FROM the pages of the November 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

Personalities of the Planes

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, November 1934)

NOW if you youngsters will get the gun cotton out of your ears I’ll tell you something that you might not have thought of before. I’m going to tell you why they sometimes call an airplane “she” just like they call a steamship or sailing ship “she.”

It’s because they all have personalities of their own, and because their personalities are so cranky usually that you can’t expect to know what they’re going to do next until you get well-acquainted with them, and by that time you don’t care much what they do. So, having personalities so much like women, we naturally call them “she” and a lot of other names that you cannot write about in a magazine.

So, if you’ll sit up I’ll try to introduce you to a bunch of the ladies and tell you some of the little things about them that you don’t ordinarily hear when they just tell you their names and addresses.

Most of ’Em British

Now most of the ladies we Americans got acquainted with were British, with just a few French gals thrown in to make it exciting.

For instance, the first lady your Uncle Eddie met when he got over in nineteen-fifteen was a gal who had just been built and had officially been named the E.F.B.5.

But that name naturally wouldn’t do for us, so we quickly got to calling her the Vickers Gun Bus, Fig. 1, You see, at this time, the war was just getting under way like it meant real business, and it had become apparent to the big shots that the airplane was going to play an important part in it.

Some Advance!

Before that they had been sending ships up with the pilots armed only with pistols or carbines or brickbats. But that didn’t work so well, so the result was an airplane with a machine-gun attachment. And boy, in those days that was some advance.

But you should have seen that old Gun Bus. Today you’d laugh your head off just looking at it, but we took it pretty seriously. She was the most famous of the early crates.

To look at her you would think the designer got his idea from a flying coffin. The nacelle sat up in front and stuck out forward of the wings. Behind the nacelle or fuselage if you could dignify it by that name—which you couldn’t—was a lot of outrigger gear with a tail stuck on it. It looked kind of like a small windmill stand sticking outward to the rear.

And then the wheels were back to the rear of the center of gravity and they had one of those landing skid arrangements in front of it so you wouldn’t nose over and bash in your face.

The Latest Thing

But boy, in those days here was what we called the latest thing in ladies of the air. The thing had a gun mounted on it, and if you don’t think that was a welcomed innovation you should have been there. The gunner sat out in front in that little cockpit of his with nothing but a lot of ozone under him, and shouted for the Heinies to come up and see me some time. He thought he was sitting on top of the world, which he was, because that gun stuck out so far in front that he had all kinds of angles through which he could aim it.

And the gal was the talk of the town because she was fast—or at least what we thought was fast in those days.

She could hit off at least sixty and seventy miles an hour! And was that getting there?

She Had B.O.

But she fitted in with those present-day soap ads. People whispered behind her back. She had B.O. That was because her 80 h.p. Gnome rotary motor burned castor oil—and no lady motor can burn that stuff and have her friends around without their holding their noses.

Anyway, she was a good old ship until a Miss Sopwith, Fig. 2, came along. That was in nineteen-sixteen, and this new gal was right up to the minute. She was beginning to look like an airplane. And just like the women in those days who tried to see how much wingspread they could carry by making their hats bigger and bigger, this Sopwith went in for wingspread in a big way by taking on an extra wing, becoming a triplane.

We kind of liked the miss because she could get upstairs in a hurry, faster in her time than any other gal on the front. But she was like a lot of the other high flyers and was unreliable in the pinches.

When You Wanted to Dive

There were times when you wanted to dive and dive in a hurry. And in times like this you felt a little worried about the gal because she could go up fast enough but she couldn’t take a dive either fast enough or safe enough to suit your hurry. It was there she showed her weakness.

Once in a while when you wanted to get back to the ground worse than you wanted to do anything else in the world she’d take you down all right—by shedding her wings. That let you down fast enough—but never easy enough. They often had to pick you up with a shovel and broom.

But she was a smart-looking gal, and so the Germans came out with their famous Fokker Triplane, Fig 2. There is plenty of argument as to whether they swiped the Sop design lock, stock and barrel. Most of us believe they did. And there’s plenty of proof. You know, if you steal a lead nickel you’ve got a piece of money that isn’t any good. The Germans’ idea wasn’t any better. They swiped the Sop, and the result was that the Fokker had just the same trouble we did. They built the ships faster, and the result was they lost more wings. There ought to be a moral hidden in that if you can find it.

The Flyers’ Sweetheart

And just about that time was born the sweetheart of all flyers—the Bristol Fighter, Fig 1. Just to prove what a good gal she was it is only necessary to say that she was the only ship that the British held on to long after the war. In fact, she wasn’t declared obsolescent until nineteen-thirty-two. That’s a mighty long life for any type of airplane, what with the steady advance of design.

She was a two-seater that had more uses than the proverbial “gadget.” They were originally intended for reconnaissance-fighters, but it wasn’t long before they used her for almost everything. She toted bombs, did photographic duty, spotted for artillery and even strafed trenches, besides being used for escorts and training. She was one gal you could stunt with and have hopes of setting her down intact when you got through.

Equipped with Stingers

And she was welbequipped with stingers. She had a Vickers gun synchronized through the prop and a Lewis gun on the scarff ring in the rear cockpit. They started her out in nineteen-seventeen with a 200 h.p. Hisso or Sunbeam Arab and got 120 m.p.h. out of her. Then they gave her a 250 Rolls-Royce Falcon and kicked her speed up to 130 m.p.h. She could take it. With that new powerhouse you could boot her up to 15,000 feet in twenty minutes, which was climbing in them days! And she had a slow landing speed of 45 m.p.h.

And she was just a nice size for proper handling, having a 39-foot, span and a 25-foot length, with a height of ten feet and a five-foot-six chord. It’ll be a long time before another ship gets as far ahead of her time as that Bristol baby. I knew her well.

A Great Family

But it seems like we couldn’t stay away from the Sopwith girls. That was a great family. So here before we knew it was another one of the sisters all rigged out and ready to step. She was the Sopwith Pup, Fig. 3. She made her debut in nineteen-fifteen and sixteen. And she was a knockout for beauty. She wore an 80 h.p. LeRhone Rotary in her hair and could get over the country, considering her small power plant.

She could get off the ground in a hurry and put five thousand feet under her in seven minutes. And when she got upstairs she was ready to talk business at the point of a Vickers fitted on the cowling to fire through the prop while she herself danced around at the rate of 99 miles per hour. She carried nearly twenty gallons of gas and five gallons of oil, and could stay in the air long enough for her to do some real damage to the Germans. And she did just that, for there was many ah Ace that piled up his score behind her guns.

Smaller, But—

She was a lot smaller than Miss Bristol, being only 26 feet across the hips. But don’t think she didn’t get there.

And she had a larger sister that you ought to get acquainted with, just to see how different sisters can be. The sister was Sopwith Camel, Fig. 3, and she was just as tricky as Pup was reliable.

Would she burn you up? And I mean that literally. This is the way it would happen. She was a kind of big Pup who was built to be still faster and more maneuverable. In order to do this she had to sacrifice some of Pup’s good qualities, and she was therefore tricky to fly, and dangerous to land. Her engine, a nine-cylinder Gnome-Monosouppe delighted in setting you on fire.

No Carburetor! No Throttle!

This was because that crazy power plant had no carburetor nor any throttle. The only way you could slow her down once she got started was to cut the ignition from certain of her cylinders.

The result was that the gas vapor would go through those cylinders without burning until it got into the exhaust. And right there the sparks from the other cylinders would ignite it. The result was a nice long sheet of flame pouring out of the exhaust into the slipstream. That made it nice and hot for you if it didn’t ignite the whole ship and leave you well-browned on both sides. Yes, sir, the old gal was hot stuff.

But she was a good old work horse when you got to know her and didn’t mind her spitting fire in your face. And she was armed to the teeth. She had two Vickers guns on the cowling and often a Lewis on the top wing just to balance things off.

Could Do Real Damage

She got a lot better when they took that crazy engine out and put a Clerget in. That sped her up to around 140 miles per hour and made her climb a thousand feet a minute. She could stay in the air two and a half hours a trip, and do real damage.

I suppose I ought to mention a lot of the other gals that helped make that war an exciting one, but there were so many that it is only possible to take a hop, skip and jump down the line and say howdy to a representative few of them.

I ought to tell you about still another Sopwith sister, that we called the one-and-one-half strutter. And I ought to tell you about some of the French ships, and a lot of others. But you’ll have to wait breathlessly for that. Just now, I’ve got a date with a modern little miss that could fly right around a lot of those good old babies, and she’s not armed with Vickers guns either.

Be seeing you.

FROM the pages of the November 1932 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing R. Sidney Bowen to conduct a technical department each month. It is Mr. Bowen’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Mr. Bowen is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot of the Royal Air Force, but also because he has been the editor of one of the foremost technical journals of aviation.

Tricky Ships

by Robert Sidney Bowen (Sky Fighters, November 1932)

POWERLESS to do a single thing about it, the members of the 23rd pursuits watched the lone Camel flatspinning down to total destruction. Its pilot was plainly visible, battling the controls. But his frantic efforts were to no avail. Seconds later the nose struck, flames leaped skyward, and another pilot was added to the long list of tricky ship victims. . . .

And that, fledglings, was the way more than one Hun-getter checked in his chips during the late war . . . a victim of a tricky ship, not Spandaus lead. Now, don’t go getting the idea that those lads were dumb pilots, else they wouldn’t have allowed their crates to throw them. That’s not the idea at all. More than a few crack pilots got into trouble with a tricky ship and lost the decision. What we are going to try and point out this meeting is that during the late war a peelot had to be a heads-up peelot for reasons other than those manufactured in Germany.

Present day ships are so well designed and constructed that you can almost go to sleep and let them fly on by themselves. They are steady as a rock even in pretty punk weather, and when anything does happen there is always the good old ’chute-pack on your back. All you have to do is step overboard, count six and pull the ring. But the war crates? Ah, there you have something different . . . mighty different, and don’t you forget it! In the first place, they were all designs of 1914-1918 vintage, naturally. Designers didn’t know as much then as they do now. And, there were no parachutes for pilots. The Germans started using ’chutes during the last year of the war, but the Yanks, English and French never had them except for balloon work.

That statement may surprise you, after some of the war-air yarns that you’ve been reading. But it happens to be a fact, and any war peelot will check on that statement.

But to get back to the business of these tricky ships. That questionasking fledgling over there in the corner looks like he’s ready to burst with curiosity, so I’ll talk fast and maybe choke him off.

JUST for the heck of it, we’ll take some of the war crates, one by one, and elaborate on their tricky features and peculiarities.

Of course, the Sopwith Camel is the first on the list. Of all the tricky ships that crossed over No-Man’s-Land the Camel was the trickiest of them all. A wonderful stunting crate, and great stuff in a dog scrap, but my, my, how you had to watch that baby and check its tendency to throw you for a flock of wooden kimonos!

The Camel was powered with a Clerget, Le Rhone, and later for high altitude work, with a 210 Bentely. All three were rotary engines. And all three gave the ship its nasty desire to flip over and down on right wing and into a tight spin. It was propeller torque that did that. As I explained at another meeting, propeller torque is a tendency for a ship to go in the opposite direction to the rotation of the propeller blades. In a Camel the prop rotated from right to left (standing in front of the prop). Therefore the ship would try to swing to the right (the pilot’s right when in the cockpit). Naturally, the way to counteract that was to keep on a bit of left rudder all the time. In other words, when you wanted to make a right bank you really eased up a bit on left rudder and let the torque carry you around, instead of actually putting on right rudder. The Camel was also rigged to whip around on a dime, and that helped the engine torque idea all the more. There was no dihedral on the top wings, but there was about two degrees on the bottom ones.

What’s that? What’s dihedral?

Well, Fledgling, dihedral of airplane wings is the angle of a wing upwards and outwards to the horizontal. In other words, if a wing is pefectly flat it has no dihedral, but if it tilts upwards it has. No dihedral reduces the horizontal stability of a plane, and in this way. The area under a tilted flat wing is the same on either side of the fuselage. But when there is dihedral the area (called horizontal equivalent) becomes increased on the down-tilted side and increased on the up-tilted side. Therefore the natural reaction is for the plane to right itself to an even keel.

Naturally the dihedral on the lower wings of a Camel was put there so that the ship wouldn’t fly completely wild, but still be a fast maneuvering ship. Never having experienced such a thing, I can’t go on record definitely, but I would say that flying a Camel with no dihedral on any of the wings would be just like going down a mountain road at midnight, with both headlights on the blink. You’d just hang on and pray that you didn’t hit anything.

WHENEVER a pilot slipped up in alertness and engine torque whipped a Camel over on its right wing, it always fell into a tight spin. Now a spin is nothing to get grayhaired about, even in a Camel, if you have altitude. BUT, the camel was so darn sensitive to the controls that when you took it out of a spin you had to be mighty careful lest it didn’t flip right over into a spin in the opposite direction. In case you don’t know, you stop a plane from spinning by moving the controls as though you wanted the ship to spin in the other direction. But as soon as the ship stopped spinning the original way, you checked its tendency to flop over on the opposite side, and began to get the nose up. In a Camel split-second checking was in order. You couldn’t take your time about it. The instant the ship stopped spinning you had to check and get the nose up, else you went spinning down in the opposite direction, and had the whole darn job to do all over again.

THERE was also another tricky feature of the Camel, and one which cost many lives. That was the tendency of the ship to go past the vertical when diving.

You would start a steep dive in a Camel and unless you watched the ship the nose would start to swing back to the rear, and before you knew it you were diving backwards as though you were going to pull an outside loop. The way to get out of that was to pull the stick back so that the nose would start moving forward, and then when you got vertical again to slowly ease the nose up. But it was right at that moment when a lot of chaps checked out of the world, and for this reason. When a Camel’s nose starts back toward the vertical, after being past it, it comes slowly at first but as it reaches the vertical it develops a vicious tendency to whip upward in a zoom. If you don’t check that and hold the ship steady in a vertical dive, and ease up slowly, why, the result is that you lose your wings. The savage up-thrust of the plane, with the top surfaces of the ship broadside to the line of motion, just wipes the wings off as though they were so much paper.

Now, if you’ve been listening to me, instead of falling asleep like that fledgling over there, why, you’ll realize that both of the principal tricky features of a Camel can be hooked up together. But, in case you don’t, it’s like this. You’re buzzing along, and start to make a right bank, a split-arc turn. You take off too much left rudder, and zowie, engine torque whips you over to the right and into a spin. You start to take it out, don’t check it in time and zowie, it flops over into an opposite spin. You start to take it out, check it this time, but before you realize it you’re diving past the vertical before you’ve had time to start getting the nose up. Well, you try to get the nose forward to the vertical, and then when it gets to the vertical you don’t hold it steady. Zowie the plane zooms up, the wings come off, and zowie . . . no more peeloting for you in this world! Now, do you get the idea?

ANOTHER tricky ship that Sopwith also made was the Sopwith Pup. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t what you’d call a dangerous ship. It was simply a crate that made you stay awake if you cared anything about seeing the girl friend again. It was a very small job, and naturally very light. And being light, it floated like a feather. And as it floated like a feather, the job of landing was just that much more difficult. Time and time again (until you got the hang of things) a greenhorn pilot would overshoot the field. Of course that’s okay provided the engine is still functioning. You simply feed it the hop, go around and try again. But in the event of a forced landing, why, the story was different. You only had one chance then, and if you didn’t make good you were just out of luck. The Pup came out before the Camel but was used mostly for training purposes. It was so small and light that it couldn’t stand the gaff in a dog-scrap.

In the early part of 1918 the Sopwith outfit came out with a ship called the Snipe. It was an improvement on the Camel, and was intended for high altitude work. Only two Snipe squadrons got out to France before the Armistice, and those only for a few weeks. But they certainly knocked the pants off the Fokkers, which proves what swell ships they were. The first model was known as the Unmodified Snipe. It was the tricky job. The fuselage was barrel shaped and the rudder and tail surfaces a bit too small. The result was that when you got into a spin it was the task of your life-time to get it out. The reason for that was this. The fuselage being so big and the tail surfaces so small, the slip-stream didn’t strike all of the surfaces. When the ship went into a spin an air-lock would be formed between the rudder and the elevators. That would practically render the controls useless. In other words the tail surfaces were so blanketed by the size of the fuselage that they wouldn’t get the proper grip on the air. (Fig. 2.) Once the ship got into a spin it was difficult to present a flat spin developing when you tried to take it out. It was practically impossible to come out of a flat spin. What you had to do was go back into a tight spin again and make another try to get past the flat spinning point. Just so’s you won’t be too confused about my jabbering, a tight spin is when the wings revolve about the fuselage as the axis. And a flat spin is when the plane pivots around the nose in a gyroscopic motion. In other words, the plane is at a slight angle to the vertical and the whole plane goes swinging around in a circle, sidewise.

Yeah, no fooling, a spin in an Unmodified Snipe was not so hot. We speak from experience about that item. One day during a joyhop we slipped into a spin at ten thousand feet, and it took us just eight thousand feet to get out of it. Another two thousand feet and yours truly wouldn’t be here chinning with you fledglings.

Later that fault was corrected in what was called the Modified Snipe. The elevators were made a bit bigger and the ship had a balanced rudder and balanced ailerons. And if you don’t know what those things are, why, just take a look at Fig. 3.

THE well known Spad might be called a tricky ship because it was more or less a flying brick, and didn’t have much of a gliding angle. Naturally, all that means that the Spad was heavy, and it was, darned heavy in proportion to the wing surface. Under full power it was a sweet ship, but when you cut the gun you had to look out. The nose just plopped right down and you started diving hellbent. In the event of a forced landing you had to decide on your field mighty quick, because you didn’t have much time to think it over. You just naturally lost ground too fast. We once had a Spad forced landing. The engine konked at two thousand feet and we were just able to make two and one-half gliding turns to get into a field. But, of course, maybe a GOOD pilot could have made five. Now, you know what we think of us!

Speaking of landing reminds me of the Sopwith Dolphin, a high altitude scout that came out in 1918. The cockpit was right under the top wing. In fact we got into it through an opening in the wing. It was a smooth job until it came time to land . . . then, hold her Newt! If you ground looped it was just too bad. Why? Well, you usually went over on your back, and there you were, head down in the cockpit and no way to get out because the opening in the top wing was right smack against the ground. And if the ship caught fire . . . well, you can figure that out for yourself! After several chaps got burned alive or had their necks broken, braces were put on the top wing so as to give the peelot exit room when he needed it.

A LOT of your heros in this mag fly the good old S.E.5 and S.E.5a, but we can’t list either as a tricky ship, because it was only tricky when the peelot was just plane dumb. We mean this. The S.E. had what was known as an adjustable tail plane. In other words, from the cockpit you could adjust the tail plane (section to which the elevators are attached), so that it would tilt up or down. In other words, you could make the ship nose heavy or tail heavy, just as you wished. When taking off you would tilt the tail plane upward and that would help you get into the air sooner. And in landing you’d do the same thing because the reaction would be for the nose to go up, and thus you would have less trouble getting the tail down for a nice three point landing. But when you forgot about that tail-plane the ship got real tricky. For instance, you might pile into an S.E., slam home the juice and go tearing across the field. If the tail-plane happened to be tilted down you’d probably dig your prop into the ground. Another case is when you’re landing and over-shoot the field. Well, you feed the hop to go around again, and pull back the stick to get more altitude. Well, if the tail plane has been tilted up, as it should be for a landing, why, you’ll just go zooming up quicker than you expected, and if you don’t re-adjust the tail plane you’ll find yourself on your back at a rather low altitude for that sort of thing. So, of course, S.E. peelots remembered that they had a tail-plane just like they remembered they had an engine in the nose!

WELL, here comes that hard-boiled C.O. of this mag, and the look in his eye says, scram. But before I do, just let me lip another word or two. Don’t get the idea that we bohunks who flew the war crates were supermen. Far from it, believe you, me! But some of the ships were tricky, as I’ve been explaining, and the war peelot who went to sleep on the job, or didn’t keep his mind on the race, was asking for a lot of trouble that wasn’t German-made, either. But even a dumb peelot could handle them okay, if he paid attention to his knitting. And the very fact that we used to fly them, and are still alive, proves the above statement beyond all possible argument.

And the same to you! S’long!

THIS November we’re celebrating William E. Barrett’s Birthday. Before he became renown for such classics as The Left Hand of God and Lilies of The Field, Barrett honed his craft across the pages of the pulp magazines—and nowhere more so than in War Birds and it’s companion magazine War Aces where he contributed smashing novels and novelettes, True tales of the Aces of the Great War, encyclopedic articles on the great war planes as well as other factual features. Here at Age of Aces Books he’s best known for his nine Iron Ace stories which ran in Sky Birds in the mid ’30s!

Among those factual features was “Is That a Fact?” which ran frequently in the pages of War Birds. It was an aviation themed version of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not kind of feature with hard to believe they’re true facts. Although written by Barrett, the feature was illustrated by noted cartoonist Victor “Vic Vac” Vaccarezza.

The February 1932 installment, from the pages of War Birds, features the Sop Pup, Jimmy McCudden, The First Tanks and Richthofen’s eightieth and final victory!

Next Monday Barrett touches on the R.F.C.’s first casualty, the great Manfred von Richthofen and his Circus and the Monument at Neuilly!