by Dan Hampton
In concert with Lilienthal, Octave Chanute believed in stable aircraft and devoted his considerable expertise in improving structural designs. A native-born Frenchman who became a U.S. citizen at age twenty-two, Chanute gained early fame as an engineer and urban planner. Designing both the Kansas City and Chicago stockyards, he was also the chief engineer for the Chicago & Alton Railroad. On July 3, 1869, the thirty-seven-year-old Chanute’s Hannibal Bridge opened in Kansas City, a tribute to his structural engineering skill and adaptability, two qualities that would propel him to the forefront of aviation.*
Always attracted by a challenge, in his midforties Chanute set out to overcome the technical difficulties plaguing aircraft enthusiasts, partnering with Augustus Moore Herring. The pair eventually constructed a lightweight biplane with extremely strong, straight wings. He ingeniously adapted the Pratt bridge truss design, which utilized a combination of vertical and diagonal members and evenly spread the aerodynamic load. This was a deliberate and highly significant departure from previous wings patterned after birds or bats. Chanute was aware that for man to fly he needed an engine for propulsion, and existing aircraft frames were either overengineered, like Maxim’s monstrosity, or, as with Ader’s Éole, too frail to support heavier equipment.
On May 9, 1896, a man named Samuel Pierpont Langley proved that powered flight was possible with his Langley Aerodrome Number 5. Catapulted from atop a houseboat on the Potomac River, it managed to “fly” about thirty-five feet under its own power. The cambered, tandem wings spanned a bit over thirteen feet but had an unfortunate tendency to flex once launched, which, of course, altered the craft’s aerodynamic properties. Like Lilienthal, Langley was fixated on the physical aspects of getting a craft airborne so, as with his predecessors, he was uninterested in controlling a machine—he just wanted to get it airborne.
A physicist and astronomer by education and training, Langley was quite capable of complex calculations and he applied this knowledge to his newfound aerodynamic interests. His Power law, which essentially stated that a faster aircraft required less power to sustain speed than one flying slower, was immediately controversial and rejected by such luminaries as the Wright brothers and Otto Lilienthal. In fact, Langley was halfway correct. What is true, and he was decades ahead of his time in seeing this, was that a “fast” wing has a lower angle of attack and therefore drag is considerably less. Less drag means less power is required just as greater drag caused by a “slow” wing with a higher angle of attack requires more power to push it through the air. This is the “back side” of the power curve, sort of an aerodynamic point of no return. What he got wrong, because his apparatus was incapable of producing it, was that at velocities exceeding 72 feet per second this reverses.
His acquaintance with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and the onset of the Spanish-American War in 1898 provided Langley with a princely $50,000 grant from the U.S. Army Board of Ordnance and Fortification. He was to design, construct, and produce a full-sized aircraft capable of flight with a pilot aboard so, with the stroke of a pen, Samuel Langley became the first aviation defense industry contractor. Skeptics abounded, but so did Langley’s optimism and five years later, on October 7, 1903, his “Great Aerodrome” was ready to fly.* Charles Manly, Langley’s assistant and pilot, started up the 52.4-horsepower internal combustion Balzer-Manly engine, smiled, and waited atop the houseboat for the signal. The nearby tugs gave a few horn blasts, and his mechanic cut a cable that launched the aircraft. A watching reporter from the Washington Post wrote:
There was a roaring, grinding nose—and the Langley airship tumbled over the edge of the houseboat and disappeared in the river, sixteen feet below. It simply slid into the water like a handful of mortar.
Langley tried again two months later. With ice on the Potomac and a cold wind blowing, they launched at 4:45 on a cold, windy afternoon. This time the Aerodrome’s wings snapped and Manley once again ended up in the river. A congressman’s sarcastic comment, oft quoted by the press, named the Aerodrome a “mud duck which will not fly fifty feet.” Ridiculed and shamed, Langley quit and died, discouraged and brokenhearted, in 1906.
Still, he had accomplished what he had intended: a successful powered flight by a heavier-than-air machine. True, it was of short duration, unmanned, and uncontrolled; but that was coming in December 1903, with two obscure men from Ohio who captured immortality on a bleak, cold North Carolina beach.
They were inseparable brothers and lifelong bachelors with rudimentary high school educations. They certainly lacked Samuel Langley’s scientific training, Lilienthal’s and Ader’s engineering background, and Cayley’s imagination; but Orville and Wilbur Wright grasped the essential and previously minimized aspect of control. It was, the brothers recognized, the final basic problem to be solved. They knew that without a pilot’s control of his powered, heavier-than-air craft there was no true human flight.
Born into the sturdy, respectable middle-class family of Bishop Milton Wright, Wilbur and Orville seemed destined to follow their father into the church and business, respectively. They founded several newspapers, the West Side News and the Dayton Tattler, followed by the famous Wright Cycle Exchange on Dayton’s West Third Street in 1893. Lilienthal’s death in 1896 was largely responsible for attracting the Wrights to aviation in that it presented formidable challenges in several areas and was an endeavor as yet unconquered.
By this time, much was known and understood about basic aerodynamics. Cambered wings, lift and drag, wind tunnels, and, through Maxim and Langley, proof that an aircraft could physically get off the ground under its own power. Yet the deaths of Percy Pilcher, Lilienthal, and others convinced the brothers that flying would never be safe, and therefore never accepted, until it could be satisfactorily controlled. With this in mind they set themselves to the task of defeating this final, elusive obstacle to manned flight. Besides a natural aptitude for science and practical engineering, the Wrights had the tremendous advantage of decades of research and experimentation to draw upon, which they did quite analytically and methodically.
As with their predecessors, the brothers began by studying birds and noticed that directional control came from a twisting of their wingtips. This altered lift over each wing and produced a rolling motion to “bank,” or turn, the animal at will. The discovery was crucial and with their experience in cycling seemed perfectly logical. James Howard Means, editor of the influential Aeronautical Annual, would opine in 1896 that:
The slow development of the flying machine in its early stages finds its analogy in that of the bicycle. The machine has been improved very gradually; most of the modifications have been slight; yet some of the stages have been marked with great distinction.
A workable method of control was absolutely one of these stages, and the Wrights’ solution was termed “wing warping.” The story is told that Wilbur, while twisting an empty cardboard inner tube box one day at the bike shop, noted that when one edge went down the other came up. If, he thought, this could be replicated mechanically on his aircraft wing, then lateral control could be achieved—just like a bird. The brothers found by removing the diagonal fore-aft bracing wires at each end there was enough flexibility in the wingtips to twist, or warp, them at will. Running the span-wise wires through a hip cradle enabled a prone pilot, by shifting his weight, to laterally control the craft. Wing-warping tests performed with their 1900 glider were entirely satisfactory.*
They would spend the next two years traveling back and forth between Ohio and North Carolina to test and validate their innovations. Often discouraged, they stubbornly persevered and incorporated each improvement into their glider designs. The Wrights discovered that although there were prodigious amounts of previous work to consult, a lot of it was incorrect or, in the case of Lilienthal’s lift table, they were applying it incorrectly.* This would gradually lead to the revelation that while there were absolutes in aerodynamics, each aircraft design would dictate how those absolutes were to be a
pplied. For Wilbur and Orville this meant discarding much preceding technical work, as Lilienthal had done, and constructing their own wind tunnel and custom instruments. The wind tunnel was 6 feet long with a 16-inch cross section and the fan, rotated by a 1-horsepower gasoline engine, could generate a 30 mph wind stream. They added a glass observation window to observe, in real time, the efficiency of their tests.
This was a logical step for them to take, yet decidedly marked the entry of aviation science into the modern age where all the data, theories, and ground experimentation used to build the aircraft are then validated by that aircraft, and its pilot. In other words, test flying. Hiram Maxim had been the first to do this, to a degree, but his aims were limited to physically getting a powered craft off the ground.
The Wright brothers intended to fly.
And so they did.
By December 1903, just after Samuel Langley had given up on his Great Aerodrome, Orville and Wilbur solved their longitudinal and lateral control issues and were ready to take their newly christened Wright Flyer into the air. On December 14, the brothers flipped a coin and Wilbur won the toss. Perched atop the dunes at Kill Devil Hills, the aircraft was fixed to a rail and angled slightly downward. Starting the engine, a 12-horsepower, gas-powered, four-cylinder design of their own, Wilbur raced down the incline and into the air.
Overpulling, he got the nose too high, stalled, and subsequently crashed, causing enough damage for three days of repairs, but with no injury to himself. December 17 dawned with a cold, gusty wind blowing over the sand. At 10:30 A.M., Orville Wright shook hands with his brother, started the engine, and stared at the dunes toward either death or immortality. Releasing the restraining line at 10:30, the aircraft puttered down the rail into a 27 mph headwind with Wilbur running alongside holding one wing for balance. Suddenly, after a short forty feet, the Flyer wobbled into the air and the volunteers gathered along the beach began cheering.
Twelve seconds and 120 feet later Orville touched down after completing the first manned, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air craft under its own power. Ecstatic, the brothers swapped places for two more flights and at noon, with Wilbur at the controls, the Flyer remained airborne for 59 seconds and covered an astonishing 852 feet. One of the volunteers summed up the event, and man’s true entrance into aviation, by shouting, “They did it! They did it! Damned if they didn’t fly!”
On that Thursday morning at Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur Wright conquered the air with little comprehension of how far, how high, and how fast their accomplishment would take mankind. It opened the door to a new world that has proven time and again that there is, and very likely always will be, another challenge waiting in the thin air beyond the clouds.
Two
The Cauldron
To a large extent we are kites in the wind with regard to fate. Governments rise and fall, fads come and go, technology soars, trends wax and wane, and most of it seems beyond our control. But is this really true? Do we make our times or do our times make us? Surely, this is an enormously complex question, yet the quest to conquer the speed demon was accelerated, if not created outright, due to the pivotal, cataclysmic upheavals that exploded on the world during the first half of the twentieth century.
Humans rarely change, and when they do, it is not a rapid transformation. To a large degree then, it is the times and their events that create the people needed to face the unique situations of each era. This means, given the necessity, we would rise up and meet challenges today just as our ancestors did before us. True, other empires had risen and fallen; evil had battled good equally unambiguously, and technological advancements had spiked before, yet the 1940s were different. Man had created weapons that could obliterate entire cities, he could freely move beneath the oceans, and unquestionably man now ruled the skies. Ken Chilstrom, George Welch, Chuck Yeager, Bob Hoover, and Chalmers Goodlin were all part of this; they were born following one great disaster, grew up in another, and came of age during the most horrific war in history. These men were all combat fighter pilots—Welch and Yeager would become aces—and all would enter the rarified world of test flying following World War II. Though they had much in common, they faced the demons of life, war, and flying in very different ways. So what factors and influences in particular molded them? How did they become who they were, and what made it possible for them to chase the demon past the speed of sound, pulling mankind into the supersonic, nuclear age?
George Welch was ten days old on May 28, 1918, when the American Expeditionary Force launched its initial offensive action and America’s first victory in the Great War.* The consequences of that battle and that war changed his life, and our lives as well. On November 11, 1918, the armistice was signed and the several million U.S. soldiers in France began shipping home to their families, their former jobs, and the lives they left behind. The government, with no forethought whatsoever, abruptly canceled most of the war contracts that had produced America’s booming economy. Jobs vanished overnight, and returning veterans wanted those that remained. A recession ensued and, exacerbated by race riots and fears of immigrants and anarchists, the nation plunged into a decade of profound uncertainty and social changes.
Ken Chilstrom was born during all this on April 20, 1921, in a tiny town called Zumbrota, on the north fork of the Zumbro River in southeast Minnesota. It was farming country, predominantly Lutheran, heavily conservative, and like most childhood experiences it left a permanent mark. “What I learned about farmers and the land taught me discipline and responsibility,” he recalls. Discipline and responsibility. Two words that would define the man for all of his long, exciting life. Born to second-generation Swedish immigrants, Ken took after his mother, Emma, a schoolteacher, but he greatly admired his father, John, who ran a general store. “My father was such a good man in so many ways. I never heard him swear or use bad language.”
By the time Ken’s father moved the family to Hartford, Wisconsin, Warren G. Harding had become president, Edgar Rice Burroughs released Tarzan the Terrible, and jazz appeared in New Orleans. Both the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, otherwise known as the National Prohibition Act, had gone into effect so America was legally dry. The Nineteenth Amendment, granting female suffrage, had also passed and proclaimed “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Benton MacKaye would propose the Appalachian Trail, and the first Miss America Pageant was held during September in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Three months after Bob Hoover’s January 1922 birth in Nashville, the lid blew off the Teapot Dome scandal. America was alternately shocked and fascinated as the government’s corruption and incompetence was exposed and President Harding publicly humiliated. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall used his position to secretly sell a lease to the Mammoth Oil Company for Wyoming’s Teapot Dome, officially known as U.S. Naval Oil Reserve Number Three. In return, Fall received $260,000 in Liberty bonds and at least $100,000 in cash.
But the news wasn’t all glum.
In May 1922 construction began on Yankee Stadium and Washington, D.C., witnessed the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. By 1923 the country’s fortunes were changing for the better. Harding died in office and was succeeded by his dour vice president, Calvin Coolidge of Vermont. The recession had faded, and though the next seven years would test America’s respect for government, politics, and religion, there was room for optimism. Refrigerated shipping made it possible to obtain a wide variety of fresh food year-round, and the virtues of vitamins had been discovered. TIME magazine hit the streets, and the first Winter Olympic Games were held in Chamonix, France, with the United States picking up four medals, including the gold for the Men’s 500 Meter Speed Skating.* Nineteen twenty-three also saw the births of Chalmers Hubert Goodlin, later known as “Slick,” and Charles Elwood “Chuck” Yeager.
Amid the ongoing strife of the ’20s, especially the “red scare” of Russian Bolshevism
and ongoing conflicts between faith and science, flying was a positive, exciting influence. There were others, to be sure, and much of the decade was certainly not grim. Fashion had changed drastically, with women showing more skin than ever before and there was the excitement, at least within larger cities, from speakeasies, illicit drinking, and new dances that encouraged close contact in dark, smoky places. Over 800 movies were made each year, and folks routinely saw “pictures” several times each week in stupendous new theaters like San Diego’s Balboa, the Saenger in New Orleans, or the opulent 3,353-seat Kodak Hall in Rochester, New York.
Then there was aviation.
The world of flight was a source of pride, inspiration, wonder, and, as it still remains today for many, a bit of a mystery. The decade got off to a tremendous start with newsmaking, eye-popping events during the summer of 1919. A trio of U.S. Navy Curtiss flying boats ponderously lifted off from Naval Air Station (NAS) Rockaway on Long Island during the morning of May 8, 1919. They turned northeast and headed up the North American coast for Trepassey, Newfoundland. All three later departed Newfoundland for Horta, in the Azores, assisted by Navy warships stationed at fifty-mile intervals with illuminated spotlights and flares to show the way. Eventually one of the planes, an NC-4 flown by Albert Cushing Read, landed at Plymouth, England, on the last day of May, via Portugal and Spain. The public was enthralled; the Atlantic Ocean had been crossed from continent to continent.
In June, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten-Brown of the Royal Air Force took off from Lester’s Field outside St. John’s, Newfoundland, heading for the United Kingdom, some 1,900 miles to the east. In an open cockpit Vimy bomber, they flew all night through snow, fog, and ice where finally, sighting the Irish coast fifteen hours later, they landed by mistake on Galway’s Derrygimla Moor. This was the first nonstop, heavier-than-air flight from North America to Europe, and it captivated the world as did the transatlantic crossing by a British airship in July. Following a 108-hour, 12-minute passage, the U.S. Naval observer aboard, Lieutenant Commander Zach Lansdowne, parachuted onto American soil then personally moored R-34 at Roosevelt Field, on Long Island’s Hempstead Plains.* The mystique of aviation had indeed captured the world’s imagination.