The following account of the accident was given by Mr. C. G. Grey, in the Aeroplane, July 1st, 1914.
“One of the most extraordinary accidents in the history of aviation, and a still more extraordinary escape from death, occurred to Mr. Harry Hawker at Brooklands on Saturday evening last. Mr. Hawker went up about 7 p.m. on the Sopwith Scout (100 h.p. monosoupape Gnome), and at about 1,200 feet he made one of his famous loops with the engine cut off, by diving steeply and then pulling back. He made the loop perfectly, but over the Byfleet road, and as he came out of it, he started a vertical dive with a spin in it.
“When I first caught sight of him from the paddock he was doing a perfect ‘tourbillon’ spin, à la Chanteloup—that is to say, the wings were revolving round the centre-line of the fuselage, and the machine was standing vertically on its nose. It was coming down quite slowly for such a fast machine, the pace being nothing like its ordinary diving speed. Then the tail seemed to swing out and the vertical path became an irregular spiral to the right, till finally the machine seemed to be doing a banked turn with the body nearly horizontal and the left wing up. The dropping speed had by then decreased noticeably, but it was obvious that the machine was not under proper control, for it seemed to ‘slash’ or ‘flutter’ round like a falling leaf. At this point it disappeared behind the trees on St. George’s Hill.
“As quickly as possible a number of people from Brooklands got to the spot, and after considerable difficulty found the machine on the ground in a thick coppice, with Mr. Hawker standing alongside it absolutely unhurt. A few minutes afterwards he went off back to Brooklands, sitting on the carrier of a motor-bicycle, leaving the machine in charge of the Sopwith machine crew.
“Apparently the machine had struck partly sideways and partly nose on into the top of a tall tree, into which it had flown rather than fallen. It had then fallen vertically, bringing several big boughs of the tree with it, and had finally sat down right side up, flat on its chassis, on top of sundry saplings and undergrowth. The wings had folded up neatly as it fell through the trees, and had come down like a lid on the cockpit—how Mr. Hawker got out is a mystery. The chassis had telescoped into the front of the fuselage. The cowl was dented and bent, but not torn off. Two or three valve tappets had been wiped off the engine, which was evidently revolving when it struck the trees. The propeller was broken at the ends, but not at the boss. The fuselage aft of the tank, with the elevator and rudder, were absolutely untouched.
“The first thing we did was to test the controls, and then found the elevator and rudder working perfectly. The warp wires were also uninjured, so there can be no question of controls going wrong. What, then, was the cause of the accident?
“For some time previously Mr. Hawker had been proving the extraordinary stability of this machine. He used to take her up to 1,000 feet or so, switch off his engine, and let the machine glide. Then he would pull his elevator slowly back to stall her. With the elevator hard back she would neither tail-slide nor dive nor side-slip. She would simply descend on an even keel like a parachute, but moving gently forward and rolling slowly first on to one wing and then back to the other. Occasionally, in a gust, she would slide to one side, descending sideways at about 45 degrees, which is hardly a side-slip. On pushing the lever forward she would pick up her gliding angle promptly. In fact, she seemed absolutely stable in every direction. She recovered promptly also from a straight-dive which was almost vertical.
“Now comes this smash, and it is worth studying, for according to the rules of the game the machine should have come up when the elevator was pulled back. During the afternoon Mr. Hawker had been arguing with an officer of the Naval Air Service about the need for more vertical surface aft on these small high-speed Scouts. The officer in question held that, owing to the short tail, if a Scout started to spin round its own nose it would never come into control again.
“When Mr. Hawker disappeared behind the trees he undoubtedly had his elevator lever hard back, and, as he was then banked well over to the right, his elevators were acting, if they were acting at all, as rudders, and so were forcing his tail round and increasing the spin. In this position the rudder should act as an elevator and throw the nose of the machine down, so causing a straight nose-dive from which it should be easy to recover. Mr. Hawker tells me that he tried to do this, but could not get it round against the air pressure, and he ascribes this to the rudder being of the unbalanced type. He thinks that with a balanced rudder and no fin he could have done it.
“Also, he admits that if he had pushed the elevator forward as soon as he found the spin developing, and had made a straight dive, he could have pulled up straight, but he thought he was too near the ground to risk doing so.