The Airplane - Jay Spenser [108]
The Navy took an immediate interest in Curtiss’ hydroaeroplane. He soon added wheels to its central float. These allowed the pilot to taxi into the water or back on to shore again. Purchased by the Navy as its first airplane, this first amphibious machine was the Curtiss A-1 Triad of early 1911 (the tri- in its name denoted land, water, and air). Japan, Germany, Russia, and Great Britain also purchased Curtiss Triads, which started many nations on the path to naval aviation.
The Curtiss A-1 Triad of 1911, the first U.S. aircraft with a retractable landing gear, had wheels allowing it to taxi up onto land or back into the water.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Curtiss soon came up with two other water-related innovations. The first was his idea for a stepped float, which is a pontoon whose underside features a tapered cutaway near the back. As the airplane gathers speed, this float rises in the water until the step is exposed, breaking the water’s suction. This allows the airplane to skim freely on top of the water and climb out more easily.
Curtiss’ second innovation was the boat-hulled fuselage. Perfected back at Hammondsport, this concept had the fuselage itself sit in the water on a watertight hull contoured like Curtiss’ stepped pontoon. Before 1912 ended, this idea had evolved into the Curtiss F-Boat, history’s first flying boat. The U.S. Navy, Army, and wealthy private owners all purchased F-Boats.
Other designers copied Curtiss’ idea. One was Thomas Benoist, whose company in St. Louis provided flying boats for the first scheduled commercial air service in the world. The St. Petersburg–Tampa Air Boat Line in Florida began operations on January 1, 1914, carrying one passenger at a time across Tampa Bay in its two-seat, open-cockpit Benoist flying boats. More than twelve hundred passengers were carried in perfect safety before the airline ceased operations that May.
The Curtiss F-Boat of 1912 was history’s first boat-hulled airplane.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Another was Grover Loening, who earned America’s first-ever aeronautical engineering degree from Columbia University in New York. During the 1920s, Loening built rugged biplanes for civil and military customers. The planes’ boat-hulled metal fuselages featured projecting prows beneath their propellers. Reflecting his expectation of its use, he called this series the Loening Air Yacht.
In 1914, the Curtiss Aeroplane Company built a twin-engine biplane flying boat for department-store heir Rodman Wanamaker, who envisioned a flight across the Atlantic in the spirit of peace. The America was co-designed for him by Curtiss and Englishman John Cyril Porte, a seaplane pioneer in the Royal Navy. Lacking range, this airplane would have depended on strategically placed ships for refueling during landings at sea. Ironically, World War I preempted the noble if precarious attempt.
Curtiss manufactured large flying boats for the Navy, which were the only U.S.-designed airplanes to participate in that conflict. England built Curtiss flying boats under license with major improvements by Porte, launching successful British lines of flying-boat development.
In the months after World War I, the six-man crew of the U.S. Navy’s Curtiss NC-4 flying boat conquered the Atlantic by air for the first time. With a wingspan of 126 feet (38 meters) and a gross weight of 21,500 pounds (9,772 kilograms), and powered by four Liberty engines, the NC-4 was a sizable machine. It and two sister ships left New York on May 8, but mishaps prevented the others from completing the voyage. Surviving damage, fog,