The Airplane - Jay Spenser [24]
For the first time in history, a human being had surmounted a natural obstacle by overflying it in a heavier-than-air machine. The phrase “geography is destiny” never again would be quite so true. Blériot’s achievement also suggested useful applications of aviation in the future, the ultimate dream being air travel between nations.
To the British, this flight dealt the psychological blow of sudden vulnerability. For countless centuries, the English Channel had buffered the British Isles from foreign invasion. This treacherous waterway had defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 and Napoleon’s planned conquest of 1805, but now the world had changed. As alarmed Britons observed, “There are no islands anymore!”6
Louis Blériot himself found lasting fame as France’s most significant aviation pioneer. A December 1909 crash onto a rooftop in Constantinople (today Istanbul) brought him his first broken bones. Deciding the time had come to give up flying, he instead devoted himself with great success to airplane manufacture.
As for Hubert Latham, he remained determined to conquer the Channel, although he could no longer be first. Setting out once again on the evening of July 29, he suffered a second engine failure, this time within sight of Dover, and once again had to be plucked from the water. The Antoinette firm declined his request for another airplane for a third attempt.
Latham’s devil-may-care adventuring may have masked a courting of death because he suffered badly from tuberculosis, a condition worsened by his smoking. He continued taking risks until killed in 1912 at age twenty-eight by a charging buffalo while big-game hunting in Sudan.
Latham and Blériot’s rivalry across the Channel served notice on the world that a dominant airplane configuration had emerged. Although the Antoinette IV and Blériot XI differ considerably in size and detail, in terms of configuration they are twins. Both are high-wing monoplanes with a similarly placed cockpit, engine and propeller, landing gear, and empennage, or tail. Both have their fuselage-mounted wing counterbalanced by a tail with horizontal and vertical surfaces that contribute to stability and control. Here was the layout George Cayley had proposed in 1799. More than a century before Blériot lifted oil-smudged goggles to contemplate England, this formula had taken flight in the hand-launched models Cayley sent sailing down his estate’s grassy slopes.
Five years after Blériot’s flight, the Great War broke out in Europe. It placed harsh demands on the infant technology of aviation, winnowing out what did not work well. Under this baptism by fire, George Cayley’s 1799 configuration emerged victorious. There were variations on the theme, of course. During that four-year conflict, airplanes designed to the Cayley formula flew with three sets of wings (triplanes), two sets (biplanes), or a single wing (monoplanes). Among this last category were monoplanes with the wing set high on the fuselage, airplanes with the wing mounted above the fuselage (parasol monoplanes), and airplanes with the wing set low.
Virtually all airplanes built today are monoplanes, and most have low wings. Dr. Hugo Junkers, an underappreciated aviation pioneer we shall soon meet, first championed this configuration in World War I because he felt it was safer. In wartime, a low wing offers protection from ground fire and absorbs the impact of crashes. In general, of course, low wings also provide a handy place to mount the landing gear.
This configuration emerged in the United States in 1922 when the U.S. Army Air Service sponsored the creation of a racing plane called the Verville-Sperry R-3. Although a military airplane, it was named for Alfred Verville, its designer, and Lawrence Sperry, whose small company built all