Marked for Death by James Hamilton-Paterson Read Free Book Online Page A

smiling of face.
    Slogging along on the little-trod paths of life;
    Cowboy, and trick-shot, and airman in turn.
    Recklessly straining the quick-snapping laths of life,
    Eager its utmost resistance to learn.
    Honour him now, all ye dwarfs who belittled him,
    Now, ’tis writ large what in visions he read.
    Lay a white wreath where your ridicule killed him;
    Honour him, now he’s successful – and dead.
    As a sacrificial victim of early aviation Sam Cody was hardly alone. He had his counterparts all over Europe and elsewhere: men with a mechanical bent who for ten years had been putting together flying machines of their own design in sheds and garages, each convinced that his would prove revolutionary, only for the dream to end in a tangle of wire and fabric in the middle of rough pastureland. ‘The only bones left unbroken in the cadaver,’ as one army medic bleakly observed, ‘were probably those of the inner ear.’
    The single flight that first made it clear aviation was a practical mode of transport and not just a spectacular way of getting killed was Louis Blériot’s across the English Channel on 25th July 1909. His model XI was the world’s first powered and truly airworthy monoplane and it was to inspire several other similar designs, including those by Morane and Fokker. Blériot’s soon became the world’s most-produced aircraft, being bought by flying schools and several European countries for evaluation of its military potential. Indeed, it was Anthony Fokker’s derivation of it, the Fokker E.1 Eindecker (monoplane), that was to establish temporary German air superiority in the skies above France and Belgium in 1915. Yet by then early monoplane design was revealing its limitations. With the exception of the E.1’s forward-firing machine gun the aircraft itself was rather old hat and could be outperformed by several biplanes at the time.
    *
    This prompts a question. Why was it – to judge from contemporary photographs and films and all the popular imagery of the first air war – that the vast majority of aircraft in those days were biplanes and even triplanes? Only part of the answer is that fourwings produce more lift than two. Four wings can also be made much stronger, the struts and wires between the pairs producing the effect of box girder construction. A box girder resists torsion, or twisting; and twisting was the inherent problem of the wood-framed wings of the day. Because Blériot, Fokker and many others at first used Wright-style wing warping to control their monoplanes’ pitch and roll, the wings had to be able to twist. But as speeds increased, together with a need for more manoeuvrability, so much torsion could be set up that the wing could be torn entirely off. Aircraft shedding their wings as Cody’s ‘Cathedral’ had were a distressingly familiar sight at air shows and also accounted for a good many deaths in Fokker’s and other monoplanes of the period. Blériot’s famous model XI was similarly plagued by structural failure and earned itself the nickname of ‘The Killer’. It was obvious that as a method of control, wing warping was doomed. Quite apart from anything else, it was mechanically complex. As Fokker himself later admitted of his own aircraft, ‘To warp the wings for elevator action required twelve wires, running on rollers and centring on the control stick. This was bad mechanics, however good a theory it might be.’ 23 The wings of a biplane, on the other hand, could be made remarkably stiff when built as a box girder, and pitch and roll could then be achieved by the far simpler method of ailerons: hinged flaps on the trailing edges at the ends of the wings. In this way pairs of stiff wings equipped with simple ailerons revolutionised control and effectively became the basic design for most of the aircraft that flew in the First World War.
    However, designers soon found that doubling the number of wings did not double the lift. The reason for this is inherent in the