Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps

by James R. Driscoll

  CHAPTER V

  JIMMY HILL STARTLES THE VETERANS

  The Brighton boys lived every hour at that big base airdrome. JimmyHill was sent up on his first practice flight on an English machine.Joe Little got his chance at the end of a week. He was sent up onemorning in a late-type bombing machine, a huge three-seated biplanewith great spreading wings and a powerful engine. This was a mostformidable looking machine in which one passenger sat out in frontmounted in a sort of machine-gun turret. The big biplane was fast,in spite of the heavy armament it carried, its three passengers andits arrangement for carrying hundreds of pounds of bombs as well.

  Harry Corwin was in the air at the same time on an artillery machine,the car or fuselage of which projected far in front of the two planes.There, well in front of the pilot, the observer sat in a turret witha machine-gun. Machine-guns were also mounted on the wings, and asecond passenger rode in the tail with another rapid-fire gun.

  As Bob Haines had been on a rather long flight that day on a Nieuport,a fast French biplane, and his observer had told Bob of a new Frenchdreadnought machine carrying two machine gunners and five machine-guns,the boys talked armament long into the night.

  Every day they learned some new points. One afternoon a pilot fromthe front line told of a captured German Albatros, which he spun yarnsabout for an hour. A single-seater, armed with three machine-gunswhich, being controlled by the motor, or engine, shot automaticallyand at the same time through the propeller in front of the pilot, withthe highest speed of any aeroplane then evolved on the fighting front,with a reputation of being able to climb to an altitude of fifteenthousand feet in less than fifteen minutes---some said in so short atime as ten minutes---the crack German machine had attracted muchattention.

  "With that sort of thing against us," said Dicky Mann, "we havecertainly got to learn to fly."

  The same thought may have come to their squadron commander that night,for the next day saw the start of real post-graduate work in flyingfor his command. The rule at the base airdrome had been to givenew units of well-trained flyers good all-round tests on varioustypes of machines. This involved straight flying for the most part,and was done more with the idea of familiarizing the newcomers withthe newer types of planes, and deciding for which branch of the workthey were best suited, than for anything else. In the work that gavethe finishing touch to his command, their squadron commander selectedthree of the six Brighton boys as candidates for high honors in thedays to come. Every one of the half dozen was good. All were eager.All flew well. But Joe Little, Jimmy Hill and Harry Corwin seemedmade of exactly the sort of stuff from which flying stars were evolved.

  "I think I will try to make hunters out of those three boys," saidtheir commander to the officer in charge of the base airdrome.

  "Our plan here," said the officer thus addressed, "is to pass youngstersout after they have satisfactorily gone through a final test of twoshort voyages of twenty-five miles each, two long voyages of onehundred and thirty-five miles each and an hour's flight at a minimumaltitude of sixty-five hundred feet. The post-graduate course ismostly aerial acrobatics. Looping the loop comes first. All ofthem can do that. The flier must then do flip-flops, wing slips,vertical twists and spinning nose dives."

  "Just what do you call a spinning nose dive?" asked the squadroncommander.

  The chief explained: "Climbing to at least four thousand feet, thepilot cuts off his motor and crosses his controls. This causes themachine first to scoop upward and then fall sidewise, the nose of theplane, down vertically, spinning around and around as it falls."

  "That sounds interesting," said the commander.

  "More," continued the chief. "It is necessary. Skill in the airnowadays means all the difference between life and death---all thedifference between success and defeat. I have an idea that we havecome nearer to the limit of human possibility as regards speed in theair than many people think. Two hundred miles an hour may never bereached. But whether it is or not, we can get better and betterresults by paying more and more attention to the development of ouraerial athletes.

  "I look on flyers as athletes playing a game---the greatest gamethe world has ever seen. The more expert we can make them individually,the better the service will be. A nimble flyer, a real star man, isalmost sure to score off a less expert antagonist, even if the betterman is mounted on an inferior plane. That has been proven to me beyondall possibility of doubt time and time again.

  "I was once a football coach. My work here, so far as it touches men,is very similar to coaching work. It comes down to picking the goodones, sorting them out, weeding, weeding all the time. You likethose particular three boys you referred to? Well, watch them.Give them chances. But don't be disappointed if they are not allworld-beaters. And don't be surprised if some of the lot you thinkwill stick at the steadier, plainer work turn out big. You never cantell."

  Before the strain of expert acrobatics came careful training inmachine-gunnery. The Brighton boys went through a course of study onland that made them thoroughly familiar with machine-guns of morethan one type. Machine-guns, they found, were in all sorts ofpositions on the different sorts of machines.

  "I wonder where they will put a rapid-fire gun next?" said Joe Littleone day at luncheon. "Let's see. I saw one plane this morning thathad a gun mounted on the upper plane, and fired above the propeller.Another next to it had the gun placed in the usual position in front,and fired through the propeller. Next I ran across a movable gunon a rotating base fixed at the rear of the supporting planes. Ofcourse all of those big triple planes have the fuselage mounting,and I was surprised to see still another sort of mounting, a movablegun fixed behind the keel of one of those new English 'pushers,' justas I came in. It keeps a fellow busy to see all the new things here,and no mistake."

  "Your talk is so much Greek to me sometimes, Joe," said Bob Haines."You use so much technical language when you get going that you fogme. I can make a plane do what it is supposed to do, most of thetime, but some of these special ideas floor me, and I am not ashamedto admit it."

  "What is worrying you specially?" asked Jimmy Hill, smiling.

  Bob was one of the soundest fliers of the six of them, but he wasforever making hard work out of anything he did not understand from theground up. Once he had mastered the why and wherefore, he was atpeace, but if the reason was hidden from him he was never quite sureon that point.

  "It is this," answered Bob. "Most all of the machines they have beenputting me up against lately have been those speedy little one-manthings---the hunters. Now I understand all about the necessity forspeed and agility in that type, and I can see that the fixed gun infront, sticking out like a finger in such fashion that you have topoint the plane at a Boche to point the gun at him, is a thing theycan't well get away from. That Hartford type of hunter just overfrom home is rigged up that way, and I can get the little gun onher pointed anyway I like. But all guns fixed that way fire throughthe propeller, and just exactly how all those bullets manage to getthrough those whirring blades without hitting one of them is notquite clear to me yet."

  "Go it, Joe," said Harry Corwin. "You spent a good time listeningto what that French pilot said about Garros the other day."

  "The Frenchman told me that a very well known pilot of the early daysof the war, named Garros, invented the arrangement whereby a gun couldbe so mounted that the bullets went through the arc of therevolving propeller blades," answered Joe. "He said, too, thatGarros had the bad luck to be taken prisoner, and the Germans gothis machine before he had any chance to destroy it. That was theway the Germans got hold of the idea. Garros simply designed a bitof mechanism that automatically stops the gun from firing when thepropeller blade is passing directly in front of the gun-barrel. Heplaced the gun-barrel directly behind the propeller. He then made acam device so regulated as to fire the gun with a delay not exceedingone five-hundredth of a second. As soon as the blade of thepropeller passes the barrel the system liberates the
firing mechanismof the gun until another blade passes, or is about to pass, whenthe bullets that would pierce it are held up, just for thatfraction of a second, again. So it goes on, like clockwork. Youhave noticed that on the new planes all the pilot has to do whenhe wants to fire his machine-gun is to press a small lever whichis set, on most planes, in the handle of the directing lever. Thatsmall lever acts, by the mechanism I have told you about, on thetrigger of the gun. It is simple enough."

  "Yes," admitted Bob, "it does not sound very complicated, but it seemsvery wonderful, all the same. Most things out here are wonderful whenyou first run into them, though."

  Of the group of Brighton boys selected by the squadron commander tostudy the finer points of aerial acrobatics, Joe Little was the star,with Harry Corwin a very close second and Jimmy Hill a good third.Their education, as the days went past, became a series of experimentsthat were nothing short of hair-raising to any onlookers save mostexperienced ones.

  To see Joe, in a wasp of a plane, swift and agile, start it whirlinglike a pinwheel with the tip of its own wing as an axis, and fall forthousands of feet as it whirled, only to catch himself and right thespeedy plane when lees than a thousand feet from the earth, was indeeda sight to make one hold one's breath.

  Jimmy Hill learned a dodge that interested older aviators. Loopingthe loop sidewise, he would catch the plane when upside down, and shootaway at a tangent, head down, the machine absolutely inverted---thencontinue the side loop, bringing him back to upright again somedistance from where he had originally begun his evolution.

  Watching him at this stunt, a veteran pilot said to the chief onemorning: "That turn will save that kid's life one day. See if it don't."And sure enough, one day, it did.

  Harry learned what a French friend had told him the great Guynemer,king of all French fliers, had christened "the dead leaf." Withthe plane bottom side up, the pilot lets it fall, now whirling downward,now seeming to hang for a moment, suspended in midair, now caught byan eddy and tossed upward, just like a dead leaf is tossed by anautumn wind.

  Joe could nose-dive to perfection. He would hover high up, at wellover ten thousand feet from the ground, then drop straight for theearth, like a plummet, nose directly downward, seemingly bent ondestruction. When still at a safe distance up, he would graduallyease his rush through the air by "teasing her a bit," as he calledit. Then, before the eye from below could follow his evolutions,he would be skimming off on a level course like a swallow.

  The day came at last when the squadron was "moved up front" for actualwork over the enemy's lines. The Brighton boys were ready and eagerto give a good account of themselves, and soon they were to beaccorded ample opportunity.