What this performance, and others, have demonstrated is this: at the present moment, although admittedly experimental, the aeroplane is sufficiently well able to combat adverse weather as to make it a highly-useful weapon of war.
II. Value of high speed, when combating a wind—Constructional difficulties of a hundred-mile-an-hour machine.
It is unwise to regard the capabilities of the present-type aeroplane as representing, in any way, a limit, or a standard of achievement. What the machine built to-day can perform, the aeroplane of to-morrow will, assuredly, be able to improve upon; and so progress will be recorded, until something in the nature of a perfected aircraft is evolved.
As a matter of fact, there is practically no stage, in connection with any forms of manufacture, when a builder can say: "Here is a machine incapable of improvement." Take, as an example, the motor-car. The luxurious, six-cylindered machine appears to represent what may be termed "the last word"; but small improvements are constantly being made, and thoughtful manufacturers still see new avenues of progress.
So it is in regard to the wind-flying capabilities of an aeroplane. Thirty to thirty-five miles an hour represents, as has been said, a fair maximum for the strength of wind in which a machine can be navigated at the present time. But this will not exist long as a standard; improvements in the speed, and in the general stability of machines, are being made from day to day.
The result of this progress in manufacture will be that the aeroplane will be navigable in higher and higher winds. Forty-mile-an-hour winds will, before long, cease to prevent regular flight; and it is the view of eminent designers and builders that it will be possible for the aeroplane to remain aloft in winds blowing at the rate of more than fifty miles an hour. It is hoped, in fact, that machines will, eventually, be able to live in any wind save such a raging gale as drives big steamships to port.
Already, certain definite lines of improvement suggest themselves to the makers of aeroplanes. In combating a high wind, failing any device to provide an aeroplane with automatic stability, high speed is found to be of the greatest aid. But there are difficulties in connection with the attaining of high speed, as will be shown later.
An illustration of the value of high speed, in overcoming the wind, was giving at the Rheims flying meeting in the summer of 1910. Morane, testing a monoplane fitted with a motor of a hundred horse-power, attained a speed of quite eighty miles an hour. Travelling at this rate, he found that he was able to pass close behind other machines, despite the rush of wind from their propellers. Had he been flying a slower machine, this "back-draught" would, inevitably, have caused him to capsize.
Speed, also, was what helped Beaumont and Vedrines, when they were fighting adverse winds in the Circuit of Britain. Beaumont’s monoplane had a speed of a little over sixty miles an hour; and that of Vedrines was a trifle faster. Had either of these airmen been piloting a slow-flying biplane, he would have been forced to descend, seeing that his machine would have become unmanageable in heavy gusts.
Speed, therefore, is the aim of most manufacturers. They see that the aeroplane must, if it is to compete commercially with land or sea transit, provide a means of locomotion more rapid than any which at present exists; and they recognise, also, that speed offers—at any rate at present—a solution of the problem of all-weather flying.