The Airplane - Jay Spenser [30]
With the armistice on November 11, 1918, peace had returned to Europe. In marked contrast to the end of World War II a quarter century later, the Great War left Europe’s industrial base largely intact. Despite the devastation near the shifting front, the factories that had forged the Central Powers’ aerial weapons of war were left untouched.
With peace at hand, these factories now turned their attention to commercial aviation as a promising arena for the technical expertise they had acquired. In particular, they looked to the manufacture of airliners.
Aside from North Atlantic weather patterns, which brought miserable winter weather and extended periods of low visibility, Western Europe was a great place for airline travel to emerge. European capitals are relatively closely spaced, and except for the Alps, the continent’s geography is not unduly challenging. By the start of the 1920s, therefore, KLM and the ancestors of today’s Air France, British Airways, and Lufthansa were all carrying passengers in a variety of airplanes.
France’s Farman Goliath airliner of 1919 put World War I technology to a new use.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Rugged and reliable, the all-metal Junkers Ju 52 trimotor was also heavy and slow.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
Great Britain’s first airliners were modified versions of the wooden-fuselage de Havilland, Vickers, and Handley-Page bombers it had developed for the war. France too repurposed World War I technology to commercial use. In contrast, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines operated somewhat more modern Fokkers with steel-tube fuselages courtesy of the D.VII.
But the most advanced airliner after the Great War was Germany’s low-wing, all-metal Junkers F 13, which featured plush seating for four in a fully enclosed passenger cabin. Building on this metal-airplane technology, Junkers introduced the Ju 52/3m, a seventeen-passenger trimotor airliner at the start of the 1930s. The Ju 52 saw wide use as an airliner by a dozen countries. As a military transport, it became the backbone of Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
In the United States, meantime, the Ford Motor Company in 1925 bought up Stout, a U.S. manufacturer of single-engine transport planes built to the Junkers formula. From this acquisition sprang the Ford Tri-Motor, an eleven-passenger airliner that entered U.S. service in the late 1920s. Except for its high wing, the Ford Tri-Motor was a direct expression of the same German thinking as the Ju 52. Both airliners had a full internal metal skeleton clad in corrugated metal skin. They were thus enormously robust and could lift heavy loads, but they were also slow, limited in range, and expensive to operate.
With its streamlined fuselage, the Deperdussin racer achieved a speed of 125 mph (200 km/h) in 1913.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
The problem was that all-metal airplanes were simply too heavy when built the traditional way. Substituting steel and aluminum for wood and fabric was not the road to success. But help was on the way in the form of new ideas that had already flown. The result would be a new construction paradigm that serves aviation to this day.
A decade after the airplane was invented, the fastest and most advanced flying machine in the world also happened to be the prettiest. This was the Deperdussin racer that handily won the 1913 Gordon Bennett Cup at a blistering average speed of 125 mph (200 km/h). The single-seat Deperdussin was a high-wing monoplane with a streamlined fuselage unlike anything the world had ever seen. Built by the Société Provisoire des Aéroplanes Deperdussin (SPAD), this racing plane introduced a new way to fabricate the fuselage.
SPAD was founded in 1911 by Armand Deperdussin, a Belgian-born entrepreneur working in France. A former cabaret singer and chocolate salesman, Deperdussin made his fortune in silk trading before