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Aviation History
1951
1951 - 1410.PDF
FLIGHT, 20 July 1951 PROFESSIONAL JOYRIDER . . . Just before the Armistice we gazed in wonderment. at theBristol Fighter, small numbers of which were arriving for operation over the Palestine front. Its ability to loop with scarcely anypreliminary dive put it in a premier position among its contem- porary two-seaters. Curiously enough, the opportunity actuallyto fly in a Brisfit did not come until some 12 or 13 years later, during an attempt to photograph a formation of Boulton and PaulSidestrands. At the briefing it had been decided that, because the Sidestrands could fly as slowly as 85 m.p.h. and the Brisfitas fast as 95 m.p.h., there was 10 m.p.h. to play with. The leader "of the Sidestrands (of No. 100 Squadron) achieved his 85 m.p.h.by climbing, a performance which the Bristol could not equal— even by cutting the corners. In the early twenties few new types were produced; vast numbersof war-time machines were drawn from store and modified for any job in hand. All the early airliners were converted bombers,mostly Handley Page 0/400S and D.H.9S and 4s. A trip to Paris in a converted D.H.4 was not without interest. One sat facing theonly other passenger, and the lid was slammed down and locked, leaving only a few inches of headroom. Conversation was carriedon entirely by notes—pads and pencils were thoughtfully provided for the purpose—because engine noise made hearing impossible.This was hardly surprising, for the open ends of the exhausts were less than two feet from the passengers' heads. My companion, 91 up. The mast had no lift: one climbed a vertical ladder inside it.Halfway up, somebody above dropped a pile of signal books which, one recalls, had exceedingly sharp corners. From themasthead the final few feet were achieved via a flexible ladder extending to the ship's entrance-hatch at an angle of about45 degrees. From the hatch—which was in the nose of the envelope—the cabin was reached via a 9-inch catwalk beneath thegas ballonets. The ground engineers of today can be thankful that they do not have to "D.I." airships; the multiplicity of wiresand girders had to be seen to be believed. As a means of travel it was wholly delightful—veritably the poetry of motion, for therewas no smell or smoke or noise or dust. One was less comfortable, however, on hearing a knot of seven or eight passengers beingquietly told to disperse gently, "without panic," because "not more than three people should stand together in case the structuregives way." Returning to Pulham that night the ship had to be brought tothe mooring mast in darkness, except for a searchlight directed on her nose. The silver nose, with the black shape of the restof the ship outlined against a brilliantly starlit indigo sky, was an unforgettable sight. My only other trip in the lighter-than-air realm was a curiousmixture of modernity and the old-fashioned, for it was to make what must have been one of the earliest attempts at aerial infra-redphotography by ascending in the basket of a kite balloon. The experiment was quite successful, but it was disconcerting foranyone accustomed to a battering slipstream and a roaring engine to be suspended in almost complete silence, to hear the cowsmooing and the dogs barking down below, while from the envelope above came a gentle sssssh of escaping gas. Incidentally, S/L. C. F.Gordon, O.B.E., M.C., D.F.C., who took me up, was the only one-legged pilot with whom I have flown. Though he sportedone of the genuine old-fashioned peg legs, he seemed quite oblivious of any feeling of insecurity caused by the fact that therim of the basket came scarcely up to the waist. By 1927 the R.A.F. were interested in the long-distance record.A Hawker Horsley was prepared and flown by Carr and Gillman non-stop to the Persian Gulf, but they held the record for only afew hours; then Lindbergh landed his Ryan monoplane in Paris after crossing the Atlantic. Their second attempt I followed inanother Horsley, piloted by George Bulman. The take-off at Cranwell had been a hair-raising experience : there were no run-ways then, even for record attempts. Later in the air, every R.36 at the Pulham mooring mast. It's registration letters were G-FAAF. A two-seater D.H.4 airliner departs for Paris from Waddon Airfield. an actress, answered my sympathetic query as to why she waswearing crSpe bandage round her neck with, "As a cure for airsickness. It stops my head knowing what my tummy feels like.And it's just as well, because I feel awful." At the same time an increasing number of twin-engined aircraftcame into use, many of them being produced just too late to see service in the war. The D.H.10 and the Vickers Vimy (the latterwas the type which made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic) were two examples. Another, which came a little laterwas the Boulton and Paul Bourges; and it was in one of these, during a demonstration at a Hendon Display, that an attempt was madeto get a photographic impression of a spin. 'The trip was my first experience of flying with F. T. ("Magic Hands") Courtney—andI was never so "demonstrated" in all my life. It was said that it took the riggers nearly a fortnight to get the Bourges right again;it was certainly some while before my own datum-line settled. The Light Aeroplane Trials at Lympne in the early twentiesproduced a number of very clever aircraft—and some not so clever. The English Electric Company, of present-day Canberra fame,produced the tiny 3 h.p. Wren on which S/L. Longton averaged 87J miles per gallon in the consumption tests. "George" Bulman,then a pilot at the R.A.E., brought over the R.A.E. Club's Hurri- cane (not the Hurricane) from Farnborough. Petrol feed troublemade him progress in a series of runs, each with a dive at the end to refill the carburetter float-chamber. For the two-seater competition the next year George flew theHawker Cygnet designed by Sydney Camm. This was a master- piece in weight-saving, the a.u.w. being considerably less than900 lfo. As a passenger one had to be ultra-careful, because there was no floorboard in the passenger's cockpit, and if one's feetSlipped off a convenient cross-member they went straight through the fuselage fabric. While on the subject of insecurity it is interesting to recall atrip in the airship R.36 during a flight which she made to control the Ascot race-traffic in 1921. (The radio-equipped traffic policeof today are not such a comparative innovation as many people believe them to be.) For this trip I joined the ship at Pulhamwhere she floated, anchored to the mast by the nose, some 120 ft. Looking down from the basket at the handling crew of a kite balloon. The bags of ballast mark the area where the balloon rested on the ground.
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