SKYWARD
ONE of my first and most striking impressions of aviation came the day a man rushed into my stateroom aboard the battleship waving a newspaper that had just been brought us by the pilot.
“For God’s sake, listen to this 1” he exclaimed. “Jack Towers has fallen fifteen hundred feet in an airplane and lived to tell the tale.”
I couldn’t believe it.
“He was thrown out of his seat.” (In those days the flyer sat right out in the open on a little bench.) “But he caught by a brace and dangled in mid-air. On the way down he kicked at the control wheel. Apparently he righted the plane just before it hit. Think of the nerve of the man!”
I did think of his nerve; and many times since I’ve admired the courage of those early pilots who flew thousands of feet in the air with defective machines about which they knew almost nothing. And it’s good to feel that my friend, Commander John W. Towers, U.S.N., the hero of the incident, is alive today and still a flyer of note.
The horror people felt fifteen years ago in reading about Towers’ escape is still felt when newspapers print tragic details of some aeronautical accident without regard for technical reasons behind the accident. As a result the average citizen still looks on flying as one of the most attractive forms of suicide.
If I had a son twenty years old today and he should come to me with the question: “Is it all right for me to fly?” I’d answer: “Go to it. And I hope you get your pilot’s license soon because I want you to do a lot of flying before you’re through.”
He might break his neck. But also he might be run over by a taxi, bum up, catch pneumonia or be struck by lightning. Those things happen to people every day.
I would like any young man who likes the idea of flying to go into aviation today first because I believe that, given reasonable perfection of equipment and training that is available today, it is thoroughly safe to make other than pioneer flights. Secondly, I know of no other profession, trade or industry that in the coming fifty years is likely to exert a more profound or far-reaching influence on civilization.
The point I want to emphasize is that flying can be made safe. That is, ordinary every day flying for pleasure and business. But the public is forever being confused by accidents from careless flying, pioneer flights, or military maneuvers in the air.
“When I entered aviation my father told me goodbye. It was his impression that he would never see me alive again. The other members of my family felt about the same; all except my mother. She was the one who let me go around the world alone at the age of twelve. To her, flying didn’t seem to have any more danger in it; just a different kind.
My mother was about right about ordinary routine flying. By statistics it is possible to demonstrate that the dangers of the air aren’t anything like what they are supposed to be. Else so many young men and women wouldn’t be struggling to enter aviation. Nor so many bankers eager to invest their money in it.
I can remember as a boy hearing discussion about which was the safest railroad on which to travel. None of them was considered very safe. Railway casualty lists of the day were often like those of wartime. Now people discuss not which is the safest railroad but which is the most comfortable. Safety is taken for granted.
Probably the outstanding cause of big railway wrecks in this country has been the presence of another train on the track ahead. Probably the outstanding cause of airplane accidents has been forced landings from a stalled engine. Ten years ago we often held our breath until a pilot climbed several hundred feet to an altitude from which he could glide safely to the ground. Nowadays the chances of having a motor stall that has been properly cared for are reaching the vanishing point.
Of course it isn’t always a stalled motor that brings a plane down. Not many months ago a pilot was flying above New York. Suddenly he caught the pungent odor of burning gasoline. Flames were shooting out of a crack in the fuel line.
This is one of those situations that still come to every modern form of transportation. Scarcely a week passes that I do not read of fatal accidents to automobiles, railways and elevated trains that rose from just such sudden and almost unmanageable emergencies.
In the case I am reciting the pilot escaped more safely than some of the passengers on the trains or motors. He side-slipped for hundreds of feet in such a way as to blow the flames away from his main fuel supply; and he managed to worm his machine into a vacant lot through a maze of poles. He wrecked it but did not hurt himself or his assistant.
Railways advertise their safety by publishing statistics. Aviation can do the same. British commercial airlines have flown over 5,000,000 miles in seven years with only four fatal accidents. German airlines in 1926 carried 56,268 passengers for a total of 3,838425 miles with only one fatality. Our own national airways maintained by the Army Air Corps have in one period to their credit 1,200,000 miles with but one serious accident. Twelve planes of our Navy’s bombing squadron have flown 216,000 miles without a single accident that amounted to anything.
It is interesting, in this connection, that I have recently come across a London Times, dated June 14, 1842, which contained the following statement: “In 1841 the number of passengers carried on the eight railway lines numbered 10,508, the distance 3,562,338 miles yearly. In this time only 56 passengers were injured, of whom 22 were killed.
Two kinds of fatal accidents undo, in the unreflecting public mind, much of the good that fine records achieve. One kind comes from experimental or pioneering work; the other from unorganized flyers who work independently and often lack proper repair and inspection facilities.
My recent flights to the Pole and across the Atlantic were in the nature of experiments. Every research worker takes the same sort of chances as we took whether he be boiling an unknown chemical in his test tube or pushing out across geographical frontiers.
By unorganized flyers I refer to private owners of planes, of which there is a rapidly growing number in this country. Some of these fellows have more enthusiasm than they have caution and are without sufficient funds to properly equip themselves. Such flyers help aviation a lot. They often bring enthusiasm and capital and public sympathy to the science of aeronautics. But often they hinder as much as they help.
I know a young flyer who had got his pilot’s license in the Reserve Corps. He was so passionately fond of flying that he could hardly wait to have his own machine and set up a taxi service near his home town. He didn’t have enough capital to buy an expensive plane.
About that time he met a man who had bought up a lot of wartime junk from the government. Among the junk was a discarded plane of ancient vintage.
“I’ll let you have it for $300,” said the junk dealer, “provided you take it out of here this week.”
The youngster closed the deal and set about tinkering on the old crock. Just as his time was up he hopped off. He flew safely to his home town, and managed to start business there taking passengers up for rides at five dollars a head.
Then one morning he went aloft in a gusty breeze. As the machine wasn’t designed as well as later models it soon became unmanageable and crashed. The passenger was killed and the young pilot badly hurt. Next day the morning papers carried glaring headlines of “ANOTHER FATAL AIRPLANE ACCIDENT!”
Whereupon there ensued the following conversation at thousands of breakfast tables all over the country.
“Heavens, here’s another horrible airplane accident! ‘Passenger crushed to death; pilot escapes with painful injuries’!”
“Too bad it wasn’t the pilot. There ought to be a law against flying!”
It is interesting to record that almost exactly this same sort of opinion was once held about railroads. In 1845 Sir Samuel Hoare seriously made a report to his country that “The largest item in railway returns bids fair to be the list of killed.”
Flying also suffers from the fixed idea in the public mind that it is just a new species of human lunacy. The Wright Brothers are said to have invented or discovered flying in 1903. This is not so. To deny it in no sense reflects on that pair of gifted pioneers, who certainly were the first to fly, even if they didn’t actually discover the art.
The idea and some knowledge of mechanical flight is as old as man. Before the dawn of written language man captured birds and saw that enough speed with proper “kite” surface would keep a body aloft. This is not encyclopedic romancing on my part. I was for a time with the Smith Sound Eskimos of North Greenland. This little tribe is still in the Stone Age. Well do I remember Nucarpingwaq freezing a huge dead burgomaster gull with outstretched wings, then tossing it off a cliff to show me how it could fly. “Had I material, White Man,” said the native hunter, “I am sure I could build wings big enough for a man to fly with.”
As early as 400 B.C. a flying chariot was constructed of a balloon and paddles. Leonardo da Vinci who died in 1519 left behind him not only the Mona Lisa but a series of sketches that showed a knowledge of the principles of aeronautics.
Engineers for three centuries have declared that human flight merely awaited a power plant light enough to carry itself and a pair of wings aloft.
Swift improvement of the steam engine in the nineteenth century awakened new hopes in those who knew how near flight was. Langley actually built and flew a small model plane in 1896, using a 1 ½ horsepower engine. He might have flown a full-sized machine of the same design shortly afterwards had it not been damaged by accident and. his own death hastened by ridicule. His machine with some changes was years later actually flown by a pilot, Glenn Curtis.
In the meantime an obscure device had been developing that carried the final factor for achieving human flight. This was the internal combustion gas engine. Its distinguishing feature lay in the fact that its fuel burned in its cylinder and not in a furnace. The first one was built about 1850. It weighed more than 500 pounds per horsepower. Advent of the automobile in 1900 gave this much-despised form of power a terrific impetus. In a few years engines were being built by Ford and others at weights as low as 25 pounds per horsepower.
At almost exactly this point flight becomes theoretically possible. Immutable physics created by the Almighty before the earth was born fix from 25 to 30 pounds per horsepower as the maximum weight an engine can lift off the ground, provided adequate wings are used.
Now the Wrights had ingeniously developed appropriate wing surfaces in their gliders. So in a sense their fine industry was rewarded by a great piece of luck; it was exercised just at the time the gas engine reached the arbitrary point of which I have just spoken.
With magnificent skill the brothers put together an engine that weighed only 13 pounds per horsepower, thus giving them about 12 pounds per horsepower, to be used on wings and body. This proved enough. And on December 17, 1903, near Kitty Hawk, S. C., the first true flying machine rose with a pilot, Wilbur Wright, and driven by a six-bladed propeller attached to a gas engine, flew 852 feet in 59 seconds.
Meanwhile the first great patron of the gas engine, the automobile, was galloping ahead. In 1900 newspaper editorials literally prayed to the Almighty for deliverance from the curse that was upon us in the shape of the horseless carriage. In 1910 accidents to racing cars alone were enough to make one’s blood run cold.
I remember going to a big automobile race in the early days when the cars did not even drive on an enclosed track, but hurtled around a course many miles long laid off on sections of regular highway. As a result there were both paved and dirt portions to cover. Car after car skidded on the worst dirt section of the road where a large and morbid crowd of thrill-seekers was gathered to watch for accidents.
This sort of thing focussed public attention on automobiles. There was no condoning it. I do not intend to, even by implication. I merely want to bring out the fact that we have irresistibly gone through the same phase of aviation; are still going through it, I believe. Subconsciously the minority who fly are eager to impress the wonder and profit of it on the majority who don’t. In 1905 those who drove motors worked just as hard to get their friends and family to drive. One couldn’t say there was any intrinsic sense in the fever for motoring that sprang up. It just sprang up.
Isn’t it possible that this irresistible spirit is nothing more nor less than the spirit of human progress that defies nature, peril and death with a blind fury not to be denied?
At any rate, whatever have been the metaphysical truths behind flying, this “madness” as many non-flyers are wont to call it, we are at just about the same point in flying today that we were in automobiling in 1905. We should tithe our tolerance to suit.
War injected another factor into flying. Military exigency stood for speed at the expense of safety. The fastest plane was the best fighter. The idea of high flying speed is still a strong one. Some of our prize races have been as tragic as the early automobile races were.
It would not be fair for me to make a blanket condemnation of speed contests. They have brought out many defects in engine and fuselage and have helped to develop our fast combat planes. But I am profoundly pleased to find that they are gradually giving way in popularity to reliability and endurance contests, which will ultimately do for the plane what they did for the automobile; establish its feasibility for use by the average man or woman.
It is true that in England and the United States there have been apparently an unreasonable number of casualties in army and naval flying; but it must be remembered that this work is largely experimental and pioneering and that the flyers must engage in dangerous tactical maneuvers. On top of all this there is the very important fact that the army and navy flyer cannot, in the nature of his work, put safety first, as the commercial flyer must do.
Take just one sample of mass misfortune from my own service. This came in the 1926 race for the Schneider trophy, one of the most important air meets ever held.
The Schneider trophy is given for seaplanes only. The great interest in the 1926 contest rose chiefly from the fact that Italy was a close contender for the cup which had been won twice in succession by Americans.
The U. S. Navy team suffered its first loss when my friend Lieutenant Frank Conant, U.S.N., was drowned just before the contest in a service pursuit plane. He was flying low over Hampton Roads which in places is filled with fish-nets during the season of the race. It is believed that one of his pontoons struck a net mooring stake.
To condemn flying in Conant’s plane on the basis of such an accident would be like condemning a make of car because the driver was unfortunate enough to strike a hidden stump in the road.
A week later the preliminary trials for the main event were held. They were marred by a number of unfortunate accidents of a minor nature leading up to a complete wreck of the navy’s most promising entry, a fine Packard-engined racer piloted by Lieutenant Tomlinson. In landing on choppy water he had the luck to capsize his ship and was nearly drowned. It is possible his pontoons were too small.
The important point I want to make is that this contest was one for speed. Therefore, every item of weight and air resistance was cut to the bone. But much of the public saw only a group of deplorable accidents resulting from a number of seaplane flights and at once was ready to condemn flying even more heartily than before.
Flights made for the promotion of aviation are for the sole purpose of ascertaining where and how the happy air traveler of the future will go. When I say flying is safe I speak of the performance of ships that have been tested in design, cruising, radius, maneuver ability and lifting power until these factors have been established, and the ships used in good weather over known routes where there are plenty of landing fields; in other words, with normal commercial flying conditions. To judge safety of aviation by experiments in which both pilots and designers are frankly and openly taking risks for the sake of aeronautic progress is like saying that a new breakfast food is poison because in the chemical experiments leading up to its invention one of the research workers had a violent attack of indigestion.
Bernt Balchen, the fine young Norwegian who went to Spitzbergen with me and was on the America with us when she flew to France, is a test pilot for a big airplane manufacturing company. When I asked him how he felt about his work he said:
“I like it because I take up planes that have never been flown before. Half the excitement is not knowing what is going to happen.”
Pioneering work in every field of science has been done under conditions that men would not repeat commercially. When Peary set off for the pole his steamer was loaded to the point where she wallowed deeply in the ground-swell. When the first steamer set out to cross the Atlantic Ocean she was reported as “exceedingly awkward to handle because of the weight of machinery she carried.” Our planes were dangerously heavy and unwieldy when they attempted to take off for the Trans-Atlantic flight. I have seen a lot of this sort of thing in recent years. René Fonck bravely ventured a take-off with his three-engined Sikorsky plane with a bigger load of gas than such a ship had ever attempted to carry before. Very little indeed was known about the performance of three-engined planes. It was understood in advance by all concerned that a large risk was taken. Two men burned to death in this attempt.
When my old friend and shipmate Noel Davis crashed last spring in his three-engined plane, killing himself and Wooster, the tragedy was explained to me by another pilot:
“They were so near the limit of the load they could carry that when they banked and reduced their lifting surface they could no longer stay aloft.”
Again here was pioneering with a three-engined plane. But it was a necessary development and we must learn about it even at the sacrifice of lives. We knew all about one-engined planes.
Then our plane, the America, crashed with three of us injured—Floyd Bennett critically. Our crash marked, I believe, the turning point. We were learning more about the three-engined plane. We repaired the America and carried on some very careful scientific experiments.
When we hopped off on our Trans-Atlantic flight we did not know just how far our plane would go with the fuel aboard. We simply made as many preliminary tests as possible and gradually increased the load until our figures indicated that we should make our destination. We had learned what we could about the maximum load such a three-engined plane would lift. It was pioneering and we knew it was risky.
If we had crashed on our take-off or suddenly run out of fuel before we got to France the only just conclusion would have been that our experiment was a failure. But when we got into the air and crossed the ocean we proved for the first time that a big plane with three motors designed like ours could do the trick.
A large percentage of accidents comes from testing and pioneering in a thoroughly proper way; such accidents are part of the progress of any form of science. It is the great misfortune of aviation that the public receives more news about this sort of work than from any other flying done.
Few people have any idea how many airplane accidents in the past have had nothing at all to do with the pilot or his machine. They were the sole result of the motion of the invisible air about him.
Non-flyers often fail to realize the impossibility of landing on rough areas. It can be readily understood if one should visualize an automobile with wings on it going nearly a mile a minute and landing in a field full of rocks or ditches.
The Wrights had not been flying long before they recognized what are still termed “pockets” and “bumps” in the atmosphere. Accurately speaking there is no such thing as a pocket or a bump in the air. These sensations which the pilot feels are the result of meeting currents of air flowing up and down. When the plane enters an up-current it is yanked upward, and the flyer feels as if he had ridden over a bump. When entering a down-current he naturally goes down with it as long as it lasts, with the feeling that he is falling in a vacuum.
One of the best pilots in the world who was flying across South America not long ago nearly came to grief while leaving a small town located in a valley. He did not know that the air entering the valley with the afternoon winds fell from the heights of land in a regular Niagara Falls. The worst of it was, as always, that this vast Niagara of air was absolutely invisible. It had to be discovered by the aeronautical pioneer. When the pilot took off he fought his way upward for a long while only to be carried downward with equal speed. He finally escaped, missing a fatal accident almost by inches.
A most terrible experience in my life was the two thousand miles we spent storm tossed in the America on our cross-ocean flight without seeing ground or water beneath us, followed by hours of a similar experience in a storm at night over France. I think my companions cheerfully subscribe to this statement. For over twenty-four hours of that flight we saw nothing whatever beneath us. I sincerely hope no other flyers ever have that experience.
Hour after hour the notations in my log of that journey declare that it was utterly impossible to navigate. We could not tell which way the winds were blowing, which way we were drifting, or what sort of land or water was below us.
Our chief safety lay in watching our instruments closely so that we should not be carried so close to the surface of the land or sea that we might crash without warning. Had we done so we should have been killed instantly. Our lives hung on our altimeter. As night closed in we could not even see the ends of our wings. At this critical time there was a leak in our gasoline tank.
I mention these points not to emphasize the hazards of such a flight but because I wish to lay stress on the peculiar nature of the perils and show how far they were removed from normal conditions of flying.
We were traveling in a territory as new as the dreaded polar regions were to Hendrik Hudson and his tiny vessels four centuries ago. Once when we fought our way above the fog around 10,000 feet we came out upon a weird view. Towering peaks of vapor surrounded us. Below was a gray murk that clutched at our plane. There was no horizon.
For ten years prior to my Trans-Atlantic flight I had been studying weather conditions over the North Atlantic. In the course of these studies I learned many things that helped us on the way. However, it wasn’t long after I hopped off for France that I discovered our information was still defective.
It is necessary that an ocean flyer know meteorological conditions for each zone through which he will pass before his passage. He must know the barometric pressure and the temperature for various altitudes. Fog and cloud conditions are equally important.
Study of air disturbances is a life work in itself. Gradually we are becoming familiar with the general movements of those of the North Atlantic. Already we know that the movement of storm centers is north and east, that storm areas are circular and that their movement is cyclonic; that is to say, anti-clockwise.
Often these storm areas overlap and sometimes they are elliptical. Sometimes they seem to contract or expand as they move. This is possibly because they come into contact with other similar disturbances.
On our first night after leaving Newfoundland we were flying in a fog until we climbed to an altitude of over a mile. The temperature fell as we mounted and ice began to form on our wings. It was quite possible for us to take on enough ice to pull us down into the sea. Thus comes the need for advance information on fog area and depth not only from ships on the ocean but also from aeroplanes flying at points along the flyer’s route. Only in this way will it be possible to know whether one should try to climb beyond the clouds or to out-flank the storm area.
It must be understood that as matters stand now there is only a relatively slight system for instructing the ocean flyer. The United States Weather Bureau does enormously good work and went out of its way many times this summer to see that our pilots had the best possible weather information. But these data were based on more or less desultory reports from ships plying between Europe and America. These ships were often some distance from our air route and were, of course, on the surface of the sea.
The great volcanoes Kilauea in Hawaii and Vesuvius in Italy are sights that few tourists care to miss. It is quite safe to proceed along a certain trail to the vicinity of the craters. But while first investigators took risks in ascertaining where and how to go, the safety of the present visitor can in no way be measured by the perils of early prowlers.
Few pilots have not had their turn at a landing crash. Every pilot recalls vividly the dizzy time he brought down his plane after his first solo flight when training. At this critical moment in flight comes another great fraction of air accidents.
But this isn’t a very damaging fact in the consideration of air safety. In the navy we always have to forget a crash or two that we made in the early days of learning to bring a boat alongside a battleship or a dock. And there will come a time when a young pilot will fly successfully the first time.
When we first took the America up for test last spring we knew that she was an untried machine. We knew that there would be problems of balance and weight and landing speed that would have to be solved before she could be taken on a long flight.
After a few minutes in the air we started down. Floyd Bennett, Noville and I were up in the cockpit with Anthony Fokker, the designer, who was doing the piloting. Floyd and the rest of us were passengers.
When Fokker stopped the engine to come down for a landing we found that a combination of five or six things had made the America very nose heavy. We went up again but when Fokker finally tried to land we crashed. My arm was broken, Noville internally injured, and Bennett was smashed up so badly that he was in the hospital for months and out of the Atlantic flight.
The next day the following statement was made:
“It is patent from the accident to Byrd’s plane that we as yet have far from reached any dependable safety in aviation.”
This statement was altogether unfair to aeronautics. I mention the incident because it so effectively illuminates what friends of aviation are up against every day in the year. The accident was to a truly experimental type of plane and under conditions that opened us all to risks that no passenger would ever be asked to face. Even the average pilot would not fly under such circumstances. Yet the safety of flying was impugned on the basis of our private test that bore but indirectly on practical aviation of the moment.
The test pilot in a sense faces death every time he puts a new plane through its paces. The pioneer in aeronautics takes chances at every new venture he essays. It is part of the game.
But the passenger or pilot flying in a tested plane under normal and proper conditions can certainly nowadays do so with the comforting assurance that at last it is reasonably safe to fly.
The degree of this safety is increasing daily with increase of safe landing fields throughout the country. In areas where there are not sufficient landing fields, there is a gradual swing to the multi-engined plane for passenger service that will fly with at least one engine dead. Nor has commercial aviation yet done all it can to bring greater safety. Weather predictions are being made gradually more reliable, landing fields, beacons, and other lights are ever increasing in number; landing speeds are getting lower; brakes are being installed on the wheels. Three-engined planes are being built that will fly with but one engine. This gives practically no danger of a forced landing from engine trouble.
Finally aviation’s great enemy “fog” is gradually being conquered by radio, beacons, and direction finders, and amber colored lights that—11 to some extent penetrate it. Until fog is thoroughly conquered the flyer must have sufficient good weather predictions to evade it.
With safe flying, strong public air-consciousness, a multitude of planes and pilots, aviation is gradually coming into its own. It is with this viewpoint the true flying enthusiast enters his work. He is not blind to the danger any more than is the careful automobile driver. But he is spurred on by a vision of the priceless agent for great achievement that is now at our command.
So it is that I believe in flying and commend it to the country’s youth as a pursuit worthy of a man’s devotion. And I hope that those who take up the game will experience the same pleasure I have had with the great good fellowship I have found among my shipmates of the air.