Chapter 6

Even more serious, however, is the general public failure to realize the gift which is within their reach. Flying was first a circus stunt and later a war wonder. The solid practical accomplishments have been lost sight of in the weird or the spectacular. People who marveled when a British plane climbed up nearly six miles into the air, or 30,000 feet, where its engine refused to run and its observer fainted, failed generally to analyze what the invasion of this new element would mean in the future of mankind.

What is now needed is a big, broad imagination to seize hold of this new thing and galvanize it into actual every-day use. There are many skeptics, of course, many who point out, for instance, that the element of cost is prohibitive. This is both fallacious in reasoning and untrue in fact. A modern two-seated airplane, even to-day, costs not over $5,000, or about the price of a good automobile. Very soon, with manufacturing costs standardized and the elements of newness worn off, this price will fall as sharply as it has already fallen during the war.

But what, after all, is cost in comparison with time? Modern civilization will pay dearly for any invention which will increase ever so little its hours of effectiveness. The great German liners before the war lavished money without stint to save a day or two in crossing the Atlantic. The limited express trains between New York, Boston, Washington, and Chicago have for years made money by carrying busy men a few hours more quickly to their destination. What will not be paid if these times of travel can be reduced practically to half?

The element of danger has been reduced to a minimum and will be still more reduced as emphasis is laid on safety rather than wartime agility. Many men, of course, will meet their death in the air, just as in the early days many men met their death in ships and in railroad trains, but this will not be a deterrent if the goal is worth attaining. There will be accidents in learning to fly, there will be accidents of foolhardiness and of collision or in landing, but they will decrease to the vanishing-point as experience grows. Already the air routes which have been established have a high record of success and freedom from fatalities.

The great need of aviation to-day is faith--faith among the people, among the manufacturers, among the men who will give it its being. Its success is as inevitable as that day follows night, but the question of when that success is attained, now or generations from now, is dependent on the vision which men put into it. If they are apathetic and unreasonable, if they chafe at details or expect too much, it will be held back. If, on the other hand, they go to meet it with confidence, with coolness, and with a realization both of its difficulties and its potentialities, its success will be immediate.

The task is one of the greatest, the most vital, and the most promising which mankind has ever faced. With the general theories proved and demonstrated, the great crisis of invention has passed, and the slow, unspectacular process of development and application has set in. Now has come the time for serious, sober thought, for careful, analytical planning, for vision combined with hopefulness. It is well in these early days, when flight is with the general public a very special and occasional event, to remember what has happened since Watt developed the steam-engine only a few generations ago, when Columbus set the first ship westward, or when America's first train ran over its rough tracks near the Quincy quarries.

The development of aviation will be world-wide and will include all sorts and races of men. The nations all start pretty much abreast. Those which developed war air services have an advantage in material and experience, but this is a matter only for the moment. The main lines of progress are now pretty widely known and the field is wide open to those who have the imagination to enter it. There is practically no handicap at this early stage which cannot be overcome with ease.

There is, of course, an element of individual gamble to those who enter this competition. Undoubtedly there will be many failures, as in all new fields; failures come to those who put in capital as well as those who contribute their scientific knowledge. But by the same token there will be great successes both financially and scientifically. The prize that is being striven for is one of the richest that have ever been offered and the rewards will be in accordance. This has been the case at the birth of every great development in human progress and will undoubtedly be the case with the science of flight. Until a field becomes standardized it offers extremes on both sides rather than a dull, dreary, but safe average.

As aviation runs into every phase of activity it will require every kind of man--manufacturer, scientist, mechanic, and flier. It offers problems more interesting and more complex than almost any others in the world. The field is new and virgin, the demand world-wide, and the rewards great. For the flier there is all the joy of life in the air, above the chains of the earth, reaching out to new, unvisited regions, free to come and go for almost any distance at any level desired, a freedom unparalleled. For the manufacturer there is all the lure of a new product destined in a short time to be used as freely as the automobile of to-day; for the scientist there are problems of balance, meteorology, air pressure, engine power, wing spread, altitude effects, and the like in a bewildering variety; for the explorer, the geographer, the map-maker a wholly new field is laid open.

The best men of every type are needed to give aviation its full fruition. In Europe this is realized to a supreme degree. England especially, and also France and Italy, have put their best genius at work to fulfil the conquest of the air. Their progress is astonishing and should be a challenge to the New World. After the natural hiatus which followed the armistice the leading men have set to work with redoubled vigor to take first place in the air.

In twenty years' time our life of to-day will seem centuries old, just as to-day it is hard to realize that the automobile and motor-truck do not date back much over a generation. No change that has ever come in man's history will be so great as the change which takes him up off the ground and into the air. This swift and dazzling era that is so close upon us is hardly suspected by the great mass of people. The world will be both new and better for it. Less than the train or the motor-car will the airplane disturb its features. On the blue above white wings will glitter for a moment, a murmuring as of bees will be heard, and the traveler will be gone, the world unstained and pure. Meanwhile high in the clouds, perhaps lost to view of the earth, men will be speeding on at an unparalleled rate, guiding their course by the wireless which alone gives them connection with the world below.

Has there ever in all history been an appeal such as this?

ADDENDUM

A PAGE IN THE DICTIONARY FOR AVIATORS

What is to become of all the new words, some of them with new meanings, the old words with new meanings, and the new words with old meanings, coined by the aviators of the American and British flying services in the war? Are they to die an early death from lack of nourishment and lack of use, or will they go forward, full-throated into the dictionary, where they may belong? Here are just a few of them, making a blushing début, so that it may be seen at once just how bad they are:

AEROBATICS--A newly coined word to describe aerial "stunting," which includes all forms of the sport of looping, spinning, and rolling. The term originated in the training schedule for pilots, and all pilots must take a course in aerobatics before being fully qualified.

AEROFOIL--Any plane surface of an airplane designed to obtain reaction on its surfaces from the air through which it moves. This includes all wing surface and most of the tail-plane surface.

AILERON--This is a movable plane, attached to the outer extremities of an airplane wing. The wing may be either raised or lowered by moving the ailerons. Raising the right wing, by depressing the right aileron, correspondingly lowers the left wing by raising the left aileron. They exercise lateral control of a machine.

BLIMP--A non-rigid dirigible balloon. The dirigible holds its shape due to the fact that its gas is pumped into the envelop to a pressure greater than the atmosphere. It can move through the air at forty miles an hour, but high speed will cause it to buckle in the nose.

BUMP--A rising or falling column of air which may be met while flying. A machine will be bumped up or bumped down on a bumpy day. A hot day over flat country, at noon, will generally be exceedingly bumpy.

CRASH--Any airplane accident. It may be a complete wreck or the plane may only be slightly injured by a careless landing. Crashes are often classified by the extent of damage. A class A crash, for instance, is a complete washout. A class D crash is an undercarriage and propeller broken.

DOPE--A varnish-like liquid applied to the linen or cotton wing fabrics. It is made chiefly of acetone, and shrinks the fabric around the wooden wing structure until it becomes as tight as a drum. The highly polished surface lessens friction of the plane through the air.

DRIFT--Head resistance encountered by the machine moving through the air. This must be overcome by the power of the engine. The term is also used in aerial navigation in its ordinary sense, and a machine flying a long stretch over water may drift off the course, due to winds of which the pilot has no knowledge.

DUD--A condition of being without life or energy. An engine may be dud; a day may be dud for flying. A shell which will not explode is a dud. A pilot may be a dud, without skill. It is almost a synonym for washout.

FLATTEN Out--To come out of a gliding angle into a horizontal glide a few feet from the ground before making a landing. The machine loses flying speed on a flat glide, and settles to the ground.

FLYING SPEED--Speed of a plane fast enough to create lift with its wing surfaces. This varies with the type of plane from forty-five miles an hour as a minimum to the faster scout machines which require seventy miles an hour to carry them through the air. When a machine loses flying speed, due to stalling, it is in a dangerous situation, and flying speed must be recovered by gliding, or the machine will fall into a spin and crash out of control.

FORCED LANDING--Any landing for reasons beyond the control of a pilot is known as a forced landing. Engine failure is chiefly responsible. Once the machine loses its power it must go into a glide to maintain its stability, and at the end of the glide it must land on water, trees, fields, or roofs of houses in towns.

FUSELAGE--This word, meaning the body of a machine, came over from the French. The cockpits, controls, and gasolene-tanks are usually carried in the fuselage.

HOP--Any flight in an airplane or seaplane is a hop. A hop may last five minutes or fifteen hours.

JOY-STICK--The control-stick of an airplane was invented by a man named Joyce, and for a while it was spoken of as the Joyce-stick, later being shortened to the present form. It operates the ailerons and elevators.

LANDFALL--A sight of land by a seaplane or dirigible which has been flying over an ocean course. An aviator who has been regulating his flight by instruments will check up his navigation on the first landfall.

PANCAKE--An extremely slow landing is known as a pancake landing. The machine almost comes to a stop about ten feet off the ground, and with the loss of her speed drops flat. There is little forward motion, and this kind of landing is used in coming down in plowed fields or standing grain. Jules Vedrines made his landing on the roof of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris by "pancaking."

SIDE-SLIP--The side movement of a plane as it goes forward. On an improperly made turn a machine may side-slip out--that is, in the direction of its previous motion, like skidding. It may side-slip in, toward the center of the turn, due to the fact that it is turned too steeply for the degree of the turn. Side-slipping on a straight glide is a convenient method of losing height before a landing.

STALL--A machine which has lost its flying speed has stalled. This does not mean that its engine has stopped, but in the flying sense of the word means that friction of the wing surfaces has overcome the power of the engine to drive the machine through the air. The only way out of a stall is to regain speed by nosing down. A machine which has lost its engine power will not stall if put into a glide, and it may be brought to a safe landing with care.

STRUT--The upright braces between the upper and lower wings of a machine are called struts. They take the compression of the truss frame of the biplane or triplane. Each wing is divided into truss sections with struts.

S-TURN--A gliding turn, made without the use of engine power. A machine forced to seek a landing will do a number of S-turns to maneuver itself into a good field.

TAIL SPIN--This is the most dreaded of all airplane accidents, and the most likely to be fatal. A machine out of control, due often to stalling and falling through the air, spins slowly as it drops nose first toward the ground. This is caused by the locking of the rudder and elevator into a spin-pocket on the tail, which is off center, and which receives the rush of air. The air passing through it gives it a twisting motion, and the machine makes about one complete turn in two or three hundred feet of fall, depending upon how tight the spin maybe. The British speak of the spin as the spinning nose dive.

TAKE-OFF--This is the start of the machine in its flight. After a short run over the ground the speed of the machine will create enough lift so that the plane leaves the ground.

TAXI--To move an airplane or seaplane on land or water under its own power when picking out a starting-place, or coming in after a landing. This is not to be confused with the run for a start when the plane is getting up speed to fly, using all her power. The NC-4 "taxied" a hundred miles to Chatham after a forced landing, and the NC-3 came in two hundred and five miles to Ponta Delgada after she landed at sea.

VERTICAL BANK--In this position the machine is making a turn with one wing pointing directly to the ground, and its lateral axis has become vertical. The machine turns very quickly in a short space of air, and the maneuver is sometimes spoken of as a splitting vertical bank. In a vertical bank the elevators of a machine act as the rudder and the rudder as an elevator. The controls are reversed.

WASHOUT--Means anything which _was_ but is not now--anything useless, anything that has lost its usefulness, anything that never was useful. Flying may be washed out; that is, stopped; a day may be a washout, a vacation; a machine may be a washout, wrecked beyond repair; a pilot may be a washout, useless as a pilot. It has a variety of meanings, and each one is obvious in its connection. The term became familiar to American fliers with the Royal Air Force.

ZOOM--To gain supernormal flying speed and then pull the machine up into the air at high speed. The rush of wind will zo-o-om in the ears of the pilot. It is a sport in the country to zoom on farmers, on houses and barns, nosing directly for the object on the ground and pulling up just in time to clear it with the undercarriage.

THE END