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Aviation History
1954
1954 - 1999.PDF
42 FLIGHT, 9 July 195 THE AVRO 504 . . . the Sopwith Tabloid put up an even better performance in the same tests. Raynham made several outstanding flights on the Avro 504. On February 4th, 1914, he flew the machine to a height of 15,000ft, thereby comfortably exceeding the existing British altitude record of 13,140ft whch had been set up by Captain J. M. Salmond on a B.E.2. Raynham had taken oft from brooklands, and from his machine's ceiling he glided to Hendon, about twenty miles away, with his engine off. After gliding for 25 minutes he was over Hendon at 5,000ft, so he spiralled down and landed there without using his engine. The flight was a magnificent exhibition of airmanship, but the climb could not count as a record because it was not officially observed. Six days later Raynham made a formal attempt on the altitude record, and, with Mr. MacGeagh Hurst as passenger, took the Avro to 14,420ft. Soon after these flights, the Avro 504 was bought by the Daily Mail and toured the country giving exhibition flights. The Avro's new owners required it to be flown from the sea at coast resorts; the manufacturers therefore made and provided a float under carriage which was interchangeable with the normal wheels. A floatplane version was exhibited at Olympia in March 1914, during the fifth Aero Show. A change of power-plant was also made at this time. It was thought that the original 80 h.p. Gnome, with its actual output o little more than 62 h.p., might not provide sufficient power fo: the heavier seaplane version; and it was replaced by an 80 h.p Gnome Monosoupape seven-cylinder rotary engine, which was supposed to be more powerful than the ordinary Gnome of tht same nominal power. The choice was an unfortunate one, for the new engine proved to be far from satisfactory and gave a great deal of trouble. It finally brought about the destruction of the Avro 504. During the Daily Mail tour the Avro was flown by F. P. Rayn ham and George Lusted, and its first flight as a seaplane was made at Paignton in April 1914. In August it was at Shoreham, on floats. It was commandeered as soon as war was declared on the 4th of that month, but was destroyed two days later: the engine failed as Raynham took off to deliver the machine to the Services, and he had insufficient height to avoid crashing on land. In the early summer of 1914 the War Office had ordered twelve Avro 504s and the Admiralty one. In the construction of these machines there arose a remarkable example of lack of co-operation between the War Office and the Admiralty. Before acceptance of the type for Service purposes the design of the airframe had been studied by both Departments. The War Office accepted the structure in its designed form, but the Admiralty requested that spars of slightly greater cross section be fitted. Avros, looking ahead to further orders, naturally wished to avoid the production complications which the use of different spars would mean, and asked the War Office to adopt the size of spar specified by the Admiralty. This the War Office declined to do. Consequently all the Admiralty Avro 504 variants had slightly larger spars than the machines which were built for the R.F.C., an anomaly which persisted until the amalgamation of the R.F.C. and R.N.A.S. in 1918, by which time spars of the original dimensions had been standardised in the 504K. All the production Avro 504s had one feature in common: the rear fuselage was modified to be symmetrical in side elevation, so that the upper longerons sloped downwards behind the rear cockpit. In the R.N.A.S., the Avro was frequendy referred to as the Avro 179, a designation obtained by using the serial number of the first machine accepted by the Admiralty. Inevitably, the use of this designation has led to some confusion. Some of the R.F.C. Avros were delivered before the outbreak of war and the remainder were handed over soon afterwards. When No. 5 Squadron went to France on August 13th, 1914, its equipment included a few Avro 504s; but the type was never used in large numbers by front-line units. In fact, the greatest known number of Avros on the strength of the R.F.C. Squadrons in France is only thirteen: on March 10th, 1915, No. 1 Squadron had eight, No. 3 had one, and No. 5 had four. Six months later the R.F.C. had seven in France, four with No. 1 Squadron and three with No. 5. Service use in the field showed that the Avro 504's flight endur ance was too short, and later production aircraft had increased tankage which brought the endurance up to 4J hours. One of the Avros of No. 5 Squadron was the first British aeroplane to be brought down by the enemy. On August 22nd, 1914, the machine flown by Lt. V. Waterfall (observer, Lt. C. G. C. Bayly) was shot down by infantry fire in Belgium, and it has been surmised that this Avro may have provided the Germans with the first positive evidence that British forces were in the field against them. Commander Samson's Eastchurch Squadron of the R.N.A.S. received its first Avro 504 on November 27th, 1914. This machine set out to bomb the submarine depot at Bruges on December 14th with four 16-lb bombs, but Fit. Sub-Lt. R. H. Collet, its pilot, could not find Bruges in bad visibility, and bombed the Ostend-Bruges railway line instead. In common with its contemporaries, the Avro 504 had not been designed to carry any kind of offensive armament, and it was flown from the rear seat. The observer sat directly under the centre-section and had a centre-section strut at each corner of his cockpit. The chances of operating a machine-gun satisfactorily from that position were remote indeed. Nevertheless, various attempts were made in the field to provide some kind of useful armament. One of the earliest of these attempts was made on Avro 504 No. 383 in mid-October 1914. The Avro had been delivered to No. 5 Squadron on October 15th, and within a few days it had been fitted with a Lewis gun by its pilot, 2nd Lt. L. A. Strange, who was assisted by Capt. L. da C. Penn-Gaskell. The "gun- mounting" would probably have delighted Mr. Heath Robinson, and is best described in Wing Commander Strange's own words (in his book Recollections of an Airman): "The mounting consisted of a metal tube, which I carefully selectee from the tail boom of a wrecked Henri Farman. The gun lay on th( top of the fuselage decking, while a piece of rope, lashed around its Reading down: the 504 prototype after modification, showing the freely- hinged, constant-chord ailerons, and modified cowling; the 504 prototype floatplane at Olympia in 1914; and the 504 production version, showing the downward slope of the upper longerons towards the tail.
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