The Airplane - Jay Spenser [32]
The Albatros D.Va is perhaps the best-known of these World War I fighters. Made of steam-softened plywood formed around molds, its streamlined semi-monocoque fuselage was robust and aerodynamic. However, it was also a bit on the heavy side, placing the D.Va at a disadvantage against Great Britain’s Sopwith Camel and Royal Aircraft Establishment SE-5a with their conventional wood-and-wire-truss fuselages.
Between the world wars, this wooden semi-monocoque construction found memorable expression in the record-setting Lockheed Vega monoplanes of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Wiley Post circumnavigated the globe twice in his Vega, first in 1931 and again alone in 1933. Amelia Earhart used hers to solo across the Atlantic five years to the day after Charles Lindbergh.
The Lockheed Vega set numerous speed and distance records at the hands of Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post, and other noted aviators. Introduced in 1927, the Vega combined cantilevered wings with a semi-monocoque fuselage of molded plywood.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
The zenith for wood came in World War II. For more than two years, the de Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber—Great Britain’s “Wooden Wonder”—was the fastest thing in the skies over Nazi-occupied Europe. So quick were bomber versions of the Mosquito that they dispensed with guns and relied on speed alone for protection.
De Havilland built the legendary Mossie out of wood because it anticipated a wartime shortage of aluminum that never materialized. In the United States, this same false expectation gave rise to the Hughes H-4 Hercules, the giant one-of-a-kind flying boat built by Howard Hughes as a World War II cargo plane. Not finished until two years after the war had ended, the Spruce Goose, as this huge machine is known, lifted off the water just once in a brief straight-ahead hop in 1947 with Hughes himself at the controls.
Despite its wartime success, wooden semi-monocoque construction was a technological dead end long before World War II. It petered out right after the war with the de Havilland Vampire and Venom jet fighters—yes, wooden jets.
Designed for strafing trenches, the armored Junkers J 4 of 1917 was history’s first production airplane made entirely of metal.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
Back in the 1920s, consensus had already emerged that metal was aviation’s future. In addition to its greater strength and predictability, metal could be formed and fastened in more ways, and it was more resistant to moisture and temperature extremes. The only trouble, in fact, was that the world kept trying to build metal airplanes the wrong way. It took time for people to understand that semi-monocoque construction (also called stressed-skin construction) was the correct way to exploit the potential of steel and aluminum.
Also in the 1920s, Germany overtook France as the world leader in flight technologies. It was in Germany that much of this all-metal construction puzzle was figured out. However, it would not all come together until the start of the next decade in the United States, whose own technological ascendancy was just beginning.
Skimming the trenches in 1917, the low-flying German warplane sprayed out a hail of machine-gun fire. Soldiers quick enough to shoot back saw the odd craft continue unfazed on its ugly mission. They had encountered the Junkers J 4, the world’s first operational airplane made entirely of metal.
Spindly, unwieldy, and so heavy it could scarcely climb, the J 4 nevertheless found use in the ground-attack role because its steel and duralumin structure, locally enhanced with armor plating beneath to protect its engine and crew, rendered it less vulnerable to ground fire than conventional wood-and-fabric airplanes.
The all-metal J 4 was the brainchild of Hugo Junkers, an industrialist who before the war had designed and manufactured water heaters. More recently, Junkers had served as a college professor at Aachen’s famous technical university. He thus combined theoretical engineering knowledge with hands-on expertise in the fabrication of metal structures.