JIMMY HILL STARTLES THE VETERANS
The Brighton boys lived every hour at that big base airdrome. Jimmy
Hill was sent up on his first practice flight on an English machine.
Joe Little got his chance at the end of a week. He was sent up one
morning in a late-type bombing machine, a huge three-seated biplane
with great spreading wings and a powerful engine. This was a most
formidable looking machine in which one passenger sat out in front
mounted in a sort of machine-gun turret. The big biplane was fast,
in spite of the heavy armament it carried, its three passengers and
its arrangement for carrying hundreds of pounds of bombs as well.
Harry Corwin was in the air at the same time on an artillery machine,
the car or fuselage of which projected far in front of the two planes.
There, well in front of the pilot, the observer sat in a turret with
a machine-gun. Machine-guns were also mounted on the wings, and a
second passenger rode in the tail with another rapid-fire gun.
As Bob Haines had been on a rather long flight that day on a Nieuport,
a fast French biplane, and his observer had told Bob of a new French
dreadnought machine carrying two machine gunners and five machine-guns,
the boys talked armament long into the night.
Every day they learned some new points. One afternoon a pilot from
the front line told of a captured German Albatros, which he spun yarns
about for an hour. A single-seater, armed with three machine-guns
which, being controlled by the motor, or engine, shot automatically
and at the same time through the propeller in front of the pilot, with
the highest speed of any aeroplane then evolved on the fighting front,
with a reputation of being able to climb to an altitude of fifteen
thousand feet in less than fifteen minutes---some said in so short a
time as ten minutes---the crack German machine had attracted much
attention.
"With that sort of thing against us," said Dicky Mann, "we have
certainly got to learn to fly."
The same thought may have come to their squadron commander that night,
for the next day saw the start of real post-graduate work in flying
for his command. The rule at the base airdrome had been to give
new units of well-trained flyers good all-round tests on various
types of machines. This involved straight flying for the most part,
and was done more with the idea of familiarizing the newcomers with
the newer types of planes, and deciding for which branch of the work
they were best suited, than for anything else. In the work that gave
the finishing touch to his command, their squadron commander selected
three of the six Brighton boys as candidates for high honors in the
days to come. Every one of the half dozen was good. All were eager.
All flew well. But Joe Little, Jimmy Hill and Harry Corwin seemed
made of exactly the sort of stuff from which flying stars were evolved.
"I think I will try to make hunters out of those three boys," said
their commander to the officer in charge of the base airdrome.
"Our plan here," said the officer thus addressed, "is to pass youngsters
out after they have satisfactorily gone through a final test of two
short voyages of twenty-five miles each, two long voyages of one
hundred and thirty-five miles each and an hour's flight at a minimum
altitude of sixty-five hundred feet. The post-graduate course is
mostly aerial acrobatics. Looping the loop comes first. All of
them can do that. The flier must then do flip-flops, wing slips,
vertical twists and spinning nose dives."
"Just what do you call a spinning nose dive?" asked the squadron
commander.
The chief explained: "Climbing to at least four thousand feet, the
pilot cuts off his motor and crosses his controls. This causes the
machine first to scoop upward and then fall sidewise, the nose of the
plane, down vertically, spinning around and around as it falls."
"That sounds interesting," said the commander.
"More," continued the chief. "It is necessary. Skill in the air
nowadays means all the difference between life and death---all the
difference between success and defeat. I have an idea that we have
come nearer to the limit of human possibility as regards speed in the
air than many people think. Two hundred miles an hour may never be
reached. But whether it is or not, we can get better and better
results by paying more and more attention to the development of our
aerial athletes.
"I look on flyers as athletes playing a game---the greatest game
the world has ever seen. The more expert we can make them individually,
the better the service will be. A nimble flyer, a real star man, is
almost sure to score off a less expert antagonist, even if the better
man is mounted on an inferior plane. That has been proven to me beyond
all possibility of doubt time and time again.
"I was once a football coach. My work here, so far as it touches men,
is very similar to coaching work. It comes down to picking the good
ones, sorting them out, weeding, weeding all the time. You like
those particular three boys you referred to? Well, watch them.
Give them chances. But don't be disappointed if they are not all
world-beaters. And don't be surprised if some of the lot you think
will stick at the steadier, plainer work turn out big. You never can
tell."
Before the strain of expert acrobatics came careful training in
machine-gunnery. The Brighton boys went through a course of study on
land that made them thoroughly familiar with machine-guns of more
than one type. Machine-guns, they found, were in all sorts of
positions on the different sorts of machines.
"I wonder where they will put a rapid-fire gun next?" said Joe Little
one day at luncheon. "Let's see. I saw one plane this morning that
had a gun mounted on the upper plane, and fired above the propeller.
Another next to it had the gun placed in the usual position in front,
and fired through the propeller. Next I ran across a movable gun
on a rotating base fixed at the rear of the supporting planes. Of
course all of those big triple planes have the fuselage mounting,
and I was surprised to see still another sort of mounting, a movable
gun fixed behind the keel of one of those new English 'pushers,' just
as I came in. It keeps a fellow busy to see all the new things here,
and no mistake."
"Your talk is so much Greek to me sometimes, Joe," said Bob Haines.
"You use so much technical language when you get going that you fog
me. I can make a plane do what it is supposed to do, most of the
time, but some of these special ideas floor me, and I am not ashamed
to admit it."
"What is worrying you specially?" asked Jimmy Hill, smiling.
Bob was one of the soundest fliers of the six of them, but he was
forever making hard work out of anything he did not understand from the
ground up. Once he had mastered the why and wherefore, he was at
peace, but if the reason was hidden from him he was never quite sure
on that point.
"It is this," answered Bob. "Most all of the machines they have been
putting me up against lately have been those speedy little one-man
things---the hunters. Now I understand all about the necessity for
speed and agility in that type, and I can see that the fixed gun in
front, sticking out like a finger in such fashion that you have to
point the plane at a Boche to point the gun at him, is a thing they
can't well get away from. That Hartford type of hunter just over
from home is rigged up that way, and I can get the little gun on
her pointed anyway I like. But all guns fixed that way fire through
the propeller, and just exactly how all those bullets manage to get
through those whirring blades without hitting one of them is not
quite clear to me yet."
"Go it, Joe," said Harry Corwin. "You spent a good time listening
to what that French pilot said about Garros the other day."
"The Frenchman told me that a very well known pilot of the early days
of the war, named Garros, invented the arrangement whereby a gun could
be so mounted that the bullets went through the arc of the
revolving propeller blades," answered Joe. "He said, too, that
Garros had the bad luck to be taken prisoner, and the Germans got
his machine before he had any chance to destroy it. That was the
way the Germans got hold of the idea. Garros simply designed a bit
of mechanism that automatically stops the gun from firing when the
propeller blade is passing directly in front of the gun-barrel. He
placed the gun-barrel directly behind the propeller. He then made a
cam device so regulated as to fire the gun with a delay not exceeding
one five-hundredth of a second. As soon as the blade of the
propeller passes the barrel the system liberates the firing mechanism
of the gun until another blade passes, or is about to pass, when
the bullets that would pierce it are held up, just for that
fraction of a second, again. So it goes on, like clockwork. You
have noticed that on the new planes all the pilot has to do when
he wants to fire his machine-gun is to press a small lever which
is set, on most planes, in the handle of the directing lever. That
small lever acts, by the mechanism I have told you about, on the
trigger of the gun. It is simple enough."
"Yes," admitted Bob, "it does not sound very complicated, but it seems
very wonderful, all the same. Most things out here are wonderful when
you first run into them, though."
Of the group of Brighton boys selected by the squadron commander to
study the finer points of aerial acrobatics, Joe Little was the star,
with Harry Corwin a very close second and Jimmy Hill a good third.
Their education, as the days went past, became a series of experiments
that were nothing short of hair-raising to any onlookers save most
experienced ones.
To see Joe, in a wasp of a plane, swift and agile, start it whirling
like a pinwheel with the tip of its own wing as an axis, and fall for
thousands of feet as it whirled, only to catch himself and right the
speedy plane when lees than a thousand feet from the earth, was indeed
a sight to make one hold one's breath.
Jimmy Hill learned a dodge that interested older aviators. Looping
the loop sidewise, he would catch the plane when upside down, and shoot
away at a tangent, head down, the machine absolutely inverted---then
continue the side loop, bringing him back to upright again some
distance from where he had originally begun his evolution.
Watching him at this stunt, a veteran pilot said to the chief one
morning: "That turn will save that kid's life one day. See if it don't."
And sure enough, one day, it did.
Harry learned what a French friend had told him the great Guynemer,
king of all French fliers, had christened "the dead leaf." With
the plane bottom side up, the pilot lets it fall, now whirling downward,
now seeming to hang for a moment, suspended in midair, now caught by
an eddy and tossed upward, just like a dead leaf is tossed by an
autumn wind.
Joe could nose-dive to perfection. He would hover high up, at well
over ten thousand feet from the ground, then drop straight for the
earth, like a plummet, nose directly downward, seemingly bent on
destruction. When still at a safe distance up, he would gradually
ease his rush through the air by "teasing her a bit," as he called
it. Then, before the eye from below could follow his evolutions,
he would be skimming off on a level course like a swallow.
The day came at last when the squadron was "moved up front" for actual
work over the enemy's lines. The Brighton boys were ready and eager
to give a good account of themselves, and soon they were to be
accorded ample opportunity.