Claude Grahame-White

“ A beautifully-timed, fine glide, the machine stealing down gracefully, and touching the aerodrome light as a feather, at a precise spot the airman has decided on even when he was several thousand feet high, is a delightful spectacle for the onlooker, and a keen pleasure also—from the point of view of his manipulative skill—to the aviator himself. But a pupil, at any rate in his first attempts, must not concern himself too much with any idea of a fine or graceful glide. ”

“ An airman, flying in a wind, is rather in the position of a man who puts to sea in a small boat when waves are high. Once he can clear the shore, the boatman feels at ease; but should a breaker catch him before he reaches the smooth, rolling billows a little distance from the beach, his craft may be overturned and dashed to pieces. So with the airman; his moments of peril, when flying in a gusty wind, come just as he is soaring from the ground, and when descending from a flight. Then an air-wave, like a sea-wave, may lift his craft and drive it with a crash to earth. ”

“ The earth, when viewed by a airman who looks down almost directly upon it, is apt to be deceptive as to its contour. A field that is selected say, from a height of several thousand feet, may not prove—as the aviator nears it in his glide—to be at all the haven he imagined it. More than once, seeking to alight on a field which appeared to him, as he was high above it, to be level as a billiard table, a pilot has found, when it is too late, that the ground has sloped so steeply that his machine, after landing, has run on downhill and ended by crashing into a fence or ditch. ”

“ With each advent of spring, when the air is alive with innumerable happy creatures; when the storks, on their arrival at their old northern resorts, fold up the imposing flying apparatus which carries them thousands of miles, lay back their heads and announce their arrival by joyfully rattling their beaks; when the swallows have made their entry and hurry through our streets and pass our windows in sailing flight; when the lark appears as a dot in the ether and manifests its joy of existence by its song; then a certain desire takes possession of man. ”

“ In his first cross-country flights, being concerned chiefly as to the manipulation of his machine, and having so many things to think of, the novice may feel tired after even a short journey by air. His chief sensation, as he switches off his engine to descend towards the aerodrome he sees below him, will be one of relief that he has escaped engine failure, and that he has been able to find his way from point to point. The joy of flight, of passing swiftly thousands of feet above the earth, will have made but a small impression upon him—at any rate consciously. ”

“ They see the land below them, stretching for mile after mile till it is shrouded in delicate mist; moving away slowly, appearing far-distant and quite remote, and yet revealed in all its detail—roads seem like ribbons, railways like tiny glistening threads, and rivers and lakes shining mirror-like. The day will soon dawn upon which, secure from any haunting fear of accident, the tourist will sweep up in his machine at Hendon, sail smoothly to the sea-coast, thence to some beauty spot inland, and so on till he has toured the kingdom. ”

“ The art of cross-country flying is still a closed book to him; and to this, as a rule, he next turns his attention, first making short trips near the aerodrome, and then increasing gradually the length and boldness of his flights. Then he must learn to combat a wind, and to steer by his maps and compass; he must, in fact, teach himself to be an all-round man. And none of these stages must be gone through hurriedly. In aviation, more than in any other art in the world, the whole of a man’s knowledge must be dependable and sound. ”

“ To those who study aviation, and have done so constantly, say from the year 1909, one of the most striking signs of progress lies in the fact that, though unable at first to fly even in the lightest winds, the aviator of to-day will fight successfully against a 60 miles-an-hour wind, and will do battle if need be, once he is well aloft, with a gale which has a velocity of 90 miles an hour. He will ascend indeed, and fly, in any wind that permits him to take his machine from the ground into the air, or which the motor of his craft will allow it to make headway against. ”

“ The third man to enter the fore-car is an official of the Post Office, who travels in charge of the mails.
The sliding door in the hull is closed; men step back away from the machine; and upon her controlling platform the pilot, leaning forward slightly, pulls over a lever. Instantly, as he does so, there comes a throb and a hum; the engines wake to life and the big propellers, flickering faster and faster, drive astern a screaming gale of wind. Then, moving forward gracefully and with quickly gathering speed, the air-mail rises and is lost to view. ”

“ With machines built lightly, and subjected to heavy strains when at high speeds, it is vital that the inspection of such craft, that the examination of every detail of them, should be carried out in a spirit of the greatest care. The fraying through of a control wire, unnoticed by those in charge of a machine, has been sufficient to cause a disaster; while carelessness in overhauling a motor, a task of supreme importance, seeing that its engine is the heart of an aeroplane, has been another cause of accident. ”

“ There is not an instant to lose; not a fraction of a second to be wasted while a man thinks what he is to do. His balancing, if he would glide through the air with wings, must be instinctive—instantaneous; as, indeed, is the balancing of the birds. Here, then, is the difficulty: to learn to make these balancing movements with sufficient quickness; and this Lilienthal found to be the stumbling-block. Time after time, while gliding close to the ground, his machine lost its balance and, before he could correct the slip or dive, had come to earth. ”

“ THEORIES OF TUITION
Only eight years ago, in 1908, it was declared impossible for one man to teach another to fly. Those few men who had risen from the ground in aeroplanes, notably the Wright brothers, were held to be endowed by nature in some very peculiar way; to be men who possessed some remarkable and hitherto unexplained sense of equilibrium. That these men would be able to take other men—ordinary members of the human race—and teach them in their turn to navigate the air, was a suggestion that was ridiculed. ”

“ Sometimes a pilot has been careless, or perhaps in a hurry, and has failed to locate some defect which, had it been seen and attended to, would have saved a disaster when a machine was in flight. Such inattention, which is sufficiently dangerous in the handling of any piece of mechanism, is deadly in its peril when those who are guilty of it navigate the air. A man who brings out a machine time after time, and ascends without examining it carefully, is adding vastly to the risks that may attend his flight; and the same remark will apply to the carelessness of mechanics ”

“ Down, as though drawn by some giant, unseen hand, sinks the surface of the land; and you yourself, save for the wind which comes whistling past the hull, might be suspended motionless in the air. Smooth, seemingly quite effortless, is the progress of the machine; and the [Pg 252] air aloft is—well, such air as, for sheer exhilaration, you have never breathed before; and, although it has an early-morning chill, you are shielded by the snug, covered-in body of your craft. ”

“ And from this phase we should move to the passenger-carrying craft; to the days when we shall be able to spend a week-end in New York, as readily as it has been the habit to do in Paris; when we shall be able to reach any part of the world in a journey by air lasting, say, a week or ten days. Then, as a recompense for the lives that have been lost, and for a conquest that has been so dearly won, the world will enter upon an age of aerial transit—the age when frontiers and seas will act as barriers no longer, when journeys that now last weeks will be reduced to days, and those of days to hours ”

“ To put in charge of such a craft a man who knew nothing of the navigation of the air, would have been like placing a novice at the levers of a 60-mile-an-hour express. Picture such a huge aircraft in the hands of a man who had never flown. It would rise, it is true; but how could one who was not an expert so adjust the angle of its lifting plane that it would glide smoothly from the ground and not rear itself upward and fall with a crash? A machine is struck by wind-gusts, too, when it is aloft ”

“ Aviation, as an industry, must prepare for years of strenuous work. A great air service must be created. Machines must be designed and built in thousands instead of hundreds, and men trained to fly them. Nor is this all. The aeroplane, though it has such significance as a weapon of war, is destined primarily and eventually to be an instrument of peace; a machine for the transport by air of passengers, mails, and goods, at speeds greater than will be feasible by land or water ”

“ No matter how well a machine may fly, or how skilled its pilot, there is peril should its structure have a weakness, or some hidden defect. For months, perhaps, in the early days of aviation, a faulty machine would fly; and then some day, subjected to an abnormal strain, a wing or a tail would break, and the airman would fall to his death. Should an aeroplane dive suddenly, there may be a tremendous strain upon its planes; and in a violent wind, while its motor is thrusting it through the gusts, it is sustaining shocks and jars which may be of tremendous force. ”

“ Experience, the researches of science, and the growing skill with which aircraft are built, stand between the airman and many of his previous dangers. The aeroplane to-day, one of the structural triumphs of the world in its lightness and its strength, has a factor of safety which is sufficient to meet, and to withstand, not merely ordinary strains, but any such abnormal stresses as it may encounter—and which may be many times greater than the strains of normal flight. ”

“ Looking down upon the earth, from an altitude of several thousand feet, you have no near object by which you can gauge your speed. It is the same when one glances from the window of an express, and catches sight of some distant hill. Even in a train running at sixty miles an hour, if you watch a landmark that is remote, it will seem that your pace is slow; and yet if you note the telegraph poles close beside the track, you see that they are flying past your carriage window. ”

“ But the pilot of a racing plane is no ordinary man; none, indeed, but the most expert will dare to handle a high-speed craft. With 160 h.p. within its frail, light hull, and sustained in flight by the smallest of wings, the machine must have a master hand upon its levers—a hand light and yet sure, delicate and yet as strong as steel. Those in France who fly these racing craft are called the “record” men. Others, who do trick-flying such as “looping the loop,” are known as the “artists.”
A daily feature of work upon the aerodrome is the giving of passenger flights. ”

“ There are still people, not few of them but many, who would be ready to declare, offhand, that one aeroplane flight in six ends in a disaster.
It is a truism, but one that has a peculiar truth in aviation, to say that history repeats itself. To-day we find large numbers of people who still cherish the opinion that—save perhaps when on service in war—it is nothing less than criminal foolishness for men to ascend in aeroplanes. That attitude of mind persists; the growing safety of flight has not affected it to any appreciable degree. ”

“ With the aeroplane engine, even with types that have gained a high average of reliability, there are many possibilities of a slight mishap—each of them sufficient, for the moment, to put an engine out of action—that the pilot who is flying across country must, all the time he is in the air, have at the back of his mind the thought that at any moment, and perhaps without any warning, he may find that his motive power has gone. ”

“ Machines are brought out and tested; pilots arrive from other flying grounds; there is a hum of activity in the workshops; and in regular batches, with this instructor and that, are pupils taught to handle a craft in flight. It is, to those who have only a vague knowledge of aviation, a surprise indeed to spend a day at an aerodrome. They imagine that the industry is no more than haphazard; that a few machines are built—mostly in small workshops, and that there is neither method nor organisation in their making. ”