Learning to Fly: A Practical Manual for Beginners

by Claude Grahame-White; Harry Harper

CHAPTER IX

A STUDY OF THE METHODS OF GREAT PILOTS

The masters of flying, and this is a fact the novice should ponder well, have been conspicuous almost invariably for their prudence. No matter how great has been their personal skill, they have never lost their respect for the air; and this is why so many of the great flyers, after running the heaviest of risks in their pioneer work, have managed to escape with their lives. What patience and sound judgment can accomplish, when pitted even against such dangers as must be faced by an experimenter when he seeks to fly, is shown by an incident from the early career of the Wright brothers. With one of their gliders, a necessarily frail machine, and in tests made when they were both complete novices, they managed to make nearly 1000 glides; and not once in all those flights, during which they were learning the rudiments of balance and control, did they have a mishap which damaged at all seriously their machine.

These two brothers, Wilbur and Orville, offer to the student of flying, apart from the historical interest which is attached to their work, a temperamental study of the greatest interest. Wilbur, who was grave, judicial—a man of infinite patience and with an exceptional power of lucid thinking—found in his brother and co-worker, Orville, a disposition just such as was necessary to strengthen and support him in his great research; a disposition more vivacious and more enthusiastic than his, and one which acted as a balance to his own gravity. The method of these brothers in first attacking a mass of data, most of it contradictory—and a large amount of it of little intrinsic value—and then framing their own research on lines which they discussed and studied with methodical care, forms a model of sound judgment for workers in any complex field. Their kite experiments, their gliders, their refusal to hasten their steps unduly in the fitting of an engine to their machine, reveal again their discretion, and that judgment which never failed them. Perseveringly and unswervingly, exhibiting doggedness without obstinacy, and with their work illuminated always by the highest intelligence, they moved surely from stage to stage; and at last, when they fitted a motor to their machine, such was their knowledge of the air, and of the control of their craft when in flight, that they were able to make this crucial step, from a glider to a machine driven by power, without any breakage of their apparatus or injury to themselves.

The same self-control marked them when, having demonstrated that men can ascend in a power-driven machine, and steer such a craft at will, they dismantled their apparatus and commenced their negotiations with foreign Governments. Wilbur Wright, too, when he came to France to give his first public demonstrations, provided by his methods a model for aviators, either present or future. He resisted all temptations to make injudicious flights. If he considered the weather conditions at all unsuitable he said that he would not ascend, no matter who might have come to see him fly, and that settled the question once and for all. He was deaf to all pleadings, to all proffered advice. When conditions were perfectly suitable, and then only, would he have his craft brought from its shed.

The same meticulous care, in every flight he made, marked his preparation of his machine. Motor, controls, propeller-gearing, every vital part, received its due attention; and this attention was never relaxed, no matter how frequently he flew, nor how great was his success. An observer of one of his early flights at Le Mans has given us an impression that is typical of this unremitting care. There was a question of some small adjustment that Wilbur had instructed should be made to the machine. When the time came to fly, and he was in the driving-seat waiting for the motor to be started, he called a question as to whether this detail had been attended to. He was assured it had. But this was not enough for Wilbur Wright. Climbing from his seat and walking round the biplane, he made a careful examination for himself, and then returned quietly to the front of the machine. People who came to see him fly, and expected some picturesque hero, leaping lightly into his machine and sweeping through the air, found that reality disappointed them. This quiet, unassuming man, who slept in his shed near his aeroplane, and took his meals there also, refused to be fêted or made a fuss of; while his deliberation in regard to every flight, and his indifference to the wishes or convenience of those who were watching him, drove nearly frantic some of those influential people who, coming in motor-cars and with a patronising spirit, thought the aviator might be treated rather as a superior mountebank, who would be only too glad to come out and fly when a distinguished guest arrived.

M. Louis Bleriot, whose name was next to become world-famous, after that of the Wrights, and who owed his distinction to his crossing of the English Channel by air, revealed in his character determination and courage, and imagination as well. And yet allied to these qualities—and here lay his temperamental strength—he had a spirit of quiet calculation and an eery considerable shrewdness. He knew, and was not afraid of showing that he knew, the full value of caution. And yet on occasion also—as in the cross-Channel flight—he was ready to put everything to the test, and to take promptly and with full knowledge the heaviest of risks. The motor in his cross-Channel monoplane was an experimental one of low power, air-cooled, and prone to over-heat and lose power after only a short period of running. To cross the Channel, even under the most favourable circumstances, he knew this engine must run without breakdown for thirty-five or forty minutes. This it had not done—at any rate in the air—before. There was a strong probability—and Bleriot knew this better than anyone else—that the motor would fail before he reached the English shore, and that he would have to glide down into the sea. It was arranged that a torpedo-boat-destroyer should follow him, and this afforded an element of safety. But Bleriot guessed—as was actually the case—that he would outdistance this vessel in his flight, and soon be lost to the view of those upon it. And he did not deceive himself as to what might happen, if his engine stopped and he fell into the water. His monoplane, as it lay on the surface of the water, would, he knew, prove a very difficult object to locate by any vessel searching for it; while it was so frail that it would not withstand for long the buffeting of the waves. He carried an air-bag fixed inside the fusilage, it is true; but, in spite of this precaution, Bleriot knew he ran a very grave peril of being drowned. There was, on the morning of his flight, another disturbing factor to be reckoned with. The wind, calm enough when he first determined to start, began very quickly to rise; and by the time he had motored from Calais to the spot where his aeroplane lay, and the machine itself was ready for flight, the wind out to sea was so strong that the waves had become white-capped. But Bleriot, aware of the value at such moments of decision, had made up his mind. He knew that, if his engine only served him, his flight would be quickly made. And so he reckoned that, even though the wind was rising, he would be able to complete his journey before it had become high enough seriously to inconvenience him; and in this calculation, as events proved, he was right. His motor did its work; and, though the wind tossed his machine dangerously when he came near the cliffs of the English coast, he succeeded in making a landing and in winning the £1000 prize.

M. Hubert Latham, Bleriot's competitor in the cross-Channel flight, had that peculiar outlook on life, with its blend of positive and negative—puzzling often to its owner as well as to the onlooker—that is called, for the sake of calling it something, the artistic temperament. He was impulsive, yet impassive often to a disconcerting extent: extremely sensitive and reserved as a rule, yet on occasion almost boyishly frank and communicative. He lacked entirely ordinary shrewdness, or everyday commonsense. He was a man of a deeply romantic temperament, and this inclined him towards aviation and the conquest of the air; while in actual piloting he had such a quickness and delicacy of touch, and such a sure and instinctive judgment of distance and of speed, that he was undoubtedly a born aviator—one of, if not the, finest the world has seen. That he did not attain greater success, from a practical point of view, was due to the fact that he was without the level-headedness and the business ability which characterised others of the pioneers. When he was in flight in his Antoinette—Latham flew that machine and no other—he was a supreme artist. His machine was beautiful, and his handling of it was beautiful.

M. Henri Farman, beyond question, of course, another of the great pioneers, is a man of imagination and of a highly nervous temperament, yet possessing at the same time a very pronounced vein of caution. No success has for an instant caused him to lose his head. At Rheims, in 1909, when he had created a world's record by flying for more than three hours without alighting, those who hastened to congratulate him, after his descent, found him absolutely normal and unmoved. Washing his hands at a little basin in the corner of the shed, he discussed very quietly and yet interestedly, and entirely without any affectation of nonchalance, the details of his flight and the behaviour of his motor. His attitude was that the flight was something, yet not a great deal, and that very much more remained to be done; a perfectly right and proper attitude, one which was just as it should be, yet one encountered very rarely under such circumstances—human nature being what it is.