads away. Maneyrol won that competition—and a ^1,000 prize—by a matter of an hour and a half, remaining in the air 3 h. 21 m. js! De Havillands had a glider for this meeting. It had an aspect ratio of 10 to 1 and a pronounced droop. When in flight any movement of the ailerons merely caused the wings to warp, so, brain-wave of brain-waves, they altered the controls to operate on the old-fashioned wing-warping system. Hearn, the pilot, was duly shot off from one of the lower slopes to try it out. The result, dear readers, is depicted opposite. The wings became self-warping, and I held that camera to my eye, waiting, waiting, while the wings twisted first one way and then the other, further each time, until at last they gave up the ghost. The stub ends kept the craft straight, and it sank with an imperial plonk into the ground. Hearn stepped out of the debris, and, with a quite expressionless face, remarked : "I think we had better go back to ailerons." Incidentally, a man standing by my elbow remarked on what he called my '' wonderful coolness'' in not pressing the button before. I murmured something about "just experience, you know." As a matter of fact I had been too stupefied with fright to press it before! At six-thirty one summer morning in 1921 I joined the R.36, which was to control the Ascot traffic. The mooring mast at Pulham had a narrow iron ladder up its centre and one had to clamber up some 120 feet of this to reach the improvised gangway from the top to the ship. It would not have been too bad had I not been treated, when half-way up, to a large bundle of signal forms dropped on my head from some fifty feet above. But that is by the way ; what I do want to say- is : "While it sticks together, give me an airship for travel." No noise, no dust, no fumes; just the embodi- ment of what one feels flying should be—a glorious sen- sation of floating peacefully over the earth. Part of the proceedings was the despatch of messages by parachute over Croydon aerodrome. The parachute was a '' Guardian Angel'' of the type in which the canopy was folded up in a container, which remained attached to the aircraft while the falling weight pulled the 'chute out. Up to that time I had thought parachutes were rather nice things if one's toes were frizzling, but, after hearing that one coming out of its bag, sounding like all the fabric which has ever been made being torn by all
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