The unsubstantial air, p.8
The Unsubstantial Air, page 8
Wind is another problem: if a gust blows hard across the path of the machine, it will strike the vertical rudder on the plane’s tail and swing the whole thing like a weather vane into the wind. Either force, torque or wind, can throw a plane that’s rolling along the ground into a violent skidding turn that American pilots call a ground loop and Frenchmen (who are more poetic about flying) call a cheval de bois—a wooden horse, like the horses that go round and round on a carousel. The young man will try to keep his course straight, but he will learn that a plane sometimes has a mind of its own.
Walcott makes it to the far side of the field, where other students rush out and turn his machine around, point him back to where he started. He rolls back across the field, but more slowly. The moniteur is waiting. “Plus encore!” he shouts. “Et plus vite!” and turns him round again.
What happened next is told in a letter Walcott wrote home:
My first sortie or trip went O.K. with a considerable breeze on the tail, but on the second there was too much wind and after I got going pretty fast—around she went. The wind caught under the inside wing and up it went. Smash went the outside wheel, and a crackle of busting wood. All the front framework of wood that holds the motor was smashed—a pretty bad break. The monitor was a bit mad and talked to me a bit in French.
The plane that Walcott has just wrecked is a Blériot XI, the standard plane for primary training in the French air service. Its design is archaic by 1917: it looks like the plane that Louis Blériot first flew across the English Channel in 1909 and quite unlike those that are in combat over the Western Front. For one thing, it’s a monoplane: most combat planes in 1917 had upper and lower wings—some had three. The Blériot’s fuselage is not covered in painted canvas, except around the cockpit where the pilot sits; the rest is just a bare wooden framework. The single wing is braced with many wires attached to posts above and below, which add to the box-kite effect.
Most of the control surfaces of the Blériot are fairly standard: the elevator (which controls vertical movement) and the rudder (which controls the horizontal) are at the back end of the plane; that’s where they are on all planes now, but in the early days of flying they might be at the front, and the propeller might be at the rear, facing backward, which must have given the odd impression that the plane was backing through the air. There are no ailerons (ailerons are the movable panels on the rear edges of the wings of a modern plane that control rolling, tilting movements); in a Blériot you tilted the plane by warping the wings—that is, twisting them by means of wires. The cockpit is located in the middle; the pilot sits there on a wicker seat, not so much in the plane as on it, with most of his body up in the air above the cockpit rim. Since the Blériot has no windshield, he’s exposed to the buffeting slipstream of the propeller and will be sprayed with the castor oil that lubricates the engine.
One other thing about Walcott’s Blériot: it can’t fly. Its wings have been cropped, like the wings of a barnyard turkey, to keep it on the ground. All you can do with it is drive it across the field. Students call these earthbound machines Penguins, after another bird that can’t fly.
Nobody seems bothered that Walcott has busted his plane; it happens all the time. Mechanics simply haul the wreckage off the field and bring him another one. (Being mostly wood and wire, the Blériot is easily repaired; it will be back in service in a couple of days.) Walcott continues with his taxiing practice. When he’s mastered the Penguin, he’s promoted to another Blériot with uncropped wings, which can rise a few feet off the ground; now he practices getting it up and down again. When he can do that without crashing, he gets another model with larger wings, and a bit more horsepower, in which he learns to take off, fly a circuit of the field, and land.
In all these exercises, Walcott is alone in the plane. Before he takes off, his moniteur will stand beside him and tell him what to do in the air, but the moniteur will never go along on the flight to take over if his student gets into trouble and to demonstrate the right way to do it. (How could he? This Blériot model has only one seat.)
The teaching language is primarily French, which isn’t surprising, since the moniteurs are Frenchmen and the country they’re flying in is France. The students learn to speak Pilot French, a language of French metaphors for the parts and movements of planes. Their letters home are full of its terms: cheval du bois and tour de piste, panne and vrille and pique, some of which they spell phonetically—vree and peek—since they’ve never seen the words written. Some of this language fades when the young pilots go on to fly in English-speaking squadrons, but some remains and becomes the standard English terminology for airplane parts: “aileron” (from the French term for a spindle); “empennage,” the vertical and horizontal tail surfaces from the French term for the feathers on an arrow.
The Blériot way is the one Walcott chose, back at Princeton, when he wrote to his father about “being sent to France to learn to fly according to French methods.”
At least one senior American aviator fully endorsed the Blériot method. When Colonel Billy Mitchell, then Chief of Air Service, First Army, visited the Avord flying school in the spring of 1917, he concluded that the system in use there produced excellent pilots, though he admitted it took a great deal of time. “I went through this same sort of instruction myself,” he recalled, “and know it taught me more about flying than any other system could possibly have done.” In this system, he said, the student really taught himself to fly. Mitchell thought that was the right way to learn—perhaps because he had begun his military career as a cavalryman; you learn to ride a horse by climbing on its back, giving it a kick in the ribs, and hanging on until you fall off. And if you think about it, the great Louis Blériot himself must have learned to fly by the Blériot method (who was there to teach him?), as did the Wright brothers, and no doubt many another backyard tinkerer, in the early days of flying.
As Stuart Walcott moved on through the stages of his training, he continued to write letters home. All the young pilots did; they were well-bred young men; they’d always written to their parents when they were away from home—at private school, at summer camp, at college. Their letters from flight training are much like the ones they’d have written from school: I’m learning this and then that; if I pass the tests, I’ll be promoted, and then I’ll graduate—the usual narratives of the hurdle race that education is. And because their families were the sorts of people who save such mementos of their children’s growing, they preserved the letters and sometimes published them in small editions for the family. So we know a lot about how American flight students learned to fly during the First World War. They explain what they’re doing in planes in careful detail, knowing that the folks back home have never been in a plane, or maybe even seen one.
Charles Biddle, a young Philadelphia lawyer turned aviator, describes the first stages of the Blériot method to his parents. Biddle arrived in France knowing something of how to fly; he had had dual-control training at the Curtiss Flying School at Newport News. The French took no note of his experience; they simply started him at the beginning of the process that Biddle calls “driving the machine”—as though a plane were a tractor or a dump truck.
You might expect that Biddle would be angry at the delay in his progress on the front and perhaps surprised at the teach-yourself method the French used. But there’s none of that in the letters he wrote home in the spring of 1917; he simply describes the stages of the process, step by step: the Penguins, the rouleur (that’s the straight-ahead-on-the-ground stage), and the décolleur (three feet up and down again), and eventually a little higher, and regular, sure-enough landings.
There is no criticism of the method in Biddle’s account, but there is a kind of patient impatience; this isn’t really flying. Other beginners feel that impatience, too; Sidney Drew called those early exercises “inconsequential flying” and was eager to move on to the next stage, the tour de piste (the piste is the airfield), where real, consequential flying would begin. Drew explains what the tour amounted to in a letter to his father: “All one has to do is to mount into the air to the height of a hundred and fifty metres, follow the course closely [it’s a rectangle], making your turns at the right angle and, when you come back to your starting point, pique and make a good landing.”
The course is only two and a half miles around, and the plane is still just a Blériot (though with a more powerful engine), but Drew calls these flights “absolute flying classes”—still classes, but no longer beginners’ exercises; “at last,” he writes, “I can say that I have flown an aeroplane.”
There will be other, more challenging tests: the petit voyage, a trip from here to somewhere else and back; two triangular cross-country flights; an hour spent at two thousand meters altitude; precision landings. Real flights, all of them, flown by a young man who was beginning to think of himself as a real pilot.
Simply describing the flight-training syllabus won’t be enough to give the folks back home that sense of real flight; the young pilots will try to express the feeling of flying—what it’s like to be up there, airborne and alone, how the air is another country with a different geography, a different sense of space, different emotions, different physical responses.
Their efforts at description begin with the first flight and continue through the whole training period. They’re not all gifted writers (though some—Quentin Roosevelt, Ham Coolidge, Drew, Walcott—are), but they are telling personal stories that are absolutely new to their experience, and the newness lifts their imaginations and makes the telling immediate and alive. Here is Drew on his first flight: “Well, father, at last I have been in the air. The class I am in now is the first real air class, and it is quite interesting to be up in the air all by yourself.”
He’s barely off the ground, but something absolutely new has happened to him. He tries to put it into words, first general, abstract terms: it’s “interesting,” he says, it’s “exciting,” this learning to fly. But such words aren’t good enough; he tries again with similes: learning to fly in the Blériot school is like trying to paddle a canoe straight (that’s the Penguin stage); then it’s like trying to ride a bicycle for the first time (that’s the décolleur stage). But the flying, the actual flying? He turns to pure imagination: flying, when he has mastered it, will be “like trying to drive a light cloud.”
A month later Drew has advanced to the tour de piste class. In a long letter he tells his stepmother what it’s like. “One gets into the machine,” he writes,
makes himself as comfortable as possible, pulls on the “gaz” and with the assistance of a few slight-of-hand tricks (the point to the trick being that the hand must be as slight as possible) mounts into the air.
One then flutters about, being impressed on the head by the weight of one’s helmet, and in the stomach by the tightness of one’s belt, while the propeller whizzes about in one’s face, causing the eyes to water and the perspective to become ethereal.
One then fiddles about with the controls, twitching nervously and with “slight hands” at them as the wings rise and fall and the whole aeroplane jumps up and down answering obediently to the demands of the air currents.
I quote this passage at such length for the sake of the self-portrait in it—the comically fuddled young man who sits in the wicker seat, fluttering and fiddling, while the plane obeys not the incompetent new pilot but the insistent currents of the air. That it’s a comic portrait is not surprising; Drew had been a rising comic actor in his civilian days. But any old pilot who remembers his early flying days will recognize its truth, the bouncing up and down in space while the plane and the air decide what to do.
Once Drew has gained a little altitude and the plane is flying itself, he looks around for the first time and sees the world around him, not fields and woods, not from up here, but yellow and green patches, a distant pattern far below.
Then it’s time to turn, and he’s back in the plane, twitching at the controls while the machine whirls around and he feels, he says, like someone “clinging to a waving flag that is suspended from the eighteenth story window of a sky-scraper”—once more the helpless comedian in the wicker seat. But he has introduced his reader to some of the complex feelings of flying: the sense you have that a plane has a will of its own; and that other feeling, of three-dimensional freedom, that comes when you’re alone in a plane, separated in space from the patchwork world below, supported only by the unsubstantial air.
The altitude test that followed added another emotion to that feeling of distance from the earth: not loneliness, or fear, but an exhilarating solitude. As you rise farther and farther from the land below, it looks more and more like a map, a diagram of itself, and less like the land you live on. Walcott, on his altitude test, took his Blériot to two thousand meters (the assigned altitude for the test) in fourteen minutes but went on up, to thirty-five hundred meters, about as high as a Blériot could go (it took him another forty minutes). By the time he leveled off, clouds had formed, and he was shut off from the earth—“nothing but a beautiful sea of clouds below me, a very beautiful sight.”
Every pilot shares that feeling of the sheer beauty of clouds when he flies among them. On fair-weather days cumulus clouds saunter like sailing ships on favorable winds, sliding their shadows across the green landscape below. On gray days you climb first past trailing wisps, like hems torn from the cloud above you, into the overcast; you call it “solid” when you talk with other pilots—“a solid overcast today”—but it’s not, it’s a luminous wetness, a shining dimness with nothing inside it. And then you come out on top, into impossible brightness, and climb on in perfect light, and look around.
Above the clouds you enter another landscape, white hills and valleys and wide plains stretching to the horizon. And thunderheads, shining mountains that tower above you, their tops like great anvils, taller than you can fly. You can play on their soft sides, slide up along their whiteness, and stall, and let your plane slide down again like a sled on a snowy hill, and when you do, a halo of light will form around you. This isn’t simply more of the earth’s variety; it’s another, separate world made of mist and space and light, containing nothing substantial—only the white clouds and the high, empty bluer-than-blue sky.
And then the letting down, into the cloud layer where the light dims again to gray and there’s nothing to see until you come out below, back in the overcast world.
After the altitude test, the petit voyage or ligne droite—a solitary flight to a town sixty kilometers or so away, where you must land, and then fly back to your home field. It’s an exhilarating and slightly scary thing for a beginner, flying away from the place you know and landing where you’ve never landed before. More than simply another exercise, it’s a little voyage to elsewhere, a liberation from the familiar.
On your first trip the world you fly over will be strange, but navigating is easy (or so Walcott assured his parents): “Nothing to do but climb two or three thousand feet and just sit there and watch the country unfold, comparing the maplike surface of the earth spread out below with the map in the machine. In good weather it is very easy to follow, spot roads, towns, woods, rivers and bridges.” When it’s like that—the weather good and the engine purring—you’ll fly your flight happily and return home at day’s end contented, pleased with yourself and your plane. Here’s Walcott at the end of his first petit voyage: “Coming back yesterday evening, the sun was pretty low and the air absolutely calm, nothing but the drone of the motor and the wind; the only movements necessary an occasional slight pressure on the joy stick to one side or the other to keep the proper direction. I came very nearly going to sleep, it was so peaceful up there.”
There’s nothing about war here, no heroism, no danger, no enemy: it’s pure flying. I remember that feeling.
Once he could fly in a straight line from A to B and find his way home again, the student moved on to the next challenge: a triangular cross-country journey, A to B to C and back to A. Each leg would be some forty miles long; in a Blériot that would take most of an hour. With the time you’d spend landing and refueling, the whole circuit would take you half a day—if nothing happened on the way.
To find your way around this three-cornered course, you’d have to rely on the map you carried and the look of the land below you; Blériots carried no navigational instruments, only engine gauges. If you wanted to fly by compass, you’d have to bring one with you. Alan Nichols remembered a student who tried to fly from Tours to Châteaudun on compass headings alone and wound up at Orléans and then crashed trying to find his way back.
On these triangle flights they’d discover France profonde, France as it has always been—the ancient forests and the farms, the rivers that water the green fields, and in the towns monuments of the French past: at Bourges, on a hill above the Yèvre, the cathedral of St. Étienne with its two tall towers; at Romorantin an island in the river with an old church on it; at Châteaudun a castle on a promontory above the Loir, at Vendôme another castle, another tall church. With such landmarks, it would be hard to get lost, as long as the weather was good.
The weather wouldn’t always be good, though. In the autumn and early winter of 1917 entire weeks passed when no flying was done, and many other days when clouds lowered and contrary winds blew, when distances were blurred and hazy, and the map of the earth was hard to read. On days like that you’d fly anyway, but if the weather worsened, you might have to land somewhere, just to find out where you were. Or you might get to one of the corners of your triangle and decide to get on the ground and stay there until it cleared. Harvey Conover, flying out of Tours in December, got as far as the Pontlevoy stop by mid-afternoon. He could have flown on back to Tours, but the ceiling had dropped to six hundred meters, and darkness comes early in December, so he decided to stay overnight where he was. Eight other pilots had made the same decision. Their stay lasted three days before the weather cleared. Conover wrote home from Pontlevoy about the visit: “There are nine of us in this village awaiting favorable weather that will permit our flying back to camp. We are quartered in a small épicerie run by a Frenchman by the name of Benoist. He was chef of the Savoy Hotel in London before the war and sure can cook. We are living like kings and have nothing in the world to do but eat and sleep in big feather beds.”
