“What happens next, Tommy?”
“I do not know… shall we drive into Salisbury tomorrow, or perhaps take the train up to London? We could do a bit of shopping, perhaps see a show and take the last train back. We cannot spend our days in grief, you know – even though we may feel it.”
“Not a show, that would be too much. But a visit to London would be a good idea – we cannot just do nothing, can we?”
A letter came from Mr Sopwith, suggesting to Tommy that he should live in a hotel in Kingston-upon-Thames, close to the factory, Monday to Thursday, returning home for his weekends, possibly longer during the winter months when flying might be less possible. The firm had booked him rooms assuming that he would follow their suggested course. He drove off early on the Monday morning, a pair of newly purchased leather cases on the rear seat.
“All very much up in the air, one might say, Tommy, just at the moment. We have our ideas on the drawing boards, several of them, and I am busy with the Naval float-planes for the while, but we do not really know what is wanted. We cannot find anyone in the Army or the RFC or the government who will simply tell us what we should try to provide for them. The Royal Aircraft Factory is to produce the reconnaissance craft, and they are looking at an experimental pusher to carry Lewis Guns to act as escort for them. De Havilland is pursuing his own ideas in that field as well; so are Vickers, hoping to improve their Gun Bus, but they seem to be working with the Royal Aircraft Factory, in terms of design, but nothing is clear and above-board and it may be a wholly separate machine. We could produce a heavier bombardment machine, perhaps, but not unless we are told what is wanted and for what particular purpose. Besides that, I am not too happy with the bigger machines with more than one engine!”
“Then, what am I to do, Mr Sopwith?”
“Not a great deal here for the while, Tommy. We are developing a prototype of a very small, nippy sort of successor to the Tabloid, which I have some hopes of. Much to be said for the lightweight aeroplane, powered by a rotary, of course – that is very much my opinion.”
“My father said the same, sir. What of the fuel tank? What sort of range can the small machine offer?”
“That, Tommy, one must admit, is a problem. Not much in excess of an hour in the air, at the moment.”
“To be honest then, Mr Sopwith, it will be of no use to us at all. Say eighty miles an hour, that means to turn back after a maximum of forty miles. If the airfield is twenty miles behind the lines, then that leaves at absolute most twenty-five minutes over the fighting area. Think how many machines and pilots we would need to keep a patrol of four machines up during a summer’s day, sir!”
Sopwith counted and decided that they would need at least thirty, and each of them making five or six patrols.
“Tiring, sir! Landing five or six times, to achieve a bare two hours in the proper place. Any useful machine must have two and a half hours in its petrol tank, sir.”
“Well… I suppose you are right, Tommy. A pity, but you make a good argument – which makes it worthwhile having you here – nothing like experience in its proper place! Especially in a young man, because flying ain’t for greybeards, that’s for sure.”
Sopwith was only a few years older than Tommy, a reason perhaps for his difficulties with the Army and the government, both convinced that wisdom came with age.
“What does Mr Hawker say, sir?”
“The same as me, Tommy. He has no experience at all of flying in war – it was his insistence that we needed to hear from you fellows in the RFC that led to me asking for you to come here.”
Hawker, an Australian, was the much-respected testing pilot and designer who had worked with Sopwith almost from his first days in aviation.
“You have shot down a German, Tommy. What does a machine really need for a pilot to be successful in such a battle?”
“A heavy machine-gun; a powerful engine; manoeuvrability; speed; a way of firing to the front; a pilot who can shoot well. Pretty much in that order, sir. You might put the engine first – the ability to outclimb an enemy is probably very useful, and you must be able to carry gun and ammunition.”
“You seem to be less concerned about speed, Tommy?”
“If you are working as an escort, then the enemy comes to you, sir. If not, well, driving the enemy away is just as good as shooting him down – a flier who is forced to run cannot observe your people on the ground.”
“That does make sense, I must suppose. Firing to the front, now – how?”
“Mount a machine-gun high on the upper wing, to shoot over the arc of the airscrew, is simplest. Could you devise a sight for the pilot that would allow for the gun being above his head by some three feet or so?”
“I couldn’t, Tommy. I might be able to find an engineer who could, or a scientist perhaps… I don’t know what would be involved, but it must be fairly complicated, with lenses and things, like those periscopes they have in submarines, and probably heavy.”
“Not such a good idea. What do the Frogs have to say about the problem, do you know? They are ahead of us in some ways in their ideas about fighting in the air.”
“I have heard talk of deflectors, Tommy. Hardened steel wedges, mounted on a spinner or something like and attached to the blades of the propeller. Set your machine-gun to fire straight ahead and those bullets that hit the blades will do no harm, if it works. A light machine-gun, one must imagine.”
“Very good, but what happens to the rounds that actually hit the blades, sir? Where do they go?”
“Well… they must sort of bounce off… in any direction, depending on exactly where they hit… they will ricochet, will they not?”
“Backwards?”
“Some might… into the engine, perhaps.”
“Into the pilot?”
“Not very often, Tommy.”
“One would be too many, sir.”
“So it would… yes, I can see your objection. Not deflectors, Tommy!”
“There was work before the war on an interruptor gear, sir, one that would cause the gun not to fire when a blade was in the way.”
“Yes, Tommy, there was indeed! It worked with at least ninety-five per cent reliability.”
Tommy wiggled his fingers for a few seconds, turning a percentage into actual numbers.
“Hmm! Fire one hundred rounds and hit the prop five times, sir. Wooden airscrew. Not the best of games to play, sir!”
“It is not, Tommy. I believe that there are engineers working on the problem now. But I have small hopes of finding an immediate solution. Pushers are the sole answer I can discover for the short term, and they are simply not fast enough and cannot be thrown about the sky with any facility.”
“Pity. For the while, it’s carbine and pistol work, sir, and try to gang up on the Taubes and bully them. No other choice. The Taubes are slow enough that they can be caught and chased away, from all we have seen. The German biplanes may be a different matter, but they are no better armed than us, so it will be a question of whether to concentrate on our own observations or interfere with theirs.”
That was a decision to be taken by the senior officers in France – they had nothing to say to it.
“Fly our prototype today and tomorrow, Tommy. Give an opinion at least.”
“Be pleased to, sir. I need to try my leg out, make sure I still remember how to do it.”
Mr Hawker said the prototype was very well-mannered, quite speedy and at least as nippy as the Tabloid.
“Not better than the Tabloid?”
“No. To be honest, Tommy, it is a dead-end. We need a new set of ideas on the design side – got a bit stale, you know.”
Tommy pulled out his flying coat, the whiff of castor oil causing his stomach to churn reminiscently and somehow seeming to change his whole way of thinking; he was a flier again, no doubts and too few fears. He inspected the little biplane, sat in the seat and gripped the control lever and felt entirely comfortable.
A mechanic span the prop
eller and he sat for a minute or two, listening, picking up the sounds of the new machine, waiting for temperatures to rise and oil pressure to stabilise. He called for the chocks to be pulled away, taxyed out, glanced at the orange streamer and turned into the wind and sped into his take-off run, the rotary engine at full revolutions, as always. The tail rose and he held the stick forward, refusing the first attempts to leave the ground – he had no wish to entertain his audience by bouncing. With a good five miles an hour in hand he eased the stick back into a gentle climb. The machine felt as if it could do much more; when he had come to know it he would see exactly what it was like, but not until he had the feel.
An easy three hundred feet a minute and he took her up to two thousand feet before levelling off and quietly establishing just what she felt like in level flight. He was no glory boy, had nothing to prove, was perfectly happy to pootle about for as long as it took to be comfortable. He banked slowly, taking the feel of the rudder, left first, against the spin of the rotary, then very delicately indeed to the right, feeling the aeroplane trying to snatch into a hard bank and possibly into a spin, the great vice of every rotary engined machine. He was sure that it must be possible to escape from a spin; centre the controls and then allow the dive with almost no power, then gently pull into a zoom, opening up the while, keeping above stalling speed… the theory was good, he was certain, but he would wait before putting it to the test – he was not tired of life yet, was not ready to take the risk.
It was a well-behaved machine, as Mr Hawker had said. He banked more steeply, dived and zoomed and then pulled her over into a controlled loop, careful not to fall off, to maintain full balance. The Thames was in sight and he could place himself at all times – no sense in straying too far from the field, possibly getting lost over the great mass of identical streets of the suburbs. He had joined in the laughter at Brooklands in the past when a pilot made an embarrassed telephone call to say that he had been unable to find his way home and had had to land in a farmer’s field. Easy done in the countryside, but he would not like to try to put down in the streets of south London.
He circled the aerodrome, his turns very precise, losing no height at all – he was being watched. They knew that he had been wounded and had been lucky to get back to his field; they would be eyeing him very carefully for any sign that he had lost his confidence. He lined up into the wind, lost speed until he could get the feel that the machine was close to stall, gave himself another three miles an hour and put himself onto an exact line, a glide path they were starting to call it, and brought the little aeroplane into a tidy landing inside fifty yards and taxyed back to his starting point outside the hangar.
“What do you think of her, Tommy?”
“Neat, tidy, workmanlike, sir. A useful little machine for a commanding officer, perhaps, to use as a runabout to Headquarters or to another field to talk with the colonel. Other than that? Single-seater, so small value for observation. No great weight capacity – one could not carry bombs or a gun. It has no real function, sir, not in the RFC.”
Hawker nodded in the background; he had been making the same argument.
“What do we need, Tommy?”
“A purpose, I think, sir. Ask first what the machine is to do, and then design it to that end. At the moment, we seem to build machines and then ask what we can do with them – all back to front. There are three different gun-carrying pushers in the building, you tell me, and we have the BE2c for reconnaissance, so the need is for a bombardment machine, sir. One hundred miles an hour and one hundred pounds of bombs, that should be the first aim.”
It seemed rather boring as an ambition, Mr Sopwith thought; he was sure he could build a small pursuit machine to carry a Lewis Gun on the upper wing and achieve at least one hundred and ten and be as agile as the Tabloid.
Tommy spent two days with Sopwith before driving across to Airco and Major de Havilland.
“The DH1, Tommy! More or less Farman configuration, but one or two ideas of my own. But, Tommy – no bloody engines! Designed for the Beardmore one hundred and twenty horsepower in-line engine, but the Royal Aircraft Factory is taking every one of them for its own machines. What we have actually got is the Renault seventy hp Vee-Eight configuration. Slower rate of climb, carries less, no more than eighty miles an hour! Two-seater and the observer in the front with a Lewis on swivel mountings, three of them so that he can switch the gun between them to fire ahead or left or right.”
Tommy looked at the machine, a bathtub nacelle with wheels below it and wings tacked on; twin lattice booms leading to the empennage, horizontal stabilisers as normal and a rudder showing down rather than higher than the pilot’s head, and far smaller than he liked at first sight. A pusher, of course, the engine to the rear, the airscrew in between the booms.
“Vertical stability, sir? Rudder is rather limited in area?”
“Makes it very nippy, Tommy! Turn on a sixpence!”
“Just as long as it don’t spin on a penny, sir!”
“We have an order for a first fifty, Tommy. Thinking of the DH2 now and how best to improve on it. Take her up a few times and give me a practical opinion, dear boy!”
“Certainly, sir. Landing speed, sir?”
“Just over forty, Tommy. From what they say, better a little too fast than anything too slow.”
That suggested to Tommy that the DH1 could stall very easily. Not necessarily a bad thing, because it meant that the machine was inherently unstable, and so could be stunted, a facility that the BE2c most certainly did not possess. The machine would have to be actively flown, by a good pilot, while the BE2c simply needed to be driven; the DH1 demanded more training and skilled fliers, who were currently in short supply.
“Endurance, sir?”
“Two hours, at least.”
Tommy nodded and noted that he would return to the ground after at most ninety minutes; in his experience designers tended to be a little enthusiastic about their aeroplanes’ capabilities.
“At least it’s not one of these gut-churning rotaries, sir. Castor oil promises to shorten my life-span!”
De Havilland laughed, but he was not in the habit of flying a rotary.
“Sandbags to the front cockpit, sir?”
“At least one hundred pounds, Tommy – you have neither observer nor gun aboard. You might prefer a little more, in fact.”
Tommy sat down in the little office given over to the use of the pilots, mainly for storing charts and maps. Five minutes of calculation said that an average man in flying clothing must weigh about one hundred and forty pounds; a Lewis Gun weighed twenty-eight; say four pans of ammunition, at forty-seven rounds apiece, must be another twenty pounds, perhaps a little less. About one hundred and eighty pounds, all sat right forward, in the front cockpit. Without sandbags the machine must be intolerably tail-heavy. Start with one hundred and fifty pounds, or thereabouts – what did a sandbag weigh, how many would he need?
It took two hours to weigh up the bags and then fix them firmly into the front cockpit – he did not want them to fall out when he was banking, for example. Major de Havilland was surprised but not disapproving.
“I was told that you were a cautious and methodical flier, Tommy. I did not realise just how much so.”
“How many pilots do you know of my age, sir? How many are in their fifth year of flying? With close to fifteen hundred hours in their logbooks as well, sir?”
“Point taken, Tommy. I knew your father well, of course, and thought you might have picked up some of his, shall we say happy-go-lucky tendencies.”
“I buried them with him, sir.”
“Sorry! Tactless of me, Tommy!”
“Not to worry, sir. I had a great kindness for my father – he was a truly gentle man, sir. But that did not prevent me from worrying about some of his ways, sir. He was much inclined to the belief that things would all come right because he wanted them to. I tend to have the opposite point of view. In flying, that is, sir. I married a few weeks ago,
as you know, and that was one of the wisest actions I have ever taken – assuming, that is, that I took it – I have a very strong suspicion that my bride had been working me towards the altar since she was about ten years of age! I am glad she was successful!”
“Another reason to fly cautiously, Tommy.”
“Not quite, sir. I don’t think I fly cautiously, but I do try to prepare properly on the ground. A different concept, sir.”
Tommy had been dressing as he spoke, scarf and leather coat over a fleece waistcoat; well- polished goggles; tight leather flying helmet over a knitted woollen head covering; whale grease smeared onto his unprotected cheeks.
“I wore one of these balaclava helmets, sir, once; the exposed wool became wet, and then froze; not very pleasant when I landed and tried to take it off.”
“What of your hands, Tommy?”
“I tried leather gauntlets, but they affected my touch, I found. Woollen gloves – the same as the balaclava. I have a pair of thin driving gloves, but they seem to make no difference – the fingers still freeze!”
“Silk?”
“Never considered that, sir. Can one buy silk gloves?”
“One can buy anything in London, Tommy. I shall have a word with people I know.”
“Thank you, sir. By the way, what are the holes on either side of the cockpit, as if there had been a fitment of some sort?”
De Havilland reddened, coughed embarrassedly.
“Ah, yes… They seemed to be a very good idea, Tommy, at the time, that was. Didn’t work quite so well in testing, it transpired; in fact I was quite surprised the first time I took her up.”
“You removed them, sir? What were they?”
“A pair of small aerofoils, winglets, I suppose you could call them. On rotatable mountings. The idea was that the pilot could, manually, shift one or both towards the vertical, to act as an airbrake, one might say, in case of need, or to allow for a much tighter turn left or right.”
Tommy thought for a few seconds; it was a superficially attractive idea. There was much to be said for the violent manoeuvre if there was an enemy shooting at one, but not perhaps so violent that it tore the wings off or catapulted the machine into a spin.
A Deadly Caper (Innocents At War Series, Book 2) Page 5