FROM the pages of the October 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

What Made ‘Em Fly

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, October 1934)

NOW you wise young sons and daughters of a double eagle, or maybe it was a buzzard, maybe you hadn’t noticed it before but if you had looked a little carefully at all the nice pictures of the war crates on the covers of SKY FIGHTERS you might have noticed that nearly every one of them without exception had something peculiar about it. Whether you noticed it or not, they all had engines in ’em.

Yes, sir, they carried whole gasoline engines up in the air. Some of them had one and some had two and some had more than that—even back in the early days of the war.

Now if I know anything about you clucks you’re just as likely as not to come asking me why those aviators wanted to load themselves down with a lot of machinery. It would be just about like you.

So I’m going to head you off and tell you something about those powerhouses we used to take upstairs along with us. And don’t be asking me why they carried more than one of ’em. I’m going to get to that if you’ll let me. Mary, don’t you throw that spit-ball!

You Gotta Have an Engine

Maybe your papas have let you look under the hood of the old family car, in which case you might have learned the secret that a vehicle just can’t get along without an engine if it’s going to do any good running at all. Honey, it’s the same way with an airplane.

So I’m going to tell you a few simple things that won’t be too difficult for your shallow pans to remember so you will have a little inkling of why they have all different kinds of engines when it would look for the world like if they got a good one they would keep using it instead of trying to think up other designs and shapes to use.

You might have noticed that some of the engines when they were looked at from the front looked like stars with a lot of cylinders all sticking out every which way from the center. And others looked more like a common every-day automobile engine. How come it and why?

Air and Water Cooling

The answer is, my precious little dunderheads, that some of them were air-cooled and some water-cooled.

They learned that an engine that didn’t have to tote its own drink along with it weighed about three-quarters as much as another of the same horsepower that was water-cooled. And they learned also that for every pound you could reduce the weight of it you could add two pounds of useful load, or what amounts to the same thing, you could have a bigger engine and more power for the given weight.

Now the reason you could get those two extra pounds where one grew before was that when you took a pound’s weight away from the engine you could reduce the weight of the ship by another pound that was necessary to strengthen it to support the pound you took away, and you could further reduce the weight of your ship by another pound that went to strengthen the wing so it would support that extra pound of engine weight. That’s as clear as mud, isn’t it?

But unfortunately that added strength didn’t always show as engines got bigger. After they got so big, an air-cooled engine wouldn’t weigh any less than a water-cooled one for the same horse power.

So they used one or the other depending on the performance they wanted.

The Air-Foil

Now when you start trying to recognize the different kinds of engines you want to look at the front of them. That way you can see what kind of a surface, or air-foil they present to the wind. That’s the important thing for you to consider.

When you look at them that from that aspect you will see that there are only about three different general groups of designs. Of course, these differ among themselves in slight ways, but after all, even human beings in one family have slight differences.

Take a look at the figure which I have very cleverly called Figure 1. In that you will see the front view of a few of the stationary cylinder engines that are water-cooled and whose fathers got the idea of their design from our old friend the automobile engine. Now this group shows some outline forms of the engines themselves, but there is a fly in the amber. They don’t show the radiators, and a water-cooled engine has to have a radiator and that presents a big flat surface to the air to reduce your speed.

Rotary Engines

So then you have next in what for want of a better name I have called Figure 2, the rotary engines that were used during the war. Some of the names of these are Gnome Rotary, the Le Rhone Rotary, and the Clerget Rotary.

These were funny power plants. You might not believe it when I tell you, but it is a fact that the crank shaft stood still and the whole engine itself revolved around it! That sounds kind of Chinese, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. What with those cylinders whirling around at a thousand revolutions or more, they kept cool pretty well, but once in a while one of them would fly off the handle and scatter cylinders all over No-Man’s-Land.

And then they had another feature that the brass hats didn’t seem to bother about, but which we didn’t like at all. They were lubricated with castor oil!

Hot Castor Oil

Our objections to it came, not because we had to share their fuel oil, but because the engineers didn’t think castor oil was bad enough cold, they let it get hot in the motor.

And brothers and sisters, you have not smelled nothing yet until you have got a nose full of red hot castor oil. And you can smell it for miles—and that is not an exaggeration! We were afraid the Heinies could always tell we were coming by just sticking their noses up in the air and taking a deep breath. Boy, it was awful!

And then you might take a glimpse at a figure that I have designated as Figure 3, even though you can’t count up that high.

Those figures in that picture are some outlines that look almost like those rotary babies. But they aren’t. Their cylinders stick out from a common center just like the rotaries, but there is some sense in the way they act. The cylinders stay still and the crank shaft revolves just like any respectable crankshaft ought to do.

We Had ’Em Long Ago

We had them in the old days, and they had all the way from three to twenty cylinders stuck around the shaft.

Those were the babies that have turned out best since the war. But we had a lot of satisfaction out of them. A couple of these babies we liked in those days were the Salmson and the Cosmos Jupiter.

And just to prove how practical these air-cooled babies were, if you will take a glance around an air field today you will see more air-cooled radial motors than any other kind. Babies of that pattern since the war were the first to cross the North Pole, first to fly the English Channel, first to span the Atlantic, and about the first for everything of any importance.

And now that you know all about the different kinds of engines, I’ll give you that promised dope about why they had different numbers in different kinds of ships.

Why the Extra Engines?

There are two reasons they put more than one engine in a ship. One is to increase and distribute the lift and the other is to increase the factor of safety. These two reasons don’t always both appear in the one ship.

But even you pupils of mine ought to be able to see that if you have two engines and one conks you’ve still got a chance to get back safely over your home trenches, and if you’ve got three engines to do the same work there’s almost no chance at all of your having a forced landing in a mess of Krauts. I know about a Handley-Page bomber that went out and got a direct hit that reduced its whole lower wing to a mass of shreds and tatters and knocked one of its engines clear out of it, but the pilot steered it sixty miles back to his home tarmac! Which is something different from landing on your nose in the middle of a few rosettes of shrapnel.

Helps in the Lift

And then in the matter of lift, you will find the heavy bombers had more than one engine so they could lift a lot of weight. You would first think they would just build one big engine to carry it, but that wouldn’t be so good. Let me try to show you why.

Suppose it took a thousand horsepower to lift the desired bomber and its load. They could build one engine of a thousand horsepower all right, but they wouldn’t get a propeller that could use up and deliver all that power. But if they, say, built two five-hundred horsepower engines, they had two props which could use up all that power and besides they had the additional safety factor of the two motors I just spoke about. You might not remember it well, Tillie, but we had plenty of ships with more than one engine during the war.

The Germans were the first to come out with them, although the French were at work on them even before the war broke out. The first German flew with two engines in 1915.

But the French quickly matched them with the old twin-motored Caudron, and the British followed right off the bat with the twin-motored Dyott, which didn’t last a very long time, however. The Government never did put its official okay on the old Dyott, but it was not a bad heavy crate, and it had a lot of features the German Gotha later incorporated.

Then the Italians in the person of the well-known Mr. Caproni burst out across the field with a three-motored ship. It had two eighty-horsepower tractor motors and one ninety-horsepower pusher. Some ship, eh, Tony!

And toward the end of the fracas the British got real ambitious and brought out a ship with four—count them—motors. It just had engines stuck all over it.

They Went in for Numbers

But once they started going in for numbers, do you think the Germans were going to let anybody get ahead of them? No, my masters, not those boys.

We knocked down one of their big bombers in France, and we thought somebody had attached wings to the machine shop itself.

That crate had five motors sprouting out of it.

That might not be a lot of motors these days, but my children, I’ve been talking all this time about the war that was fought a long, long time ago.

And now, take my blessing, and go out and jump in your ten-motored kiddie cars and zoom out of my sight. Or else I’ll be counting motors instead of sheep in my sleep.

FROM the pages of the September 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

Ancestors of the Modern Planes

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, September 1934)

I’VE been telling you rummies a whole lot about this and a little more about that from time to time. So I figure it’s about time I told you about some problems of the crates themselves. You should know, but more than likely you don’t, that up until the war started, airplanes were pretty darned crazy things at best, and people who thought they had common sense wouldn’t have anything to do with them. I remember when the newspapers all over America raised all kinds, of Cain because President Theodore Roosevelt risked his neck in one of those fool contraptions.

At the beginning of the war an airplane was a freak. The designs that inventors had worked out looked like the results of a nightmare. But a lot of them would fly in spite of their crazy-looking features. To put it straight, an airplane was a thing that was more likely to scare the enemy to death than to administer any physical damage to him.

Take a look at Fig.1. There the three pictures are of A—an Austrian ship, B—a Belgian ship and C—a British ship.

A Nightmarish-Looking Dingus

Now here’s an interesting angle about that third one of that little group. It is an early Avro. An Avro is a British ship that gets its name from its inventor, A.V. Roe. It’s a nightmarish-looking dingus, ain’t it?

Then listen, sisters and brothers, that was the granddaddy of a long and honorable line of ships that are going great guns yet today. I’ll admit that the present day Avro is a far cry from that box-kite looking thing in the picture. But it flew. And after all, Percival, you yourself are a far cry from your ancestors that hung by their tails from trees. Or are you?

Now, just when the soldiers got serious about shooting each other in the collar buttons and began to realize that this fracas wasn’t going to be just a big Rotary Club picnic, the boys with the brains stuck their noses over their blueprints and started figuring on force-feeding the awkward little birdies so their wings would get big and strong like they were eating their spinach every day.

Birds as Models

And naturally, when they figured what their problems were they showed what bright inventors they were by casting their eyes at the real birds. The results then, quickly made junk out of the crazy former models, and now all ships began to show a similarity in shape, even though they were designed in different countries and by people who didn’t know each other. See Fig. 2.

Two-A shows you the top view of the German Albatross made in 1914 and used by the Germans. Look at the wing-tips and the tail surfaces. Doesn’t the picture look like they had laid a bird down on the drafting board and traced its outline?

And what was going on in England at the same time? Look at Fig. 2-B. There’s a Handley-Page monoplane. That was used in the war, too.

Now compare their wings and tail surfaces. Don’t you see in their resemblance how they were both getting at the same idea, although not comparing ideas with each other?

Of course, in those days they didn’t have the powerful motors that were being developed and are in use now. And not having much power, their problem was to get strength enough in the wings and at the same time get the wings light enough for the weak motor to support.

Brace Wire

For that purpose, they resorted to using a lot of brace wire. Wire was light and strong so they used great quantities of it. I remember I was with a gang of flyers just up to a new field near Flanders in the early days and we just had got in a delivery of half a dozen new experimental ships that we were to try out. There were wires all over it. One of the boys said: “Gosh, I never thought I’d ever have to fly a wire chicken coop.”

But that was what they looked like, and they thought they had the problem solved. But, listen, tots, they didn’t. For just about then they learned something from the aviation engineers.

That was, that a wire vibrates crossways, and when it vibrates it offers just as much wind resistance as a flat edge of a hoard the width of the vibration!

In other words, if you had twenty wires stuck up and down between your wings and they vibrated two inches when the motor was running, you might just as well have braced your ship with twenty, two by fours with the narrow side facing the front. And what a lot of resistance that would cause. It would take a Cyclone motor to fight that and get any speed.

Let’s Watch the Albatross

So they started getting rid of wires wherever they could. And since we’ve started with an Albatross, let’s follow that baby through its stages of refinement. It was a good ship and once just about ruled the skies, so let’s watch a good ship grow up.

Look at Fig. 3. There’s your Albatross in 1915. Notice how much cleaner the lines are. But if you look closely and compare the trailing edge of the wings, especially around the outer extremities, you’ll see the same old design, although it has now become so modified that you’d hardly notice it if you weren’t looking for it.

But let’s go a step further. Look at 3-B. There she is in 1916-7. Still slicker. And, children, don’t let anybody tell you them wasn’t airyplanes for them days!

New Models—And Newer Ones!

So, you see, the powers behind the guns were throwing out new models faster than the automobile manufacturers do today. They wanted to have the very best airplanes they could get.

So, the engineers and manufacturers were busy night and day figuring out ways to improve the ships, and as soon as they got a new idea they would build a group of experimental ships and send them out with all the improvements for us to try out.

And since I mentioned experimental ships, it looks like a good chance to slip you a bit of information that might come in handy when you are looking at war crates. Whenever you saw a ship and the caption told you it was a Handley-Page S.E. 5, or a something else, R.E. 2, or whatever, did you ever wonder why they strung out that alphabet and numbers after the name of the ship just like a professor with a lot of A.B.’s and X.Y.Z.’s after his name? Well, here’s the dope.

Identification Letters

The British used a series of identifying type letters based on this system. Mons. Bleriot was credited with originating the tractor type airplane, so they designated the tractor types B.E. plus the number of the particular experiment of that company in building a tractor ship.

Farman was credited with originating the pusher type, and those types were Farman Experimental such-and-such a number, or F.E. 2’s or 3’s or whatever.

And also, they used other letters to indicate the duty for which the ship was to be tried out. Thus this table which you should always carry in the pocket of your Sunday pants:

B.E. was Bleriot Experimental.
F.E. meant Farman Experimental.
R.E. meant Reconnaissance Experimental.
S.E. meant Scouting Experimental.

And now I want you mugs to memorize all I’ve told you right quickly, or I’ll use EM on you, which means Eddie McCrae will experiment with breaking your heads.

FROM the pages of the August 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

Wings—and Why

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, August 1934)

NOW I don’t remember of any of you duck-billed flamingoes stepping up and asking me what it was that made a war crate fly—when it did fly. Maybe it was because you had a suspicion that it was because of the wings. And then again, in case you had guessed that much, I thought maybe you’d be wondering just how it was that the wings sustained the ship, even admitting that you knew that the motor gave it sufficient power to propel itself through air.

Well, if you want to give up and learn something, I’ll tell you something about that today. And while I’m at it I suppose this is the best time to explain why some of the ships were monoplanes and some biplanes and even some of them triplanes, as one of the members of the German Albatross family, and one of our own Curtiss ships, as well as others. Wake up and listen to some real scientific information already predigested so it won’t get stuck in your delicate brains.

The answer Is this; when the ship is driven forward by a motor, the wing is so shaped that the air passes over and under the wing according to the “camber” of the wing. The camber is the shape it is in cross section. Take a look at Fig. 1 and you’ll see what I mean.

You’ll notice that the wing is rounded in front, gets thicker and then tapers to almost nothing at the rear or “trailing” edge. The distance from the front to the back is called the chord of the wings. You will see that the air is diverted upward and forms a kind of vacuum or area of reduced pressure over the wing. And also that some of the air hits the under-surface.

The Lift of the Ship

The lift of the ship is caused by the vacuum over the wing and the upward pressure of the wing on the under surface. And it may surprise some of you knot heads to know that the vacuum above the wing furnishes from three-quarters to in some cases ninety-eight per cent of the lift, and therefore the pressure from underneath furnishes from a quarter down to as little as two per cent of the lift.

Now, during the war the engineers knew that the amount of lift a wing surface had depended somewhat on the thickness of the camber and the shape of the wing. A wing that was thick at its maximum depth would naturally shoot the air higher over the wing and form a greater vacuum and thus give more lift. But when it did that it also reduced the speed.

What they wanted, then, was some way to get around that if they could. So, they knew that the greater the wing surface the greater the lift. If you wanted to lift a thousand pounds you would have to have a certain amount of wing surface of a thin camber, but more surface if the camber was thicker.

They Built More Wings

What is more natural, then, than to build more wings, one on top of the other. Take a look at the Albatross airplane as an example. (Fig. 2)

They had a lot of problems. They wanted ships for speed and carrying light weights. These would be the scouts and fighters. They needed others to carry heavy weights.

So they designed ships with wings like the ones shown in Fig. 3. The wing in 3-A is the section of a bomber. It will lift heavy loads, but it flies slowly because it cuts the air at such a steep angle to the line of flight, and it has a slow speed. 3-B shows a wing that will carry a fairly heavy load, fly a little faster and not land too fast. It was used on some training planes, like the old Curtiss Jenny. 3-C would have a much higher flying speed and would be used for reconnaissance and work that took fast maneuvering. And the last one of the wings would be found only on the fastest ships, fighters that had to get places in a hurry.

I remember the first one of these babies with a flat lower camber that came out to our little orchard at Ypers. Bill Bradley who claimed he could fly anything, looked at it and grunted and said, “Hell, that’s nothing but a barn door equipped with a motor and undercarriage. Crank ‘er up and I’ll fly her, though.” And, listen, Mary Jane, he did just that.

So whenever you’re loafing around a flying field and see a pair of wings that are flat on the under-side, just grab your dresses and run, because that ship can get places.

Now, let’s follow a bird that wants to design an airplane and see how he goes about deciding what kind of wings he’s going to put on it. The first question that comes up, of course, is, what you want it for. Say, for instance, we want it for photographing work, or light bombing. At any rate, we want it to carry about two thousand pounds of weight and make reasonably good speed. We don’t want too much speed in landing because the load it carries is delicate, the machine will be heavy and will have to land slowly.

We’ve Learned by Mistakes

Now we’ve learned by the mistakes of others that the average machine will carry about two-thirds of its own weight, or a ratio of 40 per cent cargo to 60 per cent dead weight. That being the case, the ship we have to build must weigh three thousand pounds in order to carry a useful load of two thousand, a total then for ship and cargo of 5,000 pounds.

Now the next thing is how much lift is needed. We know that for an average speed with an average load, with an average motor, the ship should have a lift of seven pounds for every square foot of wing surface. The problem is, how much wing surface will we need to lift five thousand pounds.

Get out your slate Johnny and figure that out. It’s easy. Just divide the total five thousand pounds by seven and you have about 714 square feet of wing surface needed.

Now, shall we supply that 714 feet all in one wing, or break it up into two wings? We figure this way; engineers have learned that the span of a wing across the front of the ship should be at least five times the chord, or depth fore and aft. Now if we tried to build a monoplane on those proportions and got our whole 714 feet of wing surface in it we would have a wing which would be seventy feet across and about ten feet deep.

They’re All Metal Now

That’s not so much of a problem in these days, because of all metal construction that has been perfected since the war. But in those days we had spruce and linen and wooden and wire construction. So, to have built a ship out of wood and wire with seventy foot wings wouldn’t have been so hot. I can promise you, Tilly, that plenty of ships shed their wings when they weren’t even as broad as our seventy-footer.

So, we’ll cut the wings half in two and give 350 feet square to a top and bottom wing. This will allow us to strengthen each wing by bracing it to the other wires and struts. Now we’ve got two wings that aren’t so flimsy, each fifty feet across and only seven feet deep. That’s more like it.

And that’s the way they went about it. And also, that’s the reason you didn’t see so many monoplanes in the Big fracas. Ships were flimsy things and they had to strengthen them as well as they could.

More Monoplanes Today

The Germans had been experimenting with light metal, however, in their Zeppelins, and before the war was over they had constructed a good monoplane with internal bracing that was strong enough to keep it from shedding its wings. But not the Allies. Of course, after the war, the Allied countries got busy and made up for the lost time, and today you see probably more monoplanes, and certainly in the more expensive ships, than biplanes. It saves a lot of external braces and things that offer resistance to the wind, unless its speed you want.

So that, little children, is how the engineers worked day and night to build ships for men to knock out of the sky, and that’s how they learned to finally build ships that are today safer than automobiles, if you believe in insurance statistics, which always tell the truth.

And here’s another truth—it may be stranger than fiction, that business about a ship being lifted by the top side of the wing instead of the underside—but truth always turns out that way.

So, believe it and like it, you flamingoes, while I go out and rip off a couple of wings.

TO ROUND off Mosquito Month we have a non-Mosquitoes story from the pen of Ralph Oppenheim. In the mid thirties, Oppenheim wrote a half dozen stories for Sky Fighters featuring Lt. “Streak” Davis. Davis—ace and hellion of the 25th United States Pursuit Squadron—was a fighter, and the speed with which he hurled his plane to the attack, straight and true as an arrow, had won him his soubriquet. Once more it’s a battle against time—B Flight is sent out on a perilous mission to destroy the new Boche anti-tank gun munitions factory by noon in hopes of preventing a massacre when the Allies push forward in their new Whippet tanks. However, after B flight has taken off, Streak learns a spy may have fouled their mission somehow and flies off like a streak to stop them before it’s too late! From the August 1936 issue of Sky Fighters it’s Ralph Oppenheim’s steak Davis in “Aces of Destiny!”

“Streak” Davis, Lone-handed, Braves Enemy Air Against a Menacing Hun Swarm! Death-Dealing Fokkers Form a Ring of Havoc Around a Hellbent Yank Ace! A Complete Novel of Sky-High War-Air Action!

• Download “Aces of Destiny” (August 1936, Sky Fighters)

FROM the pages of the July 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

Personal Gear

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, July 1934)

DO YOUSE boys and youse goils remember the little ditty which goes:

      The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things,
      Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.

Anyway, I was sitting back in my study and looking at all the souvenirs hanging around on the walls and my mind got to wandering back to the days when we collected those scalps. Did you ever sit and let your mind wander and see just how it jumps from one unrelated subject to another? That’s the way I was doing.

More Than Cold Facts

I took a notion to jot down the things as they came to me, and when I got through I looked at what I had written and it just occurred to me that though they were interesting, most of them were in themselves of such little importance that people hadn’t written about them, but that on the other hand they were bits that go to fill in the chinks of war-air history. A kind of seasoning that makes the whole stew more intimate.

They make you feel like you have a more personal knowledge of flying than just the cold facts of airplanes.

Differences in Headgear

They’re the little personal touches. Like this:

Look at those helmets hanging on the tips of that propeller. Who has ever thought to mention little differences in headgear? Look at Fig. 1. First, there’s an old crash helmet. That is a German one. It looks like a mixing bowl. It is padded inside and has a padded rim around it. The leather is heavy—sole leather. You got plenty of crashes in those days and that old inverted bowl probably saved its wearer getting many a bump. It may have saved his life a few times.

And look at that “Gosport,” the one with the rubber tubing which runs from one helmet to the other. That was invented by an instructor who took the tubing from his air speed indicator and rigged up the helmet so he could give orders to his pupil. They’ve been standard training equipment ever since.

And look at that funny looking little gadget. Know what that is? It’s the upper end of a silk stocking belonging to the flyer’s best girl. It’s made into a skull cap to wear under the helmet at the right. It keeps your hair from getting soaked with motor oil and keeps your hair from whipping into tangled knots, keeps your head warm and brings you luck—if your girl’s true to you. If she’s not—better get another one from some other gal.

And the rag that’s tied to the top of the helmet in the left and stands out backward like a knight’s plume serves the purpose of wiping the grease off your goggles when they get blurred. Oil pipes are always cracking from vibration or being shot in two, and it’s handy to wipe hot oil off so you can see where you’re going.

Some Uniforms!

And that reminds me of the time when Ross came back to the field spattered with oil after a dog-fight and landed just in time to stand inspection by a visiting brass hat. Although we were attached to the British we had to wear the American type uniform at that time.

You had to wear a starched collar and the tunic had a stand-up collar. They jumped on Ross for having his collar unbuttoned. And Ross was plenty hot under the collar, anyway. So he risked a court-martial, and did he tell off that big bug about making men fly while being choked to death by a uniform.

It may be a coincidence, but Ross didn’t get into trouble for sassing a big shot, and it wasn’t long before we wore soft shirts, and still later the whole uniform was changed. A man can wear one now and not have his jugular vein sawed in two. See the difference in Fig. 2.

Ross just blew up and got off his chest a lot of things we were all griping about. We were Americans and proud of it, but we took an awful licking from the Brass Hats. The British were teaching us to fly and treated us like gentlemen. But our own big bosses figured we rated lower than dishwashers, apparently.

Them Was the Days—Nix!

They were against giving us commissions, and even took our flight pay away from us. That’s the way the army feels about flying. They object to there being a separate Flying Corps like the other major countries have. They want to run the flying show, but they want to handle it like they do the ground forces. That’s like trying to make a man a good swordsman by making him take pistol practice. You can’t make a good flyer by teaching him to march and stand at attention in a choker collar while the big shots strut in front of him.

But we made out in spite of our handicaps. We had to figure out a lot of tricks and do things the books don’t teach. Like the time Sprague had the magneto shot to pieces in his Camel.

We were in a bad way; couldn’t get replacements. And we didn’t have an extra magneto on the field. Sprague knew that a mag on a certain type German ship would do the work, so he went out and found a German and crashed him inside our lines and got himself a German and a magneto.

The Wonder Boy

Which reminds me of Sprague, the wonder boy. He was very young, but he’d been everywhere in the world and he made a specialty of being able to look out for himself. Earlier in the war he’d been shot down by a famous German ace, but that German, popularly credited with being a great sportsman, followed him down and kept pouring lead into him. The result was that he lost a leg just below the knee.

You’d think that would stop a man—but not Sprague. He pulled the wires some way and was back flying a ship with only one good leg. He had a gear rigged up on the rudder pedal so he could control it with one foot. Then while he was at it he went one better. He fixed up a little harness that attached to the stump of his leg and from that to the stick, and that boy could steer a ship with both hands free! He always carried a few hand grenades with him when he went out to fight.

Mystery Leg

But that wooden leg was the thing that had the whole western front puzzled. I knew him and got to find out about the mystery. It was just the length of his service boot which he had had built around it. When he got into his ship he would unstrap it and rig his leg to the steering apparatus. He ran up a lot of notches on his joystick in about this way. Germans, like the Allies, would try to get between the enemy and the sun, and then dive down on you while you couldn’t sec them for the glare.

However, you can hold your thumb up between your eye and the sun, so the sun is hidden by your thumbnail and you can see anything in the sky except it is directly in that small blind spot in front of the sun. But you can’t fly all day with your fist up in the air and staring at the sun.

What a Trick!

So Sprague painted a tiny black spot on one eye of his goggles, a spot just big enough to hide the sun itself, and with it he could keep a close lookout in the direction of the sun. Then he’d fly along in dangerous territory, but keep a sharp watch into the sun. A Heinie would dart down, figuring that Sprague would be unable to see him, and Sprague would fly along as though he didn’t know the German was coming—until the very last minute.

The German would be so confident of his kill that he wouldn’t be quite as alert as he should be. Poor Germans. More than twenty made that mistake before one of them downed Sprague, and made him a prisoner.

He Thought of Everything

And now back to the prison camp where they marched Sprague. And next morning Sprague was back with us! That boy thought of everything in advance. He couldn’t see any use in wasting all that space in that wooden leg of his.

The result was that it was a regular kit bag, fitted out for all purposes. When he showed me how he had hollowed it out and packed it, I saw, among other things, a small pair of wire clippers; a map of the sector we were flying in; some Swiss money in bills (Swiss because of their neutrality, and useful in case he had to escape from the interior of Germany and work his way back to French soil); a bottle of malted milk tablets; a flint and steel to light a fire; a tiny bottle of poison tablets; a package of Bull Durham smoking tobacco and papers, and a hand grenade!

That might sound to you youngsters—wipe your nose, Charlie—like a silly collection of things. But, as I said, Sprague was captured by a German—and was back home before morning.

Take a look at the list. See Fig. 3. He didn’t have to use everything in it, but you can see where he might have needed them. As it was, they threw him into a barbed wire enclosure with other prisoners to await transportation back into the main prison concentration camps. He cut his way out with the wire clippers under cover of darkness.

Swiss Money Useful

The map would have come in handy if they had carried him farther back of the lines. If they had carried him all the way to Germany and he had been able to escape, he would have tried to make his way to neutral Switzerland. He could have kept concealed, have built a fire with his flint and steel, to keep from freezing, he had emergency rations and even the makings of cigarettes. Having Swiss money, he could have bought things in places where they weren’t neutral because they all recognized Swiss neutrality.

And the bottle of poison? You never can tell in a war when perhaps death would be better than some of the things you have to go through—particularly if the enemy is trying to get information out of you that would spell disaster to your friends and your country.

Not Junk At All

And the hand grenade! You could blast your way out of a prison with one of those pineapples, or you could stop half a dozen men pursuing you. Sprague was partial to those little handfuls of explosive, and he managed to get them someway wherever he was, even though they weren’t issued to flyers. One time he did a loop over a man in a dog-fight and dropped one of the nuggets into the German’s cockpit. It rained tiny bits of Albatross and Hun for several minutes after that.

So, you see, you knot heads, that leg didn’t contain a junk shop after all. Most of us carried as much of that kind of gear as we thought we could hide—but we didn’t all have wooden legs. And so, sometimes, we were caught without some of these handy, all but essential, objects.

FROM the pages of the June 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

War-Air Stunts

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, June 1934)

NOW I bet you dumb clucks have been reading about air fighters and duels in the air for a long time. Everybody has. You get thrilled to death when the hero barges head-on into the Hun, gives him a round of tracers and lead, noses her up, falls off on a wing, dives, comes up into an Immelmann and is on a level with his foe again, and they go to it. Dog-fights!

Now if I know you, you just sat there and got a thrill out of the yarn, but the ships were darting through the air so fast and there was so much fighting that you couldn’t follow their movements exactly. You just knew they were doing something, but how they did it, didn’t bother you.

That’s all right because you were not supposed to know the whys and wherefores of the maneuvers. You were just supposed to enjoy the story which you did.

But that’s all over. The next time you read a story you’ll know just exactly what the Red Ace was doing when he did an Immelmann and a barrel roll—and you’ll know why he did it. Then you can check up on all those writer fellows to see if they knew what they were talking about.

Because today, Jack and Jill, you’re going to learn how they did those maneuvers and why. You’ll notice that at the top of this article there’s something that talks about principles and facts and war-air terminology. That’s what you’re gonna get an earful of right now. So wash out your ears.

The Simplest Thing First

Let’s start with the simplest and first thing a war flyer has to learn to do when he gets past the Kiwi stage. He has learned to do ordinary flying, and now he’s getting down to the business of learning how to defend himself and how to whip the other man.

Let’s follow him through one of those famous and exciting dog-fights and see why he does these things. After all, he’s not up there just to furnish thrills for you readers. He’s got business to do.

He’s already off the ground and has gained his ten thousand feet altitude. He’s one of those lone eagle boys who’s out looking for a Hun for an early breakfast. Downstairs the ground is all shell marked and rows of gray trenches look like the canals of Mars to him.

Then, suddenly, out of a cloud above him that looks no bigger than a man’s hand comes that well known little black speck, diving straight down at him. It’s an Albatross! He is being attacked!

Let’s stop right there in the story. We’ll have a look at the “why.”

Don’t Look into the Sun

The German had got the best position to start with. He had got up earlier and had taken up a favorable station. The station was behind a high cloud which in turn was so located in relation to the place he might find an enemy, that the enemy might have little chance to see him. Our hero couldn’t see through a cloud. And the German had borne in mind that the cloud was between that proposed battlefield and the sun. Thus if the American were looking for him, he would look squarely into the sun and this would blind him. You can’t see a tiny speck—in fact you can hardly see anything—when you’re looking into the sun.

But let’s go on with the story. What does our hero do? He sees the Albatross bearing down on him with tracers blazing. So he reverses his controls and makes a sharp turn out of the line of fire. (Fig. 1)

Reversing Controls

What is this reversing controls? No, Jill, it’s not like throwing an automobile into reverse. Airplanes can’t normally go backward in the air. They aren’t crawfish.

What he did was this. He had to make a turn so short and so quickly that in order to do it he had to bank so steeply that the rudder was cross-ways instead of up and down like it should be, and the elevators were up and down instead of crossways. The result of this was that he had to control his ship differently.

The wings were one up and one down instead of horizontal. Therefore, in order to control his ship, where before he would use the rudder, now he had to use the flippers or elevators for that purpose. And vice versa with the rudder. And all this time bullets coming at him!

You would think this would be confusing, wouldn’t you? Well, it is! But the boy had to learn to do it automatically—without even thinking about it, before he could go on and learn all the rest of the things he had to know!

Something to Remember

Reverse control is the important element in any sharp turn which makes it necessary to bank at an angle of more than 45 degrees. Don’t forget that, children, and you’ll have more respect for the poor flyer.

But that’s not all—it’s just the beginning of those little tricks he had to learn. That maneuver can be dangerous, and it always results—when control is lost—in a spin with the power on. And is that dangerous? Ask your Uncle “Spinner” Eddie.

So, in order to get out of such a predicament in case it happened—and it’s sure to happen—you have to deliberately learn to spin your ship and bring it out of a spin. You can’t wait until you accidentally find yourself in a jam to practice getting out of it. You have to know how in advance. It’s something like practicing driving your car over a cliff. They make ships these days that won’t spin, but they are for old-lady passengers and students to ride. A fighting ship must be able to spin, because sometimes you will want to spin it.

      “But Von Hun was on his tail, pouring a deadly volley—”
      “The Red Knight saw death staring him in the face. There was only one means of escape. Shoving the throttle forward to pick up speed, he jammed the stick forward and to the left and kicked the rudder. The ship nosed down into a power spin—”

Now why did our hero do this? Well, children, did you ever try to shoot at a leaping jack rabbit? He has plenty of speed and he’s not going in a very straight line. You can’t tell a second in advance where he’ll be the next second. And when you multiply that by the speed of a ship whirling down like a corkscrew with the motor full on—you’ve got a real job of target practice ahead of you! (Fig. 2)

Our Hero Escapes

So our hero escapes. But the Hun follows him down. He levels off and turns to meet the Von! He squeezes the triggers of the Lewis gun on his stick and sews a seam of lead up the leg of the Von’s Sunday pants. Von Hun is in dangerous territory with the Red Knight headed straight forward. Von Hun, to escape being rammed, falls off on one wing.

What the Von did was a side slip. He wanted to drop below the Red Knight, so he throttled down to lose power, banked his plane so one wing was down and jammed on opposite rudder. The rudder threw the nose down with the wing and headed the ship into a straight dive with one wing low. In order to straighten out he had to level off the wings and there he was all set, but on a lower plane and behind the Red Knight.

The Immelmann

But he climbs rapidly and is again hovering over the Red Knight. But our hero won’t stand for “that. He wants that position himself. So the Red Knight dives to pick up speed and then hauls back the stick. The ship loops in a big up-and-down circle that carries him above Von Hun. And as he comes down in the last part of the loop he manages to get in a burst that dusts off the Von’s uniform.

This is partially effective and Von Hun is trying to get out of the way. So our hero tries it again. He goes into the loop, but at the top of it he sees Von going the other way. To finish the loop will take him further away from Von. So “at the top of the loop he suddenly executes an Immelmann turn,” and is headed for the enemy, guns blazing. (Fig. 3)

What’s this Immelmann thing! Well, at the top of the loop our hero is naturally upside down and as he comes out he will be headed West at a lower altitude. But he wants to stay up there headed East.

So, just before the ship reached the top of the loop our hero pulls the stick back all the way and jams his rudder forward. The effect of this is to turn the wings over and get him right side up with care, just like the first turn of a barrel roll. And there he is headed West a little above the tail of Von Hun.

Which makes the Von sweat under the collar, so the Von eps his tail out of the way by doing a wing-over and coming back to meet The Red Knight. He does this quickly by nosing his ship up sharply and dropping one wing. He canteen keep it up until the ship stalls, at which time he falls off on one wing and completes his turn. He hasn’t lost altitude and he is back facing the way he came from on the same path instead of being over to the left or right.

And it is then that our hero triggers hs weapon and finishes him. He simply outshot the German. You’ll find out about how I did that over in the fiction department—second door to the left.

So you see, my young scallions, all that monkey business about loops and turns and chasing each other’s tails and all that sort of stuff isn’t put in there just to make a holiday for you. Every maneuver is there for a certain purpose, to aid the flyer in getting out of the other’s way, or to get into a favorable position for himself. They’re not stunt flyers just trying to entertain you. They’re in the glorious business of being knights of the air, lone fighters just like the old knights, to kill the enemy. And all those tricks are part of their trade.

FROM the pages of the May 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

Aerial Armament

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, May 1934)

NOW if you featherless kiwis will perch yourselves on the back of those chairs across the room, I’ll tell you some things you didn’t know about how all of this aerial warfare started. It would almost make you laugh, but don’t try it while I’m talking.

A few pre-war aviators had been preaching the virtues of the flying machine as a weapon of war, but the lawmakers with their customary brilliance laughed at the idea and dismissed it. However, they got wise to themselves pretty quickly when the guns started booming.

Airplanes, even though they were winged box-cars, proved invaluable for scouting, dropping bombs by hand, and dropping propaganda literature in enemy territory. And during the first months of the war you couldn’t knock down one of these machines either from the ground or from other airplanes! You dodged ’em and liked it.

He Thumbed His Nose At ’Em

You’ll remember that the German, Immelmann, flew low over Paris every afternoon at cocktail time during a certain period early in the war, and dropped small bombs on the Frenchmen’s conks. People in the street fired millions of shots at him with rifles and pistols. Even taxi drivers stopped their machines while they and their passengers got out and peppered away at the old boy, but he just thumbed his nose at them and showed them his tail.

That’s what we had to buck up against. And then Roland Garros got mad and changed the whole show. Here’s how:

Now if your brains aren’t too dusty you’ll remember that old-time French aviator Garros had already become a hero. But the Germans in the air were interfering with his business of diving down upon enemy factories and bridges, etc., so he decided to interfere with them for a change.

Some InventionI

Up until that time the nose of an airplane was the safest blind spot of all, for if any solid substance touched the whirling propeller, the blade was more than likely done for.

But that old pal of mine, Garros, made it about as safe as the action end of a mule. He invented a machine-gun that would fire through the propeller, and on that day on the nose of a ship ceased being a blind spot and became its business end—the opposite one from that of a hornet.

Before the Germans could realize what had happened, little Roland had tickled five of them in the ribs with bullets.

The Boche Took It Over

And while we’re on the subject of mules—the Germans got the horse laugh on him. While Garros was on one of his famous raids his motor conked, and he and his machine fell into the hands of the Germans before he could destroy it. Thus he delivered to his enemy the very device he had perfected for the purpose of destroying them.

They took over his invention and put it to good use, as you will see.

Now stay awake a little longer, sister, and see why this most famous of French flyers made the greatest of all single contributions to aerial warfare.

When the war broke out in 1914 we heroes were armed with a short rifle. Some of us even carried shotguns!

This sounds rather silly, but they were better than no weapons at all. And don’t I know it! They were of very little value, however, because you couldn’t hit the side of a barn with them. The wind blew against the extended barrel when you aimed them and the ship vibrated so much that you couldn’t have hit your own wing with them from your cockpit.

Did you say that carrying a shotgun was silly, Mabel? Well, listen to this:

Why, you dumb chicks—we carried brick-bats—and that’s no kidding.

Silly? The French brought down two German airplanes with these alley apples!

A Brick-Bat Hero

The idea was to get close enough to the other ship to drop or hurl a piece of this Irish confetti through the other man’s propeller and shove his nose in the mud. Your Uncle Dudley was a brick-bat hero.

Then just a month before Garros invented his gun, the French armed their fighting Nieuports with twenty-pound Lewis guns on their upper wings. Take a squint at Figure 1. The gun was mounted parallel with the line of flight and fired over the top of the propeller. It was aimed by pointing the airplane itself, and was fired by the flyer in the cockpit pulling a string. It was a great improvement over brick-bats, and the Germans quickly adopted it. But a magazine held only forty-seven cartridges and when the flyer had used them up he had to make a landing to reload.

Then up pops our hero Mr. Garros! He mounted his new invention on the engine hood so you could get your hands on it. The gun shot through the arc of the propeller blade. He learned by experimenting that only seven per cent of his bullets would hit his propeller. So he protected the propeller blades with steel bands and let ’em hit.

What a Gun!

The bands reduced the efficiency of his propeller but, “Voila!” He had a gun that was a gun. And he sighted it much to the misery of the Germans, until they got their hands on him.

Six months later the Germans, using the Frenchman’s invention, improved it by synchronizing the action of the trigger with the propeller shaft. From that day to this there hasn’t been much picnicking in the air. Now, my little hollow-heads, take out your slates and listen to some arithmetic. You ought to know this without being told.

A Simple Principle

The principle of the synchronising of the machine-gun is very simple. If a single two-blade propeller revolves before the nose of a gun at the rate of 1,500 revolutions a minute, a blade of the propeller will pass the muzzle 3,000 times. But there are also 3,000 empty spaces where there is no propeller blade in front of the gun. Now, if the gun fires 500 shots a minute it is a simple mechanical problem to operate the weapon mechanically from the motor, so that the gun fires once through every sixth of those empty spaces.

The Germans’ well known Fokker was the first ship to blossom out with one of these new-fangled weapons. But the same thing happened to one of Tony’s ships that happened to Garros’. A Fokker sat down to rest among the Allies, and very soon Spads, Camels and all manners of Allied planes adorned themselves with this new decoration. And today it is more in style than ever.

A New Toy For Peelots

It was more than two years before anybody could think of a new toy for the flyers to play with. Again it was a French Ace, who was later to die with fifty-three victories to his credit, second in France only to Rene Fonck, who thought up this cute little gadget.

Georges Guynemer converted the front end of his crank shaft into a hundred-and-fifty-pound cannon! It fired one-pound shells of several types.

Guynemer worked a long time on this gun and did much to perfect it. With it he brought down his forty-ninth, fiftieth, fifty-first and fifty-second antagonists. The shell was too large to be safely fired between the propeller blades, so it was designed to shoot through the hub itself. Look out for it in Figure 2.

The gun was built into the crank case, and its breech and shootingmechanism were within easy reach, while the muzzle of the gun protruded through the hollow propeller shaft for a distance of two inches beyond.

Semi-Automatic

To begin with, it was semi-automatic, the gun ejecting the empty shell, but the pilot reloading. This work required several seconds, and an airplane traveling at 150 miles an hour could be hopping out of tne range at the rate of 220 feet a second. By the time a flyer got his gun loaded he might find positions reversed and his enemy in charge of the situation.

So they worked this out and eventually developed an arm that would fire 120 shells a minute, each weighing a pound and a half. The catch in the use of this gun, however, was that it would shoot 180 pounds of ammunition a minute and itself weighed 150 pounds. It would take a flying freight train to carry enough ammunition to last it very long. Also, all this weight naturally slowed down the machine. A man with a light ship, a twelve-pound gun shooting rifle cartridges could fly circles around him. But when you hit a ship with your cannon that ship stayed hit.

So it was that as soon as the airplane had established itself as a supreme weapon of war, more attention was given to the effectiveness of its guns.

The Hague Convention had agreed that no explosive projectiles of size less than one-pounders should be used in civilized warfare in order to avoid unnecessary human suffering. But very early in the fighting, two American boys in the famous Lafayette Escadrille were shot with explosive machine-gun bullets! The Germans claim that the British first started breaking the rule and that they used them in retaliation. Naturally!

A Strange Weapon

Thus it was that there was a constant search for the best and most destructive weapon. I once tried out the strangest gun that ever perched on a war crate. It was a one-pounder for seaplanes, and it shot a charge out of both ends of the barrel at the same time! And my name is not Ripley! Nor Baron Munchausen!

The barrel was extremely long (see Figure 3) and the shell was inserted in the side at the middle of its length. The regular projectile was aimed downward at an angle while the other one was discharged backward over the ship. The latter consisted of a mixture of heavy grease and very small shot and was for the sole purpose of offsetting the recoil of the gun. On its flight through the air the grease caught fire and destroyed the tiny shot.

Now you kiwis can hop down off your perches and go out and chirp about your knowledge of gunnery. And try to get through talking before I get back next month.

P.S.—You might be interested to know that the Germans had such a hard time holding Roland Garros prisoner that they made him sign a book in the prison office every thirty minutes for two years. But he finally escaped and went back to fight some more.

FROM the pages of the April 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

Gas Bags

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, April 1934)

PRACTICALLY everyone of you young whipper-snappers that I have run across has the idea that you are living in the golden age which saw man first conquer the air. And for that reason you’re a big-headed and puffed-up lot of gas bags.

We’ll I’m sorry to have to knock the undercarriage out from under you and let a little hellium out of your inflated hides, so to speak.

The truth of the matter is that Napoleon used an aviation unit in his army. In the year 1794 a Captain J.M.J. Coutelle made the first military balloon ascent in the history of warfare. He was the world’s first military balloon observer.

At the Battle of Fleurus in Belgium during that year it was through his work as a spotter for the French artillery that the French won a victory. His observation balloon was in the air for several hours, always out over No-Man’s-Land. Much of the time he flew over the enemy’s army. He used the first hydrogen-inflated balloon, the result of his own experiments.

He later organized the world’s first balloon corps, which Napoleon used in his wars until it was destroyed during his campaign in Egypt. In the seventeen-hundreds, my children!

The First Dirigible

The first dirigible airship, the grandfather of the present Zeppelins and our own great Akron, was designed even before this date. It was the invention of a French army officer and it made use of the small ballonets which are found in the airships of today. This was shortly after the first man ever soared into the air, which happened in 1783. You ground-looping, high-chair aviators probably don’t know it, but this was going on at about the time that America was just drawing its breath after the American Revolution.

Lincoln Used ’Em

I know there’s no use in trying to cram your thick heads full of history because it would go in one ear and out the other, since there is nothing in there to stop it. So, I’ll just mention in passing that during the American Civil War old Abe Lincoln used observation balloons. And here’s something that maybe you know-it-alls didn’t know. Graf Zeppelin was an official observer attached to General Grant’s army! It was here that he made his first ascent, which resulted in his devoting the rest of his life to the dirigible, the first of which he built in 1900.

The skipper says that my job is to tell you ballonets how the war crates flew. (You remember I told you that a ballonet is a gas bag.) So, to tell you how things flew I suppose I’ll have to remind you from time to time why people wanted them to fly. Which brings us down to 1908.

The American government offered $10,000 for a “practicable military means of dirigible aerial navigation.” Such a ship was built and the Army bought it after it was test-flown at thirty miles an hour. It was ninety-six feet long and powered with a twenty-horse-power engine. Instead of having a gondola suspended under the cigar-shaped gas bag, it had an open bridgework, like the skeleton of an uncovered fuselage, upon which the aeronauts ran back and forth like a couple of monkeys in a high cage. The ship was attached to the Signal Corps. See Fig. I.

Now if you are properly humbled, and want to admit that you didn’t know there was such a thing as a flying machine before the World War, I’ll start the lesson proper. And cut out that snoring before I wrap a propeller blade around your neck.

German Dirigibles

The Germans went in for dirigibles in a big way. The whole layout or scheme of the fracas made it possible for them to use lighter-than-air craft to much better advantage than to the Allies. Just in case you don’t happen to have a war map in your pocket, I’ll try to explain the situation so that even you can get a picture of it.

The war was fought in Allied territory. The German armies were away from their home grounds. Therefore all the destruction of cities and towns was felt by Allied countries. The Germans were out to capture their enemy. The Allies’ task was to defend themselves.

Now it was a long way from the heart of Germany to Paris and to London and to the Allied centers which made up the heart of their activity, such as munition works, supply and shipping bases, and centers of population. These things the Germans wanted to destroy, while at the same time they wanted to break the morale of the non-combatant population.

Lighter Than Air

Dirigible balloons were strongly in favor for these purposes. They were self-lifting, or lighter than air, and therefore could stay aloft a great length of time without the danger of making forced landings in enemy territory on account of engine failure.

They were able to carry enormous loads of explosives a great distance, drop them, and return to their bases. Such machines making these long trips under cover of darkness had a great advantage.

They Cost Money!

These big babies cost a lot of money, and when you knocked one of them down you destroyed over a million dollars worth of fighting gear and very likely killed a considerable number of highly trained specialists. So, you see, their bases of operation had to be pretty safely located in a spot where there was little danger of destruction from enemy guns and aircraft. Since the theater of war was not in their home territory the Zeppelin bases were fairly safe from destruction. Only a few of them were successfully raided.

Such was not the case with the Allies, whose territory was always subject to attack. Thus it was that the Germans could, and did, make more use of lighter-than-air craft.

Plenty of Bombardment

During the course of the War the Germans bombarded England with Zeppelins fifty-three times! They raided London, itself, twelve times. In all, their dirigibles dropped 275 tons of bombs on English soil. See Fig. II.

And over fifty air attacks were made directly upon Paris!

Kite balloons also played their own important part in the fighting. These small round and sausage-shaped babies did their invaluable work in spotting. Practically all battle lines had them tugging at their cables high above the fighting while their observers, with binoculars glued to their eyes, reported the results of shell fire upon enemy batteries by telephone.

A Hot Time

Naturally such effective eyes were the centers upon which the enemy would congregate in desperate efforts to blind them. Not being able to maneuver their gas bags, the balloon observers had a plenty hot time of it on either side. Maybe you remember young Frank Luke. That young former cow puncher used to go out and knock down three or four German sausages before breakfast. He ran up a record of over fifty of them lone handed.

The story of balloons during the World War is one that has not been sufficiently told, and by the very nature of it, cannot be. Because the only ones that could have told the story of their individual dramas were killed while that story was being written. But even so, the balloons did furnish many exciting chapters.

One Well Known Incident

Take, for example, one well known incident. The Germans were making their famous drive on Paris, and were within fifty miles of its gates. The Parisians were frantic with fear for the safety of their women and children. They mobilized the now-famous taxicab army as a last means of defense. Their morale was in danger of being snapped by almost anything. The Germans knew they had the Frenchmen where the hair was short. Now was the psychological time to push home the drive.

Creating Panic

Under cover of darkness they seized the opportunity to throw panic into the hearts of the Frenchmen. They loaded one of their giant dirigibles with ton after ton of deadly explosive and sent it through the blackness to drop its burden of disaster into the homes of the defenseless women and children.

A lone French aviator patrolling the night saw the great monster coming. If she poured her deadly cargo upon the city, death and destruction would reign in the streets, the morale of the people would be broken, and defeat would be inevitable. The Germans would sweep the broken-spirited defenders away before them.

Rowboat vs. Battleship

All these things the Frenchman in his tiny monoplane knew. And he knew, too, that the Zeppelin bristled with machine-guns manned by gunners of deadly accuracy. He was in the position of a man in a rowboat going up against a battleship. Thus he soared about the giant, looking for a point of vulnerability. But there was none.

Still, if the Zeppelin reached its objective the cause of France was lost. It must not do that!

A Brave Deed

The Frenchman determined upon a course which should go down in history as one of the bravest individual deeds in the whole War. He circled his tiny monoplane high above the Zeppelin. Then he dived squarely toward its great gas bag with flaming tracer bullets pouring out ahead of him.

He rushed downward toward the balloon with the wind whistling through his struts and his guns roaring.

He increased the speed of his mad dive without veering to the right or left. Answering fire greeted him from the gun traps on top of the gas bag.

But still he held to his course. His screaming machine with its guns blazing tore headlong into the great framework of the hydrogen-filled gas bags of the great ship. There was the rending crash of wood and steel as the little monoplane ripped its way through the monster. And there was a great blinding white flash of fire as his tracer bullets and the flame of his motor ignited those thousands of feet of the inflammable gas. See Fig. III.

Paris Saved!

Then, like a giant blazing meteor, the fiery mass of wreckage plunged down to earth. There was nothing left of the Frenchman nor of the German crew. It was a glorious sacrifice!

But Paris had been saved!

Now both of you readers can wipe away your tears with your shirt tails and go out and tell the world that there are two different kinds of gas bags. Tell ‘em that you are one and that you’ve just heard about the other.

And don’t get too close to a lighted match, because I’ll have something else to tell you next month.

FROM the pages of the March 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

Aerial Photography

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, March 1934)

NOW if you two sad-eyed rum-dums can hold your heads up long enough to listen, I want to smack you in the face with a question. No? Well, you’re gonna get the question anyway. Suppose you flew over some of the enemy’s territory yesterday and got acquainted with it till you could call it by its first name. And then you came along over the same ground today—I mean a mile or so over—and—stop interrupting—and today you saw a lot of trees that must have taken forty years to grow—and suppose those trees weren’t there yesterday?

What’s the Answer?

Well, you sleepy-eyed buzzards, to call you a polite name, you’d be seeing something that was mighty interesting to general headquarters. You’d probably fly over again Saturday afternoon and instead of seeing the trees you’d see nothing but a lot of shell holes.

The answer?

Aerial photography! One of the most important branches of the flying service.

Put a couple of ten-gallon funnels in your ears to let the wisdom run in to a place where there’s plenty of room for it, and I’ll tell you about a trip made by one of the war’s outstanding heroes, who must be nameless on account of his becoming modesty. We got orders from G.H.Q., which is the title of the brass hats hired to do nothing but think up crazy ideas to make flyers uncomfortable. They wanted photographs of what we will call sector D-7, because that was the way it was identified on the big maps. So naturally they called on me to do it.

I Get a Camera

I was playing stable boy and jockey to a Sopwith. The so-called experts from the photography shack brought me out a camera—open your eyes long enough to look at the picture in Figure 1, will you? Okay, go back to sleep. I fitted the camera into the conical—not comical—slot it goes into and we climbed to about seven thousand feet, not going any higher because the light was bad.

Now, the sector we wanted to catch had a road bisecting it. I had another pilot at the stick so I could operate the camera (because the brass hats wanted to be sure the pictures were good!) So I had told my pilot to start and follow the road to the end of the sector, then come back parallel to it on the left, then go forward to the left of that, and back again to the left of that. Just like a man plowing a field.

It’s Foolproof

The camera is claimed to be foolproof. Not that that mattered to me, understand. You’ve got eighteen plates stacked in a changing box over the shutter. You have a loading handle which you slide backward and forward and the first plate falls into position. When you get over the spot you’re ready to shoot you pull a string. You tell the spot by looking at the previous pictures that were taken of the same ground.

When the string is pulled you’ve got a picture of a big area over a mile below. You yank the loading handle and the camera ejects the exposed plate into a changing-box underneath and the number two plate falls into place in the camera. You keep up this simple operation until you’ve shot all your plates.

Did I say simple—you simpletons? You’ve got plenty to do and to worry about. You have to get your positions, figure out when the ship is flying dead level so you won’t shoot a picture off to the right or left, and you’ve got to figure out the proper intervals of time between shots, so you’ll cover all the territory. Open your eyes well and look at Figure 2 to see what the ground looks like.

And then another small item might be mentioned in passing. The antiaircraft guns. Those little darlings just dearly love to pop away at you as soon as you are over the German lines.

And here’s the fun in the game of “picture, picture, who’ll get the picture.” You can’t afford to dodge their cute little bursting shells because you have to take all your pictures in a straight line and from the same altitude or they will be worthless. You have to fly straight, count five, pull the string, jerk the reloading lever, count five, pull the string, jerk the reloading lever—and you keep repeating that until I tell you to stop.

Overlapping Pictures

You have to make the pictures so they will overlap on all sides, like they do in Figure 3, then the brass hats put them together to form one big picture of the sector. So, thickheads, if you shot one here and another there, it would be as hard to match them up as a jig-saw puzzle.

Anyway, we get the five pictures on the first spurt across the line, nose her up and over into an Immelmann turn and start on the return voyage. But now we’re having the wind on our tail and are hitting it off at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. And so I’ve got to pull the string, count two, yank the lever, pull the string, and so forth. You can get it through your thick skulls, can’t you, that since we’re going faster, we have to work the camera faster to get the same number of pictures per mile? Good!

We Get a Break

But we get a break on this first return trip. We make a harder target for the archies who are sure burning up a lot of Herr Kaiser’s ammunition. Shells are bursting all around us. Not that I care, but I feel sorry for the pilot up in front. I bet he’s scared to death.

Whew! We’re back over our own lines. That’s great, except we’ve got to make another round trip to get the sector covered.

We act like we’re headed for home and the archies decide to call it a day and go home for a glass of beer. We’ve fooled ’em.

Then They Get Mad

Now we whip around and start plowing another furrow of pictures. The archie crew look kind of cheap at being fooled. Then they get mad and red in the face and call us a lot of schwein and ach du leibers and start sending us bursting greetings by the tons.

Well, I don’t like to talk about myself in too much detail, so I’ll just say that we accomplished the impossible and got back from that round trip.

The O.C. meets us as we settle gently to earth on one wheel and one propeller blade and rushes the camera to the dark room, where the experts develop the plates in about twenty minutes.

Now for Those Trees

Now if you can remember as far back as the beginning of this serious and highly technical discourse you might get some idea of what I meant. About those forty-year-old trees that grew up from acorns overnight, like Jack and the beanstalk.

Yes, they were camouflage to cover big guns that were being moved into place in the sector, but you’re both liars. You didn’t know that until I told you.

I have wasted my time giving you just one of many uses for aerial photography. Thousands of photographs were taken every day, and they enabled the generals to be prepared for attacks that otherwise would have surprised them. They gave exact information as to distance to strategic targets, and told when those targets, ammunition dumps, rail heads and concentration points were effectively incapacitated, as the big-word artists would have it.

Formed a War History

They formed a complete history of the war. They were studied and argued over, they solved impenetrable mysteries. There were thousands of pictures of every conceivable angle of the war. They’ll be valuable in the next war—which is headed this way faster’n a jack rabbit.

So now you two Rip Van Winkles can wake up long enough to try to make up your minds whether you want to shoot the enemy with a Kodak or a machine-gun during the next war. The photographic branch has gone forward just like the rest of aviation in the recent years and it’s going to be even more important.

Now you stay awake a while, while I sleep.

FROM the pages of the February 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing R. Sidney Bowen to conduct a technical department each month. It is Mr. Bowen’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Mr. Bowen is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot of the Royal Air Force, but also because he has been the editor of one of the foremost technical journals of aviation.

Guns and Howitzers

by Robert Sidney Bowen (Sky Fighters, February 1934)

BY THIS time, you yeggs—excuse me, my error. I’ll start all over again. By this time, you buzzards must be convinced that we war pilots were very wonderful fellows.

Of course, being a modest old sparrow I can do nothing else but agree with you. However, to be serious for a few moments, the object of this little get-together is to point out that the pilot who was sent to the Front during the last war had to know quite a bit about war activities other than just the flying end.

When you enlisted there was really no way of determining whether you would be okay on pursuit ships, observation ships, or bombers. That being the case, the training you received was more general than specialized.

By that I mean, you were taught at ground school the various duties of all three types of pilots. And upon your flying depended what kind of a squadron you’d be sent to—if any!

For instance, it might so happen that once you had been sent solo you proved yourself to be a knockout on artillery co-operation work. In that case you’d be shipped to an observation squadron. And then again, perhaps, you might be a dead shot. In that case, out you’d go to a pursuit unit.

Get the Idea?

Why waste a swell shot by sticking him at the controls of a bomber? Get the idea?

Naturally, war being just as mixed up as anything else, the right men were not sent to the right squadrons all the time. There were plenty of misfits floating around—birds pushing bombers around when they should be at the controls of a pursuit or an observation ship, and vice versa. However, that sort of stuff was not the fault of the pilot in question.

Just One of Those Things

It was just one of the many, many things that can happen in war. In other words, you were sent where the big shots sent you, and that was that. You couldn’t do anything about it, except weep in your own soup.

I remember a case in particular. There were two friends of mine, one a big bruiser and the other a little half pint portion of man—but plenty scrappy, nevertheless. Well, we all trained together, and when it came time for us to be assigned to squadrons, the big fellow was sent out to a Camel squadron and the little fellow was shipped out to fly Handley-Page bombers.

The funny part of it was that I met them both about six months later, and the big fellow had to have his Camel cockpit made bigger so he could get into it, and the little fellow had to pile leather cushions in his Handley-Page cockpit in order to see over the top of the cowling.

They both came through the war with flying colors, so maybe the big shots guessed right after all.

However, whether they did or not, isn’t any skin off our noses today. What I’m trying to get over to you chipmunks is, that while you were training for the Front you were learning lots of things about war besides flying. In other words, you had to be able to fill any gap at a moment’s notice.

And so, I’m going to yell about one of the extra items we had to get through our heads before they let us go. And that item is ordnance.

Or—what? You heard me, ordnance! And being as how you don’t know what that means, I suppose I’ll have to tell you. The correct definition of ordnance is, the general name for all kinds of weapons and their appliances used in war; especially, artillery.

What’s a Gun—Huh?

That last is what I’m going to talk about—artillery.

There were, generally speaking, three types of artillery used. The first was guns, the second was howitzers, and the third was mortars.

Now wait a minute, keep your shirt on and stop asking questions so soon. I know what’s on your mind. What do I mean by guns? Well, just listen.

A gun was a piece of ordnance, cannon or pieces of artillery that was used foe, long-range fire, or in other words, line fire. A howitzer was a piece of ordnance, cannon or pieces of artillery used for short range destructive fire. And a mortar was a piece of ordnance, cannon or artillery that was used for short range, very high angle of fire bombardment work.

The Long and the Short of It

Now, let’s go into detail one at a time. First, the gun.

Of course, there were various sizes of guns. The smallest being the eighteen-pounder and the largest being the twelve-inch gun. And even bigger than that if you want to count the navel guns they sometimes mounted on mobile platforms. However, regardless of the size of the gun, the bores were all rifled to give the desired twist to the shell as it left the muzzle, so that it would travel through the air the right way.

Naturally, the driving band that circled the shell made it possible for the rifling of the bore of the gun to give a twist to the shell.

As I said, guns were used for long range work or line fire. By line fire I mean just that—the shells exploding in a line area that extended from a point on the near side of the target to a point on the far side of the target. In other words, an oblong target area. To get an exact idea of what I mean, take a squint at Fig. 1.

As the shell of a gun has to travel a long way, it follows that the muzzle velocity (speed of shell as it leaves muzzle of gun) is very high. However, on the other hand, the trajectory and angle of descent are very low. To explain them there big words: trajectory means angle of flight. And angle of descent, of course, means the angle in relation to the ground at which the shell descends.

Effective Range Fire

Guns were more effective on infantry movements. By that I mean, infantry columns moving along roads, field batteries moving into position, trains, railroad stations, ammo dumps, etc. In other words, targets that were either moving or stationary, but were quite a ways behind the enemy lines. See Fig. 2.

Now, I’ll get on with howitzers and you’ll be able to see just what I mean about the effective range fire of guns.

Howitzers ranged in size from four and a half inches to around sixteen inches.

Howitzers Were Accurate!

And, by the way, when I speak of size I mean the diameter of the bore of the gun or howitzer, such as the case may be.

Okay, let’s go! Howitzers were used for short-range destructive work. By that I mean, they were supposed to wipe the target right off the old map. Their range being shorter, they were far more accurate than guns. The main reason being that their area of fire was more square in shape than the area of gun-fire.

To get the point, rest your lamps on Fig. 3.

The range of howitzers being shorter the idea was to drop a shell down on it as perpendicular as possible. To do this, required low muzzle velocity, high trajectory and high angle of descent. The advantage of howitzers was that hills didn’t bother them. Their shells went up high and came down at a steep angle. So if your target was behind a hill range, you didn’t have to worry.

A gun shell that would clear the top of the hill would, of course, go beyond the target. But a howitzer shell would sneak right up over the hill and plop straight down, on the target. Take a peep at Fig. 4 and you get an idea how a howitzer shell went through the air.

Now, when I say that howitzers were for destructive work, don’t get the idea that guns didn’t destroy things. They sure did, and don’t let your cousin Alice tell you otherwise. However, perhaps you noted that howitzers pushed out bigger shells than guns, and that those shells came down straighter on the target.

Well, there you are—howitzer fire was more evenly concentrated than gun-fire, it covered a more even area about the target, and it could nail a target (within its range) regardless of ground formations. Because of its high trajectory and short range it was the bunk for moving targets.
But take an established enemy target, a field battery in position, for instance, or a troop concentration depot, and the old howitzer would give you the best results every time.

The Howitzer’s Kid Brother

A mortar was for trench to trench work. The most famous of all mortars was the Stokes trench mortar. It popped one- or two-pound shells out of your trench and down into the enemy trench. As its range of fire was nothing to write home about, a couple of hundred yards or so, the bore was not rifled, nor was there any driving band on the shell. I suppose that you could really call a trench mortar, a small edition of a howitzer without bore rifling.

Believe it or not, they were fired by dropping the shell into the muzzle. It simply slid down, detonated and came popping out again and on its way over to the enemy trench. Yes, Clarence, you had to get your hand out of the way fast. That is, of course, if you didn’t want to present the enemy with a perfectly good hand. Personally, I never met a soldier yet who didn’t want to hang onto his hands.

And there you have a general idea of artillery used in the last mix-up. Don’t forget there were all kinds of guns and all kinds of howitzers and each kind had a special use in defensive or offensive work.

However, a gun was just as different from a howitzer as a revolver is from a rifle. But both were hot stuff for their own particular type of work.

And now, just a couple of words about artillery work in general and its relation to aircraft. The work can be tabulated as follows—registration on the target for future bombardment, the bombardment itself, wire cutting and trench destruction before an infantry attack, barrage fire during an attack and emergency target work. Registration on a target (range finding) and bombardment of target work were carried out in co-operation with aircraft.

The other classes of work were carried out in co-operation with ground observation or on the initiative of the officer commanding the battery. But no matter what type of work it was, the thing that counted with G.H.Q. was results. And, now that I think of it, the only thing that ever counted with G.H.Q. was results. Nix on explanations—you had to give those big pumpkins results if you wanted to stay out of hot water.

And so there you have one non-flying item that we pilots had to learn by heart. Maybe, if you are all good little children, I’ll tell you about something else that we had to absorb before they let us become Fokker fodder. Goombye!

FROM the pages of the January 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing R. Sidney Bowen to conduct a technical department each month. It is Mr. Bowen’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Mr. Bowen is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot of the Royal Air Force, but also because he has been the editor of one of the foremost technical journals of aviation.

Night Flying

by Robert Sidney Bowen (Sky Fighters, January 1934)

WELL, I note that both of you sparrows are here again. And I suppose that means I’ve got to do some talking and improve your knowledge as to the activities of myself, and other world renowned heroes, during the late unpleasantness.

This time I’ll gabfest on the advantages, disadvantages, and ups and downs of night flying in the days when girls used to marry uniforms.

A Mean Job

To begin with, let me say that next to daylight bomb raids, night flying was about the meanest and toughest job that the C.O. could pass out to you. You seldom saw what you were banging away at, and the other guy wasn’t any better off.

How-the-some-ever, night flying was not originated with the idea of giving pursuit pilots something else to do. As a matter of fact, pursuit ships didn’t begin to take much part in night flying work until along about the last year of the war.

Generally speaking, night flying, simply meant bombing raids at night. Long range assignments with destinations far behind the enemy lines.

The Germans Started It

To get at the idea from a historical viewpoint, night flying in the world war was really first started by the Germans. How, you ask? With their Zeppelins, stupid. Why certainly! The Zeppelin raids on London and Paris were made under cover of darkness.

The reason for that is, of course, quite obvious. A Zeppelin raid in the daytime would be just too bad for the Zeppelin. It would be spotted long before it reached its objective.

No, Alice, this is not going to be a discourse on Zeppelin raids. So tuck in your bib and pay attention.

I spoke of Zeppelins being first used in night flying work to point out the fact that night flying was fundamentally an offensive maneuver.

How come?

Home Defense Squadrons

VERY well, let me explain the difference. In the daylight your air force raids enemy territory, repels enemy raids into your territory, and also reconnoiters enemy territory. In short there is a definite object for every patrol. But at night there were no scheduled patrols for planes on the receiving end. And by the receiving end, I mean territory that was being raided. To make it a bit more clear than that, flights of ships whose job it was to repel night invaders or raiders, didn’t take to the air until the raiders made the first move. Such squadrons were known as Home Defense Squadrons. And that’s just what they did—defended the fireside against invaders. In other words, in the daytime you flew patrols whether the enemy was there or not. But at night you only flew when the enemy came to call.

Rather than frighten the French and English populace, Zeppelin warfare made them all the more determined to defeat Germany.

Not favoring the construction of Zeppelins, or I should say, lighter-than-air-aircraft, the Allies started to hit back with long range bombing raids (Fig. 1) on German strongholds behind the lines. Most of these raids were conducted by the English, and to them should go everlasting praise for their accomplishments.

Not tor the Chicken-Hearted

A bomb raid at night is not a job for chicken-hearted men. To begin with, you’ve got to have a clear night to see things on the ground. Nowadays with blind flying developed as it is, with airway beacons, and all the rest of it, a pilot can fly from here to there and back again in almost any old kind of weather. But in war days a clear night was very essential.

But as even you two nitwits can see, what was a break for the raiders was also a break for the defenders. In other words, if you could see them, they could also see you.

There were no special hours of the night for bomb raids. The time of take-off really depended upon how far you had to fly before you could let the old “eggs” go whanging down. But the dangers of night bombing raids began just as soon as you opened up the throttle.

Today when a ship takes off at night, the runway is bathed in flood lights, and it’s just about as easy as a daytime take-off. But in war days, you did the best you could and trusted to luck for the rest. There were no flood lights, or any of the other fancy gadgets that you have today. The “runway” was simply the best part of your drome, and it was lighted by parallel rows of oil pots (Fig. 2). The ship simply took off between the two rows.

What They Looked Like

And speaking of oil pots, next time you’re out driving with the girl friend at night (you do, don’t you?) and you come to a spot where they’re digging up the road, take a look at those ball-like things that rim the ditch. They look like a bomb full of oil, and burning at the top. Well, those things are what oil pot flares used to look like during the war.

WELL, as soon as you’ve taken off, the oil pots are doused, because it’s not any help to advertise the location of your drome to any enemy ships that might be upstairs. And after those oil pots go out, the rest is up to you. If there is more than one ship in the raid, each pilot has got to make sure he doesn’t ram into the other guy. To avoid that they usually flew in follow-the-leader-style. Not only did that permit the pilot to see the exhaust flames of the ship ahead, and thus keep his distance, but it also permitted more effective bombing of the objective. When the objective was reached the first plane would drop its bombs and then bank wide and swing for home. The second ship would do the same thing, and after it, the third ship, and so on.

Naturally, while you are heading for your objective the enemy hears you, and he tries to spot you with his searchlights. And when he does, look out, because you’re going to get a shower bath of archie in the next few seconds. When one searchlight gets you, two or three others swing right over with the idea of “boxing” you—fixing you so’s you can’t dodge either way into the darkness, and escape. At such times, good piloting counts plenty, and how.

Of course, most of the time defending ships don’t wait for searchlights to nail you. They come streaking up, using your exhaust flames as a guide to where you are. And in turn your gunners use their exhaust flames as a guide to where the attacking pursuits are.

The Return Trip

Once you’ve let your eggs go, you can bet your shirt that the enemy is going to try his damnedest to get you. And so the return trip is really worse than the journey out. Besides, you’ve got to get the ship down okay.

When the home drome mechanics hear you, they set out landing marks on the drome. These are oil pots set out in a way that will indicate the direction of the ground wind. There were two signs generally used. One was in the shape of a big L, (Fig. 3) the bottom of the L being at the leeward side of the drome. In other words, you landed along the upright part of the L, toward the bottom piece. The idea being that the area formed by the angle was the smoothest part of the field.’
The other sign were lights in the form of a T, (Fig. 4) with the crosspiece being toward the leeward side of the field. And so you simply landed along either side of the leg of the T, toward the cross piece.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well don’t kid yourself, sweetheart. Those oil pots never did blind you with their light, and it took wonderful pilots (like me) to get down without jarring the other guy’s teeth.

Night Pursuit Flying

To get the idea of pursuit flying at night, just reverse what I’ve been telling you about a night bombing raid. The night pursuit ships (or, bats, as your favorite authors like to call them) simply took the air when enemy bombers were announced. Their job consisted of two things. One, to get the bombers.

And the other, to avoid smacking into one of their own men. I never could decide just which job gave me the most gray hair.

Just one more thing, and I’m gone. It’s about sighting landmarks at night. One tough job, children, unless there’s a moon. About the only thing you can really see clearly, is water—rivers, lakes, etc. The rest you guess at. And here’s an interesting item lots of folks don’t know. It was a cinch for German Zeppelins to find either London or Paris at night. Why? Because both cities are on a river, and their metropolitan areas are exactly between two islands in each river, both the Thames and the Seine. They simply hovered over either of those areas and let go. And speaking of “go,” that means me. too! Good evening.

FROM the pages of the December 1933 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing R. Sidney Bowen to conduct a technical department each month. It is Mr. Bowen’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Mr. Bowen is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot of the Royal Air Force, but also because he has been the editor of one of the foremost technical journals of aviation.

Flying Comfort

by Robert Sidney Bowen (Sky Fighters, December 1933)

SO! SOUND asleep, the lot of you, eh? Well, my pin-feathered buzzards, that suits me just fine. In fact, it’s perfect. It gives me an idea of what to chin about this time. For a week I’ve been lying awake nights, tearing out my hair, wondering what I could talk about that would be close to your dear little hearts, and which you’d all understand.

Well, you yourselves gave me the idea. What subject could you better understand than one dealing with comfort?

And so, I will proceed to raise my usually calm and soothing voice above the stentorian chorus of snores, and bellow at you about the art of flying comfort.

We Were Comfortable

Though it breaks my heart to reveal the truth, my conscience forces me to draw aside the veil and show just how comfortable we baldheaded eagles were in the days when the word German was something that made you jump and jump fast.

As your big sisters have probably told you, wartime airdromes were never located in the middle of No-Man’s-Land. In fact, they were usually fifteen to twenty miles behind the lines. Such being the case, we had no fears of waking up and finding German infantrymen plowing through the room. And so, we could add the old home sweet home touch to our abodes and know that it would all still be there when we got back from a gallant patrol.

Sure! We had hutments to live in, blankets and clean sheets. A mess lounge to get plastered in, too. True, the furniture was not all mahogany or birdseye maple. However, it didn’t fall apart, much. And most important of all, my dears, the grub was good. It wasn’t dropped in the mud, and it was cooked (by a cook) in a real stove. There was usually some sort of a piano that worked. And, of course, the ever-present phonograph.

Now, before I mislead you too much, let me explain that the pilots more or less enjoyed solid comfort only as compared to the men holding the line.

I COULD name lots of places that are heaven compared to a wartime airdrome, and not even exaggerate. So, just keep it in your think-box that I’m speaking of flying comfort as compared to infantry or artillery comfort.

Visiting the Neighbors

And so, we were able to install all the little things that helped to make life enjoyable when not in the air. Usually there was a village near-by, with at least one worthwhile estaminet where we could go between patrols or any time when we were off duty. Also, if the field was big enough, more than one squadron used it, with the result that you had neighbors to visit, etc.

IN OTHER words, while an airman was on the ground, it really was a pretty good war.

In the air, though, it was different. And naturally so, because for us, that’s where the war was—in the air.

But here’s the point—we didn’t confine all our efforts for comfort to the time when we were on the ground. We took it along with us when we went up, providing, of course, it didn’t interfere with air scrapping.

That, of course, was the one essential thing to think about. And as a result, the comfort that we tried to get in the air was in reality a type of comfort that actually helped air performance.

Just a Few Examples

For a few examples of what I mean, unbutton your ears to these.

Straight flying—ordinary patroling between two points—is about the most monotonous thing east or west of the Seven Seas. There’s nothing to do but sit and fly, and then sit and fly some more. On a smooth day your legs and arms and neck get so doggone cramped, that you suddenly’ find yourself praying aloud for a flight of enemy ships to drop down on you.

True, you’ve got to keep your eyes open, to spot said enemy ships ahead of time.

And also you’ve got to keep on the alert so that you won’t slide out of formation position. But after awhile at the Front that sort of thing becomes almost mechanical. Like a sixth sense, you might say.

To permit themselves the opportunity to relax, some of the boys had headrests fitted to the top of the fuselage just back of the cockpit. The headrest was just a leather pad streamlined into the top of the fuselage. On some ships, the S.E.5, for example, the headrest was already there. And to show you how queer war pilots can be, some of the guys had the headrest of their S.E.5
taken off, because they said it cramped their necks! (See Fig. A.)

Every Little Thing Counts

ANOTHER little thing that we added for comfort’s sake, was a little box fitted to a fuselage crossbrace inside the cockpit. In ships that had a Lewis gun mounted on the top center section, the box was already there. That is, there were two boxes in which you carried a couple of spare Lewis drums of ammo. So you simply carried one extra drum—and the other was your box.

What for? Why, to keep things in, dummy. What things? Well—that depended upon the pilot’s likes and dislikes. Me, I used to slip a couple of bars of chocolate in, a cloth with which to wipe oil spatterings off my goggles, a couple of nips of this and that in a flask (in case of a cold, you understand), a picture of the current girl friend to gaze at if I felt lonely, a box of matches, and at least one deck of cigarettes.

Cigarettes?

Ah, I knew darn well that buzzard over there in the corner wasn’t asleep! Sure, we carried cigarettes. Why not? No, not to smoke while we were in the air. Nix! Can do, as a stunt. But didn’t as a regular practice.

No, the idea was, in case we got forced down and taken prisoner. Yes, sir, we were that way. Made sure of our comfort—in case. And if you think that’s a funny idea, go get yourself taken prisoner some day, and find out how many smokes the enemy gives you! Yeah, you’!I learn!

If We Were Captured

AND speaking of being taken prisoner. Some of the lads used to sew a small compass and a map or two in the lining of their flying suits. I once heard of a case where that little stunt was the means of a bird escaping an enemy prison camp. Well, all I can say is, that guy sure was lucky, and then some!

In the first place, the enemy wasn’t as dumb as the newspapers try to make them out to be. They knew a few things about fighting a war just as we did.

And searching a captured prisoner for anything that might help or hinder him was something that the Germans did nothing else but. However, for argument’s sake, let’s say that the searching officer was blind in one eye, couldn’t see out of the other, and both hands were cut off. Well, the hero goes to a prison camp, tells the guard to look the other way, and sets off for home. He uses the compass and starts south. Soon it gets darn cold and he meets an Eskimo. Heavens, he’s been walking all these weeks in the opposite direction.

And why? Because that little compass sewed in his flying suit was long ago sent haywire by the metal and ignition system of his engine.

But to get back to that box—comfort box, you could call it—I’ve told you a few of the things I used to lug along. Other guys used to carry other things. One chap, for instance, used to take along pen, paper and envelopes. Sure! Do his letter writing while waiting for action.

No Identification!

However, that was just an unusual stunt. Don’t get the idea that it was general practice. And also don’t get the idea that the box was big enough to hold a couple of spare props and
a tire maybe. And also, take it from me, you did not carry anything that would be valuable to the enemy if captured. I carried the girl friend’s picture, but I didn’t carry any of her letters to me.

No, smart guy, not because I was afraid the ship would catch fire! Simply because they were identification, and might contain information of something seemingly unimportant, but perhaps most important when pieced together with what the enemy might already know.

In other words, we carried in the box, or on our person, nothing that would divulge information to the enemy.

I Call It Laziness

MAYBE you’d call this next item comfort, but I call it just plumb laziness. It was a flight leader’s trick. As you know, a flight leader has to keep his eye on the ships back of him, just as much as the other lads have to keep their eyes on him.

So this bird, in order to save wear and tear on his neck, got hold of a piece of looking glass and fastened it near the top of his right rear center section strut. Yup, a rear view mirror for airplanes. And believe it or not, the thing worked swell—so he claimed! (See Fig. B.)

Another idea for comfort, and a thing that was mighty useful in a dog scrap, was a pair of shoulder straps fastened to the sides of the cockpit seat. (See Fig. C.) As you know, every ship had the regular safety belt that fastened about your waist. That was okay for level flight, but should you get hung in a loop, gravity would start to slide you out and pull your feet off the rudder bar.

So we installed two straps; one that came up the back and over the right shoulder and down the left side of the seat, and the other came up over the left shoulder, crossed the other at your chest, and down to the right side of the seat. Thus you were held back by the safety belt, and held down on your seat by the double straps. Naturally, snap fastenings were used, in case you had to get clear fast—like in thr event of a forced landing.

It’s All How You Look At It

Yup, our motto was, comfort east or west of No-Man’s-Land. Of course, it wasn’t like home. We did get our feet wet now and then. However, in case the Grim Reaper ever reached out for us, we kind of planned it so we’d at least die on a full stomach. For the lads on the ground shoving about the trenches, such was not the case. They had to take it on the chin day and night.

Yet, after all, it’s the way you look at it. The doughboy in the trench looks up at the aviator and says, “Cripes, that damn fool up there with nothing to hang onto!” And the pilot looks down and says, “Cripes, that damn fool down there with nothing but mud to sit on!” And, so what? As far as I’m concerned, it’s, so long!

FROM the pages of the November 1933 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing R. Sidney Bowen to conduct a technical department each month. It is Mr. Bowen’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Mr. Bowen is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot of the Royal Air Force, but also because he has been the editor of one of the foremost technical journals of aviation.

Things to Inspect

by Robert Sidney Bowen (Sky Fighters, November 1933)

A WHILE back I told you buzzards a few things about knocking engines. In other words, some reasons why the engines of the old war crates used to pass out oil us now and then, and sort of leave us in the soup. Well, today I’m going to talk about things that could happen to the plane, and likewise put us in the soup.

I believe I’ve only mentioned this fact about seven million times, so I’ll just say it again—taking good care of your ship was about fifty percent of the war pilot’s job. Now, when I say, taking good care of your ship, I don’t mean being easy with it when you’re in a dog scrap. At a time like that it’s a case of your life or the other chaps, and naturally you have to take a lot of chances that you wouldn’t take if you were just buzzing around on a little joy hop. And when I speak of taking a lot of chances I mean forcing your ship to execute maneuvers that it may not be able to stand—and as a result, tear itself apart in mid-air.

Good Pilots Don’t Take Chances

But here’s the point—good pilots didn’t take chances with their ships! And why? Well, buzzards, for this reason. A good war pilot knew his ship from prop boss to tail skid. He knew from experience in the cockpil just what it would do, and just what it wouldn’t do. And how come he knew all that? For the simple reason that he cared for it as a mother would care for a new-born babe. And naturally enough! Gosh almighty, a war pilot’s ship was the difference between life and death for him.

But enough of that stuff. What we are chinning about right now, is what used to happen to war crates, and why it did happen.

Three Important Parts

GENERALLY speaking, there are three parts of an airplane that can fail and as a result cause a lot of trouble, to say nothing of causing the death of the pilot. And those three parts are, the wing fittings, the landing gear (undercarriage) and the controls. As I said in the beginning, we’ve already talked about the engine, so we’ll leave that very important part out of this meeting.

Okay, first the wing fittings.

In a biplane (and all pursuit ships at the end of the war were biplanes) there were at least four, and in many cases eight, wing fittings, or wing bolts as they were sometimes called. And if you want to count in the aileron bolts, that’s eight more.

Now just a minute, don’t get so doggone impatient. I know what you are going to ask. Just what is a wing fitting, eh? Well, a wing fitting, or wing bolt, or wing attachment bolt (all the same thing) is simply the bolt hinge by which a wing is fastened to something else.

Take the top span of a biplane, for example. It is made up of three parts. They are, the left top wing, the center section, and the right top wing. Now, the center section is solid.

BY THAT I mean it is attached to the fuselage by struts and cross bracing wires. But the left and right top wings are hinge bolted to it on their respective sides (Fig. 1). The inner end of the wing is a solid rib. (Not holed out for lightness like the rest of the ribs in the wing.) Into that solid rib is fitted the forward and rear spars of the wing. The same thing is true of the spars in the center section. So that makes re-enforced solid pieces coming together. In other words, something strong against which you can fasten the hinge fittings.

Hinge Fittings Varied

Now the hinge fittings varied in different types of ships. But the one used quite a lot was like the one in Fig. 2. As you can see, the two parts of the hinge simply slide together and the bolt is slipped through the holes and held in place by a cotter pin at the rear end of the bolt.

With reference to the lower wings, the idea of attachment is exactly the same. Except, of course, you fasten the left and right lower wings to the left and right lower longerons of the fuselage. In some planes, though, the left and right lower wings were all one piece. That is, the spars extended right through the fuselage, and the whole thing could be fastened solidly to the fuselage.

If the wings are hinged, why don’t they fall down? Because of the wing struts and wing cross bracing wires.

No Danger of Sagging

AERODYNAMICALLY speaking, the top and lower wings of a biplane are a solid piece in themselves. When the struts are put in, and the wings are tightened up there is no sagging strain on the wing attachments. So although they may only be fastened to the body of the ship, and to the center section, by small bolts, there is no danger of them sagging in flight or on the ground and pulling the wing fastenings loose.

No, not if the pilot of that ship knows his onions and has a good rigger (name given to the mechanic that is responsible for the rigging of the ship). However, if the pilot is slipshod, and the rigger doesn’t give a darn, a lot of things can happen. To begin with, the wing fastening bolts should be put in from front to rear, and the cotterpin should be in place. If not, then engine vibration is apt to shake the bolt out, and if it does—wham, your wing tears itself off.

Another thing, the cross bracing wires between the wings should be neither too loose nor too tight. If they are too tight, extra strain cahsed by violent maneuvering in a dog scrap might make them part. And if enough of them do that, your wings will just naturally fold up on you, and you’ll get no more of mother’s cooking.

The Turnbuckle

AS YOU probably know, the cross bracing wires are adjusted by turnbuckles. And a turnbuckle is simply a rod, tapered at both ends, a hole through it in the middle (to enable twisting), and a threaded hole at each end.

For the idea look at Fig. 3. The turnbuckles are fastened by wire at one end to the strut stubbs and the other end is fastened to the wire that is to do the bracing. Naturally, excess strain, vibration, etc., can make turnbuckles untwist a bit. And the result is a slack bracing wire.

And so, with reference to the wings there are several things that the good pilot takes care of and inspects every time he lands after a scrap. And lots of other times, too. He makes sure the bolts are in right. He makes sure that the locking cotter pins are in the bolts. He makes sure that the turnbuckles have not untwisted. And last but not least he makes sure that all those parts have enough grease on them and have not become rusted (and thus weakened) by exposure.

If he doesn’t do those things, he will be flying a weakened ship, that looks strong enough on the surface, but which will fold up on him some day.

The second part of the ship that needs constant watching is the landing gear or undercarriage.

What “Split Axle’’ Means

THE ships of today have what are known as split axle landing gears, and most all of them are equipped with Aero shock absorbers. By split axle we mean just that—the axle is in two parts, hinged in the middle, with the middle part higher than the two ends, so that the axle can spread outward due to the weight of the ship above it.

But, the war crates had solid axles with a wheel at each end. The axle went through vertical slots in the landing gear struts, and was held in place at the lower end of the slot by rubber cords. Thus when a ship landed the axle would try to travel up the slot in the landing gear struts, but the rubber cord would tend to hold it back. And the result was that most of the shock in landing was absorbed by the wound rubber cording stretching. Perhaps you’ll get a better idea of what I’m talking about by glancing at Fig. 4.

Of course, the wheel was fastened to the axle by a nut with locking cotterpin. The axle was stationary and the wheel revolver about it.

Now, a bad landing could weaken the rubber cording. A bum pilot might leave the locking cotter pin out of the nut on the end of the axle. A bum pilot might forget to change the rubber cording when it got too old for good use. And a bum pilot might weaken his landing gear cross bracing wires and not trouble about it.

Here’s What Could Happen

AND if he did, here’s what could and probably would happen. He might lose a wheel when taking off from bumpy ground.

His whole undercarriage might fold up on him sometime when he made a bad landing. A wheel might buckle when making a cross-wind landing. And if the rubber on one side gave way, the ship would be flung over that way when he landed, even if it was a good landing. And the result of any one of those things happening would be a nasty ground loop, if not a direct crash.

And just to show how dumb even yours truly can be, I’ll admit that once I lost a wheel while taking a Spad off. What happened? Well, a Spad always lands like two tons of brick, even with two wheels on—and with one gone, well, I plowed up enough of that drome to plant a year’s supply of potatoes, and it was a couple of weeks before all the skin grew back on my face.

And now for the third, and yes, the most important part to keep your eye on. Naturally, I mean the controls.

You can have a bum engine, you can have a badly rigged ship, and you can have a weakened undercarriage, yet somehow you can manage to get down, and probably walk away from the wreck. But—and that’s a big but—if your controls go cockeyed, you might just as well buy yourself a oneway ticket to the Pearly Gates. Or at least become resigned to a long stay in a little white cot in some hospital.

As I told you sometime ago, the controls of an airplane consist of the rudder bar and the joystick. The rudder bar works the rudder, and the joystick works the elevators and the ailerons. Naturally, they work them by the means of wires. To the right side of the rudder is a wire that leads back to the horn on the right side of the rudder. The same thing on the left side. Now, from the joystick four wires lead back to the elevators. Two for the top and bottom of the right elevator, and two for the top and bottom of the left elevator. Also from the joystick, wires lead out to the ailerons.

Now, just how many control wires were used, and how they were lead out to the various control surfaces, depended upon the type of machine. But, on any type of ship, turnbuckles were used for tightening or slackening, pulleys were used where the wire had to go around a bend, and leather guides were used wherever the wire unavoidably rubbed against something.

Wires Constantly Moved

Naturally it follows that the wires were constantly being moved while in flight. That means that some of them were constantly sliding around on pulleys, and others were constantly rubbing against leather guides.

Contact means friction, and friction means wear. Added to that was the strain of violent maneuvering, the full force of which was instantly transmitted to the turnbuckles and the wire eyes. (See Fig. 3.)

Now if the pilot did not take constant care of his controls he was simply flirting with his life. For example, take the pulleys. (Fig. 5.) Dirt, grease and other things such as dope flakes, could very easily jam them so that they would not turn. As a result the wire would slide around it, instead of the pulley revolving with the wire. Naturally the wire couldn’t stand that very long—and suddenly it would give way, and the pilot would be helpless to use his ailerons.

In other words, lateral stability would be all lost. In most planes the pulleys were inside the wing, and you got at them by unlacing a bit of the fabric. Doing that little thing was tiresome, but lordy how important!

The leather guides wore out very quickly and if they were not replaced with new guides you might find that your control wire was rubbing against a fuselage cross-bracing wire. And you can figure out for yourself what happens when steel cable rubs against steel cable. An example of where and how leather guides were used will be noted in Fig. 6.

And as for the turnbuckles and wire eyes. Well, the same points hold true for them as for cross-bracing wire turnbuckles. Get the wires too tight and a savage loop might part them. Let them get rusty and the eyes might pull out of the turnbuckles, or the turnbuckle itself give way. And so you make sure that there is plenty of grease on them to insure no rust.

AND that, incidentally, goes for the control wires themselves. They should always have a light coating of grease to prevent rust. And for a thorough inspection, the good pilot always runs his fingers along the wires, to see if they have become weakened by a strand or two parting. And when your finger suddenly gets a pin prick, stop, look and be a bright boy. Take out the whole wire and replace it with a new one. One strand breaking does not mean death is coming to you. It simply means that the wire has been weakened just that much—and maybe the other strands will let go when you’re ten thousand feet up.

Pay Attention, Buzzards!

Well, you’re all asleep now, so I guess I’ll go home. But remember this (if it’s possible) your engine is important, but so is the ship itself. It may seem like a waste of time to crawl all over it with an eagle eye each time before you go up. But listen to me, buzzards, I’ve seen plenty who figured it a waste of time, and took a chance. Well, they lost. I’m a scare-cat—I hate to take chances—maybe that’s why I’m still able to admire the trees and the flowers and other things in life on this man’s planet!

TO ROUND off Mosquito Month we have a non-Mosquitoes story from the pen of Ralph Oppenheim. In the mid thirties, Oppenheim wrote a half dozen stories for Sky Fighters featuring Lt. “Streak” Davis. Davis—ace and hellion of the 25th United States Pursuit Squadron—was a fighter, and the speed with which he hurled his plane to the attack, straight and true as an arrow, had won him his soubriquet. Once more it’s a battle against time as Streak must retrieve vital information about Pershing’s big push against Hindenburg that had been left behind in a locked safe when the Boche over ran the villa that had been an Allied held town. From the April 1935 issue of Sky Fighters it’s “Death Takes Off!”

With the Success of the Allies in the Balance, Streak Davis Roars into Enemy Territory on a Mission that Spells Doom—Casting all Thought of Failure into the Slipstream of His Pounding Crate!

• Download “Death Takes Off” (April 1935, Sky Fighters)

FROM the pages of the May 1933 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing R. Sidney Bowen to conduct a technical department each month. It is Mr. Bowen’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Mr. Bowen is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot of the Royal Air Force, but also because he has been the editor of one of the foremost technical journals of aviation.

Why It Flys

by Robert Sidney Bowen (Sky Fighters, May 1933)

ALL RIGHT, you buzzards, sit up and take a good look at that young chap sitting over there on the right side of the room. See him? Well, take a second look, because there is one intelligent young man. You said it! Why is he so bright? Well, wait until I read you a letter that I just got from him—

Dear Uncle Wash-Out:

    I’ve been listening to your chin-jests since they first began many months ago. I don’t suppose that your head can get any bigger, so I’ll risk saying that I have enjoyed every word, including the periods and quotation marks.

    And so, I’m going to take advantage of your offer to ask a question. Here it is. The title of your chin-fests is, “How the War Crates Flew.” Well, how did they? In other words, Uncle Wash-Out, just what makes an airplane fly?

    Here’s hoping that you’ll give us some dope regarding the technical side of the actual flight of an airplane.

                                Hopefully yours,
                                    Charles Barringer.

Well, here I am, Charlie, in the flesh, and all set to grant you your wish. So pay attention and never mind if some of these other buzzards fall asleep. It’s bright lads like you that I like to help out. The others can go walk into a revving prop if they want to. Guess we’ll never miss them, much.

And, so here we go.

The air that we breathe and feel and know is all around us has weight, and it exerts pressure in all directions. Now, the action of air on a kite results in the air being compressed underneath it, and a vaccum being formed above it. That action causes the kite to rise for the simple reason that there is increased pressure on the underneath side and decreased pressure above. To get a good idea of all that, take a look at Fig.1.

FLIGHT is secured by drawing, or propelling, an inclined plane through the air, with the plane inclined upwards and toward the direction of motion. When I speak of plane in that instance I mean a flat plane, not an airplane.

Now, that plane going through the air has four forces working upon it. And those four forces are Lift, Drift, Gravity, and Thrust.

Lift, as the word itself explains, is the tendency for the plane to rise. And that tendency, as I explained above, is the result of increased pressure underneath the plane, and decreased pressure above.

Drift, or as it is often called, Resistance, is the reaction due to the action of propelling a plane through the air, thus retarding its motion. Drift is caused by the eddies of air which hinder the forward motion. You might almost call it a backward suction or drag. And then, too, there is drift, or resistance, caused by the frontal area presented toward the line of flight. To decrease drift as much as possible the thing to do, of course, is to streamline the object that goes through the air.
Take a ball for instance. Fig.2. The air slips around the ball all right, but the vacuum at the rear causes air eddies and these eddies more or less try to suck the ball backwards. And that, of course, hinders the forward flight of the ball.

Now take a look at Fig.3. We have put streamlining on the back of the ball. The result is that the air stream follows along the streamlining, and as a result of there being no vacuum, no eddies are formed to try and drag the ball backwards. Of course, you must understand that I’m speaking generally. There is not as yet, an airplane wing of one hundred percent non-drag efficiency. There is still a small vacuum and there are still eddies caused by that vacuum. But streamlining reduces air resistance to a minimum. And of course not only are the wings of a plane streamlined, but every other part of it. However, what I’m pointing out is how streamlining helps to reduce resistance or drift.

The third force is Gravity, or to be brief, the magnetic attraction of the earth to all things on it and above it, for at least a distance of fifty miles, maybe more. Scientists have not yet determined exactly how high above the earth the force of gravity extends. However, we know that this thing called gravity is an invisible force that draws things earthward.

Thrust is the forward force applied to the plane by the engine actuated by the propeller. Now the prop may push the plane through the air, or it may pull it, but no matter which it does the action is referred to as “thrust.”

What’s that? Each of those four forces has its opposite? Right you are. Good lad, for figuring that out. Huh? What does he mean? All right, listen.

In plain words the four forces are, upward, downward, forward, and backward. The thrust has its opposite, which of course is drift. And lift has its opposite which is gravity.

NOW, when the engine is off and the plane is on the ground, drift overcomes thrust and gravity overcomes lift. In other words there is no thrust or lift, which is only natural.

And so we start the engine, run it up full out and what happens? Thrust starts to overcome drift, and lift starts to overcome gravity. Eventually the action of lift overcoming gravity points the nose of the plane into the air and the plane rises. Now, so long as your engine is on, the thrust remains the same, regardless of forward speed. However, the greater the forward speed the greater the action of drift.

Maybe that last confused you a bit. How could thrust remain the same, and yet have forward speed increase so that drift increases also? Well, it’s this way. If you were flying into the wind your prop would be trying just as hard to pull you forward, but your speed over the ground would be reduced, and naturally the drift increased. But if you were flying with the wind your ground speed would be increased (because the wind helped blow you along), even though the thrust remained the same.

You probably noted that I put emphasis on the words, ground speed. Well, an airplane in flight always has two speeds. One is air-speed and the other is ground-speed. Now, take a look at Fig.4. A lot of folks get mixed up about the speed of an airplane. And as we all know, a lot of fiction authors go a bit haywire about it. However, as you will note from the figure, air speed is always the same. That is, of course, provided that you keep the throttle in the same place. And I might mention right here that air speed means the speed at which the wings pass through the air. No matter whether it is fifty miles an hour or five hundred miles an hour, it will stay the same in level flight. But the ground speed, the speed at which the plane travels over the ground, is always changing. If there is a twenty-mile wind and you fly into it, your ground speed is reduced twenty miles per hour. And if you fly with that wind your ground speed is increased twenty miles an hour.

So remember, when some one says, “This ship will do 200 m.p.h.,” that he means that the wings will go through the air at that rate of speed. Its speed over the ground will depend upon whether he flies with the wind, or against it.

Now in case you get the idea that I’m suggesting that well-known airplane speed records don’t mean a thing, just let me clear up that point. A straight-away record is taken from the average of two flights with the wind and two flights against it. Therefore the thing is balanced and you get the speed of the plane as though it were flying in still air. And the same holds true for a closed course speed record. One half of the course would be with the wind, and the other half would be against the wind. Get the idea?

BUT we happen to be up in the air just now, and talking about the four forces that are having their own individual effect upon the flight of our ship.

We said that thrust remains the same regardless of speed, but that drift increases, with increased forward speed. Right! Now, it is only natural that drift increases also as the forward speed is reduced. And when the drift is greater than the thrust what happens? It means that gravity has also become greater than lift. The result is that the plane goes earthward. If such a thing happened suddenly and the increase of drift and gravity over thrust and lift was of a great amount, the plane would naturally stall, and thrust and lift would be non-existant for the moment. In other words the plane would start toward earth, out of control until your falling speed became great enough to be flying speed.

That may sound a little complicated. But what I mean is that a plane stalls because drift has become greater than thrust and gravity has become greater than lift.

Huh? What about gliding down?

Now keep your shirt on. I can’t say everything in the same breath. I’m coming to that point right now.

You are flying along and you decide to land. Well, the first thing you do is throttle your engine. That, of course, is an automatic decreasing of your thrust. If you carried straight on at level flight drift would soon take complete charge of thrust and gravity would take complete charge of lift—and you would stall. So you point the nose downward, and let drift gradually overcome thrust and gravity to gradually overcome lift. Of course you take care of that sort of thing with your gliding angle. And then when you get right close to the ground you level off and go straight forward. That, of course, causes drift to overcome thrust (which now is simply gliding speed) at a faster rate. And the same with gravity overcoming lift. Presently thrust and lift become practically non-existant, and your plane stalls—but—you are only a couple of feet off the ground so you simply settle on the ground with no damage done. So in theory, every airplane landing is a stall—drift and gravity, having completely overcome thrust and lift.

Now, that is the general action of the four forces, thrust, lift, draft, and gravity, upon an airplane on the ground and in the air. And, therefore, it means that an airplane flies when thrust is equal to drift, and lift is equal to gravity. When those things are equal momentum carries the plane on. Increased thrust means increased air speed. And increased lift, means increased climbing angle.

Now, before I toss you all out, I’m going to say a few words about the design of airplane wings in regard to lift and drift.

THE length of a wing is called the span. And the width of a wing is called the cord. The relation of the span to the cord is known as the “aspect ratio of a wing.” A square wing would have a low aspect ratio. Whereas a narrow wing would have a high aspect ratio. See Fig.5. Now a high aspect ratio is better than a low aspect ratio for the simple reason that it gives the same amount of lift with less drift.

Now a flat wing, as we know, would have a lot of drift, regardless of its lift. So to lessen the drift the wing is itself streamlined. In other words it is changed from a flat wing to a cambered wing. And because it is cambered the air pressure on its underneath surface is at right angles to it. See Fig.6.

The curvature of a wing determines its lifting efficiency. (We are disregarding streamlining and drift for the moment.) A flat wing has less air pressure beneath, and as a result less upward lift suction on top. As the wing is curved more, both of those things increase. Naturally there is a limit, and aeronautical engineers are continually experimenting for the correct camber of the wings of the planes they design. But the curvature, particularly the curvature at the top is a mighty important item regarding the lifting efficiency of the wing. In the old days it was believed that a wing got its greatest lift from the bottom of the wing. But the wing design developments of recent years have proved that almost sixty-five percent of the lift of a wing is from the top. So camber is not something to toss out the window. Upon it depends maximum lift efficiency, in accordance with the correct angle of incidence (angle of wing toward line of flight).

And so, you might say that the wings of an airplane are the most important. You can always get a good engine, and you can always build a good fuselage, and the other things that go with it. But when you come to the wings, you have a real job on your hands. They have got to be strong enough to stay on when you are going full out. They have got to have maximum lift for the weight they are carrying, and they’ve got to have minimum drift, because you get more drift from your wings than from any other part of the ship.

But after all, drift is only one of the forces you’ve got to think about. There are three others, as I told you—lift, thrust, and gravity. Keep them all in mind, when you design that plane. And remember, thrust has got to equal drift, and lift has got to equal gravity, or you’ll never fly in a hundred thousand years!