HOW IT FEELS TO NAVIGATE THE AIR
Notwithstanding the breakdown I felt nothing but elation that night. The
sentiment of success filled me: I had navigated the air.
I had performed every evolution prescribed by the problem. _The
breakdown itself had not been due to any cause foreseen by the
professional aeronauts._
I had mounted without sacrificing ballast. I had descended without
sacrificing gas. My shifting weights had proved successful, and it would
have been impossible not to recognise the capital triumph of these
oblique flights through the air. No one had ever made them before.
Of course, when starting, or shortly after leaving the ground, one has
sometimes to throw out ballast to balance the machine, as one may have
made a mistake and started with the air-ship far too heavy. What I have
referred to are manoeuvres in the air.
[Illustration: "No. 4" FREE DIAGONAL MOVEMENT UP]
[Illustration: "No. 6." FREE DIAGONAL MOVEMENT DOWN]
My first impression of aerial navigation was, I confess, surprise to
feel the air-ship going straight ahead. It was astonishing to feel the
wind in my face. In spherical ballooning we go with the wind, and do not
feel it. True, in rising and descending the spherical balloonist feels
the friction of the atmosphere, and the vertical oscillation makes the
flag flutter, but in the horizontal movement the ordinary balloon seems
to stand still, while the earth flies past under it.
As my air-ship ploughed ahead the wind struck my face and fluttered my
coat, as on the deck of a transatlantic liner, though in other respects
it will be more accurate to liken aerial to river navigation with a
steamboat. It is not like sail navigation, and all talk about "tacking"
is meaningless. If there is any wind at all it is in a given direction,
so that the analogy with a river current is complete. When there is no
wind at all we may liken it to the navigation of a smooth lake or pond.
It will be well to understand this matter.
Suppose that my motor and propeller push me through the air at the rate
of 20 miles an hour, I am in the position of a steamboat captain whose
propeller is driving him up or down the river at the rate of 20 miles
an hour. Imagine the current to be 10 miles per hour. If he navigates
against the current he accomplishes 10 miles an hour with respect to
the shore, though he has been travelling at the rate of 20 miles an
hour through the water. If he goes with the current he accomplishes 30
miles an hour with respect to the shore, though he has not been going
any faster through the water. This is one of the reasons why it is so
difficult to estimate the speed of an air-ship.
It is also the reason why air-ship captains will always prefer to
navigate for their own pleasure in calm weather, and, when they find an
air current against them, will steer obliquely upward or downward to get
out of it. Birds do the same thing. The sailing yachtsman whistles for
a fair breeze, without which he can do nothing, but the river steamboat
captain will always hug the shore to avoid the freshet, and will time
his descent of the river by the outgoing, rather than the incoming,
tide. We air-shipmen are steamboat captains and not sailing yachtsmen.
The navigator of the air, however, has the one great advantage--he can
leave one current for another. The air is full of varying currents.
Mounting, he will find an advantageous breeze or else a calm. These
are strictly practical considerations, having nothing to do with the
air-ship's ability to battle with the breeze when obliged to do it.
Before going on my first trip I had wondered if I should be sea-sick.
I foresaw that the sensation of mounting and descending obliquely with
my shifting weights might be unpleasant. And I looked forward to a good
deal of pitching (_tangage_), as they say on board ship--of rolling
there would not be so much--but both sensations would be novel in
ballooning, for the spherical balloon gives no sensation of movement at
all.
In my first air-ship, however, the suspension was very long,
approximating that of a spherical balloon. For this reason there
was very little pitching. And, speaking generally, since that time,
though I have been told that on this or that trip my air-ship pitched
considerably, I have never been sea-sick. It may be due in part to the
fact that I am rarely subject to this ill upon the water. Back and forth
between Brazil and France and between France and the United States
I have had experience of all kinds of weather. Once, on the way to
Brazil, the storm was so violent that the grand piano went loose and
broke a lady's leg, yet I was not sea-sick.
I know that what one feels most distressingly at sea is not so much the
movement as that momentary hesitation just before the boat pitches,
followed by the malicious dipping or mounting, which never comes quite
the same, and the shock at top and bottom. All this is powerfully aided
by the smells of the paint, varnish, tar, mingled with the odours of the
kitchen, the heat of the boilers, and the stench of the smoke and the
hold.
In the air-ship there is no smell--all is pure and clean--and the
pitching itself has none of the shocks and hesitations of the boat at
sea. The movement is suave and flowing, which is doubtless owing to the
lesser resistance of the air waves. The pitches are less frequent and
rapid than those at sea; the dip is not brusquely arrested, so that the
mind can anticipate the curve to its end; and there is no shock to give
that queer, "empty" sensation to the solar plexus.
Furthermore, the shocks of a transatlantic liner are due first to the
fore, and then to the after, part of the giant construction rising out
of the water to plunge into it again. The air-ship never leaves its
medium--the air--in which it only swings.
This consideration brings me to the most remarkable of all the
sensations of aerial navigation. On my first trip it actually shocked
me! This is the utterly new sensation of movement in an extra dimension!
Man has never known anything like free vertical existence. Held to the
plane of the earth, his movement "down" has scarcely been more than to
return to it after a short excursion "up," our minds remaining always on
the plane surface even while our bodies may be mounting; and this is so
much the case that the spherical balloonist as he rises has no sense of
movement, but gains the impression that the earth is descending below
him.
_With respect to combinations of vertical and horizontal movements,
man is absolutely without experience of them._ Therefore, as all our
sensations of movement are practically in two dimensions, this is
the extraordinary novelty of aerial navigation that it affords us
experiences--not in the fourth dimension, it is true--but in what
is practically an extra dimension--the third--so that the miracle
is similar. Indeed, I cannot describe the delight, the wonder, and
intoxication of this free diagonal movement onward and upward or onward
and downward, combined at will with brusque changes of direction
horizontally when the air-ship answers to a touch of the rudder! The
birds have this sensation when they spread their great wings and go
tobogganning in curves and spirals through the sky!
Por mares nunca d'antes navegados!
(O'er seas hereto unsailed.)
The line of our great poet echoed in my memory from childhood. After
this first of all my cruises I had it put on my flag.
It is true that spherical ballooning had prepared me for the mere
sensation of height; but that is a very different matter. It is,
therefore, curious that, prepared on this head as I was, the mere
thought of height should have given me my only unpleasant experience.
What I mean is this:
The wonderful new combinations of vertical and horizontal movements,
utterly out of previous human experience, caused me neither surprise
nor trouble. I would find myself ploughing diagonally upward through
the air with a kind of instinctive liberty. And yet when moving
horizontally--as you would say, in the natural position--a glance
downwards at the house-tops disquieted me.
[Illustration: THE HOUSETOPS LOOK SO DANGEROUS]
"What if I should fall?" the thought came. The house-tops looked so
dangerous with their chimney-pots for spikes. One seldom has this
thought in a spherical balloon, because we know that the danger in the
air is _nil_: the great spherical balloon can neither suddenly lose
its gas nor burst. My little air-ship balloon had to support not only
exterior but interior pressure as well--which is not the case with a
spherical balloon, as I shall explain in the next chapter--and any
injury to the cylindrical form of my air-ship balloon by loss of gas
might prove fatal.
While over the house-tops I felt that it would be bad to fall, but as
soon as I left Paris and was navigating over the forest of the Bois de
Boulogne the idea left me entirely. Below there seemed to be an ocean of
greenery, soft and safe.
It was while over the continuation of this greenery in the grassy
_pelouse_ of the Longchamps racecourse that my balloon, having lost a
great deal of its gas, began to double on itself. Previously I had heard
a noise. Looking up, I saw that the long cylinder of the balloon was
beginning to break. Then I was astonished and troubled. I wondered what
I could do.
I could not think of anything to do. I might throw out ballast. That
would cause the air-ship to rise, and the decreased pressure of the
atmosphere would doubtless permit the expanding gas to straighten out
the balloon again taut and strong. But I remembered that I must always
come down again when all the danger would repeat itself, and worse even
than before, from the more gas I should have lost. There was nothing to
do but to go on down instantly.
I remember having the sure idea: "If that balloon cylinder doubles any
more, the ropes by which I am suspended to it will work at different
strengths and will begin to break one by one as I go down!"
For the moment I was sure that I was in the presence of death. Well, I
will tell it frankly, my sentiment was almost entirely that of waiting
and expectation.
"What is coming next?" I thought. "What am I going to see and know in a
few minutes? Whom shall I see after I am dead?"
[Illustration: OVER THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE. BELOW THERE SEEMED TO BE AN
OCEAN OF GREENERY, SOFT AND SAFE]
The thought that I should be meeting my father in a few minutes
thrilled me. Indeed, I think that in such moments there is no room
either for regret or terror. The mind is too full of looking forward.
One is frightened only so long as one still has a chance.