Mysterious Aviator (25 page)

When I was taught to fly there was a rumour in the camp that it was possible to put an aeroplane voluntarily into a spin and get it out again. Somebody said that somebody had told him that he had seen somebody do it at Farnborough. Closer to hand, one of our own instructors, a Bachelor of Science and a schoolmaster in civil life, claimed that he had done it. So far as I remember, he had the peculiar idea that the way to get out of a spin was to force the machine into a steeper dive still; as nobody had seen him do it the first time, he was disbelieved.

Whereupon he set out to show us how to do it, and it is a fact that the rotation of the machine had practically stopped before he hit the ground. I forget his name now. That made us think that there might be something in it after all; that given sufficient height it might some day be possible to recover a machine from a clumsily executed turn before it spun into the deck.

I would like to try and impress upon the reader the intense moral effect that this spin had upon us. It was a ghoulish thing, waiting to spring out upon you in an unguarded moment. All kinds of legends and exaggerations cloaked its path. My own instructor told me that if one got into a spin on an Avro the wings fell off; he, of course, had never dreamed of trying it. Another legend was that the machine frequently turned upside down in its rotation to the ground, throwing the pilot out. Most terrifying of all was the uncertainty of the commencement of this thing. We knew that it began from an imperfectly executed slow turn, but just how bad the turn had to be to loose this frightful thing upon us was what none of us quite knew. For most of us, that made our turns a nightmare, and increased our consumption of alcohol to an extraordinary extent.

I crashed five times during the war, not counting the occasion on which I was shot down. Three of those were ordinary landings upon an aerodrome, and came from shutting off the engine at the wrong moment, I think. The other two were forced landings away from the aerodrome due to engine failure; those at the time I regarded as an Act of God, and a certain crash for any pilot, good or bad. I am told that things are not quite like that now. They tell me that no pupil is allowed to fly solo in these days till he can loop, spin, and pull off a forced landing in considerably better style than the crack pilots of my day. Well, things change.

But what I would wish to point out in connection with this flight that I made upon the Breguet is—simply—that I am a 1916 pilot who stopped flying in 1917. A relic of the past.

The take-off went better than I had hoped. I settled into my seat, pulled the stick back central, and opened up the throttle
gradually. Straight before me, half a mile away, I could see the white line of the road against the greyness of the down, and the line of the telegraph wires. The Breguet stirred, and moved forward. I thrust the throttle forward to the limit of its travel, and sat tight.

We began rolling over the short turf towards the road. I held the stick a little bit forward, till presently the tail rose from the ground, and the fuselage came level. Then I just sat very still, not daring to try and pull her off the ground, while the telegraph wires loomed closer and the wind came whistling over the windscreen and around my head. She reached the end of the level ground and began to run down the incline to the road, but by that time she was travelling at great speed and I could feel that she was getting light. And then, perhaps three hundred yards from the road, she came off the ground. I made no movement of the stick, but shot a glance at the air-speed indicator. It read a hundred and thirty kilos. She touched ground once more, very lightly, and then without any conscious movement on my part, she was ten feet up. Mindful of my precautions I tried to hold her down a little. The tiny movements that I dared to make were ineffectual; I had her trimmed to climb, and climb she would, so that we were fifty feet up when we passed over the telegraph wires.

She went up very quickly. It cannot have been more than three or four minutes before the altimeter showed a thousand metres. I was well past Leventer by that time, and the earth was getting very faint. It was still half-dark, and there was a sort of haze over everything; but I could see a glint of open water on my left which I thought was Portsmouth harbour.

I made up my mind to turn then and fly back over the down, in order that they might see that I was all right and that Sheila might be comforted about this business. I had the wind up of that turn from the first, but it had to be done some time and I began to make my preparations for it. I was then at about four thousand feet.

As a preliminary, I levelled the machine out and throttled the engine a little. The speed increased tremendously; every
wire seemed to scream at me. The indicator rose to about two hundred kilos. A rapid mental calculation showed me that that was nothing like her top speed; I hardened my heart and thrust the nose down till she was doing about two hundred and forty, which I interpreted as a hundred and fifty miles an hour. I set the tail trim for that speed, and then I began my turn by pressing lightly on the rudder.

The machine swung slowly to the left on an even keel, and the cold air came in over the side of the cockpit like a blast from a hose, drenching and stifling me. I shifted the stick over to give her a little bank, and trod more heavily upon the rudder. The nose of the machine dropped suddenly below the horizon, and continued to drop. I didn’t know what to do then, and took off all rudder in a panic. The turning stopped and the air came in over the other side of the cockpit; I was sideslipping violently with the nose of the machine down and the engine on. I pulled her up a little and tried a bit of rudder again, completing the turn in a heavy sideslip upwards and outwards.

I was too high up in that dim light to be able to see them on the ground, but by the landmarks I passed more or less over the spot that I had taken off from. And then I set off on my course.

I was at about twelve hundred metres at that time, and the clouds were close above me. I had had enough of properly banked turns, and got the machine on to her course by skidding round with a very gentle application of the rudder alone. That turn must have taken me five miles to do ninety degrees, but I got her round without incident and settled on to my compass bearing. I set to work then to adjust my controls till I was flying at two hundred kilos without either losing or gaining height; by the time I had done that I was over the coast by Chichester. Before me the sea stretched away dimly into the distance as far as I could see, grey and corrugated in the morning light.

That crossing took an hour, and for the majority of that time I was out of sight of land. The clouds got lower as I approached the French coast, and I had to drop off height till I
was down to about two thousand feet. I came in sight of land at about twenty minutes past six, and crossed it five minutes later.

Visibility was getting quite good by then. I missed Havre by seven or eight miles, passing to the east of the town and crossing the Seine estuary at the point where it became evidently a river. That gave me the information that I wanted to correct my course for wind; I headed a bit more to the west and went trundling out over France at about two thousand five hundred feet.

Everything seemed to be going very well. For the first time I began to feel real confidence that this venture of mine would prove successful. If all went on going so well, I was confident that I could get to Lanaldo before Lenden, and I was pretty sure that I should find somewhere to put the machine down gently. If the landing went off all right, it seemed to me that I stood a really good chance of intercepting him before he reached the house. That heartened me for the flight.

I passed over Evreux and Chartres, and so to Orleans, which I reached at twenty minutes to eight. The clouds had gone higher by this time, and I was back at about four thousand. I was getting very cold and stiff. After Orleans I managed to get down to my flask and had a drink of brandy and water, and I nibbled a sandwich in little handfuls from my pocket. It may have been the distraction of eating that made me lose touch with my surroundings, because after Orleans I saw nothing that I recognised.

That didn’t worry me much. I had checked my course by each of those towns, and I was confident by then that I was on the right road. The clouds got higher and higher as I traversed France; I followed them up until I was flying at about six thousand feet. At about half-past eight I came to the end of the clouds; they thinned out and vanished altogether and from there onwards I was flying in bright sunshine. I went up to about seven thousand feet at that, and stayed there. I didn’t want the French to notice the machine more than was necessary.

I came to some hills at about a quarter-past nine, and guessed
rightly that I was somewhere round about the Puy de Dôme. I carried on rather to the east of them and presently I saw a great river winding parallel with my course, far away to the east. I searched my map, and had very little difficulty in identifying it as the Rhône.

I had no trouble after that. At about ten o’clock I ran through a great flock of small birds at about seven thousand feet; I saw none of them clearly owing to our relative speed, but I think they may have been swallows. None of them hit the machine. At a quarter to eleven I came in sight of a great sheet of inland water that stretched far away to the west, and a minute or two afterwards I saw the sea beyond.

I went close enough to pick out Marseilles in the distance, and then did another of those long gentle turns with a scrap of rudder and no bank at all, till I was heading about south-east. I carried on like that until I came to the coast, and set to flying down the French Riviera. I once spent a fortnight in Nice, and I knew the look of the great bluff that stands up above Monte Carlo. I flew on down the coast keeping a sharp eye open for that thing, and at about ten minutes past twelve I saw it.

That brought me to my journey’s end. I was very tired by then, very thick in the head with the noise of the engine, and painfully cramped. I had a final drink from my flask and got out the large-scale map of the Lanaldo district in readiness to fix my position.

I passed Mentone, flying at about five thousand feet a couple of miles out to sea. The hills here ran down into the sea, with very little foreshore. It struck me as I looked about and saw the smoke of a train that I must have passed Lenden by this time. In the strain of flying I had forgotten all about him, but the sight of that train recalled me to the object of my journey.

Ventimiglia was marked on my large-scale map, and from there I turned inland up the Roja valley to Lanaldo. The air here was very bumpy due to the proximity of the hills, and once or twice I hit a rough patch that put the fear of God into me. I carried on, dropping off a little height as I went, and so I came to the little grey town on the hill-side above the road that
could only be Lanaldo. Beside me, to the east and scarcely lower than the machine, was a thickly wooded hill that seemed to be the commencement of a range running away inland. That could only be Monte Verde.

The air grew frightfully rough. I flew straight on up the valley, peering over the side of the cockpit and trying to spot a likely landing-ground. Now that I saw the wooded slopes, I was not so sanguine about putting down upon the trees unhurt. These pine-woods weren’t quite like our English trees. There the woods, seen from the air, appear soft and downy; these looked thin and spiky. In many places I could see the ground between the individual trees.

Then I saw that there was a clearing, right on the top of Monte Verde. The pine trees seemed to come to an end about five hundred feet below the summit, and then there was a belt of some scrubby foliage of a different colour, that I found afterwards to be stunted oaks. The very summit of the hill was bare, and seemed to be covered with grass. The space available for landing would have been about three hundred yards square, I suppose.

I determined to try it.

I was well past the hill then, and a long way past Lanaldo. I gained a little height before attempting the turn, then slewed the machine round clumsily in a wide sweep till I was facing back on my tracks. The bare top of that hill was straight before me then; I throttled back the engine and put the machine on a straight glide down to go and have a look at it.

I passed over the grass at about four hundred feet, I suppose. It looked pretty smooth for landing. The wind was more or less from the south, and the southern side of the grassy patch was bounded by a sort of scree from which the ground sloped away steeply in the direction of Lanaldo. I made up my mind that I should have to bring the machine in slowly over the oak trees on the northern side and try to stop her before she ran forwards over the edge.

That survey rather reassured me; it didn’t look too bad at all. I put the engine on again and eased the machine round in
a very long, gentle turn to the north. I flew some way to the north before I came round again in another of those long, easy skid turns. Then I throttled the engine and put her on the glide down to land.

I raised my goggles on to my forehead, and rubbed my eyes. I can remember that the air felt very fresh and sweet.

I was gliding short. I came to the oak trees perhaps half a mile short of the grass, and put on a little engine at about fifty feet above the tree tops. I had one eye on the air-speed indicator all the time, and eased her down slowly towards the final fringe of trees.

Then I was there. I shut off all power and passed over the edge of the grass at a height of about thirty feet, thrusting her down to land. She gained a little speed as I did that, and I knew that the scree was getting very near. I flattened her out a little near the ground, irresolute. Then I thrust her down again, and the wheels crunched heavily upon the grass; the Breguet quivered and bounced high into the air again. Slowly she sank until the wheels bounced on the grass again—and we were barely thirty yards from the edge, travelling at about seventy miles an hour.

With a sudden decision I did what I should have done twenty seconds before—thrust forwards the throttle. The engine came to my rescue with a roar, and we surged forwards over the edge of the scree and up into the air again.