The Airplane - Jay Spenser [114]
The hopes Sikorsky and his colleagues held for their airliner were shattered by world events. World War I preempted Russia’s commanding lead in this pursuit, turned the Ilya Muromets series into a line of World War I bombers, and ultimately destroyed the imperial Russian Empire itself. One wonders what might have happened if history had taken another course.
Igor Sikorsky fled the October Revolution in 1917. Following two years in Paris, he arrived penniless in the United States, where he soon gave Pan Am its first ocean-conquering flying boats and then placed the helicopter into volume manufacture for the first time.
Sustained passenger airline operations emerged in Europe immediately after World War I. However, the air travel experience in 1919 ranged from uncomfortable at best to terrifying at worst. The era’s transport planes were slow, drafty, painfully noisy, palsied by fatiguing vibrations, fraught with sickening fumes, and all too subject to the vicissitudes of weather.
Equipped with wicker chairs, picture windows, a writing table, and electric lights, the first Ilya Muromets drew obvious inspiration from luxury rail travel. The door to the airplane’s dual-controlled cockpit stands open.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
German, Dutch, French, British, and Italian airliners were all in service as the 1920s began. Hands down the most advanced was the Junkers F 13, history’s first all-metal airliner as well as the first to employ a fully cantilevered wing. The F 13 was also then the most comfortable airplane in existence. Fully enclosed and soundproofed, its passenger cabin featured club seating for four, plush leather upholstery, and the airline industry’s first seatbelts.
Junkers F 13s flew with German, Swiss, Swedish, Finnish, Romanian, Polish, and other European airlines. These rugged workhorses also flew bush services in Asia, the Americas, and other parts of the world challenged by rugged terrain and a lack of roads. In 1921, an F 13 on floats began scheduled operations in Colombia that evolved into Avianca, the oldest continuously operated airline in the Western Hemisphere.
As the 1920s began, however, most commercial transports were still converted wartime types that had not been designed with comfort or boarding ease in mind. This was true of France’s Breguet 14 and Farman Goliath. It was also true of Great Britain’s first Vickers, de Havilland, and Handley-Page airliners.
Entering ser vice right after World War I, the Junkers F 13 seated four passengers in a plush, fully enclosed cabin.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
Fokker’s initial commercial offering was the Fokker F.II of 1920. Like the Junkers, it was designed as an airliner from the outset. Perhaps for this reason, these two series came to dominate European commercial aviation between the wars even though many other companies—including Armstrong Whitworth, Blackburn, Bloch, Bolton Paul, Dewoitine, Dornier, Focke-Wulf, Heinkel, Latécoère, Potez, Savoia-Marchetti, and Wibault—built propeller airliners, mostly in small numbers, for the remarkably varied European air market before World War II. Although individually those past transports may be forgotten today, they comprise a strong European and British heritage in commercial aviation.
U.S. commercial aviation also started after World War I, but it emerged with airmail because the sheer scale and challenging geography of North America outstripped the capabilities of early airplanes. Even so, America too used wartime machines as airliners as the 1920s began.
After the 1918 armistice, some enterprising