Eleven months after the Rheims meeting came what may be reckoned the only really notable aviation meeting on English soil, in the form of the Bournemouth week, July 10th to 16th, 1910. This gathering is noteworthy mainly in view of the amazing advance which it registered on the Rheims performances. Thus, in the matter of altitude, Morane reached 4,107 feet and Drexel came second with 2,490 feet. Audemars on a Demoiselle monoplane made a flight of 17 miles 1,480 yards in 27 minutes 17.2 seconds, a great flight for the little Demoiselle. Morane achieved a speed of 56.64 miles per hour, and Grahame White climbed to 1,000 feet altitude in 6 minutes 36.8 seconds. Machines carrying the Gnome engine as power unit took the great bulk of the prizes, and British-built engines were far behind.
Rolls executing a turn (note tilt).
Fatal accident to Rolls. Bournemouth Aviation Week.
The Bournemouth Meeting will always be remembered with regret for the tragedy of C. S. Rolls’s death, which took place on the Tuesday, the second day of the meeting. The first competition of the day was that for the landing prize; Grahame White, Audemars, and Captain Dickson had landed with varying luck, and Rolls, following on a Wright machine with a tail-plane which ought never to have been fitted and was not part of the Wright design, came down wind after a left-hand turn and turned left again over the top of the stands in order to land up wind. He began to dive when just clear of the stands, and had dropped to a height of 40 feet when he came over the heads of the people against the barriers. Finding his descent too steep, he pulled back his elevator lever to bring the nose of the machine up, tipping down the front end of the tail to present an almost flat surface to the wind. Had all gone well, the nose of the machine would have been forced up, but the strain on the tail and its four light supports was too great; the tail collapsed, the wind pressed down the biplane elevator, and the machine dived vertically for the remaining 20 feet of the descent, hitting the ground vertically and crumpling up. Major Kennedy, first to reach the debris, found Rolls lying with his head doubled under him on the overturned upper main plane; the lower plane had been flung some few feet away with the engine and tanks under it. Rolls was instantaneously killed by concussion of the brain.
Antithesis to the tragedy was Audemars on his Demoiselle, which was named ‘The Infuriated Grasshopper.’ Concerning this, it was recorded at the time that ‘Nothing so excruciatingly funny as the action of this machine has ever been seen at any aviation ground. The little two-cylinder engine pops away with a sound like the frantic drawing of ginger beer corks; the machine scutters along the ground with its tail well up; then down comes the tail suddenly and seems to slap the ground while the front jumps up, and all the spectators rock with laughter. The whole attitude and the jerky action of the machine suggest a grasshopper in a furious rage, and the impression is intensified when it comes down, as it did twice on Wednesday, in long grass, burying its head in the ground in its temper.’—(The Aero, July, 1910.)
The Lanark Meeting followed in August of the same year, and with the bare mention of this, the subject of flying meetings may be left alone, since they became mere matters of show until there came military competitions such as the Berlin Meeting at the end of August, 1910, and the British War Office Trials on Salisbury Plain, when Cody won his greatest triumphs. The Berlin meeting proved that, from the time of the construction of the first successful German machine mentioned above, to the date of the meeting, a good number of German aviators had qualified for flight, but principally on Wright and Antoinette machines, though by that time the Aviatik and Dorner German makes had taken the air. The British War Office Trials deserve separate and longer mention.
In 1910 in spite of official discouragement, Captain Dickson proved the value of the aeroplane for scouting purposes by observing movements of troops during the Military Manœuvres on Salisbury Plain. Lieut. Lancelot Gibbs and Robert Loraine, the actor-aviator, also made flights over the manœuvre area, locating troops and in a way anticipating the formation and work of the Royal Flying Corps by a usefulness which could not be officially recognised.
