Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (2 page)

A flicker of movement caught his eye off to the southeast and he peered out over the wing. Nothing . . . then he saw it again. Blinking rapidly, he squinted through the wet mist.

There!

A dark dot crawling along just above the horizon where the clouds broke. The Frenchman smiled slowly. Just where he’d expect to find an observation plane. Shifting a bit in the seat, Garros pulled his goggles down and leaned forward. Going to full rich on the fuel mixture, he pulled the lever slowly aft and opened the throttle. Staring intently at the other aircraft, he figured it to be at least five kilometers away. As he eased the stick back slightly, the Moraine began a gentle climb, and Garros angled it at a cloud well in front of the German.

Well, he didn’t know for certain it was a
boche
, but he’d put himself in a good position anyway. With that thought, he reached down and yanked one of the ammo strips from his left boot. Both came out, and the second one clattered down to the floorboard. He groped around for a moment, causing the plane to porpoise a bit.
Forget it
. . . there were two other ammo strips in his right boot. Laying one in his lap, Roland eyeballed the other airplane, banking up slightly left and carefully feeling along the gun breech.
There it was
. . . . Letting go of the stick, he used both hands to insert the ammo strip, and it clicked in place.

Heart thumping, he grabbed the stick again and gazed ahead. Suddenly white puffs appeared against the darker clouds, and his smile widened. Anti-aircraft fire. Again, that didn’t necessarily mean it was an enemy aircraft, since infantry tended to shoot at anything that flew. He stared ahead for a few moments, then grunted with satisfaction. Torpedo-shaped nose, swept-back tail . . . it was a German Albatros reconnaissance plane. Leaving the power up, he pointed the plane directly at it and pushed the stick forward slightly. The German began to turn away in a big, lazy circle.

Banking up to follow, Garros saw that the ammo strip was bobbling in the slipstream, so he eased the turn and frowned. He hadn’t thought of that; it could cause a jam.
Careful . . .
The Morane-Saulnier was vibrating and rapidly gaining on the Albatros, so he closed the throttle an inch to slow down. At 100 meters he could see both Germans leaning out and looking down to the right. Easing the throttle another inch, Garros reached up to grasp the cocking bar on the gun’s left side. He’d left his glove off, and the metal was cold. As he pulled back, the slick bar slipped from his fingers, and he rapped his knuckles against the stock.

He snarled, and pulled again. This time it slid all the way back and locked. Nodding, he added power and began closing again on the other plane. They’d seen him by this time, and the observer raised a pair of binoculars. Garros knew he was looking for a gun mount above the wing or an observer who might have a weapon. Lifting a hand, the Frenchman waved to put the German at ease. If Garros was lucky, the man wouldn’t be able to see anything dangerous through the spinning blade and he’d go back to watching the ground.

And that was the real surprise here, wasn’t it? Garros chuckled, pointing the nose of his Morane-Saulnier directly at the German plane’s cockpit. His mechanic and armorer had screwed wedge-shaped metal plates onto each blade so he could fire directly through the blades now, using the wedges to protect his propeller, instead of an unwieldy and highly visible over-wing mount. It had worked well enough on the ground, with maybe three in ten bullets getting through. But he’d have to get close.

Now at 50 meters, Garros saw the observer shrug and turn back to the side. It often happened over a battlefield that several observation planes ended up in the same piece of sky, all looking at the same thing. Once in a while someone took a shot, but mostly they simply ignored each other.

Not today.

At about 30 meters out he could plainly see the details of the German plane. It was relatively clean save for the dark oil streaks down the cowling and was painted a nondescript brown, with a black Maltese cross on the fuselage. The Albatros was unarmed, though either German was likely to have a weapon. Tugging the cocking bar one more time, he nudged the throttle, then let go, grabbing the machine gun’s stock with his left hand. It was awkward, but he needed his right hand to fly—and hence aim.

Taking a deep breath, he exhaled and, nearly on top of the German plane, squeezed the trigger. The noise was a surprise, and Garros flinched as shell casings flew back into his face. Shuddering from the recoil, the little monoplane bounced, and the stick jolted in his hand. Swallowing hard, he let go of the gun, closed the throttle, then fired again. Smoke blew back in his face, and he was glad his goggles were down. The gun chattered loudly, then stopped abruptly as the ammo strip ran out. Pulling back and rolling left, Garros skidded the Morane-Saulnier sideways away from the German plane, reaching for another clip.

He needn’t bother.

As his eyes cleared, Roland saw the Albatros nose over, wings waggling back and forth. The German pilot was hunched over the stick, unmoving, and shreds of fabric flapped wildly around the cockpit. The Frenchman blinked rapidly. His bursts had gone straight into the other pilot’s back.

The observer was still very much alive, however, and struggling. It looked like the man was trying to climb into the front cockpit, but the dead weight on the controls forced the Albatros further down, and it began spinning. Garros arced around to keep it in sight, and the last image he had of the Albatros was a flash of blue from the observer’s scarf. Then the German plane slipped into the heavy gray clouds and vanished.
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ON THAT extraordinary Thursday in April 1915, fighter aviation and the fighter pilot were born. Aviation has advanced more quickly, with wider-ranging impacts, than any other field of human endeavor, yet flying itself—that is, controlled, manned, motorized flight—had begun less than a dozen years before Roland Garros’s 1915 encounter. Although the Wright brothers were not the first men into the air, they did pioneer controlled flight in an aircraft operating under its own power.

Ballooning, at least with humans attached, had been around since Etienne Montgolfier ascended in October 1783.
^*
The value of aerial reconnaissance was recognized by the militaries of the day and was used whenever possible to spy out enemy movements. By the 1880s, most of the great powers (Britain, France, Germany, and Russia) had a balloon corps of some type. But unpowered ballooning involves floating around at the mercy of the wind or being tethered to a big winch for observation purposes—it’s not flying.

Gliding had been around much longer. Abbas Ibn Firnas, a Berber living in Moorish Spain, made the first known systematic attempt at flight. In a specially constructed glider, he launched himself from a mountainside and floated for more than ten minutes before gliding safely back to earth. Four centuries later, the English philosopher-scientist Roger Bacon provided the first written technical details of an aircraft in his
Secrets of Art and Nature
. Called an ornithopter, it was a machine that flew by flapping its wings like birds and bats. Incidentally, there have been several successful motorized ornithopters, but human muscles have never proven a sufficient means of power. The magnificent and multitalented Leonardo da Vinci added control surfaces to his ornithopter design, demonstrating that he understood the basic properties of airflow and how it might be manipulated.

In 1633 an extremely brave (or completely crazy) Turk named Lagari Hasan Çelebi launched himself from the grounds of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul on a seven-winged rocket. Using 140 pounds of gunpowder to get airborne, he fell into the sea, survived, and swam ashore. No one ever recorded how high he ascended.

One hundred sixty years later, a Spaniard with no formal education or scientific training built a flying machine from wood, cloth, and feathers plucked from angry vultures that had been trapped with rotten meat. On May 15, 1793, accompanied by his sister and the village blacksmith who’d helped with the construction, Diego Marin Aguilera leapt from the castle of Coruña del Conde. Under a brilliant full moon he flapped the mechanical wings of his glider and, according to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, flew “about 360 meters.”

Marin crossed the river Arandilla but crashed when one of the glider’s metal joints fractured under the stress of flight. Unfortunately, the inhabitants of the nearby town thought him a heretic and burned his glider, which they considered an affront to God. Though he never flew again, Marin is widely regarded (by the Spanish at least) as the father of aviation.

In 1843 it fell to William Henson, an English lace maker, to make the initial leap to powered flight. Along with John Stringfellow, another engineer, he patented the Henson Aerial Steam Carriage. Though it never truly got airborne, his scale model did manage to hop a bit under its own power. Henson and others were so excited by this that they incorporated the grandly named Aerial Transit Company in order to build a passenger-carrying monoplane. Eventually Henson and Stringfellow discovered that steam engines are impractical aircraft power sources, as they weigh more than any lift generated, so five years later Henson dissolved the company and immigrated to the United States. Though he never succeeded in aviation, anyone who shaves owes him a debt of gratitude for inventing, among other things, the modern safety razor.

So it was left to two self-educated bicycle makers to make the first successful powered and controlled flight in December 1903. Despite their undoubted vision and mechanical skill, Orville and Wilbur were a strange pair: extremely secretive, legally combative, both lifelong bachelors. Wilbur once stated that he “did not have time for both a wife and an airplane.”

Following their flight, aviation became a new sport, a fad, and an exciting expression of man’s possibilities. This arrived during an age where fascination with new technologies—and they were sprouting regularly—was commonplace. To conquer the air, though, was special.

The Wrights’ first American patent (no. 821,393) made no reference to a flying machine. Rather, it was a patent for an aerodynamic control system that adjusted the outer portion of a machine’s wings to achieve lateral control. The technique was called wing warping, as the surfaces were physically twisted, or “warped,” to produce lift from one wingtip while dumping lift from the other.

To circumvent the Wrights’ patent, another American pioneer, Glenn Curtiss, developed the aileron system, which accomplishes the same result but in a much more effective manner. The Wrights promptly sued him, and the resulting legal battle continued for more than a decade. During the process it emerged that in 1868 a British inventor named Matthew P. W. Boulton had patented the first aileron-type device for lateral control, thus likely negating the Wrights’ claim of infringement. Curtiss couldn’t have cared less, however, and he continued selling aircraft even after a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict against him. A much better businessman than the Wrights, Curtiss cashed out in 1920 for over $30 million and moved to Florida. Ironically, in 1929 Wright Aeronautical and the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company merged into the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, which still exists today.

During the years immediately following the Wrights’ experiments at Kitty Hawk, the principles of aerodynamics were still being worked out. There was an imperfect understanding of basic concepts such as lift, drag, weight, and thrust.
Lift
occurs when airflow splits over a surface. As it moves more quickly across the top than the bottom, a lower pressure is created above the wing; the higher pressure under the wing pushes upward, creating lift and allowing the wing and anything attached to it to fly. Next time you’re in a car, stick your hand out the window, parallel to the road, then angle it up slightly and you’ll feel the lift that’s generated.

Drag
is basically anything that counteracts lift. It’s helpful to visualize air like water and then imagine being towed through the water with your shoes and clothes slowing you down. This is drag. Imagine also how the position of your body, streamlined or spread-eagled, would impact your ride through the water; this also is drag. From an aerodynamic standpoint, the struts, wires, fixed landing gear, and exposed structural components on early aircraft all caused drag and worsened the plane’s performance. So did the shape of the fuselage and wings, the areas where these joined together, the placement of the cockpit, and so on. All of this had to be worked out by trial and error until engineering and experience caught up with design.

Drag has to be overcome by lift for an aircraft to fly. This had been done before 1903 with gliders, either launched from a height or towed behind a vehicle traveling on the ground. The Wright brothers are famous for successfully using an engine to move a craft through the air, creating airflow over a wing and thereby generating lift. This sounds simple enough to modern ears, but engines of the day were rudimentary and had been designed for automobiles, not aircraft. Charlie Taylor’s motor for the Wright Flyer, although custom made, was a basic inline design without spark plugs or a carburetor, and only produced 12 horsepower.
Weight
for a car motor wasn’t as critical as for a plane, and at the time more power (to generate more thrust) meant a bigger, heavier engine.
Thrust
is the forward movement that results when an aircraft is propelled through the air. Enough extra thrust, or excess thrust, had to be produced to overcome the aircraft weight, otherwise the two would simply cancel each other out. In the early days of flight this excess thrust occupied a razor-thin margin, so while engine technology improved, designers sought ways to maximize lift with whatever power they had available.

Early wing design was crucial to utilize the available lift—which wasn’t much. Most of the early flying machines were biplanes, with two sets of wings braced by struts and wires. Wing loading, which is the weight a wing must support for the aircraft to fly, is overcome by lift. This can be done by flying much faster (which wasn’t yet possible) or by using two wings. Having two wings spread the load, thus permitting a stronger design, which permitted heavier, more powerful engines, and the eventual addition of armament.