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Aviation History
1941
1941 - 0022.PDF
h l:LIGHT. Horatio Barber's " Valkyrie " was a tail-first monoplane, with a 50 h.p Green water-cooled engine driving a pusher airscrew. bleak weather immediately set in, and put an end to flying for many days. If my memory serves me faithfully, it was nearly three weeks before any of the school machines took the air. Every day we went from Amesbury to Lark Hill, and spent the morning in the sheds becoming familiar with details of construction and control, sitting in the pilot's seat, and working the controls whilst imagining the normal procedure of a flight. Instructors (Maurice Tetard and Leon Versepuy) discoursed and advised. Tetard was chief instructor. He was a pilot-mechanic, and knew scarcely any English. Versepuy, ^more volatile French type, knew some English, and was diligent to learn more. T6tard was instructor on the Gnome-engined Bristol, and Versepuy was in charge of the much more difficult machine fitted with an E.N.V. water-cooled, and compara- tively heavy, power-unit. These were pusher biplanes, and the weight of the engine was a rather important matter. It was much easier to stall with the E.N.V. The Gnome, it may be recalled, was an engine in which the crankshaft was fixed whilst the radially arranged cylinders, to which the prop, was attached, revolved round it. The advent of the Gnome marked a new stage in aviation, for its lightness gave it such an advantage that new records for speed' height and duration were soon set up with its aid. At the Doncaster Aviation Meeting in October, 1909, I saw Ldon Delagrange fly a Gnome-engined Ble'riot at the amazing speed of 60 m.p.h., thus equalling that of an express train! But in swinging a prop, it was necessary to get the whole engine on the move, and this was rather heavy work. I hated doing this when the ground was miry. The weather had to be nearly perfect before pupils were taken up even for mere passenger flights. Flying, in fact, had not long emerged from the days when no flight was undertaken unless the smoke of a cigarette went straight upwaffas. Foot-work During the bad days, and when we could find nothing else to do, the half-dozen pupils and the instructors would kick a football about. It was all very boring, and the pro- tracted tuition period, moreover, made it expensive, for I was neglecting my newspaper work to some extent, besides having to live away from home. And it was extremely tedious, for practically our only evening amusement was the roller skating rink at Salisbury. One day the late D. Graham Gilmour and Mr. E. C. Gordon-England, who, by the way, got his ticket just before me, flew over in the course of a real jiif tour, and in the evening Gilmour explained to us pupils in the lounge at the "George" many things we were thirsting to know. One of these concerned the difficulty of right-hand turns in Gnome-engined pushers. The wind had been blown up our anxious mentality by the insistence by many experts of the day that the right- hand turn was very risky, the machine refusing to put its nose down, the danger of stalling thus being increased. It certainly did seem to be something like that, and one had to be careful. Gilmour, however, pointed out that the alleged gyroscopic effect of t^p rotating mass of the engine could only have been extremely slight, and that the whole thing was more imaginary than real. This was very com- forting. The lounge of the '' George '' heard many discussions on the elementary principles of flying, and as the weeks wore on new pupils arrived, and various celebrities of the flying world visited us. Here, too, on Sunday afternoons the young boys and girls of the village came to us for our autographs. Among the pupils were Henry Fleming and Edward DESIGNER AND PILOT, TOO. Mr. E. C. Gordon-Englandin a Bristol box kite, Circa 1911.
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