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Aviation History
1938
1938 - 0425.PDF
FEBRUARY 17, i938- FLIGHT. The memorandum recognises that some works cf national importance cannot be completely blacked-out. Certain types of furnaces, for example, are hard to conceal, and they must be kept going continuously. It seems that the workers in such cases will have to take their chance. Despite the very great improvement in bomb sights and generally in the art of bombing since 1918, it may be taken as true that the greater the height of the bomber the less chance there is of his scoring a bull's-eye. We can at least feel sure that modern means of defence will keep the bombers up very high. The A.A. guns and searchlights now have a much greater range, the fighters have a wonderful rate of climb, and then there will be balloon barrages. These last ought to ensure that the raiders who have come in at a great height will not be able to come down low over their target before bombing. Compromise ?I T should be recognised that complete darkness will not protect all places. Water will nearly always give away a locality, and it should always be possible for raiders to find their way to London, though not necessarily to distinguish a particular target in London. It would prob- ably also be impossible to prevent the raider from identi- fying Portsmouth and Southampton. Darkness would seem to be most useful in concealing inland centres such as Birmingham or Coventry. There would be small wisdom in causing a great deal of incon- venience to places which can be easily identified in any case. If a raid takes place, rules ought not to be too rigid just because they are rules If incendiary bombs are dropped and fires are started in a town, there would then be no reason for denying a reasonable amount of light to the parties which have to attend to casualties, decontamin- ate streets, and carry out other essential work. To leave these people without light to work by might cause as much preventable damage as would be caused by the dropping of another bomb. j DIARY OF FORTHCOMING | ; EVENTS— Pag,- 156 ! Indoor Flying /4 LMOST from the earliest days of flying the possibility /-% of raising a weight into the air by a lifting airscrew has been realised. What has held back the develop- ment of the helicopter has been the problems connected with controlling the helicopter after it had got into the air. Dozens of helicopters have been built during the last twenty years or so, but most of them have come to grief sooner or later as a result of defective or inadequate con- trol. That Dr. Focke, of the German Focke-Wulf company, has solved the control problem, whatever may be one's opinion of the practical utility of his present two-rotor helicopter, was shown in Berlin the other day, when Fraulein Hanna Reitsch made a flight inside the Nazi Deutschlandhalle, which is rather larger than the main hall of Olympia. Those fortunate enough to have seen Fraulein Reitsch fly the helicopter in the open knew that the machine must have been under perfect control. Her take offs, landing and hovering a few feet up while talking to people on the ground proved that. The Focke-Wulf helicopter had previously collected all the world's records open to an aircraft of this class. But the "record" of being the first to do indoor flying is, perhaps, more signi- ficant than any of them. We in this country can claim to have flown helicopters indoors many years ago. The old balloon shed at Farn- •borough was the scene of certain helicopter experiments, but few would claim that the machines were under control. Now that the Focke-Wulf has demonstrated that at any rate one solution of the control problem has been found, there remains but to clean the machine up so as to give it a fairly good performance in horizontal flight. In the meantime, our own rotating-wing experts are not by any means idle, and it is likely that in the near future the world will learn that Great Britain, fcr many years the centre of this particular type of research and develop- ment, is still in the running. The military people are sitting up and taking notice, and that generally means that something will be done. The last helicopter to be built in this country was the Isacco, which was not a success.
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